Space Infinitum – Part II

Continuing on from yesterday’s post,  there are no more North Americas to exploit, no more Indias or Chinas.  There are no places with large expanses of land either over or under the land. There was an attempt in a way to explore other planets, going back to the 60’s when John F. Kennedy said there would be a man on the moon, but that really didn’t bring us any enhancement in terms of resources that we could use or consume in order to keep feeding the expanding number of people on Earth.  We’re in a situation where fossil fuels are running out and though there is a good deal of resources underground, if we do exploit it to extent that we could, we would speed up the climate change that is already occurring. We’re in a bit of a situation that relates to space on Earth in the sense that there are no more vast tracks of land that we can exploit. We’ve tried other things like pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, but these are man-made substances that aren’t natural that pollute natural resources and deplete them. The other irony about fossil fuels is the main constituent of nitrogen-based fertilizers comes from fossil fuels.  That’s another looming problem that we have to deal with that no one wants to deal with as we continue to try to perpetrate the world that we live in. 

The interesting thing is, is that there are so many things we can do about it.  If we as human beings began to really live a sustainable lifestyle, where we’re not constantly buying new cars, new clothes, or even worse, new jewelry, and if we began to wind back on what we’re buying and the amount of power we use (which is sustained by fossil fuels therefore not sustainable), by reducing the amount of everything we consume, it would be better for us directly as we’d spend less money and it would certainly be better for the Earth. It may not be so great for the financial institutions in place in the world today, but they have nothing to do largely speaking with sustainability, only with consuming finite resources.

In bringing this blog piece to a close, the reality is that with our lifestyles as they are, we are running out of space, rapidly. We can’t go into outer space because we haven’t gained anything resource-wise from that, and we’re not going to, because we don’t have enough fuel to get us out there in any meaningful numbers. We have to live in the space on Earth, and do so more sustainable.  We have to learn how to be happier with less, because buying and consuming things is not what makes us happy. It really isn’t.  All we end up with is large bills, storage units and the need to keep buying.  Let’s stop this, let’s get back to real happiness, and back to a sustainable world. We don’t need new things all the time! Let’s live on what’s already here. As I sit here and look at the sofa, a table, a coffee table, pots, pans and glasses etc. Why should I continue to buy things when I have most of what I need already, save for food? Let’s stop buying new stuff!  It’s as simple as that really!

Space Infinitum – Part I

So today the word ‘space’ entered into a chat between myself and my friend Alexandra.  It’s an interesting word really, or seemed that to me as I was thinking and talking about it because space is the amount of room we have in any particular situation, but there is also outer space, which is the universe beyond the earth.  I’ve seen some interesting things in my life to that regard. I remember John F. Kennedy’s speech that in this century we would send a man to the moon.  I don’t think he realized that a man would end his life brutally and early, but that’s a different subject. I will say this though – there is a piece of music that we created called Secret Societies, under our band name, Co-Opera.  You can find it on Soundcloud, Mixcloud and BassCamp. It talks about what happened and what John F. Kennedy was saying before he was assassinated.

                Back to ‘space.’  It’s an interesting thing to look back at history and about people’s attitudes to what is going on, peoples acceptance of that, ignorance or fright about that.  When it comes to climate change, there is a fairness in those attitudes, as the climate has been changing ever since the beginning of the earth. There is a truth in that; however, the bottom line is that if the climate change that is happening is detrimental to life as we know it, we’re obviously going to feel it. 

                As much as we think we have these omnipotent powers, we can’t make it rain when we need it to rain, and considering the issues with water today and a growing population, this will become an increasingly serious problem.  If we look back in history, which most people base their assumptions for the future on, there’s been a very unfortunate trend in people exhausting the resources of the land they live on – water, trees, plants, soil, animals, etc, and then moving into someone else’s territory and taking it over.  A good example of this is Europe, which grew and expanded beyond their means, which started search and conquer of other lands (India, for a time, North and South America), destroying other cultures in brutal and barbaric ways that were most definitely not deserved in any sense. The United States at this point is really just an extension of Europe. At the time of the Europeans arrival, it had a vast amount of resources and not very many people relatively speaking. The irony that remains is that the Native Americans did not know much about the size of the continent, but they did conserve and they did know about not exploiting the resources they had around them.  The Europeans that came in had no notion of that.

The thing is, there are no more countries that we can go to and exploit in that way, without military power, loss of life and soon the devastation of those resources as well.  The problem lies not in our lessening space to fill, so to speak, but in our ways of living that are well beyond our means.

