Overlooking reality will not help us limit the climate impacts

From an Article by Bill McKibben, Shana Gallagher, and Joseline Garcia, Common Dreams, September 2, 2022

We’re on a slippery slope of complete democratic collapse—and corresponding planetary collapse due to inaction on climate change—if we don’t act fast.

Young people — as revealed in poll after poll and conversation after conversation — despair of our democracy. Older people share some of that despair; until it happened, it was impossible for many of us to imagine American citizens trying to stage a coup. And yet, despite months of inaction, legislative packages now passing through Congress give those of us in college a glimmer of hope for a Washington that works for change, one that we’ve rarely seen in our lifetimes.

We older people have a gift to provide: the memory of a far more responsive political system, one we must rebuild again. When we were young, 20 million people marched on the first Earth Day in 1970—and the next year the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency formed. This is how politics is supposed to work, and it can again. It should not take catastrophic wildfires, fatal floods, and increasingly dire reports from scientists about the gravity of the climate crisis for legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act to pass. But a truly responsive and representative democracy will not be reborn without both corporations and politicians acting with courage, and without voters demanding that their representatives proactively work to fix our broken system rather than just maintaining the dysfunctional status quo.

The climate crisis and its ever abundant reality demonstrate this point in devastating and depressing ways. Our politicians have known about the reality of man-made climate change since the 1950s—but fossil fuel corporations have been working hard to deny this reality and spread misinformation for almost as long. Crucially, that hard work has involved cumulatively billions of dollars in spending on our politicians to block the will to pass climate policy. The result? A federal government that has gone the past 50 years without passing any federal climate policy despite America’s unparalleled contribution to carbon emissions and corresponding responsibility for action.

Even older Americans who still believe strongly in the promise of democracy would agree that dysfunction in our political system has gotten worse in our lifetimes. The multi-headed monster attacking our democracy—exorbitantly expensive campaign cycles, insufficient regulation on political spending and lobbying, partisan gerrymandering, and voter suppression—has grown several powerful teeth since 2010 with the demise of Citizens United. This decision by the Supreme Court to equate money with speech and remove limits to PAC and Super PAC spending was a major blow to the will of the people winning out over corporate influence.

The consequences have been drastic: in 2008, the election cycle prior to Citizens United being overturned, the financial activity for all Senate candidates came in at $499,354,330, and $1,741,970,535 for all Presidential candidates. Twelve years later, in 2020, financial activity for all Senate candidates was a whopping $2,005,771,999, and $3,977,441,987 for all presidential candidates. These 400% and 230% increases respectively have corresponded in equally dramatic disillusionment and loss of faith in the system by American voters, especially by young voters. Federal lobbying numbers have followed a similarly unsettling but unsurprising trend.

Dysfunction in our democracy creates a dangerous feedback cycle: young people increasingly don’t believe in or care about democracy as a political system, leading to less and less engagement, which further allows the corporate special interests and lobbying forces hard at work in DC and state legislatures across the country to erode public trust. We’re on a slippery slope of complete democratic collapse—and corresponding planetary collapse due to inaction on climate change — if we don’t act fast.

And yet, at the final hour before the midterm election season is fully upon us, there are reasons to be hopeful. Congress very recently passed a bill that would include the most ambitious climate change legislation that America has considered in decades. Is it enough to reduce emissions to our pledged 50% by 2030 and keep global warming below the international goal of 2°C by 2050? Not quite. But is it an important step forward, and an indication that where there’s a will, our democracy does have a way of passing policies that will improve the lives of millions and help save the planet of billions? Yes.

If we are to pave the way to sufficient action on climate change, action on all the other issues we care about, and prevent another January 6th-like event and the collapse of American democracy, however, several more important steps forward must be taken, and soon:

1. First and foremost, entrenched interests benefit and celebrate when we don’t vote — especially us young people — and we should disappoint them every chance we get. Those of us with the means and motivation to vote in the midterms should do so, and encourage our friends and family to do the same.

