72 Percent of Ohioans Want A Fracking Moratorium, Citing Need For More Study

onJan 19, 2012 @ 21:24 PST

The unconventional gas industry’s latest rush in the United States will land it in the state of Ohio, but a recent poll shows that the state’s residents are not rolling out the red carpet for an industry famous for threatening drinking water supplies, causing earthquakes, noise and air pollution and trying to proliferate global addiction to fossil fuels.

Results from a Quinnipiac University poll released today shows that 59 percent of those polled have heard of or read about hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the complex and risky process that enables unconventional gas drilling. A whopping 72 percent of Ohioans familiar with fracking support a moratorium on the process until it is studied further.

The other 41-percent of citizens are likely to follow suit once they discover what is headed their way, and how little this industry will help them from a financial point of view in the long run.

Ohio recently found itself with the fracking shakes, as magnitude 4.0-level earthquakes struck near Youngstown on New Year’s Eve. Scientists suspect the earthquakes resulted from a wastewater injection well disposing of fracking brine from Pennsylvania. The Christian Science Monitor explained in a story that the “quake triggered shaking reportedly felt as as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Toronto.”

These fracking-related earthquakes are not an aberation, but rather a repeated occurence linked to fracking in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, as well as abroad in the U.K., in the city Blackpool. Al Jazeera English recently ran a story on the Ohio fracking-induced earthquakes. Watch:

By Steve Horn

Steve Horn is the owner of the consultancy Horn Communications & Research Services, which provides public relations, content writing, and investigative research work products to a wide range of nonprofit and for-profit clients across the world. He is an investigative reporter on the climate beat for over a decade and former Research Fellow for DeSmog.

Fertiliser and Grain Bosses Bank $66 Million Selling Shares During Iran War

ByClare Carlile

onApr 30, 2026 @ 05:45 PDT

Industry giants have been accused of ‘enriching shareholders’ while ‘farmers and consumers pay the price’.

uk/Revealed: Reform’s £24 Million from Fossil Fuel Interests

ByAdam Barnett and Sam Bright

onApr 30, 2026 @ 01:27 PDT

Nigel Farage’s anti-climate party has received two thirds of its income from oil investors.

Series: Defending Democracy from Dirty Money

Series: Defending-UK-Democracy

uk/'Mad Men Fuelling the Madness': Meet the Advertising CEOs Boosting Big Oil

ByTJ Jordan

onApr 29, 2026 @ 23:05 PDT

You might not have heard of them, but a new analysis shows these ad execs have overseen $1.5 billion worth of fossil fuel ads in the U.S. since the Paris Agreement.