And cheap, abundant, and domestic sources of energy of this kind are the best hope the Left has of sparking the economic growth needed to preserve the Entitlement State, in contrast with the bleak zero-sum economic vision currently offered on the Right as the urgent motivation for dismantling the Entitlement State, including not only Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, public pensions, but also public education.
One question remains. One criticism of fracking in particular and natural gas in general is that methane is a much more potent “greenhouse gas” than CO2; the inevitable leakage of methane (CH4) in drilling, piping, and usage makes natural gas “a wash” compared to coal. I have heard this criticism from environmentalists but I have also heard this from the coal industry in terms of “why are you picking on us and think natural gas is so great?”
The right probably got a zero-sum economic vision of the entitlement state because unless it’s restrained, no matter how much money you make you’ll still be flat broke after taxes. That’s worse than zero-sum, it’s the case where the sum is always zero.
I wouldn’t overly worry about natural gas leakage because it leaks naturally anyway, which is how we find most large petroleum and gas deposits. Since it’s a fuel that burns with oxygen (unlike H2O or CO2) its concentrations in an oxygen-rich atmosphere filled with lightning is probably limited, otherwise the atmosphere would filled up with it eons ago from decaying orgranic matter and natural seepage.
We had been through this before, agonizing about Social Security, deficits “as far as the eye could see”, Gramm-Rudman, and we grew our way out of it with cheap oil in the late 80’s and the 90’s.
This thing about “unless its restrained . . . you’ll be flat broke after taxes” is the Right Wing version of the Left’s Peak Oil and Climate Change Crisis, or whatever the term-de-jour for the putative effect of CO2.
The defining characteristic of the Left is that “everything is a crisis.” It doesn’t matter so much what the Left is fer or agin’, the main thing is The Pending Crisis, that the opposition politicians or even the average person resists education on The Pending Crisis, and matters remain hopeless because of stupid people in every quarter.
Of course the collision course of the Entitlement State with reality is a genuine crisis whereas Peak Oil, Climate Change, whatever are fake Left-wing crises. I guess.
Grow the economy, for goodness sake, and people will stop collecting unemployment and Food Stamps, seniors will delay retirement and drawing on Social Security and pensions because they will have be forced out of their jobs to leave.
How to grow the economy? For one thing, Drill Here and Drill Now. We are seeing it work with natural gas and it could work for oil. If the Democrats were still in the mold of FDR, we would have a National Oil Drilling Authority, complete with grinning sportsmen holding up oil-soiled ducks from the latest Federal Deep Water Gulf Gusher, and we would be complaining about why does resource exploitation have to be in gummint hands.
For another thing, we have clanked along for the past three years in deep recession because of the Fiscal Cliff, which is there because Blame Bush First is foremost on Mr. Obama’s agenda (oooh, the Booosh Tax Cuts, we can’t have any of that), and because of the Right Wing fixation on deficits and entitlements, we are making supporting a case for tax increases.
If I blame Mr. Obama for anything, he had two full years in which he could have done something, anything about taxes, and gotten past the tax drag on the economy of the (rolling horizon) of the pending stiff tax increases (on everybody). The horizon of the Fiscal Cliff rolls on, and the recession grinds on, the Right/Conservative/Tea Party movement is intent on frightening voters (not my original idea but one voiced by Donald Trump, who wears a stupid haircut but is not stupid about many other things).
I completely agree about the need to grow the economy. However, the hunger for new freebies from the government in insatiable and unsustainable. The rate of growth in government spending has far surpassed the growth in population and inflation. I don’t want my grandchildren to be forced to pay ruinous tax rates to support not only entitlement programs but other government spending. We need to cut and that includes sacred cows like the defense budget. I say that as a military veteran and 17 year defense contractor who just lost my job. To argue there is no fat in the defense budget (or any other government agency budget or entitlement program) is laughable.