2. Second, if there’s anti-democratic legislation under consideration in your state, make sure to do your part to vote out the irresponsible legislators who are endeavoring to subvert our democracy for their own corrupt political gains. Instead, vote for candidates who have democracy reform in their platforms, especially campaign finance and lobbying reform, and reward politicians who vote to get rid of gerrymandering and dark money. You can find a list of candidates who have pledged not to accept any corporate PAC or Super PAC money here.

3. Third, keep your eye on the horizon for federal democracy reform like the Freedom To Vote Act, which almost passed earlier this year, and which could still pass Congress if sufficient political will existed. Fourth, companies, universities, and all institutions with lobbying clout should be using that clout to support pro-democracy bills at the federal and state levels.

4. And finally, get involved with organizations like Un-PAC (for young people) and Third Act (for older folks) as we strive to create a truly representative and functional democracy!

Our democratic house is on fire (probably caused by a wildfire worsened by climate change!) and it is incumbent on all of us to help put it out. The system has been broken, but it worked better in recent history, and can work again. The fate of young Americans, and of the entire planet, depends on us refinding our path and salvaging the promise of the world’s greatest democracy.

XXX

Senator Manchin struggles to find common ground

From the Article by Karl Evers-Hillstrom, The Hill News Service, August 13, 2022

Coal country is still reeling from Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) decision to back a sweeping climate and energy package that will accelerate the nation’s transition away from coal.

In the Mountain State, the once-burgeoning coal industry says it feels betrayed, displaced coal workers are celebrating the bill’s black lubenefits and Republicans seeking Manchin’s seat in 2024 are licking their chops.

The Inflation Reduction Act includes several Appalachia-centric measures, including subsidies to build renewable energy projects on former coal fields and the permanent extension of a tax on coal companies that funds benefits for miners suffering from black lung disease.

Advocates who fought hard for the black lung fund extension — they warned Manchin that the benefits were at risk when the excise tax expired last year — hailed its inclusion as a breakthrough victory for workers who don’t typically wield influence in Washington.

“We were surprised. We thought it’d be a four-year or 10-year [extension],” said Gary Hairston, a former West Virginia coal miner of 27 years who now leads the National Black Lung Association. “So, when we got it permanently, we might not need to worry about it no more.”

The coal industry, on the other hand, attacked Manchin for making the tax permanent and pushing policies to subsidize alternative energy sources. Leaders of Appalachian coal groups, including the West Virginia Coal Association, wrote in a recent letter that the excise tax will cost them tens of millions of dollars and hurt their ability to compete and keep energy costs stable. “This legislation is so egregious, it leaves those of us that call Senator Manchin a friend, shocked and disheartened,” they wrote.

Backlash from the coal industry, conservative groups and GOP lawmakers has opened up an opportunity for political challengers ahead of Manchin’s upcoming reelection battle. Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) is running television ads accusing the Democratic senator of crossing the state’s coal industry, an apparent signal that he plans to challenge him in 2024. “Alex Mooney won’t let Joe Manchin and Joe Biden destroy our coal industry and devastate West Virginia,” the ad tells viewers.

Cecil Roberts, a longtime Manchin ally who leads the United Mine Workers of America, the nation’s largest coal miners’ union, called those critiques “absolute bull” in a recent statement. He noted that the bill includes tax credits for carbon capture that could extend the life of coal plants and authorizes $4 billion in tax credits exclusively for companies that create new clean energy jobs in coal communities. “I cannot understand how any politician who actually cares about working West Virginians and the quality of their lives can trash this bill,” Roberts said. “They should be thanking Senator Manchin, not attacking him.”

In a response to the West Virginia Coal Association, Manchin noted that the excise tax has consistently been extended at the same rate for nearly four decades and said that coal companies can take advantage of a $5 billion fund in the climate bill to boost their efficiency. “The big pushback I’m getting from the coal operators right now is having to pay the black lung fund, and that’s a shame,” Manchin told reporters on a recent conference call.

