US Rust Belt Manufacturing Rebounds Via Fracking Boom 191
schnell writes:
A NY Times article reports that Midwestern "Rust Belt" towns and their manufacturing economies in particular have rebounded greatly due to the U.S. resurgence in fossil fuel production. This resurgence is driven by production of shale gas and natural gas from "fracking" and other new technologies that recover previously unavailable fuel but are more invasive than traditional techniques. "Both Youngstown and Canton are places which experienced nothing but disinvestment for 40 years." "They're not ghost towns anymore," according to the article. But while many have decried the loss of traditional U.S. manufacturing jobs in a globalized world and the associated loss of high-wage, blue collar jobs, do the associated environmental risks of new "tight oil" extraction techniques outweigh the benefits to these depressed economic regions?
Transition fuel (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually cheap natural gas and wind go hand in hand. You use Natural gas as a backing fuel for wind. If natural gas gets cheap enough you can turn it into clean burning diesel and jet fuel. Electricity is fine for many things but you will not see an electric airliners or long haul truck anytime soon. I also do not see the US electrifying all of it's railways anytime soon.
As to natural gas as a strategic fuel export might be a requirement strategically. Europe gets a lot of it's gas from Russia and may ver
Strategy (Score:2)
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You would save nothing.
Unless the Russia rapidly decreases the size of it's military you still need to have the military power to back it up.
After all a natural gas tanker could always just explode in the middle of the Atlantic or in a harbor in Europe.
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Does not take a blockade, just an "accident". You will always want to have enough military force to win any war if possible. The goal is to never have to fight a war. The simple rule is no nation ever starts a war because the opponent is too strong. Nations start wars that they think they can win.
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I agree that electrifying the railways isn't likely to happen, but it would still be a good idea. I'd go so far as to say it would be a better idea than running long-haul trucks off of natural-gas-derived synthetic diesel. Heck, I'd even rather see the trains running off the synthetic diesel, just because the fuel economy is s
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Exactly when cheap NG is cheap enough you can use it to make synth fuels for vehicles like trains, trucks, and aircraft. I do wonder if battery power would work for tractors? Weight is not an issue and range sure is not. The question would be is if they use too much energy for a practical battery. Of course a battery swap might be a simple solution for that.
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Trains will probably never run on synth fuel, with a train storage is a complete non-issue, fuel takes up a tiny fraction of the available cargo room and towing capacity so trains will just use lightly compressed natural gas directly, it's WAY more energy efficient that way and the conversion from traditional diesel is trivial (Berkshire owned CSX is already starting to convert their fleet)..
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Good point.
Re:Transition fuel (Score:5, Interesting)
There will be no low cost energy, there will be no reserves. It's just a quick cash grab.
Not quite true. There is a huge supply that will last much longer than 4 years. But there will continue to be a cash grab.
Gas fracking is the big dog in the energy market right now, and driving down pricing in the electrical market. But below about $3.5/Mbtu, profitability drops below the point where it makes sense to add new extractions, so new development slows to a crawl. At the same time, gas fired generation steadily increases due to the low cost, thus the overall energy market dependance on nat gas increases. Once this dependency reaches a tipping point, the gas companies can raise prices significantly. This price spike will be temporary, as it will invite more extractions, and thus increase supply. So you will see a cyclic price pattern combined with some extreme spikes during periods of excessive demand (primarily very cold weather). The greater the dependency becomes, the bigger the cycles and spikes will become, with added uncertainly a periods of huge price spikes.
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Natural gas exploration has boomed because it is the low cost option for reliable electrical generation, not because of, but in spite of anything wind has done. Local pricing is clearly not the central driver. You can assume reality is different if you like.
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Do you have a point or have something to add to the topic? If so , make it, and stop asking me pointless questions in an attempt to divert.
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Natural gas basically just subsidizes the cost of drilling, the profit comes from the liquid petroleum fraction, that's why BP recently pulled out of their holdings in SE Ohio, their test wells were all much drier than expected resulting in wells that had ROIs well below other global areas so they shifted their capital elsewhere. So as long as they can find large pockets of wet gas there will be as much supply as the transportation network can handle, and if they're finding enough wet gas then liquification
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Maybe you missed the natural gas and propane shortages that occurred in the north-central regions last winter due the Canadian pipe-line explosion.
