Fracking Opponenets Find a New Angle

If by fracking opponents you mean the US government, through it's agent, NPR - Drilling In PA Forests Could Harm Chesapeake Bay:

...The analy­sis also raises a con­cern for Chesa­peake cleanup efforts. The con­ser­vancy esti­mates that about 46 per­cent of the drilling would take place within the Bay water­shed. That sug­gests the for­est loss within the water­shed por­tion of Penn­syl­va­nia could be between 45,000–110,000 acres.

For com­par­i­son, that’s enough land to build between 1 to 2.5 Dis­trict of Columbias.

Because forests absorb more nutri­ents and retain more sed­i­ment than other land uses, their loss could result in more of those pol­lu­tants reach­ing local streams.

Assum­ing those forests are con­verted to meadow, and apply­ing load­ing rates derived from the Bay Pro­gram model, rough esti­mates sug­gest it could increase the amount of nitro­gen runoff reach­ing local streams between 30,000–80,000 pounds a year; while phos­pho­rus could increase between 15,000–40,000 pounds; and sed­i­ment could increase between 18 mil­lion to 45 mil­lion pounds. The vari­a­tion depends on whether the amount of for­est lost was at the low, or high end of the conservancy’s estimates.

Wow, those sound like big number don't they?  Shall we put them into context?  Current loads of nitrogen and phosphorus to streams from Maryland alone (almost all of which drain in Chesapeake Bay) are 100,000,000 lbs and 20,000,000 lbs respectively.  An equal or greater amount come from Pennsylvania (not to mention Virginia, Delaware and New York, all of whom contribute significant nutrients to the Bay.  The amount on nutrients that fracking would contribute to the Bay are rounding error, at best in the other loadings of nutrients into the Bay.  Sediment loading vary widely but the Susquehanna River alone accounts for 600 million to 3 billion lbs of sediment per year.  Again, the worse estimate due to fracking would would be lost in the noise in current inputs.

This abuse of "large numbers" to scare people without putting them into proper context is intellectually dishonest.  If your going to tell the story, tell all the story.