First and foremost: Congrats to our reader Andrew as winner of our Wheeler Del Torro ticket giveaway!  It DOES pay to like us on FB! 🙂  (We used random.org to select the winner based on commenter place.) Here’s what else you missed this week:

Philly.com shared that there’s several efforts to clean 130 miles of river with the Schuykill Scrub this spring – Find a cleaning event near you!

If you want to participate in Earth Hour, it’s asking people to turn off their lights for 1 hour on Saturday night at 8:30 PM local time to raise awareness for climate change.  I think my neighbors will assume I just went out for the evening…

The Inquirer/Philly.com had 3 articles on gas pipelines & fracking – They’re a threat, 7 towns are filing a lawsuit to oppose the gas-drilling law and even the fed is calling for more monitoring.  Speaking of Natural Gas fracking….

Finally, I’d like to share with you a Twitter war that was waged on me by a Pro-fracking filmmaker.  If you pay attention to GPB, we try to play fairly and look at the positive side of environmentalism. I enjoy challenges & questions – If we’re not questioning the eco-logic, how would we come up with the best solution?

As I was browsing my Tweetdeck, I retweeted a gas leak from Scotland (next tweet caught the typo, btw):

So I was surprised when Pro-fracking filmmaker responded to me about how infrequently spills happen.  Yet as a Political Science major-almost-turned-lawyer in college & former Mock Trial participant, I couldn’t turn down this challenge.  My response to her initial tweet is below (Please read from bottom up, for those who aren’t used to Twitter):

So after my multi-line rebuttal (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) including 3rd party sources as links, we see the Pro-fracker try to attack Wind as an energy source, specifically.

For the record, apprx 10K – 40,000 birds are killed per year by wind turbine. But, cars kill at least 60-80 million and power lines kill 130-174 million. While we don’t like any deaths, wind turbines are a fraction.  (Also, hundreds of millions of cats kill birds. And I know one specific dachshund which has killed 8-10.)

Ironically, I had one more tweet and then had to run to the Water Department’s “Green Cities, Clean Water” ambassador training on Wednesday night. Although I love Green Philly Blog (and our faithful readers), I do unplug from time to time.  So on Thursday morning I came in to this bombardment from profracker:

At this point, I was finished arguing.  Yet I realized she failed to dispute that ONE fracking water contamination and 1 oil spill affects the eco-system tremendously. For my amusement, I decided to go in for one last round (and did agree that nothing is 100% clean, which we’ve said before on the blog):

And yes, there are anti-penny campaigns with my friend Kevin currently the #1 supporter.  Yet I threw in that one slightly facetious comment, just like the fracking justifications.

Readers, do you agree with the pro-fracking argument?  Is it worth risking contamination to find a quick fix?  Or do you know of problems with ‘green’ energy we didn’t address?

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Julie Hancher is Editor-in-Chief of Green Philly, sharing her expertise of all things sustainable in the city of brotherly love. She enjoys long walks in the park with local beer and greening her travels, cooking & cat, Sir Floofus Drake. View all posts by Julie Hancher