(to be continued)

New Zealand – Introduction

Tags

New Zealand, Waiheke

So here I am, after dinner, on Waiheke Island. I had the pleasure of having my good friend Alexandra and her son Wolfgang here for a few weeks, and though it seems quiet after they leave, and as though something is missing, that’s how it is for now as we’re all in a transitory stage in our lives.

What I wanted to talk about on this blog piece is New Zealand, a very interesting place. It was colonized a little later than Australia, and it seems to me from what little I know (and I’m learning), that the relationship between the people of the land (the Maori) and the Europeans is better handled than it is in other places, for example Australia with the Aborigines, North America with the Native Americans and South America with the indigenous peoples.  That is one aspect of New Zealand that is different, I’m sure it could be better of course, but it is better than many other places.

                Living in New Zealand whilst still traveling fairly often, I wanted to write about the most important aspects of it from both an insider’s and outsider’s point of understanding.  Having grown up in Great Britain, England more specifically, I have noticed that New Zealand is about the same size as Britain, in terms of geographical coverage. One of the first remarkable things about New Zealand is the size of the population in comparison to the land mass – it’s definitely much smaller than most other countries of any comparable standing in the world, and most definitely a first-world country in the leagues of Australia and the USA.   It has much smaller population than Britain having a population of 65 million, and New Zealand about 4.5 million.  A lot of that population, too (about 1.4 million), is in Auckland, a city on the North East Coast of the North Island. As a small tangent, regarding the different standings of countries in the world, my personal opinion is that there shouldn’t be different echelons of countries, as that means some will be less well-off than others.  Where we are born should not affect us so much in the sense that some are born into deep poverty, violence, or even wealth.  We do have to accept that it is not correct for such imbalances to exist.  The only way to work towards more balance to align ourselves with nature. But alas, I have been through that in other blogs!

                Another remarkable thing about New Zealand is that it is a very green country. Typically speaking it rains a good deal here so it is good for growing things.  This makes me think, as there are many places in the world that do not grow things well due to less sun, less rain, or the land is deteriorating due to overpopulation by humans. There are already indications of the effects of that in New Zealand in fact, with other countries purchasing land here for big agriculture and other uses, a fact that has many here fighting against the selling of the land to non-New Zealand entities.  A house on 28 acres of land, with a swimming pool and views of the ocean here in New Zealand (a kind of home that is very sought after in many places in the world) costs 2.3 million New Zealand dollars (less in American dollars) – not a lot of money compared to properties for sale in, say, Los Anegles, where I lived for many years, where one could get a house on a very small amount of property, enough say for a small garden, definitely not an acre, let along 28 with ocean views. The good thing about New Zealand so far is that it has been very good about preserving its environment. Certainly it Is a leading light in that regard. I was reading an interesting story about a local company that had gone to someone’s house and was ‘persuaded’ if that is the right word, to cut down some trees and bushes. Those trees and bushes were protected, and the company ended up getting fined $25,000 for cutting them down. There is a great deal of desire to preserve New Zealand, by the people and the government (which is currently a bit laissez-faire in that regard in all actuality due to increasing economic pressure).  There is a good deal of environmental protection, and that is going to be so important to us as the future unfolds, as there are so many places where we are making things significantly worse.  The USA is one case in point, Australia another, and I could site many more but that might get redundant due to the general knowledge of what is going on in the world. We are absolutely degrading the land that we need to grow food from, and if we can’t grow plants, animals can’t eat, and we won’t be able to eat plants nor animals or their by-products, so we do have to grow plants in order to have a healthy, symbiotic environment. There are many places in the world where we are absolutely stripping the soil of the nutrients needed to grow the plants healthily. One of the results of that is that the soil has to be supplanted with chemical based products like pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, some of which come from finite resources.  New Zealand is not over-populated, still has fertile land, and has not yet been ruined by over-industrialization of the food.  There aren’t GMO’s or a terrible over saturation of everything by fossil-fuel derivatives.

How will New Zealand be able to cope with a growing world population in the face of great needs for food and life-sustaining resources, which it has in abundance?  Let us explore this further in the next few blog pieces.

