9 Good Reasons to Ban Fracking Immediately

6. Fracking Displaces Poor Communities

Pennsylvania, which houses the Marcellus Shale, is home to thousands of fracking operations. As more companies come in to drill new wells, they often displace entire communities of people who are then left homeless and broke, forced to uproot themselves for an out-of-state industry. One example is in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, where 32 families didn't even know they were going to be evicted from their trailer park until they read about it in the Williamsport Gazette. Aqua America, a water company dedicated to fracking, bought the piece of land that housed the trailer park, and families were told they would be paid $2,500 if they moved out by April 1, 2012; $1,500 if they moved out by May 1, 2012; and paid nothing if they moved out after that date. As Mother Jones reported, the cost of moving each family's trailer was between $8,000 and $10,000 on average. Residents staged a blockade of the construction, and state troopers were eventually called in to arrest anyone who refused to move. Construction has since begun where those 32 families used to live.

7. Fracking Makes Economic Inequality Even Worse

By investing in some professions that are labor-intensive, like education and construction, you can be assured that the money will create lots of jobs. But fracking is an industry that's capital-intensive, meaning most of the investment goes toward the equipment and technology, rather than the people. And when fracking wells become profitable, most of the profit goes to the owners of the equipment, not the workers who did the drilling. In addition, jobs on drilling sites are only temporary, since wells can only be fracked up to 18 times. Fracking makes it possible for people like Richard Kinder of Kinder Morgan to make out like bandits, whereas immigrants and other non-union employees who work on drilling sites get crumbs and are routinely exposed to lethal chemicals like benzene.

While there were 135,000 more people working in the oil and gas industry in 2012 than there were in 2007, that number of jobs is negligible compared to the jobs created through sustainable energy. The solar industry alone employs over 140,000 Americans and is outpacing national job growth in other sectors by a factor of 10. The U.S. economy added one million new green jobs in 2013 alone, for a total of 6.5 million green jobs in the U.S. today. If you want an energy source that's great for job creation, look to wind energy -- wind turbines alone create thousands of permanent jobs through their production, transportation, installation, and continued maintenance. More important, wind and solar power don't contaminate water supplies.

8. Fracking Depletes the Value of Your Home

Exxon is one of the largest companies that engages in fracking. And in an ironic twist, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson became a fracking protester when well drilling was about to happen next to his home. Through his attorney, Tillerson said he wasn't concerned about the environmental impact, but rather the impact to his property values. As I've written in the previous sections, Tillerson is obviously wrong to not be worried about the environmental costs of fracking, but he's 100 percent correct about what fracking does to homes. A study by the University of Denver found that fracking can reduce a home's value by 25 percent on average. And of 550 people surveyed, most wouldn't buy a home near a fracking site. Researchers looking at 43 counties in New York and Pennsylvania also learned that a house within 0.6 miles of a fracking site that depends on wells for its drinking water rather than municipal sources saw the value of their home plummet by 16.7 percent.

9. Fracking Encourages Crony Capitalism and Monopolies

Right now, the incentives for using clean energy to heat and light our homes are next to none. Oklahoma and Arizona are even penalizing homeowners with fines for installing rooftop solar panels. This is the result of a model bill written up by the Koch Brothers-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) aimed at giving oil and gas companies a monopoly on residential markets.

Kansas governor Sam Brownback, a Republican, was originally for wind energy, before the Kochs twisted his arm. Kansas currently gets 11 percent of its energy from wind farms, and the state has invested $7 billion to date in installing and maintaining wind turbines. Kansas farmers receive a healthy $8 million in lease payments every year in exchange for allowing wind turbines to be built on their land. This all started in 2009, when Governor Mark Parkinson, who replaced Governor Kathleen Sebelius when she went to Washington, signed legislation stating that power companies must have power grids consisting of 20 percent sustainable energy by 2020.

But the Koch Brothers started aggressively lobbying against wind energy tax credits in 2013, and called for Kansas' renewable energy benchmark to be frozen at 16 percent in 2016. Koch-funded groups spent $383,000 in ads calling for the repeal of the 2009 legislation. On July 23 of this year, Brownback began calling for a phase-out of the program, in the midst of his re-election campaign, likely caving to pressure from the Kochs. Even though Charles and David Koch are already worth over $100 billion, they still insist on closing off all avenues for cost-effective sustainable energy and steamrolling politicians who get in their way.

Whether you're passionate about the environment, housing markets, immigration, economic inequality, or ending crony capitalism, ending fracking is a major step toward solving those social ills. It'll take a combination of direct action, new ordinances and laws, and us generating our own sustainable energy to do it. Let's get to work.

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*Carl Gibson, 27, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nonviolent grassroots movement that mobilized thousands to protest corporate tax dodging and budget cuts in the months leading up to Occupy Wall Street. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary We're Not Broke, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Carl is also the author of How to Oust a Congressman, an instructional manual on getting rid of corrupt members of Congress and state legislatures based on his experience in the 2012 elections in New Hampshire. He lives in Sacramento, California.