Mother Nature (WRATH)

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Gov. Brown clashes with environmentalists over fracking

Gov. Jerry Brown was on a roll, enthusiastically preaching to a choir of environmentalists about how carbon use and global warming are a looming catastrophe for California and the world.

“Stopping carbon will be like stopping a heroin addiction,” Brown told a standing-room-only crowd at a downtown San Francisco hotel last month. “We are addicted to carbon” and something has to be done, and quickly, if the world is to be saved.

But a growing number of environmentalists argue that the governor’s long-standing refusal to ban hydraulic fracking, a controversial process that has helped revive the oil industry in California, opens the state to just the type of environmental disasters he regularly rails against.

“It’s hypocritical for Brown to call himself a climate leader,” said Catherine Garoupa White of Californians Against Fracking, a coalition of environmental groups. The governor’s support for fracking “is a huge smear on Brown’s green record.”

Fracking is a technique in which wells are injected with a chemical fluid under high pressure to fracture underground rock formations to release oil and natural gas that are otherwise unobtainable. While fracking has boosted energy production across the nation, environmentalists argue that the fluid used can threaten the water supply, that more carbon pollutants are released into the air and, more generally, that producing more oil allows people to use more oil.

“The state needs to move to an economy with 100 percent clean energy and get out of oil,” said Dan Jacobson, legislative director for Environment California. “The governor needs to play a leadership role in getting us off oil.”
http://www.sfchronicle.com/science/article/Gov-Brown-clashes-with-environmentalists-over-11151180.php