"You can drink it. We did drink it around the table, almost rituallike, in a funny way. It was a demonstration.... they’ve invested millions of dollars in what is a benign fluid in every sense."
(Maybe it will help if you ever get the Hickenloop-ups.)
February 13, 2013
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I don't want to touch sandpaper and I don't want to drink Al Frankenfluid.
Will he wake up tomorrow green and glowing?
I would have expected a state governor to be less pliant.
Yeah, and salesmen used to drink a pesticide -- not alar, something else -- in southern WI to "prove" it was "safe". It's the one that contaminates well water now.
So fracking fluid is food. Good to know factoid in days of famine.
My brother is a horticulturist at a major university. For years, one of his colleagues would drink a quart of diluted Roundup in front of his first class of the semester to make the same point.
Years and years ago Petr Beckmann offered to eat, gram for gram, as much plutonium as any anti-nuke would of caffeine. He knew caffeine would kill quicker and more certainly. Just saying.
The chemist that sponsored PCBs also claimed that they were safe for workers in the factories that made the electrical equipment filled with PCBs, and he smelled glasses of the fluid in demonstrations, but he never inhaled nor drank that man destroying super pollutant.
Did he break eye contact?
I once heard some smart guy say that every substance is a poison - it's all a matter of dosage. I didn't quite understand the point until a few years ago when a contestant in a radio contest died from from drinking too much water - they called it "water intoxication."
Oil-laden fracking fluid gushed from an oil well near Fort Collins for nearly 30 hours before it was stopped Tuesday afternoon.
A hydraulic failure around 9:30 a.m. Monday caused a piece of equipment to fall onto a valve and break it at the drilling site 4 miles east of Fort Collins. A horizontal stream of green-tinted fluid flowed from the valve for nearly a day and half before crews gained control of it.
Love to see Hickenlooper drink that.
"The company drilling at the site north of Windsor has been involved in 32 spills in Colorado during the past year."
Hickenlooper was one of the founders of the great Wynkoop brewery. He knows a thing or two about good drinks.
Trey
"So fracking fluid is food. Good to know factoid in days of famine."
Don't get too excited. Next week Obama's going to announce they're funding a company that turns fracking fluid into ethanol.
traditional: Some PCBs are nearly harmless in human beings. Some are more harmful. As far as I know, none of them are known to be deadly "man destroying super pollutants" in any environmental concentration ... or likely even in "drink a swallow of it" concentrations.
(See also dioxins, for "overblown media hype about an alleged super-toxin".
Remember Viktor Yushchenko? He was "dioxin poisoned", we asssume, by the Kremlin. It ... gave him chloracne. And no other obvious effects, years later.
The idea that one chemist "sponsored" PCBs as a class of chemical? Baffling.)
They poured shots of the fracking fluid and lit them on fire before drinking it.
So? Dihydrous monoxide is one of the deadliest substances in common use - it kills thousands every year - but we allow it nearly everywhere. It is sold everywhere, virtually without regulation.
Concocting a fracking fluid that is edible is the wrong approach to solving potential water pollution.
According to this Fort Collins news report, pollution occurs when a "flowback" of frack water mixed with oil happens.
It is unlikely that the governor would drink oil contaminated water.
Blend it with rum, lime and ice and have a fracking daiquiri. Maybe the next big trend at frat parties.
Back during the Medfly infestation in early '80s Calif., in a news conference an Ag Dept spokesman drank a glass of Malathion in the same concentration as the aerial sprayers to allay poisoning concerns.
Sigivald... Get serious. PCBs have been known since 1937 in Monsanto Chemical Company internal reports to seriously affect workers nervous system and livers and also cause skin rashes among not only the workers at plants but the wives and children of workers who came into contact with an employees clothes.
The cover up of the facts about toxic PCBs is the worst example of Corporate cover ups simply to make money ever documented.
The straw man argument that small amounts are safe has nothing whatsoever to do with the PCB liquid itself contacting a person's skin or being breathed in at a plant. There it is a man destroying event.
The final trick was to blame the workers for being lazy and stupid, especially the black men they gave these safe jobs to.
Furious: Yeah, I was in the Santa Clara valley during the spray operations. All those Huey's overhead just about gave my dad flashbacks. The spraying seemed harmless except it was hell to get the droplets of goop off your car's paint (some kind of corn syrup carrier fluid, IIRC). Then, the ant population went crazy for a while - I wonder if anyone studied the overall ecosystem effects of the spraying?
