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Related: About this forum"Well and Truly Fracked" (blog post from Archdruid Report)
.........Modern industrial civilization faces serious challenges in the years immediately before us, as the paired jaws of resource depletion and environmental disruption clamp down ever more tightly on it, and the consequences of decades of bad decisions come home to roost. In order to deal with those challenges, hard questions need to be asked and realistic answers consideredand this isnt furthered at all by the tendency on the part of so many people these days to lapse into cheerleading instead. Its rather as though you were trying to have a serious discussion about educational policy with someone whose only response to anything you said was to shout, Central High, Central High, rah, rah, rah!
Any number of examples of this could be quoted, but the one Id like to discuss here is the way that frackinghydrofracturing of oil and gas-bearing shales, to give it its more precise monikerhas been transformed, at least in the popular imagination, into the conclusive answer to those annoying little worries about the impossibility of extracting an infinite amount of petroleum from a finite planet. Thats worth discussing just now for at least two reasons.
The first of these is that the public debate over fracking is almost certainly about to become a good deal more heated than its already gotten, due to the publication of a lively and eminently readable little book on the subjectSnake Oil: How Frackings False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future by Richard Heinberg, which you can order from the publisher here. Those of my readers who have been following the peak oil story since its reemergence early in the last decade will recall Heinbergs The Partys Over; that and James Howard Kunstlers memorably edgy The Long Emergency were the books that launched peak oil into the collective conversation of our time.
Snake Oil may just accomplish the same thing with the side of the fracking debate thats getting no attention from the mainstream media. Heinberg makes four points in the book, each of which could usefully be put on the business end of a branding iron and applied to the tender backsides of pundits and politicians alike. First, the loudly ballyhooed claims that fracking promises a new age of limitless cheap energy for Americans are pure malarkey, based on a patchwork of unjustifiable assumptions and outright fabrications that wildly overstate potential production and tacitly ignore all the downsides of a far from flawless technology. Second, in the usual fashion of todays American economy, fracking piles up short term profits for a few by loading immense long term costs on local communities, natural systems, and future generations.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/well-and-truly-fracked.html
Any number of examples of this could be quoted, but the one Id like to discuss here is the way that frackinghydrofracturing of oil and gas-bearing shales, to give it its more precise monikerhas been transformed, at least in the popular imagination, into the conclusive answer to those annoying little worries about the impossibility of extracting an infinite amount of petroleum from a finite planet. Thats worth discussing just now for at least two reasons.
The first of these is that the public debate over fracking is almost certainly about to become a good deal more heated than its already gotten, due to the publication of a lively and eminently readable little book on the subjectSnake Oil: How Frackings False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future by Richard Heinberg, which you can order from the publisher here. Those of my readers who have been following the peak oil story since its reemergence early in the last decade will recall Heinbergs The Partys Over; that and James Howard Kunstlers memorably edgy The Long Emergency were the books that launched peak oil into the collective conversation of our time.
Snake Oil may just accomplish the same thing with the side of the fracking debate thats getting no attention from the mainstream media. Heinberg makes four points in the book, each of which could usefully be put on the business end of a branding iron and applied to the tender backsides of pundits and politicians alike. First, the loudly ballyhooed claims that fracking promises a new age of limitless cheap energy for Americans are pure malarkey, based on a patchwork of unjustifiable assumptions and outright fabrications that wildly overstate potential production and tacitly ignore all the downsides of a far from flawless technology. Second, in the usual fashion of todays American economy, fracking piles up short term profits for a few by loading immense long term costs on local communities, natural systems, and future generations.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/well-and-truly-fracked.html
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"Well and Truly Fracked" (blog post from Archdruid Report) (Original Post)
JohnyCanuck
Aug 2013
OP
Champion Jack
(5,378 posts)1. Just bought the kindle version
Looks pretty good