Plastic Bag Ban. Good or Bad?

On November 4, 2013  I responded to Ivitte Hernandez's post in favor of the Austin plastic bag ban.

I personally thought the plastic ban was a very positive thing. Plastic takes thousands of years to degrade, and even with the strictest recycling policies it would be impossible to recycle every plastic bag. Additionally, in terms of grocery shopping, there is no need for plastics bags. Reusable canvas bags can be brought to the store with minimal effort, not to mention you would actually spend less money in the long term since you are no longer buying bags everyday. 
In terms of the government "raising taxes" in order to pay for cotton and paper bags, I can really on see this as a positive. Would you rather see mounds of plastic bags in town lake, downtown, and zilker. Or pay a couple dollars more and have a cleaner city. In regards to "plastic bags do not destroy the environment before they are even sold", plastic is actually petroleum based therefore the production of plastic does propagate pollution inducing practices. While paper bags do require trees, trees are a renewable resource, unlike oil. 
Essentially my questions are, does the inconvenience of not having plastic bags really outweigh the positives of less pollution. I also don't understand the relation between higher taxes and paper/cotton bags. It seems to me that the budget could easily incorporate the price of plastic bags into paper/cotton.

Today I would like to speak to the issue of fracking.  First off, what is fracking? Fracking can be defined as "the forcing open of fissures in subterranean rocks by introducing liquids at high pressure, especially for oil and gas".  Fracking is a technique that was developed and used for the first time in 1949, but was not commercially used on a large scale until quite recently.  It is estimated that sixty percent of all natural gas and oil production now comes from hydraulic fracking, with over one million wells being opened in the United States alone.  Texas, as on of the leaders in oil and natural gas production in the States, has a vested interest in seeing fracking expand. However, as with all new technologies, there are kinks that need to be ironed out.
In my opinion fracking heralds a new age of natural gas production and cleaner energy, as natural gas is a much safer alternative to coal.  Coal is one of the most polluting fossil fuels to burn but is also more efficient than natural gas, with an energy conversion rate of about 35%.  While natural gas powered electricity produces less CO2 than coal, many environmentalists have measured that fracking sites leak a significant amount of methane.  Methane is a green house gas much like C02, however it is twenty times more absorbent than C02.  Environmentalists have used this information to claim that the lessened pollution of natural gas compared to coal does not make up for the leaked methane produced by fracking.  However I don't think that is the primary issue.

Environmentalists would stop all fracking work, forcing us to rely on  a combination of coal and some eco-friendly alternative sources.  The simple fact is that even if fracking does release methane, it can be fixed.  Fracking is not a process set in stone, it is an ongoing test to produce oil and gas and safely and efficiently as possible.  Therefore it serves no purpose to stand in the way of fracking, it's going to happen either way, the best course of action is to make sure it is done as safely as possible.

 Essentially environmentalists and the companies that engage in fracking should engage in a conversation about fracking, instead of remaining rigidly inflexible.