Fracking in America and Britain - a comparison

[spot]

I offered to quote a short passage from Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions", Chapter 14:

The truck carrying Kilgore Trout was in West Virginia now. The surface of the State had been demolished by men and machinery and explosives in order to make it yield up its coal. The coal was mostly gone now. It had been turned into heat.

The surface of West Virginia, with its coal and trees and topsoil gone, was rearranging what was left of itself in conformity with the laws of gravity. It was collapsing into all the holes which had been dug into it. Its mountains, which had once found it easy to stand by themselves, were sliding into valleys now.

The demolition of West Virginia had taken place with the approval of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the State Government, which drew their power from the people.

Here and there an inhabited dwelling still stood.

I would readily accept that the passage is an exaggeration, and that a coalfield isn't fracking. Nevertheless, mining subsidence affects properties all over my part of Britain, there was a road collapse within a half a mile of where I live just a few months ago. House owners locally need to buy survey reports before they can sell. Nobody has mined here for at least fifty years and quite likely more than a hundred. Children have been known to fall fifty yards down undocumented ventilation shafts within town boundaries.

Every extraction of minerals necessarily involves either immediate or eventual subsidence. Fracking is no exception.

America has large cohesive shale beds which don't overlap urban areas. Britain most definitely doesn't have that. Any oil or gas which can be extracted after fracking can only come from unconnected small deposits, and nowhere here is far from urban settings.

Any party authorizing this sort of environmentally destructive exploitation of a fossil fuel instead of coaxing local or multinational capitalists to expand our renewable sources should be unelectable.

[LarsMac]

When I was a youngster, we traveled a bit, by automobile. I remember going through several regions of Appalachia in Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky, where strip mining was quite active. It was the ugliest thing that I witnessed as a boy. The beautiful mountains were systematically torn down and the rock and dirt turned over and sifted through.
Later the government passed laws that the companies had to "restore the land" after mining.

I've been back along some of those areas recently, and the land is now rolling hills with an odd regularity to them, and young forests have begun to take over the landscape.
Unless you were there before the mining, you could easily think it was a natural area,

Fracking. That is a detestable process. The fact that most of it is performed deep underground, where nobody actually sees the damage done, makes it even more disturbing.
And the petro companies have managed to hide just how much damage is being done to the aquifers where much of our fresh water comes from.
We can no longer pull enough water to keep our garden sated without having to use the city water supply.