John Harte has written and spoken extensively to get the message details out to all of us (select video below)

From an Article by Douglas Fischer, Environmental Health News, June 22, 2022

How do you cut through the fog around climate change and get to a solution? Noted ecologist John Harte offers a fresh take on the dire topic of the climate crisis.

John Harte, a physicist-turned-ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, looks first to the mountains, then to the oceans and the ice, and then finally to the optimism that underpins so much political thought and action in the United States.

Speaking before the Humanist Science Committee in tiny Salida, Colorado, earlier this month, Harte used one slide to “demolish” deniers, one slide to show the real stakes—collapse of civilization—and the remainder of his chat to describe impacts he’s seen from a lifetime of research in the Rocky Mountains and where he sees hope.

“There is no question that the course we have been on for the last 60 years will lead to a crash,” he said. “But the alternative future is the careful transition to what we call a soft landing … where we need less than one Earth to support what we do on Earth.”

Global warming: Bad news ~ But first, bad news: Global warming is going to be worse than we thought, Harte said. Various feedbacks related to a warming planet—from increasing wildfires to hotter oceans to thawing permafrost—are not understood well enough to factor into predictive models.

“This is scary. These models are likely significantly underestimating the rise in atmospheric temperature that will likely occur from our current levels of climate-changing pollution.”

Harte, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s famed Energy and Resources Group, has spent a lifetime connecting dots — studying flowers in high mountain meadows for evidence of increasing fossil fuel emissions, looking at the “smoke and mirrors” behind geo-engineering and carbon sequestration.

Climate change solutions ~ Solutions, he says, are more politically achievable than most would consider given today’s polarized political environment:

1). Improve efficiency, including upping car mileage standards to 60 miles per gallon of gasoline, up from 35 mpg today, 2.) Expand clean, safe renewable energy, particularly home rooftop solar, 3.) Change personal consumption practices, 4.) Stop destroying forests, and 5.) Support reproductive freedom.

“Who are going to be the economic winners 50 years from now? They’re going to be the countries that made the greatest advances in solar energy and battery storage, in the technology needed to achieve a future without climate change,” Harte said.

“Selfishly, for the sake of our grandchildren and the economy they live under, we should be doing these things.”

The talk clocks in at just over an hour. But it’s a refreshing overview of a problem increasingly staring us all in the face. See the Vimeo video here.

https://vimeo.com/719687216

Scientists, engineers, economists and political leaders have a responsibility ...

From the Article by David Shearman, The Hill ~ Energy & Environment, May 12, 2022

Human health and the natural environment are indivisible. A recent article in the journal The Lancet reminds us that “economic decisions on the environment have major impacts on human health, and health and wellness depend on a flourishing environment.”

Those living in vast cities may find this statement difficult to grasp and many economists certainly do, for the words “natural environment” have now to be changed to “natural capital” for their understanding. We live in a world where economic thinking rules our lives, whereas many believe it should be our servant in delivering an equitable and secure future.

When leaders of most Western nations continue to puff out their chests to announce their latest increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or rate of growth, they expose their impotence to manage a nation’s future by failing to recognize environmental costs.

Or as written more politely by Stephen Posner and Lydia Olander, in The Hill, “While congressional leaders debate trillions of dollars of federal spending, they have a critical blind spot” for they are “not informed by a complete accounting of the nation’s assets, leaving out many critical services that nature provides.”

After nearly 70 years of GDP in economic ideology and practice, the World Bank is having second thoughts about GDP as a measure of “growth” for it takes no account of natural and human capital used to achieve it.

Indeed the bank’s “The Changing Wealth of Nations 2021 Managing Assets for the Future” report now seriously questions the use of GDP in its present form and may at long last provide a glimmer of hope for the world to have a sustainable future.

On “natural capital,” the report states “mismanagement of nature and failure to consider the longer-term impacts of our actions can carry severe consequences, even if they might not be immediately evident. We therefore need an expanded economic toolkit, including broader measures of economic progress, to secure our collective prosperity and even sustain our existence as a species.”

The report notes that “in countries where today’s GDP is achieved by consuming or degrading assets over time, for example by overfishing or soil degradation, total wealth is declining. This can happen even as GDP rises, but it undermines future prosperity.”