The basic problem, as I see it, is that the U.S. is in the verge of becoming truly energy independent, and, ultimately, one of the big oil exporters, through the use of fracking, shale, etc. Can't of course produce this on a lot of federal land, with Obama in the White Houe, but private land, along with some unwanted federal land is sufficient with the combination of fracking and horizontal drilling.
Why is this a problem? Because the "Green Energy" boondoggle is based on two pillars. One is the highly questionable theory that burning hydrocarbons causes global warming, and that much of coastal America will go under water if not stopped immediately (Apparently though, it is just fine if the Chinese coasts flood from their ever increasing use of hydrocarbons).
The second pillar is based on the notion that hydrocarbon based fuels drilled from the ground are not "renewable". We hear about the need for "renewable" energy sources constantly, because we are supposed to run out of non-renewable energy sources momentarily, or at least in the next decade, or maybe century. This is one of the big stated justifications for a lot of the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of "green energy" "investments" ranging from Solyndra, to turning all that corn into engine destroying ethanol instead of using it to feed starving people around the world and to keep our own food prices down.
This entire "green energy" edifice is at risk of tumbling down, like a house of cards, due to our sitting on so many potential oil and gas reserves. And, that has a lot of the environmental wackos in this country defecating in their collective pants right now. And, all they need to do is create enough FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), and the Obama Administration, somewhat beholden to them, will do whatever is in their power to shut this down (as they already mostly have on much of our federal lands).
Their problem though is that fracking isn't new. Supposedly it is 60 years ago, but my best friend from college, a petroleum geologist, told me about using it maybe 30 years ago (right around the area that Garbage is talking about in Colorado). The big differences today? It is being used much deeper (that much further beneath the water table), with a lot more horizontal drilling (which again is not new, just refined), using safer fracking compounds, and safer drilling practices.
The greenies will lose a lot of money if we're energy independant. What will RFK Jr. do with out the government grants for "River Keepers?" I suppose it will give him more time to work on slandering pediatricions and scientists with his anti-vaccine hackery.
1. It is SOP (standard operating procedure) for Green Nazis and their supporting liberal and progressive Jewish media masters to greatly exaggerate the toxicity of items used in energy production that they are opposed to.
In the most ridiculous, direst terms. "A generation of humanity is doomed to lethal mutations due to Chernobyl..(there were none). "The Gulf will be a Dead Sea for 1,000 years thanks to evil oil and Corexit 2000 - the Dispersant of Doom. (bacteria munched all the high energy volatiles in months, creating new nutrients of higher level organisms in the food chain, and Corexit turned out to be as low toxicity as a Green Nazi's laundry detergent, and a lot faster biodegradable).
Now we are in the evil, evil poison fracking fluid alarmism phase. Only to find out the stuff is banal, and aside from minor spills to no consequence, employed in strata miles below any water table.
I really do like Hikendooper as governor, even though he is a Democrat. He is iconic, a maverick, and I like that. Colorado has tended to create a lot of those, at least during my life time. His single term predecessor always seemed to remind me too much of Eliot Spitzer, the overzealous prosecutor of high profile cases, both as Denver DA, and state AG, riding that into the governor's mansion. Don't know what happened to Bill Ritter, but don't think it had anything to do will prostitutes.
Gov. Hikenzooper though is different. He wasn't a Dem politician until he ran for mayor, or, maybe even governor, since I think that Denver elections are officially non-partisan. Rather, he was a successful businessman. And, I think a lot of people expect him to go back to such when he leaves office in 2 or 6 years (he is term limited to 2 4-year terms). At least in Colorado, you see this sort of temporary politician much more on the Republican side (last Republican Senator who lost to a Dem, I think lost to Timmy Wirthless, and the last Republican Governor to lose was Vanderhoof, who lost to Governor Gloom (Dick Lamm), all back in the 1970s - rather, they all served one or two terms then went back home). The Dems here in Colorado, of course, seem to see "public service" in the form of holding political office more as a well paying career, which is why Hickenlooper is so unique here - a Democrat who sometimes acts more like a moderate Republican.
"Dihydrous monoxide "
That doesn't make any sense. Hydrous means that it contains water, not that it contains hydrogen. So, "dihydrous monoxide" would be something like O+2(H20) and you can't do that, I don't think.
If you want to come up with a silly name for water that actually makes a sort of sense, try hydrogen hydroxide.
Garage you're such a pip. Spills happen all the time. Some large, some small. What do we do? We clean them up. If someone is negligent, they typically get fined and/or sued. (see Zero's extortion of BP).
