SNOPES: Did Fracking Cause Volcanic Activity on Hawaii’s Big Island?

from Snopes, June 22, 2018 (excerpts)

...Fracking does not take place on Hawaii’s Big Island, but that is far from the only problem with this absurd conspiracy theory….

On 30 May 2018, conspiracy blog YourNewsWire.com made a curious claim about volcanic activity in the lower Puna region of Hawaii’s Big Island, which first began on 3 May 2018 and continues unabated.

YourNewsWire, an outlet not known for its commitment to facts or accuracy, argued that this specific geologic event (which, in reality, is a continuation of an eruptive event that began in 1983) was caused by fracking — the process of injecting fluids into bedrock at high pressures to crack rocks and liberate petroleum products.

The alleged culprit, counter-intuitively, is a (petroleum-free) geothermal energy plant named the Puna Geothermal Venture (PGV):

Scientific data has linked the surge in volcanic activity in Hawaii to increased fracking activity at Puna Geothermal Venture.

The data shows how the fracking may have been deliberately designed to create a geological process by which lava would drain from Kilauea’s summit into the East Rift Zone so as to create large new vents that would destabilize the geology, and trigger a major collapse in the Hilina Fault System.

Without boring readers with the intentionally onerous and largely fallacious details, the goal of creating a covert fracking operation aimed at generating a massive landslide and/or tsunami under the guise of a green, geothermal power plant (at least, according YourNewsWire’s primary source, Exopolitics.org) is to disrupt the global world order by causing widespread economic collapse, of course:

The creation of a massive tsunami through a collapse of the Hilina slump was the secret purpose behind the creation of the Puna Geothermal Venture, whose owners are linked to the Rothschild family.

(Exopolitics is an alleged branch of political science that deals with extraterrestrial influence on human affairs. The link to the Rothschild family, a frequent target of conspiracy theorists and generally deployed as an anti-semitic dog whistle, is that the owner of the PGV since 2004 is a company whose founder was awarded the “Rothschild Prize for Innovation” — in 1977.)

The claims laid out by YourNewsWire and Exopolitics suffer from several factual, scientific, and logical flaws, but chief among them is the fact that fracking — a process utilized by oil companies searching for fossil fuels — does not occur anywhere on Hawaii, as there are no petroleum reserves for which to frack.

To get around this, Exoplanet claims that the processes employed at PGV are in essence identical to fracking, because the geothermal plant operates in a fashion that requires re-injecting a liquid into the ground….

PGV does not employ geothermal fracking — the plant was designed before the technology existed, and regardless there would be be literally no need for it. The location of PGV, next to a fault on a continuously erupting ocean island with porous volcanic ground, has all of the rare characteristics that normally make geothermal energy hard to come by….

Aside from the fact that nothing that could factually be described as fracking actually occurs on Hawaii’s Big Island, the evidence presented that the lower Puna lava flows were triggered by the PGV’s “fracking” are a textbook cases of circular-reasoning….

read … Debunk of Punatic Anti-Geothermal Idiots