In Australia with an election due on May 21, the government has proudly announced a current GDP of 4 percent, yet it may well be minus 4 percent if the loss on natural capital is accounted for, due to prodigious land clearing, urban expansion and extensive environmental damage from mining. This may also be the case in the U.S. but there has been little attempt to measure it.

The issue is of pressing importance because world food supply is threatened by war, harvest failures from climate change extreme events and by supply problems. This is a threat to one of our life support systems, the living soil, the ecology of which together with the surrounding services from biodiversity provide our food. The research of many scientists defining these threats should galvanize action.

The World Bank 2021 report may have been influenced by the report “The Economics of Biodiversity,” by eminent economist Professor Partha Dasgupta, which was cited in a previous article in The Hill. Dasgupta pointed out that GDP does not include “depreciation of assets” as such as the degradation of the biosphere. Economic progress has been based on the extraction of resources from nature and the dumping of waste back into it. When extraction and dumping exceed nature’s capacity to repair itself, natural capital shrinks as do biodiversity and the essential environmental services they provide.

A basic tenet of any policy or practice is that it should be able to measure its effect accurately so it is now vital to establish environmental accounting to place a value on natural capital as explained in an article from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Indeed, one has to ask why the U.S. has been tardy to adopt the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) which commenced in 2012, when about 90 countries have already done so. The answer may be that the U.S. favors of a free-market system that embodies deregulation and is the leading instrument in disregard for the consumption of natural capital. Indeed, even recent articles from eminent business schools fail to mention the environment as it related to the U.S. economy.

It is also important to reflect that for too long we have failed to acknowledge and use the inherent knowledge of many indigenous peoples on land management. The free-market system has moved Western civilizations far from such understanding.

Reform must be initiated by a fundamental change in the thinking of economists and by politicians of both persuasions. Bipartisan reforms will become all the more necessary when climate-driven conflict emerge, and reforms could offer security, especially to rural constituencies who understand food production. Given the unprecedented impact we’ve had on land, the recent sobering UN land report is essential reading for all members of Congress as they consider economic policies — not just climate action.

A vital step in developing the World Bank’s “expanded economic toolkit” should be to educate the public and business on reform of GDP to put a value on nature so providing an incentive for government to protect it. Currently, “Real GDP” denotes GDP adjusted for inflation. Let us have “true GDP,” which encompasses environmental loss.

But we must realize that reform of GDP is only one piece of a thousand others needed to complete this jigsaw puzzle in the next few decades, if the planet is to remain viable for human life. The other pieces — including climate change, pollutions, toxic chemicals, water security, sea and land ecology, population growth, consumption, conflict — must all fit together as they are interrelated. Only in fitting together the puzzle can we ensure out survival.

>>> David Shearman (AM, Ph.D., FRACP, FRCPE) is a professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide, South Australia and co-founder of Doctors for the Environment Australia. He is co-author of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” (2007) commissioned by the Pell Centre for International Relations and Public Policy.

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See Also: Americans Largely Favor U.S. Taking Steps To Become Carbon Neutral by 2050, Alec Tyson, et al., March 1, 2022

Majorities of Americans say the United States should prioritize the development of renewable energy sources and take steps toward the country becoming carbon neutral by the year 2050. But just 31% want to phase out fossil fuels completely, and many foresee unexpected problems in a major transition to renewable energy.

Capturing bright ideas is a challenge!

From an Article by Michael I. Kotlikoff, Emmanuel P. Giannelis and Glenn C. Altschuler, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, April 27, 2021

America’s dominance is currently at risk, and a new model is needed now more than ever.

More than a century after Thomas Newcomen, a miner, and John Calley, his plumber assistant, invented the first useful steam engine, the French scientist Sadi Carnot developed the theory of thermodynamics to explain it. And in 1903, the bicycle makers Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first powered flight, but the underlying mathematics of aerodynamic theory were explained by a university scientist — Ludwig Prandtl at Hannover University — almost two decades later.

