Are drilling, fracking and flaring going to ruin Big Bend?

I recently posted about my first visit to the park in more than 8 years.

In addition to things new in the park, and often not for the good, there's new on the way down there.

While most of the big new fracking efforts in the Permian Basin are at its west-northwest northwestern areas (think between Pecos and Carlsbad) there is some to the southwest, as well.

Driving Highway 18 from Monahans to Fort Stockton, then back four days later, I probably saw about 20 flaring sites on the west side of the highway. Flaring is only allowed with a permit, but the feds hand them out like candy, and were doing so already under Obama; it's not just a Trump think, Doinks.

I even saw a few flares south of Fort Stockton on US 385.

First, Big Bend is an International Dark Sky Park. We don't need flaring messing with that.

Second, flaring doesn't cleanly burn all gaseous hydrocarbons. Poorly combusted and uncombusted ones escape. And in the winter, when prevailing winds can often be from the north, head to Big Bend. The Bend has been polluted enough in the past by Mexican power plants, some of which are starting to clean up. (Boquillas has solar panels!) We don't need this instead or in addition.

One independent driller would like to see the RRC do its job on natural gas flaring, with the hope that would slow drilling enough on oil to prop the price up more, and also help natural gas prices. That would help the pollution, of course, but would mean a bigger potential long-term problem on climate change.

And it wouldn't address leaks from gas wells, which will remain a problem whether flaring is due to laziness, downstream bottlenecks, general overproduction or some combination of the above.

Per NM Political Report, we know that leaks are getting worse on the New Mexico side of the Permian.

Nor will it address the fact that most drilling in the Permian (and much drilling for gas in general, and somewhat for oil) is a late-stage capitalism Ponzi scheme.