Frackopoly by Wenonah Hauter is a nonfiction environmentalist novel about the history of energy sources in the United States. This book shows how the influences in politics took control of our energy and pushed it towards fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. The United States spends $37.5 billion dollars annually on the exploration and production of fossil fuels. (Kretzmann, 2015)
Fossil fuels have a very heavy use in today’s society, being used for heating and fueling our everyday lives. Only 12% of the energy research budget was spent on trying to expand the renewable side of energy and 10% on efficient use of energy. (Hauter, 2016) Most of the federal money being spent on energy is going towards increasing our oil and gas companies. …show more content…
(Hauter, 2016) Through this form of energy, the Earth is damaged greatly.
The use of water in fracking, pollutes clean water sources, causing our already depleting fresh water sources to deplete even further. Areas around the “sacrifice zones,” sacrifice zones are areas where fracking is taking place, have reported seeing brown murky sediment in their tap water. (Hauter, 2016) With hydraulic fracturing, water is polluted, and the Earth is severely harmed. The water that is polluted is from our aquifers.
There have been reports on the side effects on people's health when it came to the dangers of fracking. People in the rural areas where fracking occurs more often have had an increase in reports of nausea, headaches, and nosebleeds near fracking sites after they became active. (McCarthy, 2016) Fracking uses up to 1.5 million gallons of water a year, while the average household of four uses 146,000 gallons per year. (Skroupa, 2014) This goes to show just how many resources that fracking uses up each …show more content…
(Chiras, 2016) Aquifers are underground water storage tanks that occur naturally. The water is brought to the surface by naturally occurring springs or man-made pumps. When the rock is destroyed during fracking, this often causes the gases and the materials to leak into the aquifers polluting our water.
Not only are our fresh water supplies depleted, but areas surrounding fracking have reported a significant increase in seismic activity. When water is shot into the earth to break up the rock formation, this often causes the rocks to start shifting against each other, causing small almost unnoticeable earthquakes. (Vaughan, 2014) With the increase in fracking across the county states without fault lines and little to no earthquakes in their history have reported earthquakes measuring up to 4.0 in the richter