Facing South Facing South  The environmental health costs of a
petrochemical future for North Carolina  Facing South Facing
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»  A chemical industry trade group is touting a job-creating
side benefit of fracking in North Carolina, claiming that
building a plant to process natural gas into the petrochemical
products used to make plastics and synthetic fabrics would
create thousands of jobs for the state.  But the experience of
other places with similar facilities shows those jobs would come
at a heavy cost to the health of the environment and local
community.  The American Chemistry Council recently released a
report claiming that 15,000 jobs would result from construction
of a single ethylene production plant in North Carolina, where
the legislature recently legalized fracking, which could begin
as soon as 2014. The plants are known as "ethane crackers"
because they break down or "crack" complex hydrocarbons from oil
and gas into simpler molecules