Healthy children more important than gas fracking
Reading the July 28 article “In Gas Country, Families Say They Are Prisoners in Their Own Home,” part two of the “Human Toll” series, makes me wonder: What is it going to take to put the brakes on the rapidly expanding industry that fracks gas in order to make plastics ( which, incidentally, is one thing nature doesn’t need any more of)?
Will it be the growing body of medical evidence — highlighted in the recently published 6th edition of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s fracking science compendium — that finally persuades Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine that residents living near fracked gas infrastructure are suffering? Will it be when the new petrochemical hub on the Ohio River is designated a “cancer alley”?
Will it be when Gov. Tom Wolf actually does the math and realizes that $ 1.6 billion given in tax breaks to industries that directly threaten public health in order to create fewer than 600 permanent jobs is a terrible investment for the state? Will it be when we get weary of seeing photos of rivers, ocean gyres, coastal beaches and aquatic and terrestrial life forms choked by plastic trash?
Will it be the realization that geophysics trumps politics — that fracking for plastics is contrary to serious action to slow global climate disruption?
Will the tipping point come when we read more articles by Dave Templeton and Don Hopey of children getting sick with, and dying from, rare cancers? What is it going to take?
EDWARD C. KETYER, M. D.
Peters