Larry, the 2012 DoD budget, including all war funding, was just under $700B. If you cut the defense budget in half, you’d still be left with nearly a $1T budget deficit. Does anybody think there’s that much fat in Defense? I say this not to argue that there’s no place for defense cuts, but to point out that you’re not going to get any meaningful budget reductions from defense, even if you cut not just fat, but bone, muscle, and sinew. I would also argue that defense is the one area of government where cuts should be based less on budgetary considerations and more on a realistic strategic assessment. Weakness is provacative, and a couple of months of full scale war can easily wipe out a decade of “peace dividends”.
Of course the collision course of the Entitlement State with reality is a genuine crisis whereas Peak Oil, Climate Change, whatever are fake Left-wing crises. I guess.
Eh, I think the entitlement state will just inflate the currency either deliberately or as part of the wriggling on the hook. Then that will cause simultaneously a rise in taxes through capital gains and a reduction in spending due to benefits not keeping up with inflation. It’s a pretty stupid way to do it, but I don’t see the political will to avoid that particular fate.
I suppose that’s a crisis, but it’s a fairly tame one I think. We’ll just have to see what happens.
The defining characteristic of the Left is that “everything is a crisis.”
The defining characteristic of the Left is the theocracy. It is the inexorable singularity of ideology. Everyone is required to believe in lies and delusion, and the ruling elite required to be more deluded than anyone else. The closer one is to the center of power, the further from reality one must be.
Grow the economy, for goodness sake, and people will stop collecting unemployment and Food Stamps..
We have to convince Nancy Pelosi that unemployment and Food Stamps aren’t growing the economy.
If we’d unleash the nuclear industry then a lot of the natural gas produced by fracking could be converted to longer chain hydrocarbons, and coal could also be converted to liquids, both supplementing our domestic oil production. We could also extend the operations in the Bakken and Texas Eagle Shale to federal lands and California’s massive Monterey shale oil deposit, containing at least 15 billion barrels.
I know it seems logical to refer to the opposition to “the Left” as “the Right”, but actually there’s plenty of us that are opposed to both forms of statist.. and your description of the opposition sounds more like us libertarians than the right. Maybe your political spectrum is broken?
FWIW I couldn’t care less about so called greenhouse gas emissions but the article doesn’t explain how the heck is fracking supposed to cut emissions. Simply because it doesn’t. People are simply using less petroleum or other hydrocarbons (including so called unconventional oil) because they are expensive. It makes sense to do fracking for national security concerns but it has nothing to do with fulfilling enviro-wacko policies.
In the EU all sorts of stupid things are being done which will actually increase emissions and increase the cost of electricity like the new socialist French PM wanting to close down the nuclear power plants in favor of windmills and burning Algerian natural gas (it was already being done before he went into power but he bluntly announced it as official policy).
In Japan their PM already announced that unless they restart the nuclear reactors the country is going to head to an economic crisis and a recession.
Natural gas has a lower carbon to hydrogen ratio than longer chain alkanes, so for the same energy output a plant emits a bit more water and bit less CO2 in the exhaust, and much less than coal does. It’s still infinitely more CO2 than you get from a nuclear plant, though.
I’M sick of the whole fracking topic.
I’m SICK of the whole fracking topic.
I’m sick of the WHOLE fracking topic.
I’m SICK of the whole FRACKING topic.
I’m SICK of the whole fracking TOPIC.
What…are YOU looking at ME?
What…
The fact that we actually having a recurring argument about preventing people from converting a natural, organic, toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratrogenic, pollutant into plant food and water boggles the hell out of me.
Pretty much the entire laundry list of resource extraction companies should bill themselves as waste removal. “Yes, we’re removing coal. Do you have any idea how dangerous that would be if it caught fire under your house?!? You’re welcome, no charge.”
I’ve always thought we should apply that argument to ANWR. If it’s such a delicate arctic ecosystem, sitting on millions of tons of toxic petroleum sludge, shouldn’t we pump all the dangerous sludge out to protect the carribou? Won’t someone please think of the carribou?
