Your front-page McClatchy article (Dec. 28) tells me more about corporate takeover than about the reality of gas extraction. With only a hint at the catastrophic consequences of fracking, the article undoubtedly passed muster of the only billionaires in the country who make big bankers look benign: oil and gas barons.

Natural gas has long been a desirable alternative to other fossil fuels, but the current fracking frenzy depends upon destruction of air and water at a cataclysmic rate. Failure to acknowledge environmental degradation and lavish use of petroleum and water to retrieve this so-called clean energy is fraud, not journalism.

Please mitigate the damage with a front page story about household tap water that is undrinkable, flammable and carcinogenic in the 35 states where this practice has mushroomed. I would also like to know if my congressional delegation signed off on the protection of the gas industry from all restrictions and penalties of the Clean Water Act, while lagging on conservation and solar and wind development.

Any economic recovery based upon hydraulic fracturing will be a devastating mirage, another crime against the 99 percent and the Earth, itself.

Rusty Nelson

Rockford