I totally agree that everyone should move to southern California so we don't waste all this energy just keeping people from freezing to death in these regions, but until that's practical you might notice that some people actually need this stuff.
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Excellent Question (Score:5, Informative)
do the associated environmental risks of new "tight oil" extraction techniques outweigh the benefits to these depressed economic regions?
That is an excellent question. What we need is an excellent answer. Unfortunately, right now, we only have some rather crude guesses, mostly made by people with entrenched preconceptions (on both sides of the issue). We don't know what the probable environmental cost of an additional $100m of fracking production is.
There are two reasons to continue fracking, while going easy on the rate of production; 1) the oil will still be there, it will probably continue to climb in value, and we are learning -- by doing -- more cost effective and safer approaches to extraction, and 2) because we need more data to improve the risk assessment model.
Not doing fracking won't get us the data we need, and would prevent us from developing the technology to get this stuff out cheaper and safer. Doing fracking as fast as we can will waste money and create additional damage by using current early-stage extraction processes, and it exposes us to poorly quantified risk.
The biggest problem right now is that the oil companies, in fear of regulation-to-come, are extracting as fast as they can to try to get the money out of the ground before the axe falls. That is pretty much the worst possible answer: It minimizes the profit margin on a finite resource while maximizing the risk. It is a textbook example of short-term orientation market failure.
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But what if doing the fracking causes irreversible damage? Maybe we need to make the mistake to realize it's one, but then it might be too late. Some countries apply the "Principle of precaution", that is, "if you're not sure of the effects of what you're doing, don't fucking do it."
Re:Excellent Question (Score:5, Insightful)
But what if doing the fracking causes irreversible damage? Maybe we need to make the mistake to realize it's one, but then it might be too late. Some countries apply the "Principle of precaution", that is, "if you're not sure of the effects of what you're doing, don't fucking do it."
Well played. :)
Here, let me do the iconic example of the other side:
'We can't have government jumping in and killing off entire industries just because the sky might be falling. There have been no major catastrophes as a direct result of fracking, and even the few relatively minor events that have been recorded turned out not to be caused by fracking, but by improper deep-well injection of effluent.'
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Bullshit. There was a case here locally where a farm that had had fine drinking water for almost 200 years suddenly had flammable water with Benzene levels 5-10x the allowable limit. They have water reports from as little as 2 years before the fracking began because they were contemplating selling the farm (they ended up donating most of the land to the county for a park and taking a 100 year tax abatement on the homestead instead, which is how the land ended up being fracked to begin with, talk about no go
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You'll notice that your "market failure" argument is completely based on a non-market "government chill-factor" driver?
No, I will not. The same short-term-orientation market failure would occur in a pure laissez-faire system. In that case, the failure to account for long-term risk combined with limited liability, bankruptcy, and shell corporations would result in the same public risk / private profit that is the primary economic failure with fracking now.
I will grant that it is exacerbated by the current go
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While I get what you are saying as far as "research" it's kind of like saying; "We can't know how to treat Agent Orange damage if we don't keep spraying Agent Orange -- there won't be enough data."
Fracking is a transition tech -- it's getting the last bits of natural gas and that's fine. But if we spent more money pushing the alternative energy -- which WILL EVENTUALLY be cheaper, we speed the day and time when it's more viable.
The environment and mankind will be better off on alternative energy so why are
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While I get what you are saying as far as "research" it's kind of like saying; "We can't know how to treat Agent Orange damage if we don't keep spraying Agent Orange -- there won't be enough data."
While I get what you are saying, I think you are using a charged metaphor. We know how bad Agent Orange is. We genuinely do not know how dangerous fracking is. Try replacing Agent Orange with, for example, "the search for the Higgs Boson", or "artificial intelligence", or some other thing that has unknown potentia
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Fracking takes water out of action (Score:4, Interesting)
This article [theenergycollective.com] tries to compare fracking water use to other uses (eg. golf courses) but fails to account for fracking water being taken out of the system - it's not recycled, it's disposed of. With lakes drying up or disappearing in California and other countries fighting over fresh water, how can the fracking industry be so wasteful?
Re:Fracking takes water out of action (Score:5, Insightful)
While fracking water can't be reused as drinking water, there is some evidence [nytimes.com] that it can be recycled for other purposes, and may not be nearly as contaminated as previously thought.