Manchin added that despite his best efforts to boost coal, its prevalence has declined under both Democratic and Republican presidents, indicating that his state needs to take advantage of emerging energy technologies to keep up. Hundreds of coal-fired power plants have shut down over the last decade amid the emergence of cleaner and more efficient energy sources, causing pain for Appalachia’s coal mining companies.

At its peak, the West Virginia coal industry employed more than 125,000 employees, a figure that dropped to less than 12,000 in addition to 36,000 independent contractors, according to estimates from the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training.

While they’ve been slow to adopt clean energy policies, West Virginia legislators in recent years passed bills to boost solar projects despite opposition from the coal industry.

The Nature Conservancy and West Virginia Chamber of Commerce released a survey last year finding that most West Virginians believe that the state should reduce its reliance on coal and shift to renewable energy sources, a significant shift in public opinion.

“This is a traditional energy state, but folks in West Virginia are also interested in looking at what the new energy economy can bring to the state in terms of jobs, and economic development and economic diversification,” said Thomas Minney, West Virginia state director at the Nature Conservancy.

As part of his climate deal, Manchin also secured an agreement from Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) that Democrats will pass legislation to expedite approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which spans hundreds of miles in West Virginia and Virginia. Manchin says the natural gas pipeline, which has drawn opposition from local environmental and property rights advocates, would create 2,500 jobs in his home state and help make up for coal’s decline.

Still, it’s not clear whether deep-red West Virginia will embrace Manchin’s climate deal, given that his popularity soared around the time that he told Democrats he couldn’t support the $2 trillion Build Back Better Act.

From the first quarter of 2021 to 2022, Manchin’s approval rating shot up 17 points to 57 percent, the biggest increase among all senators over that period, according to Morning Consult. Nearly 7 in 10 West Virginia Republicans expressed support for the Democratic senator as he railed against his own party’s spending package.

QUOTATION ~ Change is inevitable in life. You can either resist it and potentially get run over by it, or you can choose to cooperate with it, adapt to it, and learn how to benefit from it. Jack Canfield.

A new day is coming to recognize critical issues

From an Essay by Robert C. Koehler, Common Dreams, July 12, 2018

Now, more than ever, the whole of humanity needs leaders who can who can envision and articulate a global transition beyond war and dominance, beyond environmental exploitation, beyond policies and practices that dehumanize part of us and cluelessly continue more of the same.

The Democrats have been in turmoil for the last half century and then some, when they abandoned their racist base and supported the civil rights movement.

Revved up by the spirit of the ’60s, the party began opening itself to further change, even daring to push beyond the financial interests of its controlling oligarchs and declare an opposition to war. “I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan,” George McGovern said during his 1972 presidential campaign . . . and that was that. After his crushing defeat, at the hands of Richard Nixon and his “Southern strategy,” the Dems quietly retreated. Their prevailing slogan ever since, whispered subconsciously, has been: We don’t stand for all that much.

The Democrats are now Republican lite.

The Dems are now Republican lite. They don’t have the will to disrupt anything that seems tried and true — such as, for instance, American exceptionalism and bloated militarism.

Even in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, the Democrats opted for wimpiness as opposed to courage and sanity. They didn’t dare speak against it, or propose anything but a military path to “peace.” In his 2004 campaign, John Kerry stood thus on the war, as stated on his website: “The hard truth is that we know that more lives will be lost until the mission is truly accomplished.”

And what was that mission? “To create a stable democracy in Iraq.” Those were the words of Kerry’s media spokesperson, with whom I had an enormously frustrating conversation in the wake of a fundraising call I had received from the Kerry campaign.

That war is still quietly going on, fourteen years later. So are a few others. The planet is hemorrhaging refugees, thanks largely to these wars and to the savage inequality that remains the legacy of colonialism. We still have thousands of nuclear weapons ready, on command, to destroy the world. And climate change is stirring up chaotic conditions across the planet.

Now, more than ever, the whole of humanity needs leaders who can who can envision and articulate a global transition beyond war and dominance, beyond environmental exploitation, beyond policies and practices that dehumanize part of us and cluelessly continue more of the same.