 

(to be continued…)

But What Can I Do About It? (Part II)

(continued from Part I)

What can we do about it?  The reality is that there is nothing that we can do easily about it. If we’re living in a city in high density housing, we sort of feel stuck trying to make enough money to pay the bills, and yes it does take a lot of courage to make the push out of that situation, but once you are out of it, it’s a much different, and better world.  The majority of governments and institutions are encouraging and pressuring people to live in cities, either overtly or by nature of what’s going on.  I encourage anyone that reads this to consider not living in cities.  If all that we’re doing is earning money to pay for a higher level of living the lives that we do, then we’re simply in a rat race, a treadmill.

I saw myself at one point as a processor of money, because I had to work continuously to pay the high bills I had coming in. I was bringing on money on one hand, and paying it out with the other. Many people are in that situation – it’s the root of the world as we know and the root of everything that keeps us under control.  The whole of modern societies is based on levels of control in essence, and a lot of it is financial control.  We have to get out of that, as the future will not be like the past.  We see a lot of changes coming on, with the fires and extreme heat waves.  The average temperature in Australia on one day was 104 degrees, and if you think about 80 to 85 degrees being uncomfortably hot, at over 100 and being surrounded by fires, you can imagine how terribly hot that must actually feel.

The problems are not just heat, either,  they are severe weather events increasing in frequency and intensity like the poor people getting hit by Hurricane Sandy and such – we are moving into that sort of a world. At the end of it, whether the severe weather was ultimately caused by humans or not, what difference does it make if you are surrounded by bush fires and somebody’s saying “We didn’t create this,” and someone else is saying “Yes we did.”  It simply doesn’t matter that that point.  The point is, we need to think about what we’re going to need to do for the future, and even if we are in our senior years, we need to think about the future of those younger than ourselves, and the for the people that aren’t even born yet.  We have to think of future generations, who will have to deal with what we are not dealing with currently, largely speaking.  It seems like that change is coming rather quickly.  The financial models that we are all tethered to are starting to fail.

I have a fairly esoteric thought here:  I think that the Mayan prophecy was not that the world would end, but rather that at the end of 2012 there would a significant set of changes set in motion. One of the key points in this is the US general election because there was no choice – both people are following the same path – a failing path. What makes it worse is that many other countries around the world are trying to follow the same path of great Industrialization and the consequent depletion of resources.  I’ll finish this piece by saying that the greatest irony is what’s happening in Australia because they are on record the world’s worst polluters by head of population.  They are responsible for polluting the most, mine very heavily, and are suffering very severe weather patterns like droughts, heat waves and fires. If I had some advice to anybody, particularly people who live in New Zealand since they tend to do this, is if you are thinking of going to Australia for work, don’t do it.  Again, it’s this rat race treadmill that many of us are on and tend to want to stay on.  When someone says, “But what can I do about it?”  all I can reply is that it is a very individual question to answer and it has to be, because no government, no organizations and no institutions will do anything that puts their nice life and their fat wallets on the line.  We have to do something about it as people, and there will be a lot more of that as these subjects gain more awareness and these blog pieces unfold.  Thank you.

But What Can I Do About It? Part I

I often talk to people or correspond with them and get the feeling that they feel something; either implied or stated overtly, “but what can I do about it?”  I understand that feeling – my own son who is very dear to me feels a little like that, and that is no criticism, just a statement of fact.  If we do nothing about that, then that will not change. We live in this incredibly complex world, in my opinion, an overly complex world, particularly when you get into the financial world where you have this terrible abstraction from anything and everything.  You’ve got things that are nothing more than gambling, such as things that caused the financial crises, credit swap derivatives, mortgages of mortgages of mortgages.  I just read something today where some people in Spain went out to persuade those who couldn’t afford it to take out 100% mortgages, and have now taken their homes back off them.  It’s no wonder that people say ‘but what can I do about it?’ 

Let’s get really basic here.  We have a very complex world, and it all starts with something very simple: plants.  It starts with plants because of this:  Those of us who eat a lot of meat tend to have this idea that meat is completely different than plant food.  I’ve stated this a few times but I’ll state it again as it is important – without plants there would not be meat – animals eat animals who eat plants if they don’t eat plants directly themselves. If we assume that all that we rely on as a complex society comes from plants, we start to simplify things.  Let’s not forget that even fossil fuels come from plants and animals – it is decayed carbon that becomes the fossil fuels, therefore we have a close tie to plants on every level.

In modern cities our abstraction from plants is particularly severe because if we live in an apartment or high density housing, more or less all the time, the only plants we are going to see are the plants we may grow in our own homes or the parks we walk and drive past.  We’ve come to think of that as being normal, but it is completely the opposite of that.  Normality should be humans living in close proximity to plants and nature, away from highly planned out cities.  If we think about it, people want to be near plants, in the countryside, on beaches.  When we take children to a park, a grassy area, or to somewhere where they can see birds on trees and such, they’re incredibly happy, and yet we see the opposite when they are ensconced in a place that has no access to the natural beauty of nature. 

