We need to stop the idea of fracking before anything gets started.

Fracking gets into our drinking water, and its waste products are toxic. For those two reasons I am against it. But do us all a favor and cut the climate change crap already. Fracking DOES NOT impact the weather!

another enviromental disaster we the people are failing to stop for the love of money.

Frack off. They tax us to hell, take away our firearms and pollute our environment. Why do we stand for this?!?!?

As soon as we are all ready to give up all the benefits we receive from low cost power and petro chemical products ( zip loc bags, medical devices, gas, tires, shoe soles, you know, small stuff like that), there will be change. Oh, not ready to walk, ride your bike, have a horse and buggy, then you are not ready for chnage that will make a difference. China and India are pumping out waste at rates we did not see during the industrial revelotion.

According to Mr. Tittel our very existence on earth is a danger to mother earth. Seriously, is there anything about our existence worth preserving? It's almost a religion. We are born with this original sin of polluting. Instead of celebrating a human birth it's "oh, look. Another polluter, another strain on earth".

While troglodytes mock and deny climate change, ridicule any efforts to reduce pollution and littering, a country like Germany is working overtime to not only wean itself off of fossil fuels but also nuclear energy. It won't happen over night, it will take decades but at least it has taken the big step to phase out nuclear power and to drastically reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. Meanwhile back in the USA all we hear is drill baby drill and climate change is just a joke, blah, blah, blah. Autos have been made much less polluting, let's keep working on that, we have hybrid cars and electric cars. bd seems to be saying we should do nothing just keep on doing what we have been doing; his attitude is give up, shut up and do nothing.

Why is "Kumbaya" running through my head?

We can't flip a switch and eliminate all plastics overnight we have to do it a step at a time. Using fewer plastic bags would help but the attitude of the climate change deniers is that if you can't eliminate all plastics right now immediately then why bother, it's just a joke. Of course I am dependent on the electrical grid, plastics and fossil fueled transportation. Does that mean we should do nothing and make no efforts to reduce pollution? The climate change mockers expect a 100% change to renewable energy and non-plastics in a few months or else do nothing. This is a long term project that will take many decades. Instead of mocking the efforts of so called tree huggers, why not offer some good ideas to reduce pollution and littering.

Your attention is being diverted from really important matters!!! Before any hydraulic fracturing for petroleum products can occur in New Jersey, you would need to lease gas rights and more importantly secure a drilling permit. There are literally years of permitting and environmental impact statements need before any fracking would occur. WAKE UP the left and right are diverting your attention from more important issues. Oh yeah, check the geology of NJ and realize there is little of the Marcellus shale in the state to frack.

Fracking is a brilliant engineering process that is a testament to Man's ingenuity. It has been used for decades without consequence. The anti-fracking movement is brought to you by guys like Tittel who would have us all living in caves if they could. We need more gas and oil, especially from the US and we need it now. When all those wonderful alternative fuels are ready fine, but until then, our vast supplies of oil and natural gas are ready for the taking.

Let's get crackin with frackin........ thank God we can now start using this safe, clean and efficient means of obtaiing energy. Hey Jeff, move on to your next thing to wring your hands over.

Sorry Jeff but thanks to your misguided attack last week on plastic grocery bags I have lost my fervor that was for environmental issues.
Fracking is helping this country recover economically from the disastrous policies of the Dubya administration. By 2010 we will become the world leader in energy production – producing more energy than even Saudi Arabia. Fracking has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs and given us an abundance of natural gas. From this abundance, in the last four years ago, the price of natural gas from PSE&G has dropped form an all-time high back to 2002 prices. Because of the low prices, it is attracting manufacturing companies to build new plants in the USA. Jeff, you have a job so you don’t care about the millions of unemployed Americans but I do.
It certainly appears that you would truly prefer for all of to live the stark existence of my grandparents who were poor sharecroppers. They had no modern conveniences and cooked on fires that burned kindling wood found on the ground and wove their own clothes. That does not appeal to me.

Get your facts straight. Fracking typically occurs HUNDREDS, if not THOUSANDS of feet BELOW the water table where your drinking water is located. You need to understand the process, and not blindly listen to Hollywood types who don't have a clue. This process has been in place for over FIFTY years....never has it affected drinking water.

You need to get your facts straight Marie - It has ALWAYS affected drinking water, and will continue to impact our health, all for about 5 years worth of natural gas from the PA shale. I guess if you don't live there, you think you don't need to care. but if you are among the 15 million people who get their water from the Delaware River watershed, you should care. go to the Delaware Riverkeeper website or watch "Gasland" if you don't want your info from "hollywood types".

I heard that, to date, the EPA has not found any drinking water with contaminants from fracking in excess of what is permitted.

That's right, Monk! This is a totally manufactured crisis.

The people who live in the areas where there are oil wells, deep water oil rigs, coal mines, mountain top removal and fracking are the ones really suffering for our addiction to fossil fuels. There are coal mine fires that have been going on for more than 50 years, it doesn't affect us in NJ but it sure did affect the people in the little town of Centralia, PA. Centralia is a borough and ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 10 in 2010, as a result of a mine fire burning beneath the borough since 1962. We are stuck with fossil fuels for a long time, all the more reason to work harder developing renewable energy. Instead, the Fox News and CNBC crowd are screaming for more oil and more drilling and more digging and more despoiling of the environment.

Drill baby drill. Frack baby frack. Money, not enviromental BS makes the world go round. Drilling, fracking, industrial development in general is as safe as we can make it. Whiners like algore, Laura and Joe R are always going to whine...turn up the volume...we won't have to listen.

Hey look at that HBO special about fracking, oh yeah it was a hoax. But they have Bill Maher, oh yeah. Having people lie for a cause is OK if you agree. Oh yeah, that sounds like something Bill Maher would say. Wonder if they get funding from OPEC?