These examples from The Code Breaker, by Walter Isaacson, convey an important lesson about the relationship between application and theory that is relevant for future technological innovation — and for research in universities in the United States.

Vannevar Bush, the director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in the 1940s, articulated the inverse relationship between basic and applied research: universities play a critical role in developing the fundamental science that industry deploys to create products. Bush’s linear approach, which led to the establishment of the National Science Foundation, has powered innovation in the United States for decades. But America’s dominance of the innovation economy is currently at risk, and a new model is needed now more than ever.

Bipartisan concern about the erosion of America’s innovation dominance has led Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Senator Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, to co-sponsor the Endless Frontier Act to invest $100 billion in research for emerging technologies. Echoing their apprehensions about “our national research and innovation enterprise,” Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, added his support for “the infrastructure that we need to support technology development.”

To more effectively harness the potential of research universities, whose basic research has enabled the development, among other products, of the iPhone, RNA vaccines and self-driving cars, we need a paradigm shift in higher education.

The new approach begins with an affirmation of the centrality of discovery, but it explicitly recognizes the role of the marketplace in driving innovation and the marked decrease in the timeline between concept and product. It supplements and complements basic research with investments and expertise in feasibility assessment, design and transitions to commercial markets. This model does not treat exploratory (basic) and translational (applied) research as silos but, as Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the National Science Foundation, has proposed, like double-stranded DNA, multidirectional and mutually reinforcing.

Dependent on a shift in culture, hiring and allocation of resources within the academy, as well as a new kind of partnership with government and industry, this model calls for unified discovery and commercialization engines, or “D&CEs.” D&C engines in the university are transdisciplinary teams integrating expertise in physical and biological sciences, social sciences, engineering, humanities, business, and entrepreneurship, and which work with government, corporate and venture capital partners to develop next-generation products. Such teams are essential if we are to address global crises, including climate, energy, food, water, health, inequality and poverty.

In practical terms, the shift should be accompanied by changes in pedagogy and curriculum that expose students to business strategies, intellectual property concepts, patent protocols, marketing and supply chains, and experiential learning in companies.

Catalyzing the development of diversified local economies consisting of start-ups, step-ups and established companies will also yield opportunities for students and drive economic development in university towns and beyond. To encourage companies to stay local, universities should work with government officials to identify tax and other incentives.

As universities encourage collaborations between private companies and innovative faculty members, they need to find new ways, where appropriate, to “share” faculty with companies. Such partnerships retain talented faculty in the academy while providing them with opportunities to fully develop and commercialize their ideas.

Universities must also develop investment funds through a combination of philanthropy and venture capital to support the development of new discoveries, provide incubation space for the early proof-of-concept and de-risking stages, and work to identify co-location space for established companies. Seed and gap funding are crucial for validating early-stage technologies, strengthening intellectual property and bringing technology to the inflection point for further development.

Finally, where appropriate, as it increasingly is in computing and information science and genetics, universities should adopt “translational” achievements as metrics for faculty tenure and promotion and include commercialization as part of Ph.D. theses. This new emphasis will not compromise indispensable institutional values, including independence of thought, dispassionate discovery and transparency. But adapting to the indivisible nature of discovery and application will be necessary to increase the volume and velocity of technology commercialization and start-up creation, nurture the next generation of innovators, catalyze economic development, and provide the wished-for returns on federally funded programs like the aptly named Endless Frontier.

>>> Biographical Sketch — Michael I. Kotlikoff is professor of molecular physiology and provost of Cornell University. Emmanuel P. Giannelis is Walter R. Read Professor of Engineering and vice president for research and innovation at the university, and Glenn C. Altschuler is Litwin Professor of American Studies there and the co-author, with Isaac Kramnick, of Cornell: A History, 1940-2015 (Cornell University Press).

American economists warn of climate crisis & benefits of action

From an Article by Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com, October 8, 2018

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics to a duo for their work on how the world can achieve sustainable growth.

The prize was divided equally to William D. Nordhaus of Yale University and to Paul M. Romer of New York University’s Stern School of Business, both Americans, who have “designed methods for addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable economic growth,” the academy said Monday in a press release.

