Yes. Agriculture-based distributed methane production. The current system requires centralization (and, preferably, militarization) of energy production to survive.
You’re welcome.
Not disaster capitalism. Nor capitalism without moderating effects of government. Just capitalism.
Fracking occurs with moderating government regulations. The argument is that the regulations are not stringent enough, not that they’re non existent.
This is almost the opposite of the ‘American Dream’ that I was taught about as a kid.
I bet teachers aren’t teaching that anymore. They’re certainly quite a bit further from living it.
I’m not sure what Alberta’s oil industry has to do with miserable, hard drinking, heavy smoking and unhappy people. That describes an awful lot of people here in Los Angeles working nowhere near the resource extraction industry.
Resource extraction has always been a boon to low skilled low educated workers. It’s not without its downfalls. Such industries often are dirty jobs in remote areas. And good money doesn’t always change the reason a worker may be low skilled low educated. But it’s hard to deny they’re a boon none the less.
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Hard working, low skill jobs that allow one’s children a chance at upward mobility? That’s exactly the American dream I always heard about.
Look, if you landed a job making $100k in a place like Alberta (or $60k as rig oberator in a place like ND), you just got a good bit of seed money for success and happiness. It’s up to you to use it wisely.
Ahh. . . there’s the problem!
And that’s even without ethical requirements being incorporated.
Yeah, American Dream <= Crud.
Interesting, but I think the journalist in FrackNation is making spurious claims of his own. At the preview end, he says fracking isn’t exempt from federal regulation, doesn’t contaminate water, isn’t causing earthquakes, and doesn’t cause “widespread illness and death”. That last one is in scare quotes because I think his rhetorical flourish is much akin to going Godwin…but whatevs.
I’ll try not to belabor the point:
- Exemptions from regulation: From an article "Conventional Politics for Unconventional Drilling?", the authors note that
The emergence of hydraulic fracturing as a major new natural gas source poses a range of environmental concerns that transcended a single environmental medium or the scope of an existing federal environmental program. However, even partial application of any federal law has been severely constrained by a set of exemptions and limitations. The Safe Drinking Water Act might have been a natural focal point for consideration of groundwater concerns, but 2005 amendments to the Energy Policy Act precluded it from reviewing any fracking-related chemical contamination except that which involved diesel fuel. Other established statutes such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act; Clean Water Act; and Comprehensive Environmental Responsibility, Compensation, and Reliability Act have long featured provisions or interpretations that restrict or preclude their application to oil and gas production operations. The Clean Air Act lacked statutory restrictions of this nature but has generally been applied only to large industrial point sources of air emissions, raising doubts concerning any potential transferability to a more decentralized air contamination threat such as proliferating well operations scattered across large sections of multiple states.
- Doesn't contaminate water: From "Geochemical evaluation of flowback brine from Marcellus gas wells in Pennsylvania, USA":
"Flowback water from later stage flowback from Marcellus wells contains very high concentrations of TDS, Cl, Br, Na, Ca, Sr, Ba, Ra and other elements. The levels of TDS, Cl and some other constituents can be 5–10 times the concentration in seawater. The high salinity and toxicity of these waters must be a key criterion in the technology for disposal of both the flowback waters and the continuing outflow of production waters.
- Doesn't cause earthquakes: The article "Does gas fracking cause earthquakes" would likely be dismissed as prejudicial by the FrackNation reporter, but the author does not appear to draw deceptive claims, saying that more research is needed and that some researchers have faulted (ha!) fracking as a likely, but not perfectly attributable cause, of some earthquakes. YMMV, natch. Sorry for the long, somewhat OT post, but I felt the FrackNation reporter's closing merited some mild rebuttal.
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