Wow. Joe Nocera doubles-down on why fracking in the Northeast makes sense:

Oh, puh-leeze!
Some readers of The New York Times are unimpressed with the idea of substituting natural gas for imported oil, even though such a move would help wean the country from its dependence on OPEC. Or so it appears after I made that argument in my column on Tuesday, noting that natural gas is a fossil fuel we have in abundance and is cleaner than oil to boot.
After that column was published, I was buried under an avalanche of angry e-mails and comments, most of them complaining that I had ignored the environmental dangers of drilling for gas, particularly the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique that involves shooting water and chemicals into shale formations deep underground.
“No mention of the disastrous consequences of fracking?” read one e-mail. Many readers pointed to a study by a Cornell scientist — reported in The Times the same day my column appeared — claiming that methane gas emissions posed a bigger threat to the environment than dirty coal. Another reader called my column “a disgrace.”
Really? Let’s take a closer look. To begin with, fracking is hardly new. In Texas and Oklahoma, it has been used for decades, with nobody complaining much about environmental degradation. It must be a coincidence that these worries surfaced when a natural gas field called the Marcellus Shale was discovered in the Northeast, primarily under Pennsylvania and New York. Surely, East Coast residents wouldn’t object to having the country use more natural gas just because it’s going to be drilled in their own backyard instead of, say, downtown Fort Worth. Would they?

Ha! The rest here.