![]() Chevron announced in December 2019 that it would write down up to $11 billion in shale gas assets. Some, like Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, liquidated their shale gas holdings. The stock prices of premier energy firms like Chesapeake Energy Corporation crashed (it declared bankruptcy in 2020). A wave of consolidations and bankruptcies swept across the sector. But nationwide, the glut of gas (and, to a lesser extent, oil) precipitated by the fracking boom depressed prices to their lowest levels since the 1990s. The entire model was premised on high oil and gas prices. With new wells facing average production declines of 60% in the first year, petroleum companies had to frantically drill more of them. Visit the burning of fossil fuels, freshwater use, deforestation and reforestation, and habitat loss and restoration pages to learn more about how resource and land use affects global climate and ecosystems.What happened? As a Bloomberg report put it, “The numbers never added up.” Fracking has always been expensive extraordinarily generous fossil-fuel subsidies helped hide the true cost. The use of extracted fossil fuels is the primary cause of current climate change, which is altering the Earth’s ecosystems and causing global human and environmental health problems.Ĭan you think of additional cause and effect relationships between the extraction of resources and other parts of the Earth system? With the extraction of resources and with industrialization, energy, food, water, and medical care became more available and reliable, allowing the global human population to increase, which has dramatic impacts on global climate and ecosystems. Fracking uses water, sand, and chemicals to create new or expand existing cracks in rocks that allow oil and gas to flow into drillholes for extraction.Increasing human population growth. Increasing seismic activity (earthquakes) in some regions from the use of hydraulic fracking to remove oil and gas. ![]() Ground water extraction can also cause the sinking of land (called subsidence). Reducing freshwater availability, both for human consumption and for ecosystems.Increasing erosion can also decrease water quality by increasing sediment and pollutants in rivers and streams. Mining and d eforestation can destabilize soils, increase erosion, and reduce the nutrient levels in terrestrial ecosystems. ![]()
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