We can take the sludge and run it through our piston powered Porsches and convert the sludge to pure rainwater and CO2, which then get turned into strawberries through the miracle of nature.
So, we could leave the carribou endangered by millions of tons of toxic sludge waiting to burst forth and destroy them and everything they have known, or we can live in a world filled with fast Porsches and strawberries.
“we can live in a world filled with fast Porsches and strawberries”
Works for me, George. 😀
Frack the watermelons.
TANSTAAFL needs to be chiseled into every brain.
Too many people have too much control over other peoples lives because of imaginary threats. The government encourages these fantasies. Personal responsibility in all facets of life has been usurped by government.
We do not have an energy problem. Energy is an economic question. Get government out of it and their wouldn’t be a problem. Economic laws work to the benefit of everybody. Gas should cost about ten cents a gallon if we didn’t screw with it and no more than a quarter. That it cost more is pure political interference. Competition that would drive the price down is interfered with by politicians, bureaucrats and various agencies that serve no other purpose.
Every agency we lived fine without for hundreds of years has it’s champions claiming we can not live without them now. This is a mental illness.
What about inequities? Some people do need help. We aren’t doing it the right way. Why isn’t securing your own personal financial future part of a basic education? It’s a very simple thing if you have twenty years of stability. Disaster insurance takes care of the rest. Perhaps it’s time to realize that producing children without securing their financial future is a crime?
When a demagogue promises a free lunch a sane society would make an example of them so that others would not dare to follow.
I want my strawberry Porsche. I’ll get it myself.
Methane is a great fuel for homes, industrial burners and boilers, and stationary power plants. However, it kinda sucks as a motor fuel. It has to be stored under very high pressure to be at all useful, and to meet practical weight requirements, that requires composite tanks.
I’m involved in a multi-agency effort to investigate a phenomenon associated with CNG tanks. They are exploding at random times, for no known reason, all over the world. It’s one of those unintended consequences things…
And cheap, abundant, and domestic sources of energy of this kind are the best hope the Left has of sparking the economic growth needed to preserve the Entitlement State, in contrast with the bleak zero-sum economic vision currently offered on the Right as the urgent motivation for dismantling the Entitlement State, including not only Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, public pensions, but also public education.
One question remains. One criticism of fracking in particular and natural gas in general is that methane is a much more potent “greenhouse gas” than CO2; the inevitable leakage of methane (CH4) in drilling, piping, and usage makes natural gas “a wash” compared to coal. I have heard this criticism from environmentalists but I have also heard this from the coal industry in terms of “why are you picking on us and think natural gas is so great?”
The right probably got a zero-sum economic vision of the entitlement state because unless it’s restrained, no matter how much money you make you’ll still be flat broke after taxes. That’s worse than zero-sum, it’s the case where the sum is always zero.
I wouldn’t overly worry about natural gas leakage because it leaks naturally anyway, which is how we find most large petroleum and gas deposits. Since it’s a fuel that burns with oxygen (unlike H2O or CO2) its concentrations in an oxygen-rich atmosphere filled with lightning is probably limited, otherwise the atmosphere would filled up with it eons ago from decaying orgranic matter and natural seepage.
We had been through this before, agonizing about Social Security, deficits “as far as the eye could see”, Gramm-Rudman, and we grew our way out of it with cheap oil in the late 80’s and the 90’s.
This thing about “unless its restrained . . . you’ll be flat broke after taxes” is the Right Wing version of the Left’s Peak Oil and Climate Change Crisis, or whatever the term-de-jour for the putative effect of CO2.
The defining characteristic of the Left is that “everything is a crisis.” It doesn’t matter so much what the Left is fer or agin’, the main thing is The Pending Crisis, that the opposition politicians or even the average person resists education on The Pending Crisis, and matters remain hopeless because of stupid people in every quarter.
