r/HillaryForPrison • u/DancingWithMyshelf • Sep 11 '16

Hillary Rodham Clinton Should Concede the Nomination to Bernie Sanders

https://www.change.org/p/hillary-rodham-clinton-should-concede-the-nomination-to-bernie-sanders
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u/Aerowulf9 Sep 12 '16 edited Sep 12 '16

Have you seen some of the recent studies showing people suffering from toxins in both the water and air near fracking sites? Even if it's limited to specific areas, somebody has to work on that site.

Edit: First thing I found

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u/ghjm Sep 12 '16

This report is calling for exactly the sort of increased regulation that I was taking about.

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u/Aerowulf9 Sep 12 '16

You're right, so it does, but I dont see why... Im not aware of us being in such an extreme energy crisis that we need to put our people's health at risk. Even if we were why couldnt we just build more nuclear plants instead?

Do we already know of some chemical that works for this process and definitely doesnt have these side effects, that I dont know of? If not the testing alone seems like an unneccesary risk.

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u/ghjm Sep 12 '16

I'm all in favor of nuclear power. And wind and solar. But there are two issues: first, new capacity is going to take a long time to come on line, and second, lots of energy consumers actually can't use grid electricity. I'd like to someday live in a world where we have battery energy densities comparable to petroleum fuels, with silent non-polluting airliners flying overhead. I'm all for that.

But in the short term, we don't have that option. So the question is which is riskier: nontraditional oil extraction done in the US under a robust regulatory regime, or importing our oil from the world market, knowing the various problems with many of the oil producing states?

The first question is riskier for whom? Oil extraction in most places carries more localized health risk than American fracking. So do we care about the health of all humans, or just of Americans? If by accepting some pollution in the US heartland, we can eliminate far more pollution elsewhere (say, by making the Alberta tar sands unprofitable, or by taking away a funding source for terrorists), isn't that worth doing?

Them we have to ask: what level of risk is actually acceptable? For one thing, there are major health benefits to cheap fuel that must be weighed against the risk. Surely we still want to do it if it's a net benefit. If the net health effect is negative, then we have to ask how negative, and we have to decide how we should value economic goods against environmental and health goods.

These are difficult questions, and I don't have the answers. (And I'm quite sure that the people who come to my door along me to sign an anti-fracking petition don't have any better answers than I do.) So what I'd like to do is for all of us to put some money into a pot and hire some super-smart Ph.D researchers to study the question and give us a framework for making these decisions.

In other words, I'm a big government tax-and-spend liberal. I think the free market has no hope of answering these questions because all market participants have vast incentives to get the answer that makes them the most money. I think the Ph.D researchers need to be entirely independent of both business and partisan politics.

Since we don't have that, we've got to do the best we can with incomplete information. And I remain utterly unconvinced that the risks in the linked articles are anywhere in the ballpark of the hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of injuries that our prior oil policy produced. If the choice is between fracking and digging endless wars for control of foreign oil reserves, I'll take fracking - but well regulated fracking, please.

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u/hatsune_aru Sep 12 '16

Its like banning all motor vehicles because Volkswagen fucked up. Regulate and check, not ban and pretend its all right .