Class action lawsuit over Oklahoma Earthquakes

[A Black Falcon]

On the water contamination issue I certainly agree that it's a huge problem that should not have been allowed to get to this point. That's really bad.

But as for energy as it is, here in Maine, a few things:

Electricity is about 50% more expensive in Maine than it is in Oklahoma, according to this data here: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/index.cfm That's a significant difference. The Northeast in general has higher electricity costs than some other regions do.

So, when it comes to heating options here, electricity is rarely high on the list. This article: http://thesunriseguide.com/heat-of-the-moment/ goes through all the options we've got here, starting with oil (which again 70% of people have) and also natural gas, propane, wood pellets, cordwood, biofuel, electric baseboard heaters, electric heat pumps, solar, and geothermal. Yeah, there are a lot of options.

This chart from that previous article: http://thesunriseguide.com/wp-content/up...-graph.jpg shows comparative costs of the various options. For the electric options, the two main forms of electric heat you see here are not full-house heating systems, but something you put in a room or two that doesn't get enough heat from your main furnace. Electric furnaces would just be too expensive to be reasonable, I imagine. So, the two options are baseboard heaters, which are quite expensive but can be useful (They're the most common way you see electric heat here, and indeed though I have an oil furnace, I do have them in a few rooms.) Heat pumps apparently are much cheaper to run, though probably more expensive to install and are not a replacement for a furnace because apparently they are less efficient in cold weather, but I don't know much about them. It sounds like they are slowly growing in popularity though: http://www.centralmaine.com/2012/04/01/m...012-03-31/

I see no mention of an electric-powered furnace replacement in that article at all, which says something -- that just isn't happening here, yet at least.

Another factor might be that our houses are generally newer than the ones on the east coast, due to our having been "settled" much more recently. Due to that, our houses are built to more recent building code standards than your's. For example, I'm aware that most places in New York and so on still have those dangerous plastic dryer vent tubes, whereas in Oklahoma they're almost all metal. I myself am living in a very recently built place that's even got ethernet cabling in the walls already, and it holds in the temp pretty well. Not all our places are so lucky, but that might have a lot to do with things. That said, Oklahoma's building codes are still different, so then we go back to our general lack of basements or storm shelters around here, and, more recently, the lack of any structural reinforcement for earthquakes.

This is very true, yes. I've heard it said that Maine has the oldest housing stock [average house age, I believe] in the nation, and I believe it; most homes here are older. This house was built in the 19-teens, and college dorms excepted, the other two houses I've lived in in this state during my life aren't exactly new either -- both were built in the '50s, if I remember right. Post-WWII developments and such. There are of course some newer homes built in this state, and the Portland area has seen a lot of development recently, but it also has a lot of older houses.

So yeah, if Oklahoma houses are mostly more recent, that definitely would be a difference from here, and that does affect things like heating systems and energy efficiency. Highly energy-efficient windows? Ethernet in the walls? Hah, yeah right... I don't have those things, and nor do lots of people here. (But on the other hand, and basements are great. Awesome places to store stuff, among other things! You couldn't have a furnace without a cellar to put it in, either...)

If it is any consolation, coal burning stoves and oil burning heaters aren't the greatest generators of greenhouse gasses anyway. That still goes to industry. They're the champs generating the lion's share of carbon, to the point that even if we switched all our cars to electric tomorrow, it would only put a small dent in total emissions. If industry isn't changed (for example, shutting down coal burning plants in favor of wind turbines and the like), we're doomed. You say that there's a cost to pay either way, but you can't equivocate like that. Sometimes, we really do need to say "this thing is absolutely worse than the other thing", and that's when these choices come up. This is a very obvious choice.

This is all very true, but unfortunately as the Obama administration shows, or Clinton before him back in the '90s, even when liberals are in charge, no one is willing to do the kinds of things necessary to REALLY take on climate change because it's just too expensive and people are incredibly short-sighted about things. And then Republicans win office and abandon even the not-nearly-enough efforts of the Democrats, and things get even worse and that's awful, but it's not like anyone is actually proposing the kinds of policies we actually need, because people would not support such things because of the massive short-term costs. That those things would have incredibly huge long-term benefits somehow just isn't something enough people can see, and that's why climate change keeps getting worse every year as we keep pumping out so much carbon emissions -- and yeah, industry does make the largest share of the emissions, very true. Things like houses and personal cars contribute quite a bit, but industry's the biggest share of it.

As for the earthquakes, yeah that's bad and should have been avoidable I'd think, but isn't your states' government high on the list of people responsible for that, given that they make many of the rules? Both state and federal governments have authority over fracking. (I'm sure your Republican government has their party's usual opposition to regulation, but still, they are to blame...)