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The problem is that they won't tell us what they're using in the fracking water, which means we have little way of knowing what's in it, and how contaminated it actually is.
To date (at least as far as I've seen), the companies have been keeping the mixture as a trade secret, and refusing to let any independent science take place.
It's all just "don't worry, it's safe", even when people are ending up with contaminated wells.
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Doesn't sound safe to me:
DEP finds 243 water sources contaminated by gas exploration [bizjournals.com]
I can't help but wonder how many more water sources will be have chemicals leach into them even after the fracking is finished. On the positive side, sometimes the contamination diminishes over time to safe levels.
Re:Fracking takes water out of action (Score:5, Informative)
That you cannot get the recipes is a big lie propagated by the gasland film.
You can do a google search and find the generic recipes. The problem is those recipes are generic and depending on the soil the proportions of different chemicals change. The big problem and why various companies have been fighting the various anti-frackers is that as you use the water it picks up chemicals from the ground, the various anti-fracker groups want companies to do a constant scan for those picked up chemicals and track all of them and report all of them.
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The northeastern US doesn't have a water shortage that's why.
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Re:Fracking takes water out of action (Score:4, Interesting)
In terms of the universe, you are probably correct.
However, I notice that pure combustion of methane gas yields carbon dioxide and water vapor (incomplete combustion yielding some nasty things like carbon monoxide). So all of this pulling of methane from underground and subsequent combustion: yields water vapor and a gas plants use to grow and thereby convert to CO2 to oxygen, which bound to hydrogen yields water.
So eventually, we will get the water back. And I'm not sure if the numbers work out (gallons of water polluted vs. amount of water vapor produced from millions of cubic feet of methane), but it seems there's a possibility, over time, we will actually have *more* water in circulation as a result.
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Water is a finite resource.
That's a gross misrepresentation. It's not like it boils off into space after it comes out of a well, it can be reused. There are several cities that have switched over to using filtered sewage for drinking water, and """contiminated""" frac water isn't any more polluted.
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Large volumes of inexpensive, clean water that do not require large amounts of energy to process is a finite resource.
There, I fixed it for you.
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and """contiminated""" frac water isn't any more polluted.
Really, you say that with such conviction. Would you drink untreated, or lightly treated fracking water every day for a year? Because AFAIK nobody but the fracking companies knows exactly what they're putting into their mixtures (and often not even then, many wildcaters buy from Halliburton and friends). The companies have fought extremely hard against any attempt to have them disclose what they are using, or at having and independent scientific ana
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They submitted exactly what they use in a god damn congressional hearing
[citation needed]
Preferably a link to the Congressional Record where the additives are listed.
Does natural gas fracking work the same way as oil (Score:3)
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I know the extraction bellcurves of conventional oil wells/fields are generally decades long things, while fracking lasts only a few years, so a fracking area tends to get dotted with many, many wells before they have to move on due to depletion.
Does the same short-livedness hold true for natural gas?
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http://geology.com/royalty/pro... [geology.com]
What about green fracking? (Score:2)
One of the huge complaints is that all that crap can contaminate water supplies; this would include the fracking fluid itself coming back up to the surface.
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The "greenest" fracking I'm aware of is propane-fracking. Uses propane instead of water as the fracking medium.
No water is used, some of the propane can be recovered, the remaining is suitable as a crude oil. As an added plus, unlike water, no radioactive radon is conducted back to the surface with this process.
Some Canadian company has applied for a patent to the process in the United States. IMO, this should be declined since Chevron invented the process back in the 70s for under-sea fracking. Not to
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Methane is something like 20x as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 over a century, and ~50-70x more potent over periods of less than 50 years (give or take). When you take the methane release into account, even away from all the water/soil pollution, fracking is more damaging vis-a
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So when I was talking about green fracking, it was greening those issues directly around the fracking area.
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Someone should look-up the term "Rebound" (Score:5, Insightful)
From what the article says, this is a bump in manufacturing from short term contracts, this is hardly a sustainable client base. My guess is that at the very most this will be a benefit for one generation, maybe two at the very most. A few thousand jobs is nothing to shrug off but I hope that these towns are prepared for what is going to happen within the next 20 to 40 years. The cheap housing and sharp increase in demand will attract real-estate prospectors; and just like these sociopathic leeches always do, they will start building up their little housing price bubbles and once again the idea that maybe "infinite growth" can be a real thing is going to settle in the backs of peoples minds. I'm not saying that we should stop this kind of thing mind you. The money generated in this way is very real, even if the actual wealth is not. But we should be better prepared for the fallout this time.