Nordhaus is known for his pioneering model describing how economic activities drive climate-warming emissions. He is a major advocate of using carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

He has worked on this topic since the 1970s, when scientists became increasingly worried about fossil fuels contributing to a warming world, the academy said.

Coincidentally, the academy’s announcement was issued the same day that a United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report about the catastrophic effects of unmitigated climate change and advised rapid government action. The report builds on and cites Nordhaus’ work, The New York Times reported.

When it comes to averting climate change, “the policies are lagging very, very far—miles, miles, miles—behind the science and what needs to be done,” Nordhaus said in an interview after his win.

He added that the United States has fallen behind in mitigating global warming due to the “disastrous policies” of the Trump administration. President Trump has pushed for fossil fuel usage and infamously pulled the U.S. out of global Paris agreement to limit warming.

Romer, whose work focuses on how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to produce new ideas and innovations, laid the foundation of what is now called “endogenous growth theory,” the academy said. The theory explains how ideas require specific conditions to thrive in a market.

Romer is less pessimistic about the future of the planet in light of the IPCC’s dire report, but said work needs to be done to slash carbon emissions.

“It is entirely possible for humans to produce less carbon,” he said at the press conference announcing his prize. “Once we start to try to reduce carbon emissions, we’ll be surprised that it wasn’t as hard as we anticipated.”

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Nobel prize in economics.

“The contributions of Paul Romer and William Nordhaus are methodological, providing us with fundamental insights into the causes and consequences of technological innovation and climate change,” the academy said. “This year’s Laureates do not deliver conclusive answers, but their findings have brought us considerably closer to answering the question of how we can achieve sustained and sustainable global economic growth.”

Are birds made of paper, to be manipulated?

Editorial of the Morgantown Dominion Post, May 14, 2018

EPA & Interior policy shifts focused on economics, not health or wildlife

Protecting the environment and wildlife often calls for balancing benefits and costs. No, it’s not written as such into relevant legal codes or regulations. And though this tradeoff is almost a matter of course for wildlife, it’s also apparent in many decisions for humans. However, the nation’s Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency are about to put an exclamation mark on that idea.

First, Interior is about to change how agencies under its umbrella enforce the more than 100-year-old Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Formerly, potential penalties served as incentive for businesses and agriculture to take reasonable measures to avoid killing birds. For instance, installing netting over oil waste pits or restricting certain pesticides spare thousands of birds annually. In other words, taking reasonable steps at a reasonable cost to protect bird populations.

But now, the Interior Department has decided it will only prosecute those that “d e l i b e r a t e l y” kill birds, not those that kill them by “accident.” This treaty has never attempted to altogether end the deaths of birds from unintentional consequences (wind turbines, skyscrapers, vehicles and power lines come to mind). There’s an unwritten understanding that such deaths are unavoidable. What this treaty does is aim to prevent those deaths that can be prevented. But to argue that gross negligence does not translate into criminal intent is as good as a blank check to ignore practical protections for birds.

Meanwhile, the EPA is intent on putting a price tag on the protections the Clean Air Act provides for breathing. The EPA now wants to calculate what the economic impact of your need to breathe clean air is.

Formerly, federal law and court decisions have required the EPA to focus on public health — not what it cost businesses or tax revenues — to set limits on pollution. Now, before defining regulations on pollution, smog, soot, etc. it will need to determine their impact on the economy. We don’t have a problem with having all the facts about such issues, but protecting public health should win every argument.

The EPA was never a perfect agency but once it cared as much about the environment as it now does the ability of polluters to get rich. This shifting of the principles of the EPA and the Interior Department to “reform” regulations can only muddy their efforts. What is clear though, is these policies tip the scales for wreaking havoc on clean air and wildlife.

Prof. James Van Nostrand, WVU Director, Center for Energy & Sustainable Development

WVU professor tells U.S. Senate to stop ‘War on Coal’ talk

From an Article by Karen Kidd, WV Record, October 21, 2016

Morgantown, WV – A West Virginia University law professor hopes members of a U.S. Senate subcommittee who heard his testimony earlier this month will stop talking about the so-called “War on Coal” and concentrate instead on West Virginia’s economic good.

