Effort to avoid vote on fracking falters in Colo.

We keep on poking holes in Earth to (1) get natural gas and(2) make money. Meantime, wildlife habitat is irretrievably fragmented, destroyed, and otherwise kissed off. In the end, America's natural heritage continues slipping into "threatened and endangered" states. Read about what just transpired in Colorado right here.

Another gas pipeline, or save bird habitat?

The fellow who's trying to keep a pipeline from being installed across a Vermont park has done alright, so far. He's gotten good media attention for his cause. Hey, the park in question is public land so it ought to be kept as is. Here's what today's media attention says.

Is naural gas 'cleaner' than coal (i.e., dirt)?

A wittle bit, I suppose. But it is still a fossil fuel and burning it still releases a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, into our atmosphere (the only one we have, buckaroos). No matter matter how many holes we cram into Earth to get natural gas, we're still in trouble and future generations are in even more dire straits. But yet another debacle associated with gas and oil drilling remains under the news media's fuzzy umbrella: Drilling means road-building, which means wiping out a ribbon of natural landscape, which means fragmenting wildlife habitat, which means losing more biodiversity. This op-ed looks at the natural gas vs. coal/methane question.

New fracking rules proposed for drilling on federal public land

A couple of things: If there isn't any human health problem with the chemicals drillers are using to collect natural gas stored in shale rock formations, like Marcellus in Pennsylvania, then why so much secrecy? Trade rules? Right. And not. We humans continue treating the Earth - our only planet - as an infinite source of "resources." it is not. I suggest a couple of fixes right off: Put a nice warm sweater on when the weather turns cold; turn the thermostat down (I get by with a setting of 60 and I am in northern Vermont!); and get up and move around. There is nothing worse than camping out in front of the boob tube.
Natural gas drilling - just like myriad other human activities - destroys and fragments habitats needed by all the other life the Creator placed on Earth. And w show our reverence for this biological diversity by wrecking it? The NY Times reports on the Obama administrations latest compromise on gas drilling on federal public lands. Sad.