The Republicans, who know how to win elections, have served us up a president who is, for better and for worse, pretty much the exact opposite of this. Donald Trump doesn’t articulate a coherent vision for a sustainable and peaceful future, but he does mock the political status quo that has delivered us to our point of no return.

More precisely, what he mocks is the mask called political correctness, which has hidden the racism we became aware of fifty-plus years ago, which has continued, ever so quietly, to drive much of American politics.

More precisely, what he mocks is the mask called political correctness, which has hidden the racism we became aware of fifty-plus years ago, which has continued, ever so quietly, to drive much of American politics. When Trump and his supporters cry “Make America Great Again,” they see an America free of the constraints of political correctness.

Trump brings us an America once again free to hate, belittle and stereotype . . . somebody. If not African-Americans, then Mexicans and Muslims and, well, Native Americans.

“Let’s say I’m debating Pocahontas, right?” This, of course, is Trump talking about arch-nemesis Elizabeth Warren, at a rally of wildly cheering supporters last week in Montana. Oh, to be free of political correctness!

“I promise you I’ll do this, you know those little kits they sell on television for two dollars. . . . I’m going to get one of those little DNA kits, and in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she’s of Indian heritage because her mother said she has high cheekbones,” Trump joked to the delight of his overwhelmingly homogeneous audience.

“We will take that little kit . . . but we have to do it gently because we’re in the Me Too generation so we have to be very gentle. And we will very gently take that kit and we will slowly toss it to her. Hoping it doesn’t hit her and injure her arm, even though it only weighs about two ounces.”

The words are remarkably juvenile and clueless, the spew of a bully-bigot who happily mocks an entire people in order to toss a verbal dart at a political enemy. The laughter and applause from the crowd were, I’m certain, due far less to any animosity toward Warren than to sheer delight at the freedom to stereotype. Make America Great Again!

This is the same president who, in May, said of immigrants: “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”

As Annie Linskey noted in the Boston Globe: “And with Trump, pontification becomes policy.”

The wars we wage, the horrors visited on civilian populations, have faded into invisibility, but a national compassion and outrage have broken loose about Trump’s border policies.

Shortly afterward, news of the Trump administration’s treatment of asylum seekers at the Mexican border — the separation of children from their families, putting children in “cages” — went global. And suddenly the treatment of immigrants dominates the news. The wars we wage, the horrors visited on civilian populations, have faded into invisibility, but a national compassion and outrage have broken loose about Trump’s border policies.

It’s almost as though this is a real democracy, at least on that issue.

All of which brings me back to the Democrats, who have one choice only in this year’s midterm elections, and in the presidential election of 2020: Put forth real values and run on a commitment to real change, a la Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young Democratic Socialist who won a shocking upset victory in her congressional primary in the Bronx two weeks ago, and then this week won a second primary in her neighboring district as a write-in candidate. She wasn’t a candidate, but she won anyway.

This is what’s possible for Democrats who refuse to campaign as centrists: that is, as lite Republicans.

WV, PA, OH, shale fracking states

Opinion – Editorial by S. Thomas Bond, Charleston Gazette, June 1, 2018

Fracking, the most recent method of extracting gas and oil, is the delight of some and the dread of an increasing part of the population. The arguments for it are exactly two in number: first, civilization is based on energy, and burning fuels is the way to energy; second energy provides lots of jobs, the arguments against fracking are many, keen, and the list is growing.

Unfortunately, many tend to view fossil fuels as the only feasible source of energy. This inability to distinguish between the conventional way of getting energy and energy itself is the product of science illiteracy and not-so-subtle cultivation of the idea by our present day energy industry.

The most pressing argument for ending use of fossil fuels is the accumulation of the colorless, odorless, chemical byproduct of burning, carbon dioxide. It is capable of converting a certain range of the sun’s wavelengths into heat we can feel. This is causing measurable warming worldwide, a widely studied phenomenon with seriously deleterious effects. If you “don’t believe in global warming,” you are like people who don’t believe in evolution or those who think the world is flat, not a sphere. You are beyond evidence and reason, or too lazy to pursue the subject.