“It is time to move beyond the tiresome complaints about the ‘war on coal’ and focus on the real drivers of the decline in the coal industry in West Virginia,” James Van Nostrand, a WVU College of Law professor and director of its Center for Energy and Sustainable Development, said during an email interview with The West Virginia Record. “We are not going to be successful in addressing the problem if we are not correctly identifying the causes of it.”

Earlier this month, Van Nostrand testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee about stimulating West Virginia’s coal industry in reference to the Clean Power Plan, an Environmental Protection Agency and Obama administration initiative to reduce carbon pollution from power plants in response to global climate change.

“Our efforts would be far better served by one, creating an environment that is going to stimulate innovation, and two, positioning the state for participating in the new energy economy by adopting public policies that encourage the development of renewable energy resources and energy efficiency within the state,” Van Nostrand told the The West Virginia Record. ”The ‘currency’ of the new energy economy are carbon credits [i.e., emissions allowances that are generated by zero- or low-carbon resources], and we currently have no policies in place that will position us to succeed in those markets.”

Without those policies, Van Nostrand said, not only will the state’s cost for complying with the Clean Power Plan go much higher but West Virginia will lose a huge opportunity to stimulate its economy and provide broad economic benefits for its residents. To do that, the era of laying blame must end, he said.

“Continuing to blame the EPA for the decline in the coal industry in West Virginia does nothing to improve our prospects and, in fact, raises false hopes that defeating the Clean Power Plan or dismantling the EPA will solve our problems,” Van Nostrand said. “It is about economics, which is driven by technology and innovation. That’s how we succeed in this game, not by misguidedly blaming the EPA.”

Van Nostrand testified before the U.S. Senate panel Oct. 5, the same day three West Virginia lawmakers, U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R), U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D) and U.S. Rep. Evan Jenkins (R), also testified about how the Clean Power Plan affects the nation’s hard-hit, coal-producing region.

Capito is chairwoman of the clean air and nuclear safety subcommittee, which traveled to Logan for the hearings. It heard from an emotional unemployed coal miner, Jimmy Dale “Bo” Copley II, a coal union lawyer and a coalfields county commissioner who had been invited by the state’s GOP majority.

Van Nostrand was among the speakers invited by the state’s Democrat minority. Despite the high-profile testimony, Van Nostrand said he is not hopeful that it will make any difference whatsoever.

“But I think it is worth pointing out what I believe to be a disservice to the citizens of West Virginia to continue to shake our collective fist at Washington, D.C., and to create the false impression that everything will be fine in the coal industry if the EPA would just leave us alone,” he said.

“EPA regulations have played a contributing, but not leading, role in the decline of the coal industry in West Virginia. It is all about economics [cheap natural gas displacing coal-fired generation], geology and the impact on demand for coal created by concerns about climate change.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Add More Pipelines?

Large Natural Gas Transmission Pipelines in “Pipelinealachia”

>>> Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV <<<

Pepe Escobar and others have referred to four countries whose names end in  … -stan (Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) as “Pipelineistan” because they are rich in oil and gas and ripe for the picking. I am going to call, from time to time,  northern Appalachia as “Pipelinealachia” in analogy.

Of course, the gas over there is in conventional deposits and here it must be fracked at considerably greater expense and environmental damage. That’s “because the good stuff is gone” here. Much of it went into the atmosphere, let me remind you.

My attention was focused a few days ago by a lady who is in the unenviable position of having one of the big new pipelines go across her small property, and being within half mile of a second large pipeline. Unfortunately it is on the top of a ridge, and each of the pipelines is projecting a compressor station on that ridge within a mile of her home.

The pipeline bisects her property with a 125 foot right of way, but there is a high road bank where it enters, so they want an access road perpendicular to the pipeline, which will block off her house. To top it all, she is allergic to diesel fumes!

Over two decades ago she retired from Washington, where she had had worked as a technician in her husband’s legal practice, picking up a great deal of law knowledge, and familiarity with court procedure. She has considerable experience reading contracts and is not afraid to dive right in to reading them. As one might expect, the contracts offered to people take as much as possible, without consideration of present or future landowners.