Of course the collision course of the Entitlement State with reality is a genuine crisis whereas Peak Oil, Climate Change, whatever are fake Left-wing crises. I guess.
Grow the economy, for goodness sake, and people will stop collecting unemployment and Food Stamps, seniors will delay retirement and drawing on Social Security and pensions because they will have be forced out of their jobs to leave.
How to grow the economy? For one thing, Drill Here and Drill Now. We are seeing it work with natural gas and it could work for oil. If the Democrats were still in the mold of FDR, we would have a National Oil Drilling Authority, complete with grinning sportsmen holding up oil-soiled ducks from the latest Federal Deep Water Gulf Gusher, and we would be complaining about why does resource exploitation have to be in gummint hands.
For another thing, we have clanked along for the past three years in deep recession because of the Fiscal Cliff, which is there because Blame Bush First is foremost on Mr. Obama’s agenda (oooh, the Booosh Tax Cuts, we can’t have any of that), and because of the Right Wing fixation on deficits and entitlements, we are making supporting a case for tax increases.
If I blame Mr. Obama for anything, he had two full years in which he could have done something, anything about taxes, and gotten past the tax drag on the economy of the (rolling horizon) of the pending stiff tax increases (on everybody). The horizon of the Fiscal Cliff rolls on, and the recession grinds on, the Right/Conservative/Tea Party movement is intent on frightening voters (not my original idea but one voiced by Donald Trump, who wears a stupid haircut but is not stupid about many other things).
I completely agree about the need to grow the economy. However, the hunger for new freebies from the government in insatiable and unsustainable. The rate of growth in government spending has far surpassed the growth in population and inflation. I don’t want my grandchildren to be forced to pay ruinous tax rates to support not only entitlement programs but other government spending. We need to cut and that includes sacred cows like the defense budget. I say that as a military veteran and 17 year defense contractor who just lost my job. To argue there is no fat in the defense budget (or any other government agency budget or entitlement program) is laughable.
Larry, the 2012 DoD budget, including all war funding, was just under $700B. If you cut the defense budget in half, you’d still be left with nearly a $1T budget deficit. Does anybody think there’s that much fat in Defense? I say this not to argue that there’s no place for defense cuts, but to point out that you’re not going to get any meaningful budget reductions from defense, even if you cut not just fat, but bone, muscle, and sinew. I would also argue that defense is the one area of government where cuts should be based less on budgetary considerations and more on a realistic strategic assessment. Weakness is provacative, and a couple of months of full scale war can easily wipe out a decade of “peace dividends”.
Of course the collision course of the Entitlement State with reality is a genuine crisis whereas Peak Oil, Climate Change, whatever are fake Left-wing crises. I guess.
Eh, I think the entitlement state will just inflate the currency either deliberately or as part of the wriggling on the hook. Then that will cause simultaneously a rise in taxes through capital gains and a reduction in spending due to benefits not keeping up with inflation. It’s a pretty stupid way to do it, but I don’t see the political will to avoid that particular fate.
I suppose that’s a crisis, but it’s a fairly tame one I think. We’ll just have to see what happens.
The defining characteristic of the Left is that “everything is a crisis.”
The defining characteristic of the Left is the theocracy. It is the inexorable singularity of ideology. Everyone is required to believe in lies and delusion, and the ruling elite required to be more deluded than anyone else. The closer one is to the center of power, the further from reality one must be.
We have to convince Nancy Pelosi that unemployment and Food Stamps aren’t growing the economy.
If we’d unleash the nuclear industry then a lot of the natural gas produced by fracking could be converted to longer chain hydrocarbons, and coal could also be converted to liquids, both supplementing our domestic oil production. We could also extend the operations in the Bakken and Texas Eagle Shale to federal lands and California’s massive Monterey shale oil deposit, containing at least 15 billion barrels.
Shale plays
“*blank stare* Are you serious?!”
