Worth a read: Bill McKibben's "Why Not Frack?" in the current New York Review of Books.

McKibben reviews two books on the topic - Seamus McGraw's "The End of Country" and Tom Wilber's "Under the Surface: Frack, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale," plus Josh Fox's film, "Gasland."

As is typical with NYReview, McKibben piece combines review with his own deep subject knowledge. And for residents of New York's Marcellus Shale region - and anyone concerned about potential environmental problems with fracking - there are plenty of lessons, including what can happen when politicians throw caution to the wind if there's a possibility of new jobs.

(Pennsylvania's leaders "don't even charge a severance tax on the gas that's generated in the state," McKibben writes. "In fact, they've even offered up official state forests for use as drill sites.")

McKibben also warns that fracking's danger is much broader than potential environmental damage in the Marcellus region: the possibility that natural gas leaking into the atmosphere "can cause even more global warming than coal."

And, he notes, a heavy reliance on natural gas could take our minds off development of less damaging alternative fuels.