Why fracking? Our national reserves of conventional gas and oil are approaching exhaustion, due to profligate use and export for decades. It lays in porous rock, and all that was necessary was to drill down to the reservoir rock and pump from the well. The petroleum would make its way to the well through the pores in the rock, and wells would supply product for decades before becoming uneconomic.

Our use was profligate, and we exported, so conventional began to run out, and we have been importing more and more in recent decades. The Eastern Gas Shales Project ran from 1976 to 1992 at the Morgantown Energy Research Center produced a way to actually break rock in shale reservoirs, which are not naturally permeable. George P. Mitchel worked with government financing to combine this new high hydraulic pressure with bending the drill stem to horizontal, special targeting control to keep the drill in the preferred strata, and a zoo of synthetic chemicals to produce the method that is now called “fracking.”

In the hinterland where fracking is done, fear runs rampant. Experience shows the new method, in practice for only a decade or so, causes a variety of harms, which drillers are unwilling to recognize or pay for. Large acreages are required for drilling, pipelines and pump stations. They cannot be returned to their original use in the foreseeable future. Environmental problems result, such as sediment in streams and destruction of wildlife and domestic animals from the drillng and leaks of synthetic chemicals.

Devaluation of property results. Who wants to live or farm near the noise, light and smells of this industry? Roads are broken by a thousand or more trips to each well site and removal of waste. The tax money pays for this cost.

Sickness is well documented by over 1,700 medical research articles, illness such as asthma and other respiratory problems, abortion and light birth weights, heart problems, and endocrine gland disruption.

There are serious problems with fracking compared to alternate energy industry. It is high capital and low labor, compared to alternate forms of energy. A lot of jobs at the construction phase, but these last only a few weeks, followed by few workers to operate the equipment. The jobs are specialized, so little is open to local men (very few women want this kind or work) except truck driving and many cases are known where drivers are kept on the job 24 or more hours straight.

Fracked wells commonly have an economic life of 6 to 8 years, and the recovery is seldom more than 8 percent of the oil or gas in place. No chance of recovery of the rest is insight. Increase in production per well is due to longer laterals (horizontal drilling segments of the well), not any real efficiency.

According to a report in a December Wall Street Journal titled “Wall Street Tells Frackers to Stop Counting Barrels, Start Making Profits,” the fracking industry has lost an amazing $280 billion since it began.

So what is the power of fracking? Politics! The accumulated law and practice that allows the industry to rip off land and mineral owners, make its neighbors sick and gets the public to pay for roads and emergencies. Cozy relations with glad handing legislators and officials is a big factor. And not to be forgotten is inertia due to lack of scientific awareness, and general reluctance to change the way things are done.

Fracking is power over people and property, over a livable world, and over alternatives the world must have.

>>> S. Thomas Bond, of Jane Lew, is a retired chemistry teacher.

Shale Drilling is in Trouble, Part 5. “The Limits of Shale Drilling”

Original Article by S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

So far we have seen shale drilling, the subject of one of the world’s most ballyhooed public relations campaigns, has serious limitations: low rates of recovery, immense capital costs, low profitability (for the driller). It damages the world we live in and the one our children will have for the future. It makes people sick. It defeats agriculture, forestry, and hunting as well as the retirement industry and recreation. And it has adverse effects on politics, supplying money to influence voting.

We have seen there are good reasons for resistance, even though the force seems to be irresistible at present. It causes a legislative climate which has little consideration of the value of the environment or citizens who are not part of the corporations. The result is the shale drilling industry is aided by one-sided legislation and poor enforcement of even weak rules. Shale drillers would rather have diverse rules in each state than a single rule from the Federal Government, because state governments lack the capacity for research and are more malleable.

There is growing resistance as more and more people are affected. Some 15 million now live within a mile of a shale well. There is the unending resistance of rural people, farmers and the environmentally conscious. It even affects people in states that don’t have drilling and pipelines, because the waste sometimes goes out of state and the sand used is mined in the upper Midwest.

