Lately, I’m working under system overload but we at Yukoners Concerned try to stay on top of the subject and we do all this on our own dime and time. In the last 20 months, I spent probably half of my days researching the subject of fracking and all its environmental social, economic and health effects.
A lot of these effects are nothing new. As a matter of fact, I knew since my apprenticeship days, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, as a steamfitter-pipe fitter that natural gas is not cleaner then coal. In the last decade or so, with the tremendous development of new drilling technologies, especially fracking, the side effects of the extraction of fossil fuels on the environment have increased many fold. But so has the development of renewable energy technology. We in the Yukon already have one of the best track records in electrical energy production (close to 99 per cent hydro) so why don’t use more of these new clean alternatives?
Werner Rhein
Whitehorse