Hi Neighbors,
I am writing to ask how many of you have been watching the reports in the last several months of dead fish washing up on our shores, and also about the fracking that is being performed to get to reserves of natural gas (the kind for stoves).
I believe there is reason to be greatly concerned. I had a neighbor once who put her cigarette out in my fish tank, thinking it wouldn’t do anything since I didn’t have an ashtray. All the fish died, so I cleaned everything with hot water and salt, aged new water and restocked the tank. I learned the hard way that I was not going to get the coal tar out of the Plexiglas of the tank. I cleaned three times and lost three batches of fish before I figured it out. I understand by correlation that the oil spills in our oceans have been “cleaned up” but that does not include the stuff that has settled into the sediment, or ocean floor. I believe it is possible that that residue could be killing plant life and animals in the ocean, because since the residue does not reside naturally at the surface of sand under the water, it is probably poisonous, and sticky enough to deprive plants which animals feed on of their necessary light and whatever oxygen may be in the water. By extension, anything that we may need from the ocean may also be poisonous to us, either because we consume fish, or use other types of ocean products, kelp and the like. Also some of the fish washing up on our shores are discovered to have been eating our garbage, as though they could find nothing to eat. The pictures are awful, but enlightening. Why would they suddenly be showing up stuffed with our garbage, unless their food supply is no longer there? ARE the plants and crustaceans and smaller fish dying?
There are also the problems that fracking causes to too many of our fresh water sources around the country. I have seen more than one special on television in which neighborhoods water supplies are already damaged by the companies doing the fracking process. What they do is force water and chemicals into the ground to push up and capture the natural gas. What happens is that the chemicals escape into the ground water in the surrounding areas, poisoning public water supply. The safety measures promoted, are simply put, NOT SUFFICIENT. The companies offer bottled water to the residents, but the damage is done, and their homes have lost their value. On top of that the films show running water at the kitchen tap , and also a rig over a water well with water coming up, at which a blow torch or lighter is put in the air near the running water, causing fire and explosion. People also suffer the possibility of health problems before finding out about the insidious problem. The companies involved don’t seem terribly forthcoming about either. We have also had too many reports of explosions and fires and deaths caused by exploding antiquated natural gas lines across the country. We have too many more than the involved utilities can keep up with, causing terrible damage in the present and unknown damage in the future with no remedy in sight, and I believe the last report said that the gas lines are plentiful enough to go around the world 6 times.
Now, with all these problems to our survival in the midst, the government is proposing taking out the Environmental Protection Agency. You know, the folks who are there to take care of this sort of thing, along with the many other disasters they clean up. If our ocean waters end up being too poisonous to desalinate, and the senate keeps pushing the various kinds of fracking, and drilling in the ocean for poison, what are we supposed to do?
I have seen a wonderful possibility in a project successfully done in Reno. The city got new but never used turbines off of a mothballed ship, and combined them with geothermal spots in the city to create electricity, by using the hot water already coming out of the ground to run through the turbines to create power. The water then leaves cold, and unpolluted. That’s a win, win, right? This one installation creates enough electricity for the entire city. The report said that there are geo thermal spots such as Reno used “all over” the US. I have written to my senator about it, but I think there needs to be more awareness, that there ARE things affordable to be done, and very quickly. Reno has virtually free power, and I believe they said within a year of the inception of the project.. With that and electric vehicles for ourselves and for transporting our food and products we’d be sitting pretty!
If you are concerned about this, please write to your senators and tell them. They need to know what we are thinking and what we want. I believe this is a great portion of the deadlock they are dealing with. If you have any other low cost, ecologically safe ideas, PLEASE forward them to your Senators?
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