 

(to be continued)

On Vegetarianism

This blog piece relates to food. There are various paradoxes because of decisions we have made over many years – some could say 10,000 years.  I think the most critical years however have been the most recent years, in terms of how they could impact us.  There’s a great school of thought that says that it would be much better for the Earth and for us physically (though we are part of Earth so it’s the same thing) if we moved to being vegetarian instead of eating meat and fish also (though I do still eat fish at this time).  That particular school of thought is a good one in my eyes.  There is a lot of writing out there speaking of how in order to produce a pound of meat an immense amount of resources must be consumed. The other thing to bear in mind is that the root of all animal life is plant life. There are no animals that don’t rely on plants in some way, direct or through eating animals that eat plants.  So there again we go back to plants which is what vegetarianism is talking about. 

Unfortunately, we’ve sort of boxed ourselves into a corner in this regard:  agriculture has created a severe depletion of certain plant varieties.  The second thing is that we are relying very heavily on modern agriculture’s fertilizers which are reliant on nitrogen, which is produced from gas which is a fossil fuel. If we have to rely on fossil fuels for our agriculture, it doesn’t give us a lot of time even if we do become vegetarian. There’s a lot of talk in fracking about timing of the reserves of oil in the earth. Let’s say we have 200 years of a good amount of fossil fuels still available to us (which is actually more than twice the estimates within the energy industry).  Are we saying, knowing that, that we should continue this way of life, accepting that we won’t be able to live this way once the oil is gone?  Let’s think about the stress on vegetarianism.  We are basing that food supply on fossil fuels so there is no future in that either, so to go more extreme, if everyone in the world went vegetarian.  There simply wouldn’t be enough food to feed them. It’s as simple as that, because everything we do in the world, which include animals, we base how we exist on what we’ve been doing. For example, if every animal was carnivorous, and then suddenly tomorrow became vegetarian, it would totally change the balance of nature and there wouldn’t be enough for those animals to survive on locally.  I’m talking extremes here, as we know that changes in nature occur gradually over time as Charles Darwin famously illustrated with his Origin of Species when he was in the Galapagos Islands.  Things change slowly in nature. Maybe we can change things slowly ourselves as humans in terms of what we’re eating, but we can’t continue the way we are, whichever way we look at it.  We can survive for 3 to 4 weeks without food, but it is something that we need after air and water.

I believe that in all of these things we need to fairly quickly become much more local in terms of what we do, in terms of the water we drink and the food that we eat.  Certainly moving to a plant-based diet seems to be a viable thing to do if we can do it locally and without use of nitrogen based fertilizers.  I have been eating a largely vegetarian diet with some wild caught fish from local water and I don’t have any ill-effects whatsoever. If anything, I feel healthier than I’ve ever felt before.  You don’t need lots of meat to maintain muscle mass – protein comes in many forms ie. legumes, greens, and sea vegetables. Mushrooms are a good substitute for meat as well if you enjoy the texture. I don’t have any craving for meat anymore, and I don’t feel the need to eat vegetarian ‘alternatives’ to meat such as tofu or the faux meat products. That to me is not surprising, as why would we want to substitute something that’s made from meat by something that’s made with vegetables or soy? But that’s just me of course.  These are just my thoughts for the day on vegetarianism and how it won’t save the world the way many people think it will, particularly while it is based on a fossil-fueled agriculture system.

Fracking – Part V

Tags

Dick Cheney, fracking, George W. Bush, Halliburton

Ten days after the first George W. Bush’s residency in early 2001, Dick Cheney the Vice President who also had very close connections with Halliburton, an energy-sector company, formed an energy task force, which was largely speaking being dominated by energy companies (like Halliburton), to reconsider the US’s energy policy which had gone away a little bit from exploiting the US’s own soil for large reserves of energy.  They had instead become more reliant on other regions like the Middle East which weren’t as friendly towards the United States, or didn’t aspire to their policy aspirations.

