Prospects of Colorado Senate Bill 181
The scientific evidence is in. It is the up-to-date review of the relevant, authoritative scientific literature compiled as the New York Compendium. It is the definitive voice; it is the literature search; it is the sought after scientific evidence; it is the further study; it is conclusive.
The Compendium, by an overwhelming 84-90 percent of the research, concludes that fracking threatens our air, water, health, public safety, climate and long-term economic viability in ways that regulators cannot prevent. Accordingly, fracking must be banned in order to protect the health, safety and welfare of both citizens and wildlife.
Such an overwhelming consensus, evidence at the 84 percent level, has seldom, perhaps never before, been assembled by science on any subject of inquiry.
All aspects of meaningful, continued human existence are based on the very qualities of life that fracking undermines.
Senate Bill 181, contrary to legislative intent, is in danger — via the COGCC’s uninformed, preliminary interpretations — of becoming a compromise with an ignorant, short-sighted, selfishly industry-serving, recalcitrant 15 percent. It may even give that very small minority all they need to further destroy to a degree beyond possible remediation.
Bad politics, indeed!
Should this impending, disastrous, solely politically-based compromise take place, our children, who necessarily inherit the outcomes of our political failures, will never forgive us. If bad politics, as threatened, does prevail over science, our children will be left with no choice.
In order to retain a remote chance at a decent life, Colorado’s children would have to rebel against State enforcements of unwarranted law. That likely would mean going to the bloody streets, even knowing it may already be too late. Such threatens to be our legacy to them.
Dr. Wendell Bradley, retired
professor of physics
