Hillary Clinton, If You Care About the Flint Water Crisis You Should Care About Banning Fracking

A debate about water boiled down to a debate about hydraulic fracturing. Clinton was asked if she supports fracking, a controversial process of oil and gas drilling.

Rather than plainly saying, "I support fracking," or "I don't support fracking," Clinton instead chose to name all of the conditions in which she would not support it.

"I don't support it when any locality or any state is against it, number one. I don't support it when the release of methane or contamination of water is present. I don't support it, number three, unless we can require that anybody who fracks has to tell us exactly what chemicals they are using... By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place." - Hillary Clinton

The key takeaway here was that Clinton supports fracking on a conditional basis, whereas Sanders opposes it altogether.

Similarly, Sanders opposed the Keystone XL Pipeline since day one, while Clinton initially supported it and just recently came out against it.

When Sanders had his chance to answer the fracking question, he cashed in.

"My answer is a lot shorter," Sanders said. "No, I do not support fracking."

Senator Sanders went on to explain that climate change represents an existential threat to our planet and that fracking can contaminate our nation's water systems. By bringing the fracking issue back to Flint and the water crisis, Sanders delivered arguably his heaviest blow of the night.

He later contended that Clinton's super PAC is raising huge sums of money from the fossil fuel industry, and that rather than standing up to the multinational corporations that are destroying our planet, Clinton is taking money from them.