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Coal mines cause earthquakes as well [1]. Not sure if anyone has ever used that as a reason to stop doing it.

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070103-mine-...

Whether to stop doing it or not is a political decision. Here we're discussing something else: an industrialist is preventing the facts from being established so that an informed political debate cannot take place.

A casual google search tells me that there are about 1k coal mines in the US. The number of oil/gas wells that use fracking seems to range somewhere between 50k and 1.1m.

Alas, I'm not aware of better numbers.

> There are approximately 550 Class I wells in the United States. (Municipal Waste)

> The approximately 144,000 Class II wells in operation in the United States inject over 2 billion gallons of brine every day. Most oil and gas injection wells are in Texas, California, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Enhanced recovery wells are the most numerous type of Class II wells, representing as much as 80 percent of the approximately 151,000 Class II wells. (Oil & Gas related)

> There are about 165 mining sites with approximately 18,500 Class III wells in operation across the nation. (Mining via leaching)

http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/

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