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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13836 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Fracking won so hard that no one talks about it anymore. It still causes miniquakes when the wastewater is injected underground, and some people will randomly get methane in their water supply, but total US energy dominance outweighs such petty concerns.

The downsides of fracking are fake. I live in north Texas, where there was a spate of news stories a little over a decade back about how suddenly there's minor earthquakes because we're now exploiting fracking(as if non-fracking based natural gas was new here). But nobody checked- there'd always been earthquakes too small for anyone to care on, we're sitting on a fault line(the same one running through Austin). Likewise the 'contaminated water' stories always turn out to be flint-like mismanagement of completely separate water sources.

One notices the people pushing these stories tend to be anti-fossil-fuel watermelons.

but total US energy dominance outweighs such petty concerns.

https://en.macromicro.me/collections/26367/electricity/142474/us-vs-china-total-electricity-generation China is by 2026 roughly producing 2.5x the electricity that the US produces. EU + Norway + Switzerland + UK produces about 3300 TWh per year compared to the US which produces roughly 4050. The US onlu produces about 22.5% more electricity than Europe.

Total electricity production isn't a useful metric here. The US hasn't been power constrained (until recently) and prices are consistently lower, thanks to fracking. US electricity production leveled off in the 2000s as incandescents were replaced with fluorescents and LEDs (this change alone has saved countless QALYs).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/27/opinion/electricity-power-grid-infrastructure.html

Sure, datacenters are putting pressure on the grid, but there's a reason they're being pumped out over here.

Was it here that there was an energy industry lawyer talking about how excited everyone was over fracking since natural gas is much better for the environment than coal, but then suddenly overnight the sentiment reversed and fracking was the devil?

Yup, that was me.

You get something greater than the effect of "miniquakes" (magnitude 1 or less) when a large truck drives by. And the stories about methane in water supply were fraudulent; the methane was there before the fracking.

And the stories about methane in water supply were fraudulent

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1100682108

In active gas-extraction areas (one or more gas wells within 1 km), average and maximum methane concentrations in drinking-water wells increased with proximity to the nearest gas well and were 19.2 and 64 mg CH4 L-1 (n = 26), a potential explosion hazard; in contrast, dissolved methane samples in neighboring nonextraction sites (no gas wells within 1 km) within similar geologic formations and hydrogeologic regimes averaged only 1.1 mg

This study seems to suggest that, at least in 2011, there was a real risk.

I expect the wells were placed where there was the most methane.

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