The other problem we have is that the environmental nuts who don't want fracking (fine, I can live with that one) also want us to find alternatives. But as soon as we try to build offshore wind turbines to collect wind energy, they complain that we're spoiling the view of nature. You can't have it both ways, geniuses. If fracking is off the table, then let the wind farms be built. If you don't want the wind farms, then stop complaining that solar farms take up too much space and we're losing open land. Pick one and get on with it!

I only see fracking in Jersey affecting the counties.of Sussex and Warren, possibly Morris and Hunterdon, and less likely but possibly the western reaches of Passaic and Bergen unless the waste waters are dumped south and east of there. Those are also the areas with the highest record of earthquake activity which could be expected to increase given fracking, if current experiences in the midwest are relevant here. I hope fracking doesn't happen in NJ, but if it does, I'm glad I don't live in the skylands JUST as I am glad I don't live in the shorelands. At least I can watch the downward spiral from a distance.
I'm all for huge solar and wind farms but not fracking in Jersey. We can live without it, and the energy potential from wind will ONLY increase, unlike whatever natural gas supplies we might have.

Any of you Anti-Frackers care to comment on "FrackNation" or would that make too much sense? Feel free, Jeff, if you think you possess the goods.

The joys of fracking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTw3NwvXfx0

Jeff Tittel's continued one-sided columns, without noting that he's executive director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, makes me less trusting of PATCH. People need to understand his bias and be left to determine what they think of his commentary in that informed context.

I won't dignify this column with facts, but suffice it to say he is against everything for his own organization's financial benefit and doesn't acknowledge or relay a balanced view on this. It's about continuing to raise money for his cause, and you can only do that if people are scared to death about fracking and a number of other issues.

Until then, readers should know the columnist doesn't have a job if people are fighting for something or against something in New Jersey, and that context should help people understand his shrill, unscientific viewpoints.

Write the blog and run...we get it Jeff. Yes, as PrincetonIQ points out, you are the director of the NJ chapter of the Sierra Club which makes any mention of such as any type of authority on your subject worthless. Look, I've written over 50 blogs on the Patch and have essentially responded to every criticism or inquiry...and I work a full time job. So...what's your excuse?
Admittedly, I don't normally read your stuff because I've recognized from what little I have read that you're completely biased and write from a totally subjective point of view. you must think your writing is so powerful and important that nobody deserves a response. Well, at least one person thinks your writing has something to offer us...can you guess who that is, Jeff?
Actually, I don't really expect a response because I doubt you even read the comments here. When it comes to the common people of New Jersey, Jeff, your voice is essentially irrelevant, seldom rising above the noise.

wheee! let's all jump in our 12 mpg SUV's and head on out to the anti-fracking protests!
make sure you wear plenty of polyester and be sure to bring your own "spring" water in your throw away plastic bottles! oh, and be sure to leave on all the lights and your heat cranked up so your McMansion is nice and toasty when you get home and microwave yourselves a midnight snack while you stand looking out your picture window admiring your on all night landscape lighting...

@SOG....well said!!

@SOG, totally irrelevant. Talk to the poor folks who have had their water ruined, their lives ruined and their home values destroyed. They don't live in McMansions. They can't sell their homes and most of these people are just scraping by so they have to live under horrible conditions because of fracking. These people are desperately worried about their health and the long term consequences of being exposed to all these toxins.

Jeff and him fanatical band of merry men (AKA Sierra Club) will have us taxed taxed and taxed some more with their ridiculious fairy tales of mass destruction.

When is his keeper going to take away his keyboard. Jeff is truly a NUT-JOB

I have spoken,

I agree.

watch North Dakota burn. in fact, watch it burn from space because it's now on fire from the unregulated filthy practice of flaring off natural gas (aka wasting ENERGY and generating more CO2).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265516/North-Dakota-oil-boom-comes-gas-fires-bright-region-space.html

what will it take to make the climate change deniers realize man's addiction to dead dinosaurs is our doom?

I'm not yet convinced of the evidence that what is happening to our climate is a direct result of our use of fossil fuels. All they really have is conjecture based on correlation they derived through limited data and computer models. Any good scientist knows that correlation doesn't equal causation, my blue jeans aren't bear repellent merely because I've never been attacked by bears while wearing them. Also it is known we are coming out of a long cooling period in earth's history, providing more proof that whats happening is actually natural. CO2 is not the worst green house gas in the world, Oxygen is actually much worse. Could our use of carbon emitting fuels be contributory to the overall climate change? Possibly, but to what degree is not known and if we all sacrificed and stopped using fossil fuels now, there is no guarantee any difference would be made other than the collapse of modern society as we know it. The alarm-ism over fracking is born from poor experimentation and the spread of misinformation, just as they did to DDT. Fracking takes place much deeper in the earth and isn't a danger to our water supply, that assumption came from experiments that weren't done at the average depth, thus its flawed.

I just can't avoid responding to a plea for help...Please Jeff and Company. Start doing what you are supposed to be doing. Worry about what the plastic will have done to the ocean by the time you finally wake up and what we are going to do with all the bottles we have and will have. If you want a more immediate goal. Think about what Sandy has done to our pets and marine life. Isn't that the goal of your club. Sometimes people have to do what they do because they have to live.

That is the problem in a few sentences...good analysis. They mean well but are not focused on short and long term impact. Next thing he will write an article about how we should have his elevated concrete boardwalk. The design is off on that too. without going into the cost. I shudder when I remember what they did to the lumber industry when they tried to protect the North American spotted owl. I should have remembered that.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323485704578258172660564886.html?mod=hp_opinion

I love the line:
let's address the three horsemen of the climate apocalypse...
really wish I wrote that.... great content

Release the frackin!!