With President-elect Donald Trump’s stance on the environment, his appointment of one of the most avid climate deniers on the planet, Myron Ebell to the EPA, and his plans to seize public land to expand logging, coal mining, and fracking, environmental activists already have a load of issues on their hands.
Now, the USGS came out publicly to reveal they have found the largest oil and gas deposit ever to be assessed, and its right here in the United States.
The USGS announced that an area in West Texas known as the Wolfcamp shale contains twenty billion barrels of oil and sixteen trillion cubic feet of natural gas. To compare, that is three times more petroleum than they found in the controversial Bakken shale in 2013.
For a country who has reveled in the accomplishments to combat global warming over the last eight years, finding this super supply of fossil fuels right when President-elect Trump is revealing his plans to dismantle all the environmental regulations recently put into place, is devastating.
We all know that the mining and burning of coal and natural gas are two of the largest contributors to the expulsion of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, the substance fueling our rapidly deteriorating hold on the climate.
Among President Obama’s many efforts to combat global warming, his more notable and efficient actions include the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement and a bold plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2020, which would cause the energy production in this country to shift to more sustainable methods.
However, with this discovery combining with Trump’s efforts to reverse all regulations and efforts we have finally achieved towards saving the planet, environmental activists, and scientists may have a huge fight on their hands. With the hundreds of protests against oil and gas pipelines happening all over the country, we can expect to see even more proposals pop up over the next several months.
More plans equal more pipelines which in turn equals both an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and an increase in accidental oil and gas leaks which devastate the earth and gravely affect our water and soil conservation. It seems the country still doesn’t understand that when it’s all said and done you can’t drink oil, and you definitely cannot reverse that type of damage to our planet.
If you are interested in helping to combat these, and other environmental issues facing the planet, make sure to find out who your local environmental organization is and volunteer to make a change. We have to start fighting harder and show we are all in this together.
Featured Image Via The New Main Times