Re:Someone should look-up the term "Rebound" (Score:4, Insightful)
From what the article says, this is a bump in manufacturing from short term contracts, this is hardly a sustainable client base. My guess is that at the very most this will be a benefit for one generation, maybe two at the very most. A few thousand jobs is nothing to shrug off but I hope that these towns are prepared for what is going to happen within the next 20 to 40 years. The cheap housing and sharp increase in demand will attract real-estate prospectors; and just like these sociopathic leeches always do, they will start building up their little housing price bubbles and once again the idea that maybe "infinite growth" can be a real thing is going to settle in the backs of peoples minds. I'm not saying that we should stop this kind of thing mind you. The money generated in this way is very real, even if the actual wealth is not. But we should be better prepared for the fallout this time.
Many of these rust-belt cities have struggled for so long that suburban sprawl has been quite limited. Many of them have intact urban downtowns that are run-down and many of these towns and cities have been focusing on smart urban renewal of these downtown areas. They won't be making the same mistakes again. And they don't need a whole generation of investment to make them great little places to live.
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Many of these rust-belt cities have struggled for so long that suburban sprawl has been quite limited. Many of them have intact urban downtowns that are run-down and many of these towns and cities have been focusing on smart urban renewal of these downtown areas. They won't be making the same mistakes again. And they don't need a whole generation of investment to make them great little places to live.
They still need ongoing jobs. And this is the elephant in the room as far as fracking goes. It's boom-bust all over again.
The money isn't really in the product, the money is really in creating enough buzz to get some other sucker to put his money into a well so that you can cash out. Once that stream of suckers^Hinvestors drops out, the economy drops out. Quickly.
So in ten years you will seen storefronts boarded up again. They won't be storefronts from the 50's and '60s (the last boom and bust cycle),
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Huh? Cleveland and Detroit are both the definition of rustbelt and urban sprawl, heck Youngstown was ranked 175/221 for worst urban sprawl in the smart growth 2014 [cleveland.com] report.
A little preparation handles that (Score:2)
Local policy makers should make preparations for what happens in a generation or two, agreed. This is, however, a solved problem. More money/jobs from the energy industry means that other businesses have paying customers- hair salons, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores - every segment of the economy benefits from the inflow of money to the area. Over the next 10-20 years, blighted abandoned areas become vibrant again. At that point, they are attractive places to build any business. That's the time
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It's a third- world environment, but with unions and Democrat labor laws.
Normally I wouldn't entertain the idea of politicizing what is clearly an economic and social development issue; but what the hell I'll respond.
I'm not sure how you think that unions work where you are from. But here in the US what they do is monopolize the labor pool for a given trade on a per entity basis; they do not annex an entire cities population all at one a time. But, solely for the sake of your argument, let's say that a labor union somehow actually DID manage to maintain the peoples faith, in a s
drilling & mining is NOT manufacturing (Score:5, Insightful)
If the ultimate cost of extraction were markedly lower (as it has in decades past) the net energy gains might still be enough to justify. But those days are long gone.
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No need to swear (Score:2)
US Rust Belt Manufacturing Rebounds Via Fracking Boom
Watch your fracking language.
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We don't need that felgercarb herre.
Bad title..Manufacturing is (Score:2)
NOT rebounding because of the fracking boom. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost to globalization are being replaced by the fracking industry.
fracking is NOT new (Score:3)
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Fracking itself may not be new... but it wasn't used on a scale anywhere even close to what we're seeing now... until the advent of directional drilling [wikipedia.org], which definitely is new. And it can be argued that drilling long narrow tunnels laterally through layers of shale is far less disruptive and risky than the recent trend of pumping millions of gallons of fresh water, diesel, propane, proprietary mixes of mysterious synthetic substances into the ground beneath our pastures and farmland.
So, while the media ma
Let me sum up the issues (Score:2)
Problem: fossil fuels are required for a fossil fuel based economy. Yes that includes tech which requires plastics, electricity, and fuel to extract the mierals needed to build the products, make the products, and ship them.
