This fills me with anga.


Also, 'virtually no mercury'.

Comments and ratings aren't centered around the facts.

Fuck it. I don't care anymore. It's time we mechanized the planet.

I expect monolithic evil from energy producers, it's kind of the nature of the beast.

In an ideal world though, it would be impossible for them to find actors willing to read their lies into a studio and they would all have to use robotic synthesized voices.

I sincerely hope that the actress who read this tripe feels that she was sufficiently compensated for the harm she's done.

Fracked up

And yet despite these kinds of lobbying efforts many professionals in the petroleum industry itself are claiming that there are environmental dangers.

As long as idiots are insisting that fracking can trigger massive tectonic activity then there's plenty to complain about across the board. I personally hate that the issue is divided between two camps. The most serious issue is probably not the environmental dangers of fracking, since the immeasurable wealth created by these activities could actually repair a lot of the damage if it were to be directed that way. The most serious issues are economic, and are practically invisible in the Polluters vs. Hippies debacle.

In economics, there is something called the Dutch Disease, which refers to the deleterious effects of fossil fuel wealth on fragile economies. It refers to the curious effects that mass exploitation of new mineral resources have on manufacturing jobs and on prices in general. The Dutch disease describes much of the job loss in Britain during the 1970's, and the inflation too. The solution, in a nutshell, is to manage oil wealth and reserve a lot of its profit in a public trust. We are already seeing the effects of Dutch disease on our rural communities:

http://aede.osu.edu/sites/drupal-aede.web/files/Making%20Shale %20Development%20Work%20for%20Ohio%20June%201.pdf

Tell me, how much of our trillion+ barrels of shale oil wealth, an amount exceeding 500% of Saudi Arabia's reserves, is ending up in public trusts? The truth is it varies. Colorado has a great public trust program, Mississippi, with its enormous reserves of gas shale, will likely let the cronies run the show. What will happen when the water runs out in North Dakota, and those smaller boom towns find their 5-10 years' worth of oil all gone? It means the Federal government will have to engineer a bailout, it means crushing poverty and widespread crime in places that used to be virtually free of both.

So the shale problem isn't so much an environmental one as it is a labor, social and economic problem, and I wish more attention would be directed towards that.

And yet despite these kinds of lobbying efforts many professionals in the petroleum industry itself are claiming that there are environmental dangers.

As long as idiots are insisting that fracking can trigger massive tectonic activity then there's plenty to complain about across the board. I personally hate that the issue is divided between two camps. The most serious issue is probably not the environmental dangers of fracking, since the immeasurable wealth created by these activities could actually repair a lot of the damage if it were to be directed that way. The most serious issues are economic, and are practically invisible in the Polluters vs. Hippies debacle.

In economics, there is something called the Dutch Disease, which refers to the deleterious effects of fossil fuel wealth on fragile economies. It refers to the curious effects that mass exploitation of new mineral resources have on manufacturing jobs and on prices in general. The Dutch disease describes much of the job loss in Britain during the 1970's, and the inflation too. The solution, in a nutshell, is to manage oil wealth and reserve a lot of its profit in a public trust. We are already seeing the effects of Dutch disease on our rural communities:

http://aede.osu.edu/sites/drupal-aede.web/files/Making%20Shale %20Development%20Work%20for%20Ohio%20June%201.pdf

Tell me, how much of our trillion+ barrels of shale oil wealth, an amount exceeding 500% of Saudi Arabia's reserves, is ending up in public trusts? The truth is it varies. Colorado has a great public trust program, Mississippi, with its enormous reserves of gas shale, will likely let the cronies run the show. What will happen when the water runs out in North Dakota, and those smaller boom towns find their 5-10 years' worth of oil all gone? It means the Federal government will have to engineer a bailout, it means crushing poverty and widespread crime in places that used to be virtually free of both.

So the shale problem isn't so much an environmental one as it is a labor, social and economic problem, and I wish more attention would be directed towards that.

This and the supreme court are the reasons I'm voting for Obama.

Why am I reminded of those prerecorded messages that played over the Rapture PA system in "Bioshock"?

And why are the hairs on the back of my neck standing up?

I view the energy crisis and the resulting corporate avarice in acquiring what energy is left as byproducts of overpopulation. Demand is only going to skyrocket as the global population potentially doubles in the next century. Complaining about the symptoms while ignoring the root cause is getting us nowhere fast. It's a problem we'll eventually be forced to tackle, and when we finally get around to it, China's one-child policy is going to look like a stroke of genius.