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Do you promise not to tell?

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


In the no-science-is-good-science (or is that good science is no science?) state of North Carolina, the Republican legislature has decided that some of the science we can do without is testing our water.

That's for companies who want to use hydraulic fracturing -- fracking -- for natural gas, that is. Your average municipal water system has about a skillion EPA regulations, of course, and municipal water systems love to follow them, on account of regulation and testing takes care of little jobs like keeping the water safe.

Anyhow, the Committee on Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources of the NC Senate has passed a rule that would let companies that want to frack for gas -- forcing water and chemicals into stone to fracture it, releasing trapped hydrocarbons -- do so without telling us what chemicals they are using. And if you're wondering who's in charge here these days, it was the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources -- the people supposedly looking out for the North Carolina environment -- that requested the whole shhh-don't-tell thing.


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See, here's the thing: in May, the N.C. Mining & Energy Commission was going to approve its rules for the newly approved practice of fracking. Rules included things like, say, disclosure of the toxic stew companies use to keep the fluid doing what they want it to underground. Then noted environmentally aware and science-supportive petrogiant Halliburton started clearing its throat and shuffling its feet, and suddenly the commission's chair, James Womack, withdrew the rules from voting.

The original rules allowed the fracking companies to submit certain ingredients under seal to the commission, if it considered those trade secrets. But because the ingredients would be held, even under seal, by a public agency, they could be used as evidence in litigation. The fracking companies don't like that.

So the NC Senate Committee on Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources has done what the energy companies hoped: voted to let them frack away without disclosing what they're using. They promise -- seriously, they PROMISE -- that they wouldn't use anything dangerous, and we should totally trust them.

I'm willing to take the energy companies at their words that they're trustworthy. So I suggest they submit the ingredients, make the information totally public, and just promise not to steal each other's trade secrets. If they're that trustworthy, resisting the temptation won't be hard. Shamefully untrusting citizens can thus make sure nobody's using poison to blow up the rocks in their aquifers, and the companies' trade secrets remain safe.

Best of all -- no science needed! Even the NC legislature should like that solution.

 

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus.

His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.

For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.

He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

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