I know it seems logical to refer to the opposition to “the Left” as “the Right”, but actually there’s plenty of us that are opposed to both forms of statist.. and your description of the opposition sounds more like us libertarians than the right. Maybe your political spectrum is broken?
FWIW I couldn’t care less about so called greenhouse gas emissions but the article doesn’t explain how the heck is fracking supposed to cut emissions. Simply because it doesn’t. People are simply using less petroleum or other hydrocarbons (including so called unconventional oil) because they are expensive. It makes sense to do fracking for national security concerns but it has nothing to do with fulfilling enviro-wacko policies.
In the EU all sorts of stupid things are being done which will actually increase emissions and increase the cost of electricity like the new socialist French PM wanting to close down the nuclear power plants in favor of windmills and burning Algerian natural gas (it was already being done before he went into power but he bluntly announced it as official policy).
In Japan their PM already announced that unless they restart the nuclear reactors the country is going to head to an economic crisis and a recession.
Natural gas has a lower carbon to hydrogen ratio than longer chain alkanes, so for the same energy output a plant emits a bit more water and bit less CO2 in the exhaust, and much less than coal does. It’s still infinitely more CO2 than you get from a nuclear plant, though.
I’M sick of the whole fracking topic.
I’m SICK of the whole fracking topic.
I’m sick of the WHOLE fracking topic.
I’m SICK of the whole FRACKING topic.
I’m SICK of the whole fracking TOPIC.
What…are YOU looking at ME?
What…
The fact that we actually having a recurring argument about preventing people from converting a natural, organic, toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratrogenic, pollutant into plant food and water boggles the hell out of me.
Pretty much the entire laundry list of resource extraction companies should bill themselves as waste removal. “Yes, we’re removing coal. Do you have any idea how dangerous that would be if it caught fire under your house?!? You’re welcome, no charge.”
I’ve always thought we should apply that argument to ANWR. If it’s such a delicate arctic ecosystem, sitting on millions of tons of toxic petroleum sludge, shouldn’t we pump all the dangerous sludge out to protect the carribou? Won’t someone please think of the carribou?
We can take the sludge and run it through our piston powered Porsches and convert the sludge to pure rainwater and CO2, which then get turned into strawberries through the miracle of nature.
So, we could leave the carribou endangered by millions of tons of toxic sludge waiting to burst forth and destroy them and everything they have known, or we can live in a world filled with fast Porsches and strawberries.
“we can live in a world filled with fast Porsches and strawberries”
Works for me, George. 😀
Frack the watermelons.
TANSTAAFL needs to be chiseled into every brain.
Too many people have too much control over other peoples lives because of imaginary threats. The government encourages these fantasies. Personal responsibility in all facets of life has been usurped by government.
We do not have an energy problem. Energy is an economic question. Get government out of it and their wouldn’t be a problem. Economic laws work to the benefit of everybody. Gas should cost about ten cents a gallon if we didn’t screw with it and no more than a quarter. That it cost more is pure political interference. Competition that would drive the price down is interfered with by politicians, bureaucrats and various agencies that serve no other purpose.
Every agency we lived fine without for hundreds of years has it’s champions claiming we can not live without them now. This is a mental illness.
What about inequities? Some people do need help. We aren’t doing it the right way. Why isn’t securing your own personal financial future part of a basic education? It’s a very simple thing if you have twenty years of stability. Disaster insurance takes care of the rest. Perhaps it’s time to realize that producing children without securing their financial future is a crime?
When a demagogue promises a free lunch a sane society would make an example of them so that others would not dare to follow.
I want my strawberry Porsche. I’ll get it myself.
Methane is a great fuel for homes, industrial burners and boilers, and stationary power plants. However, it kinda sucks as a motor fuel. It has to be stored under very high pressure to be at all useful, and to meet practical weight requirements, that requires composite tanks.
I’m involved in a multi-agency effort to investigate a phenomenon associated with CNG tanks. They are exploding at random times, for no known reason, all over the world. It’s one of those unintended consequences things…