The jobs provided go mostly to out of state people and involve brutal working conditions. There is no supervision for safety, no Occupational Safety and Health coverage, and it has the highest fatality rate of any industry.

Shale drilling involves huge future costs. It is an unending capital sink. Soon it will face drilling in areas where the yield is less and less, so the price of gas and oil must go up and up to compensate. It must continue the environmental damage as more and more acreage is exploited.

Slowly it is dawning on many people that for hydrocarbon energy, “Production from shale is not a revolution; it’s a retirement party,” as Arthur Berman expresses it. As I have pointed out, shale drilling is no usual industry. It did not go through the normal development process for an industry – bench scale invention, scale up through pilot plants of increasing size, being carefully studied at each step for adverse effects, before building the full scale facilities.

Shale drilling techniques were researched by the federal Morgantown Energy Technology Center (METC). The people who did it are still around! George P. Mitchell, who is sometimes called the “father of fracking,” although a hard worker, a risk taker, and a man of great persistence, used a federal government assistance to drill the wells that proved the method. “They (DOE) did a hell of a lot of work, and I can’t give them enough credit for that. DOE started it, and other people took the ball and ran with it. You cannot diminish DOE’s involvement.” – Dan Steward, former Vice President of Mitchell Energy.

Once proven, it was only a matter of many other existing companies shifting over to it. No research on negative effects. The attributes of earlier drilling were simply claimed for the new method. (There is a vast literature which says shale drilling is a triumph of private enterprise, though. Forget that! It was follow the leader who tried government research results.)

The lying about shale drilling is endless – to the public, to the press and to the government, and especially to industry people themselves. The wonderful narrative crafted by the industry brings to mind what critic Pauline Kael once said about art, “The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”

The hydrocarbon industry is treading on people with the help of the courts and legislatures. Denying damage to rural people and assets has been facilitated by calling evidence “anecdotal” and denying it a place in reality. They like to hide behind “science” (bought and paid for by the companies), the way a crucifix protects a vampire hunter in grade B movies.

Now that is coming to an end. Peer reviewed science, published in professional journals, real science, is beginning to appear. Everything has been done to delay it. Access to sites to do their studies is routinely denied to independent researchers. Good thinking and action has made access in West Virginia and some other areas possible, including the WV Host Farm program.

Ways around the problem have been worked out by individual researchers in other states, too. Powerful research organizations, for example Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy, have become quite active.

Long established research organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, are devoting time to the problems of fracking and linked phenomina. Here is a list of 59 peer reviewed studies. Here is one article, by a prominent scientist, not peer reviewed, which will help a lot in your understanding of endocrine disrupters, little understood chemicals which have very serious effects in very small quantities. This is an older article and drilling methods are different from what we have here in Appalachia, but the chemicals are the same.

Then there is the white elephant in the room. That often forgotten, but inescapable giant – the result of dumping carbon dioxide in the air by so many industries – global warming. There is a truly vast scientific literature showing how it is happening. It is complex, because the earth has winds, it has ice in glaciers and floating on the ocean. It has bare rock surfaces, vegetation, and an ocean that covers three fourths of the surface. Heat goes into these, too. Both the atmosphere and the ocean have complex currents well known to scientists, but unknown to most of us.

There is also a truly vast literature trying to debunk global warming. Most of it is written by people with no background to understand. But a small amount of it is sincere. Science does not have a grand poobah making pronouncements about what is true and what is not. It is a debating society, and like any consensus forming body, some take a long time to come around. But 97% have, and the large body of factual information sets out a clear message.

Extreme energy extraction makes the carbon dioxide problem worse. It soon will be even more of a problem. The old routine is: Exploit – Deplete – Abandon. This time it may be: Exploit – Crash. If America wants to be a world leader, it should lead to energy sustainability which includes environmental protection and respect for human health.

>>> S. Tom Bond is a retired chemistry professor and resident farmer active in central West Virginia near Jackson’s Mill State Conference Center. <<<

PA Oil & Gas Industry Billboards

This commentary is by S. Tom Bond of Jane Lew, WV

Recently an acquaintance was in a car dealer’s showroom waiting for repairs. Four “rough looking” young men came in she said, and made it known to all they were there for three identical large pickups. Obviously, they were with the Marcellus industry.

