Friday Roundup: Wheeler Winner, Twitter Wars & What You Missed

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?