So this began in early 2001, and some meetings took place over the years, almost all of which were behind closed doors and weren’t reported on at all to the extent that people didn’t know exactly who were in the meetings.  In 2005 there were some legislative options that were renewed.  Basically what they did was exempt most of the energy companies from the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.  This gave them the capability to pollute things that are important to us as we have gone over before. Without air, we won’t last more than a few minutes and without water no more than a few days.  What we know to be happening now is that we are polluting the air and have been for many years and now polluting the water supply from fracking (the leakage of the chemicals and the natural gas as well as discussed in previous blogs). These leakages that are known about are inevitably going to end up in the water table.

Water from a well near a fracking site

Dick Cheney and his meetings have allowed this to happen. Because energy companies and those who are responsible for fracking are exempted from the clean water and air acts, we now bear the brunt as people who live off the Earth’s resources.  Largely speaking, the debates in favor of fracking are so because of energy independence, which is absolutely fatuous as we will never totally be energy independent, as there are not enough reserves for that to happen.  The second thing is that natural gas, even though there seems to be a lot of it available via fracking, there is only about 80 – 100 years of supply, and that’s from the optimistic assessments of the energy companies themselves. Even still, though there are that many years, that’s just over one generation of people that we are teaching to rely on an energy source that is finite, that being fossil fuels.

A pit captures water from a fracking operation

The main point behind this blog piece is the political racketeering that is going on, because anyone that meets in secret has something to hide, as John F. Kennedy once said very well.  There is no other way of expressing it – it’s simple: they have something to hide.  The panel that Dick Cheney created met in secret, and still to this day has not been revealed in any sort of substantive way.  That to me equates to the fact that they have things to hide.  There is no other reason to meet in secret.  From early 2001 there was a very, very close connection formed between energy companies and government at the highest level and that sort of colluding and connecting and talking secretly about very important matters that include the government and companies, that is fascism, and I am not exaggerating there in any sense.  Fascism is the collusion of government and corporations to the disadvantage of citizens. This has been going on in United States since at least early 2001 and probably before because some of these laws have been enacted for a good number of years.  Certainly during the Bush presidency with Dick Cheney as vice president things got much more set in concrete, one way or another and we’re still dealing with that today and that in my opinion is why fracking has grown so rapidly without checks and balances.  I hope I am wrong as I often say, but I really have these misgivings about the future and our descendants who will inherit the earth after us. Being optimistic will not help if we are not able to see the reality of what is going on negative as it may be, to make the positive changes necessary to make our optimistic outlook on the future the reality we would like it to be.

Fracking – Part IV

Let’s go to a more pressing need, and this goes back to the beginning of part 3 with the question: “Would you like to continue driving your car and other things that need fossil fuels for the last 3 days of your life, or would you rather not drive the car and live a few more years to the natural end of your life?” In this case, we center our discussion on how fracking is actually directly affecting our lives through the food and water we consume, which we obviously require to live.

Let’s talk about water.  There are challenges with water, there are no doubts about that. We are really not being efficient enough in capturing drinking water to use.  There are plenty of places that get lots of rain, but don’t capture it in tanks and filter it for use like we do here on Waiheke Island.  If we don’t do that, we really have a relatively unpredictable situation with regards to what happens to the water. Once again, like the dirt, if it drains to the ocean we can’t use it for a very long time as we can’t drink salt water. There have been attempts to commercially successfully create desalination plants but largely speaking, they’re nothing more than a periphery of things as the cost of desalination on any sort of scale is prohibitive and worse still, they consume a lot of energy in order to desalinate the water, so at this point of any real solution.  We could talk about other things that are more peripheral like not capturing the sun that falls on the land daily, but that’s a different subject.  Going back to the subject of water, on top of the fact that we are not capturing water as efficiently as we could be, now we’re coming full circle back to fracking and how it has an impact on edible plants and use of water.

One of the first cases is farmers in financially desperate situations in the United States being wooed by companies who want to carry out fracking on the land, so there are farms with soil that is becoming depleted as a result of the fracking on their land.

The second way that fracking affects life as we know is in pollution of water in aquifers.  There can be arguments and counterarguments regarding this and how severe it is, but it is documented by the energy industry themselves that at the commencement of a fracking operation there is an average 6-7% leakage rate from the equipment into the ground and the aquifers. We’ve seen dramatic evidence of that with people lighting the water on their taps on fire due to the methane.  The other aspect of that from a previous blog piece is IF fracking is so safe, why do the energy companies keep secret the systems used to drill and pump these chemicals into the ground?