This brought up a line of thinking I’ve been on lately. Why do the companies go to small dealers? Obviously they can make a better deal by buying any item in bulk from one dealer.

Look at all the names on the trucks that carry water and brine – quite literally enough to fill a page with the different names. Same diversity with sand trucks, environmental companies and all the rest. Why? I think the dis-economy of such diversity is compensated by the political power generated diversifying these functions. Each owner and his employees and their friends will support the drilling industry, and this is more important than the savings forgone by loss of economy of scale.

All corporations without exception must have enabling legislation. Individuals can do business, small shops and manufacturers can do business, professionals can organize their support without legal structure beyond common law; but corporations must have a body of law to shape interaction with outside bodies and individuals. They maintain lobbyists in all legislatures and in Washington, as do other groups, often to counter the corporations.

Politics is especially important to the shale drilling industry. The laws that allow them to proceed involve land, technology, interaction with the environment, also with the numerous accidents and with conditioning and distribution of their product. It also involves public health, degradation of the assets of other industries like farming and recreation and interference with hunting and fishing as well as other areas of concern to other members of the public with whom they come in contact. Battalions of lobbyists are required to allow them to proceed against these other interests.

The shale drilling industry cannot negotiate all these interferences with all interested parties for each well. The shale drilling industry absolutely must have the coercive force of government to back them up when dealing with other parties. They must have the right laws to do that. Thus they need politics.

This need for political power also is the explanation for all the other ways they cultivate it. Consider the public meetings the industry puts on and public meetings others, such as the University Extension Service, put on at their expense. The seemingly endless advertising along highways, including new ads along the Pennsylvania Turnpike which describe critics as “green slime,” advertising in newspapers and magazines and on the internet is directed at the same end. Some of it sounds like “public service” advertisements, some like solicitation for investment, but it all serves to encourage the public to bend to their political needs.

The big bash known as “Shale Gas Insight” to be put on in Philadelphia September 20-21 Is entirely unprecedented. It is costing millions and featuring top executives of several corporations and arch-enabler Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, who even wants to ham-string doctors and reduce the wind generated electrical industry to advance his shale drilling backers.

Boosterism isn’t entirely new to today’s gas industry. Years ago the industry cultivated opinion leaders: Chamber of Commerce types, some church leaders, leaders in education, and others who might influence the public. What is new is going directly to the public, as well as the leaders. Also new is spending a significant part of the investor’s money on public relations.

This is necessary because of much greater damage where they now operate, and the inconvenience they cause to so many people. Where ever shale drilling goes, opposition arises from these complaints.

The public is much more sophisticated in its understanding of environmental concerns, too. One hundred years ago salt water could be directed down the hillside without concern and oil on the creek was not a worry.

Now everyone knows about the coming population expansion and the exhaustion of resources, and although many people do not much concern themselves about it, others are more forward-looking. Global warming is now widely accepted, except among those who are paid to deny it, and burning carbon for energy is seen to be a root problem to continuing life as it is on earth. For the fossil fuel industry, it is important to represent burning carbon as the practical way to get energy, and importantly, to soak up capital that might be used in other energy directions.

The position of the carbon energy business is now seen to be far from glamorous. Rather, it is at best dirty and dangerous, but necessary. It has been wary of successors for forty years, nuclear, solar and wind power, and now with so much against it, as the end time for carbon burning approaches, every effort must be made to prolong the period of its greatness. Politics, with the enabling coercive force of the state, is more important than ever.

As always, economics is a major determinant in the choice of an energy source, but now that we are on the edge of technologic change, and when we need decarbonization because of global warming, political power is used to sustain the carbon industry.

>>> S. Tom Bond is farming some 500 acres in Lewis County. He is a former chemistry teacher and has been active in the Guardians of the West Fork and the Monongahela Area Watersheds Compact <<<