If the pipeline doesn’t get built, the company owns the right of way after taking the lease, and the terms are vague enough that one can think of several other uses it covers. Assuming it is built, no provision is made for abandoning it. The rapid advance of other kinds of energy may make it obsolete (a “stranded asset,” the investors’ worst nightmare). If so, what happens? If it does continue for some projected lifespan, what happens then? Is whatever current landowner married to it “for time and eternity.” Or is it to become a public liability, like so much of the remains of the coal industry and chemical industry, to be cleaned up at public expense? The end of useful life certainly will come.

Some of the lady’s neighbors were glad to get a little cash. It is a poor neighborhood, and they are willing to endure the traffic, the dirt, the contamination for a modest payment. Or perhaps they had a limited concept of what was coming. The ones who bargained received second, even third offers, often with more money, but taking more land or changing the take somewhat. Of course the contracts had the standard “nondisclosure clause” to keep information, including both terms and price from the neighbors.

In such conditions people who refuse to sign are often told “Your neighbors have all signed” or “If you don’t sign, we are going to take it anyway,” even if the company has no right of eminent domain. Essentially, only interstate pipelines which have been vetted by FERC have eminent domain, although in many cases lease men may  say a line which has not been vetted can use law to take the right of way.

Lease taking is an art in applied psychology which is well cultivated. They have tough guys, they have types that can charm, they have legalistic types and so on. Lease takers have been known to threaten old people, to claim the lease doesn’t say what it does, and even to make wild claims about what the law says when in fact it doesn’t.

You are supposed to be able to write-in additional provisions, which supersede the printed page, but I’ve also heard people claim the recorded lease is different from the one they signed. You can demand different terms on a printed page, requiring the land man to come back, too, if you hint you will then sign it. He likely would have to go back to get the boss’s permission to make a change anyway.

This is pretty serious business for the owners that reside on the land, the neighbors and those that follow, the “heirs and assigns,” as the law puts it. You need to cooperate with your neighbors, and get expert help. The land men do it every day and have a big organization behind them with experts of all kinds. You do it once or a few times in your life. You are just a daily hurdle that must be gotten over. Perhaps one of several for the day. Remember, it’s your interest against the company’s.

How long will this extraction boom last? Is it likely to play out? In the view of those playing the game, it can’t be interrupted. It will go on for decades. It can’t. First of all, there is much gas in the world that can be taken out of the ground cheaper. Some is in the Arabic states that are our nominal friends. Far more is in Russia, “pipelineistan,” allied with Russia, and Iran, all of which butt up against each other in the center of the Eurasian land mass, where gas can be piped to Europe and China without fracking or liquefaction.

Secondly, solar and other “renewable” sources of energy are poised for a rapid advance. Hydrocarbon advocates deny the chance of displacement, but it will happen quickly, because it eliminates much of the cause of global warming, provides more and better jobs and eliminates huge, long distance power lines.

Third, the financial scenarios for fracking  are uncertain. The price usually quoted for gas is the Henry Hub price. So what is that? It is a concentration point for gas moving east at Erath, Louisiana, where it interconnects with nine large transmission lines to pipe the gas on east. It serves as the source of figures used for gas price in the New York Stock Exchange and elsewhere. It is not the only transshipment point for gas, however. Marcellus gas is already in the East, and it goes through other hubs, being sold by one party to another.

It’s not just need to pay off debt that forces companies to keep drilling, see here.

Experts are saying the pipelines are needed for transport to markets, but the real objective is to export liquid natural gas. The cost of liquefaction, onloading and cross sea transport, with regasification is needed in addition to the higher cost of fracking.  American businesses will have to compete with foreign countries for gas markets. Your cost may be the price in China, less what it takes to get it over there.

Then there is what I have referred to as the “White elephant in the room,’” i.e. global warming. Can economics drive us over the climate cliff, like in the movie “Thelma and Louise”?

The fact is that fracking is investment driven, not production drawn. Those who put the money together to capitalize the industry take theirs off the top, and they have the means to get publicity and influence legislation. Plenty of money is available to the producing companies, and they spread it around liberally to the benefit of their activities.

Like they said in pirate days, “Devil take the hindmost!”

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net