Fracking is a huge environmental and human threat. Why does Obama support it?

[TheKentuckian]

43. Supporters would have a lot more credibility if they would ever demand the "easy" answers

that would make disasters between impossible and rare be put in place before rolling the dice or at the very least as the price of future rolls but no, never always just beating the drums for the fracking or the deep water drilling or the nukes or mining practices with all you can eat sides of "ifs and buts" without a tooth to be found and lots of "who could have ever guessed?" phony hand wringing when and if the "magical" fixes that are reluctantly implemented predictably fail as well the goalposts are reset to some new and improved fix.

I also think there is at times a very human factor of shading to the side our bread is buttered on on these issues, not many will take a side that puts a serious dent in the viability of their own career path and/or income streams.

Tony Hayward is patently unlikely to put himself in competition for geology teaching gigs no matter what the evidence really says and even if he does, he will be a rare bird.

Extraction is probably one of the poorer natural fits with stewardship anyway, there is little in the way of tomorrow because once exploited the site has served it's purpose and is depleted forever, mixing this with the profit motive is automatically dicey and exploitation will inevitably become standard operating procedure as we see now.

Big picture consideration is logically excluded, strangled by the weeds of feeding the bottom line.

Then on another side, it seems that questions on the sustainability of the water usage go into a universal ignore folder, which leads me to think it is a disaster all by its self since there seems to be little in the way of soma like responses nor is it much better when someone happens to wonder what happens to all the sludge that comes from the various extraction techniques, some of the mining shit being really nasty and I suspect the truth is probably further from benefiting the seventh generation out than most would be comfortable with in the true light of day.

For profit extraction is theft from the commons to start with but socializing the downsides to the people and nature is wickedly shortsighted systemically, by definition and bound by charter such vision is beyond the scope of industry. Government is hypothetically supposed to play beat cop in the paradigm but is severely handcuffed in resources, expertise, technology, scope, and via corporate influence and capture to independently and realistically any such thing.

Then if by chance audits of submitted reporting or obvious debacle something is found, we see token (compared to the take and/or damages) fines.