Problem: reliance on foreign fossil fuels can cause wars.
One solution: extract fuel from places where the fuel was unreachable or very difficult to extract.
Problem: can cause environmental damage.
Benefit: energy independence
Benefit: jobs
Problem: does nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
So
oh Belgium! (Score:2)
In my day, kids didn't use fucking vulgar goddamn language like that, they had respect.
Life imitates art ... (Score:2)
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Everything is a Western?
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There's no stopping this. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of nonsense posts in this thread about how it doesn't benefit anyone... I live right in the middle of this so let me provide some anecdotal evidence...
My Uncle is a farmer (cranberries) and has a 160 acre farm. His son worked in factories. Those factories pretty much left the state for China and my cousin, who admittedly is an idiot and therefor can't get a decent job that involves thinking, has been bouncing from fast food job to fast food job for about a decade. The cranberry market crashed a while back as the 'cranberry fad' died. Berries went from $80/barrel to around $12/barrel. My uncles farm was floundering, he was about $200k in debt and pulling in $40k/year after expenses.
Then came fracking.
My cousin got a job hauling pipes... he went from working at McDonalds to making $55k/yr over night. That may not seem like a lot to most slashdotters but in the Northern/Midwest area thats a very good salary. He's got land, a house, he's very happy though the commute is terrible. (up to 4hrs to work and back depending on the site hes working on)
Cranberries grow in sand... Sand is used in fracking. My Uncle just closed a deal to sell his farm to a Sand Mining operation for $2 million. In fact, nearly every Cranberry farmer he knows is selling as well. The sand mining companies are offering 400% the going rate for the land and are buying everything... everywhere... Some people are getting as high as $20k/acre depending on the Sand quality and how close they are to the railroad.
Now... as far as environmental impacts... The farm he spent his entire life building is going to literally be turned into an open pit 150ft deep. He hates the idea, but he can either retire a millionaire or leave his children so much debt they'll be forced to sell to the mine as well. The farmers that aren't selling are happy about it to because with fewer farmers around, the price of cranberries will go up. He plans to use his new found wealth to buy some land that has a trout stream running through it up the road and spend the rest of his days fishing.
So yes, the environmental impacts are huge. But to say it's not a boom for local people and the poor, that's just disingenuous. If you live anywhere near this stuff you're economic situation is going to improve. My uncles retaining ponds will, however, no longer be the best fishing spot in the county.
Re: There's no stopping this. (Score:2)
Odds are he outlives the fishing.
evolution is too slow (Score:2)
if we humans could just evolve quicker so that polluted water could be consumed, then all this nonsense about "saving the earth" by banning fracking would just go away.
Centurions (Score:2)
Read the headline and wondered if they weren't bouncing back via the lucrative "toaster" market. So say we all!
I work in fracking industry (Score:2)
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i'm saying that human beings, no matter how intelligent, have powerful cognitive biases. when possible, it's worthwhile to at least take a minute and ask if it's possible that our view is distorted in some way - whether it be in synch with sinclair's comment or otherwise.
i assure you, there is a plethora of data out there regarding the industry and practices that point to significant damage being done.
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I'm pretty sure most common laborers in these areas lost their houses a long time ago.
Re:Cure is worse than the disease. (Score:5, Insightful)
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that explains it.
(sorry, couldn't resist).
would you prefer geothermal power? (Score:3)
Simple question - would you prefer geothermal energy rather than energy obtained by fracturing?
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It was a trick question, geothermal requires fracking
Re:Cure is worse than the disease. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ok, I'll beat my daughter instead.
No, please don't beat your daughter either.
Ok, I'll beat my wife.
huh??
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I'm pretty sure we would have to invade Canada to force them to take Detroit.
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Preemptive asshole strike?
Scared much?
Re:Now comes the Time of the Envirowackos (Score:5, Insightful)
You've just read the label on your Pop-Tart.
Put your glasses on, drink some more coffee and try again.
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Nice bit of scare tactics there. Repeat items in the list to get a 37% longer list; Probably another third of the list are common FDA approved ingredients for food and soaps.
Seriously, you want to complain that up to half of one-percent of what they pump in could be table salt or pure grain alcohol? Or that they are using very soft water?
You are the reason why the only people who take environmentalists seriously anymore are the environmentalists who are to stupid to realize that the other environmentalists