So we’re scrambling around as a human race trying to keep the way of life we have, and I understand that because I lived it.  We can’t live how we’ve been living, for any length of time however.  This has come to me in recent years.  Some work in the past week or so I have been doing in growing sustainable food, and I realized that we can’t grow food sustainably or preserve the quality of the water supply whilst ever there is fracking.  It is as stark and simple as that.  I will have more to talk about on fracking as I myself learn more.

Fracking – Part III

Tags

fracking, GMO's, soil

So imagine if someone were to give you the choice: would you like to continue driving your car and other things that need fossil fuels for the last 3 days of your life, or would you rather not drive the car and live a few more years to the natural end of your life?  Fracking is spoiling our water supply and without water we can live only for 3 to 4 days.  I realize that this sounds like quite a sensationalist question.

On Earth, there is something happening.   The population of the earth is increasing. Although there does seem to be a leveling off, we already have China questioning their one-child policy, and they’re still the largest population on earth, although India is catching up quickly. My opinion is, for what it’s worth, is that the population growth of the Earth, unless something unexpected happened like some mass sterilization, is increasing and will continue to.  Let’s say that I’m wrong and it slows down a bit – it’ll still continue to increase. People are still predicting 10 billion people will be on Earth by 2050.

The second thing is, the soil that we need to grow the crops which produce the food that we eat (and it’s all food that we eat with the exception of sea life generally aside from fish farms) is deteriorating, which is worrying considering it covers the land needed to grow the plants that we all eat. There are movements to actually grow meat in the form of muscle tissue, but I think that will go down the same route as everything else that is genetically engineered. It’ll end up at some level of failure, like genetically engineered crops have.  We’re tampering with the very face of nature, and I don’t think we can, in the fullness of time, do that, although a lot of money has been spent doing that, and a lot more time will be spent doing that. The reality is that the root of our food system – that of edible plants – is being tampered with or depleted, and that is due to the erosion of the soil that the plants need to grow in.  There are many examples of water being washed from the land into the ocean along with silt, or dirt, or soil, which is what we need to grow things in, and once it’s gone into the ocean it’s a long time before we’re in a position to be able to use it again.

(to be continued…)

Fracking – Part II

Tags

fracking, hydraulic fracturing

(continued from Part I)

So what happens next is that the mixture of unknown chemicals gets pumped down the first drill shaft under very high pressure so that it breaks the shale under the ground, releasing the gas and oil, which then goes up the recovery shaft.  There are countless pipelines that get built so that the gas and oil that is recovered can be taken to a refinery.

One point I would like to make quickly is that natural gas, though is sounds nice and clean, is actually methane and methane is significantly more destructive to the atmosphere, the ionosphere and to global warming than is carbon dioxide. So this is another aspect of all this.

Let’s say there was a complete moratorium on fracking tomorrow.  The equipment is still there, and no one would pay money to take it out – it would stay there.  There are as many as half a million fracking operations in the United States alone.  Driving in Colorado a few years ago, it was mind-blowing to me to see the amount of fracking operations going on, visible from the road. The future problem is that the equipment, once unable to be used, will not be removed due to the heavy price tag of doing so, unless they are forced to by government or public bodies.

There are two things that stick out in my mind, and I am not exaggerating here: In 2005 during the Bush Administration, Dick Cheney, the Vice President during both Bush Administration terms who was also the managing director at Halliburton, a major supplier of fracking materials and chemicals, actually watered down the liability that energy companies have to things like The Clean Water Act, to the extent that they’re exempt from them. So we now have energy companies able to pollute the water supply with little supervision or checks and balances, and claim they haven’t done so, as it’s hard to prove since no one is enforcing it or watching them.  That to me a criminal, fraudulent act.  In the long term it could be ecologically devastating.  I have no doubts in my mind about that.

The second thing is that Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, have fracking operations all over the surrounding areas, and the California legislature has legislated hardly anything protecting citizens from the results of fracking.  There is no definite proof that fracking causes earthquakes, but some Universities find some compelling evidence with earthquakes correlating with fracking operations. My daughter and son live in Northwestern England.  In Blackpool there is a fracking operation and they experienced very mild earthquakes.  I lived there for 40 years before this fracking operation existed here and never once experienced an earthquake of any caliber. It was unheard of.  We know for certain that Southern California is an earthquake region.  How can it be that we can allow fracking operations in a high-earthquake zone?  There is no way that it should be allowed in Southern California.  That in its own right gives me the impression of how unscrupulous and uncaring the companies that are making money out of fracking are. There will be more technical details, as unboring as possible (  :)  ), coming up in the following blogs.

(to be continued)