The arc of the quintessential fracking battle is still taking shape, but it's beginning to look like a recurring feature in the storyline may be the "ban" – a word drilling companies are loathe to even speak. We see that scene playing out in New Jersey where legislators, enviros and up-in-arms citizens are putting heat on Governor Chris Christie and the Delaware River Basin Commission to ban the controversial extraction process of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," until impacts on the environment and human health can be fully assessed. The "ready, fire, aim" approach embraced by frackers and their supporters in government is becoming an increasingly heated point of contention among opponents of a practice that has been known to produce a range of volatile environmental impacts, including flammable tap water and exploding drinking-water wells. Most level-headed folks would agree that it makes sense to conduct a full environmental impact assessment before – not after – subjecting a region and its residents to an aggressive, "no holds barred" industrial practice like fracking. At issue is the rapidly expanding use of an extraction process first used by Halliburton (which should tell us something) in the late-1940s. Fracking extracts oil and natural gas from deep ...
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