I have fracked 3 wells on my property. The frack water source? My fish pond. I wouldn't drink what comes out of the ground. The brine I pay someone to haul away, the oil I sell, the natural gas I use.
In addition to fraccing, acidizing is a very common procedure for stimulating wells. Fraccing and acidizing are sometimes combined into one operation -- the acid-frac. Common acids used are hydrochloric (HCl) and hydroflouric(HFl). Watch "Breaking Bad" for a little bit of information about HFl. You won't see the governor drinking much of the fraccing fluid that contains these acids.
These are not new technologies and these procedures can be used safely and the safe use should be encouraged as there are great benefits to be had.
Unfortunately, however, there are risks and regulation is necessary. Just because a process is well-understood and everybody knows how to do it safely doesn't mean that proper and safe procedures will be followed every time. Consider the well-understood process of cementing well casing and how improper execution (in order to save a relatively small amount of money) contributed to the loss of life and property in the Gulf a couple years ago.
While I agree with the general thrust of Bruce Hayden's comment - the truth is many resources ARE finite and not renewable. And I disagree with the overly sunny glossover some make that Jesus gave the Earth unlimited resources to support unlimited numbers of people living American-level lifestyles and we only need new "exciting, miracle high tech solutions" to access those Jesus gifted unlimited resources.
We will be running out, and some non-renewable resources in large part not recyclable in a way that significantly conserves a large fraction of use (silver, helium, tin, oil, phosphates, Saudi potable groundwater, sperm whale oil). And are currently beyond any reasonable high tech solution to make them abundant and cheap.
But an enema is completely out of the question?
Bruce Hayden is correct about fracking. President Obama and the democrats are sitting on a tremendous opportunity to grow the U.S. economy. There is nothing to be discovered, nothing to perfect.
Oh I forgot, that big snow storm was caused by global warming.
Fracking daiquiri = fraquiri
Frack-quiri?
Resources are not infinite, at least on this planet, though we probably could have plenty of power if we would use nuclear power. A lot of good technology has been developed since the last time we built working reactors in this country, and so far, we are refusing to implement it. Modern reactors are "fail-safe", meaning that when they fail, they naturally shut down safely. Older ones had to have safety measures to shut them down, and those could, and have, failed. Fusion is moving along, though slowly, and solutions are being developed for much of the nuclear waste, even assuming that Yucca Mountain stays shut down after Obama and Harry Reid are out of office (though with the latter, it will probably be in a casket).
We could probably have safe and abundant nuclear energy very quickly, if we just did it, and unlimited fusion energy in our lifetimes, or, worse, the lifetimes of our children or grandchildren, or, at worst, long before we ran out of fossil fuels, given fracking, horizontal drilling, shale, etc.
The place, of course, where there is unlimited energy is in space. Sun shines 2/7, and isn't lessened by our atmosphere. Raw materials abound, in the form of asteroids (and moon rock). The basic problem is getting a sufficient infrastructure in space that is self-sustaining. Quite possible, but not, apparently, with government running the show, given how long it has been since man stepped on the moon. Once established though, with near infinite raw materials and energy, we could theoretically eliminate most earth side manufacturing, and, maybe even energy production, if we can ultimately figure out a good way to transmit energy from space down to the surface of the Earth. And, interestingly, this year, probes are being sent out to test the viability of asteroid mining, and it is being done privately, and not by NASA, whose goals under Obama seem truly to have been redefined as enhancing Muslim self respect (or something just as bizarre).
A couple of decades ago, the estimates were that if we used our spare hydrocarbon based fuels for getting into space and building a sustainable infrastructure there, we had maybe a couple of decades to accomplish it, before we ran out of spare hydrocarbon fuels. And, since NASA was in charge, nothing happened, and that window seemed to have mostly closed. BUT, with another century or two of reserves, along with the advent of civilian space flight, that all has changed.
You can put all sorts of godawful things in a glass of water & one small sip won't kill you. Colour me underwhelmed.
Though there's no such thing as truly "clean" energy - the energy itself devolves into thermal pollution - ignoring renewables (which are basically free once the collectors are in place) in favor of any hydrocarbon source at this point in history is tragic. Other than the potential gallows humor of consumers begging not to be oppressed by all that awful socialist free energy so they can keep spending more to prevent the dire threat of Exxon, BP et al having to have a bake sale, it's a pathetic farce of the highest order.
Fracking has very real potential to create a nightmare scenario when it comes to maintaining water supplies, especially in the Rust Belt. If the Oglalla Aquifer becomes contaminated, a LOT of cities are without potable tap-water - & American agriculture is dead like Elvis.
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