Shaking up the natural world, and therefore the future well-being of human beings could be exactly right in the sense that fracking will most probably turn out to be an environmental disaster.

Fracking already has and will be a movement in which powerful corporate interests will ride rough-shod over the legal rights of the ordinary citizen.
Such rough-shodding is of course very much related to the other posting on this forum today whereby the same "conservative" corporate interests are emasculating what little powers the various government Environmental Protection agencies have in the USA.

Why not Google Fracking as an Environmental Disaster and also have a read of Fracking the Future available at the DesMogBlog.

Just maybe the new IOS6 Apple Maps is a spooky visual preview to post-fracking topography.

Just because human ingenuity is capable of devising these methods of extraction, it doesn't necessarily follow that a wise species would act on it.

Here's another country that's devised a "clever" way to extract fuel:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/essick-photography

(the largest single industrial polluter on the planet)

Good luck, homo sapiens.....

Oh dear Julie, more of the Liberal pipedream of mining, cutting down, trashing everything on the planet for more profits for big business?
Fracking is a groundwater polluter.
It has caused earthquakes in the US and UK.
Each well runs out very quickly and new ones have to be constantly drilled at great cost in fuel and CO2.
Sorry but it is not the end of the worlds problems with peak energy and it most certainly is not the end of the US dependence on imported fuel.

Australia is missing the boat on this. Our Green/NIMBY coalition and their Lock the Gate campaign is a major economic brake.

What Julie Bishop and her conservative colleagues should come up with is a formula for creating incentives to develop CSG. How about a royalty system for landowners, like they have in the USA?

Poirot
Okay, go back and look at the picture you link to. Which would you rather have, many times that area covered by unsightly wind turbines and solar power plants (which look something like oil installations), or that small piece of Canadian wasteland ripped up? Propaganda can work both ways. Leave it with you.

Daffy Duck
those big corporate interests you so despise are meeting the energy demands of the little consumers. If you don't want energy go live somewhere else. why not a commune in Nimbin where you can all try to get your laptop to work on the output of the in-house wind turbine and dozen car batteries?

Robert LePage
Earthquakes?? You mean mild tremors which activists have tried desperately to connect to fracking? this advance has destroyed the peak oil story so it must be guilty of something, I suppose, but its always a good idea not to repeat all the wild stories you hear.

Does it not seem strange that what I call the 'Australia Institute of whacko thinking' doesn't want us to use ANY forms of energy? They scream when we mine for ore, they hate windfarms, building dams for hydro, despise desalination plants, positively loathe fracking, etc, etc. They want us to cut the population and shrink the tax base yet increase social welfare payments at a time when, over the next 30 years, 40 per cent of Australia's population will be over 60. These people are Alan Jones in reverse.