Yeah it would be great to live in a world where we didn't rely so heavily on coal or fracking, but I don't see the U.S. intalling Solar Panels at nearly the rate of say Germany or making any other serious efforts to get off of coal and cheap carbon rich sources of energy. It gets stalled as a political argument where people who worry about the impact of carbon on our atmosphere are painted as the ones full of shit. It's very hard to convince people that something that feels good in the short term but has potentially disasterous impact on the long-run is something they shouldn't do, especially once they are addicted. Just look at cigarettes. Fossil fuels are the equivalent of societal amphetamines, they speed everything up and make it so that people sleep less, work more, and generally do more but they over the long-run are wearing out our planet and the extraction is contaminating many parts of our earth, from the plastic debris to the oil spills to the coal residue contaminating fish. And at the same time I don't really see a way for individuals to prevent this from happening because going against the short-term economic benefit of fossil fuel extraction and use is political suicide for most politicians where people are benefitting from both the consumption and production of fossil fuels. We could provide subsidies and even more credit to encourage the wide-spread adoption of solar energy, and we as individuals could probably afford to install small solar systems onto our houses to help off-set the electrical production even if it were a somewhat expensive investment with a long-term financial payoff.

Actually I think this makes sense and sounds accurate. Why should fracking chemicals be excluded from the clean water act ? Just because they design concrete boxes to try to prevent the fluid from leaching into the surrounding acquifers ? Concrete cracks over time, and there have definitely been some screw ups in the initial designs which caused the contamination that the fracking companies refuse to take accountability for, but instead just offer water treatment systems and trucked in water. More of this will likely happen, hopefully it won't be universal, but really people this is potentially tricky stuff with a lot of variables that are unknown because they are hidden.

Regardless of whether fracking results in the near-permanent contamination of rural water supplies nearby it, it is a rather dreadful noisy and destructive process. I've spoken with someone who got lumped into a settlement and is watching the process unfold around him. Roads being destroyed by heavy machinery, and a 24-hour cacophony of noise. And that is without the potential contamination of the water supply due to concrete breaking down over time or unknown geological variables that result in the leaking of said chemicals somewhere along the line. Perhaps as a result of negligence or economic short-cutting to make more profit as the price of natural-gas plummets thus resulting in a desire to extract it with as little "investment" as possible. Yeah truly a luddite fairy tale, or is it really more of a real-life nightmare.

Exactly. Apple is simply trying to block the use of a free standard because it is competitive with their proprietary nature. The fact that they won't add a free standard video codec to Quicktime is infuriating and makes me want to stage a protest at a Apple store just for fun. Similar to the protests against DRM that people staged a few years ago. I think that we need to stand up and demand accountability for this attempt to muscle out a real positive alternative to a region of software that is dominated by proprietary codecs.