Drill, baby, drill. Who the frack cares!

One event and so many different headlines!

Who you gonna believe?

I wonder if it always was like this, or whether such contentious interpretations day in and day out are a modern phenomenon.  Even for a junkie like me, this is simply head-spinning.  Perhaps all the more why many simply decide to shut themselves off from this cacophony and instead rely on their favorite news sources.  You know, like the Faux News people!

What was the event that triggered all these headlines? In a weighty tome that can put anybody to sleep, the US EPA found "no signs of “widespread, systemic” drinking water pollution from hydraulic fracturing."

But, we are talking about energy and politics.  Not really science.  Which means:

it’s widely believed the Obama administration is deferential to natural gas fracking companies because the industry is more environmentally friendly than Big Coal but also robust enough to help drive much-needed economic growth. That attitude is shared by other members of the president’s part

Fight coal, but then a wink-wink towards natural gas.

Except, even the fighting coal is not really happening, notes the Pulitzer-winning writer at my favorite magazine:

So, where do all these  leave us?  Do the President and his people have any real energy policy at all? Kolbert writes, "the White House’s energy policies remain a muddle."  Great!  Can anything be done?

the Administration is undermining its own best efforts. But such a muddle is probably the best we can expect until and unless American voters demand something more coherent.

Ah! American voters demanding something coherent?  Good luck on that!

All these mean that after November 2016, we will most likely end up with a President and a Congress that will be a lot more fossil-fuel friendly than the friendly environment that currently exists.  Meanwhile, there is a climate conference coming up in December:

Good luck on that, rest of the world!

It is a scientific reality that fracking causes earthquakes

I worry a lot about issues over which I have no control whatsoever.  A lesson that I should have learnt a long time ago, at least when when the campus recruitment interviewer literally drew it on a piece of paper.  But, stupid is as stupid does!

One of those issues that I worry about is energy and the environment.  Especially the fossil fuels.

My worry about the fossil fuels is also why through my tired and sleepy mind and body I read through a depressing and comprehensive report on the earthquakes that are being caused by fracking.

The links between fracking and seismic activity have been reported for a while now.  The essay is not "news" in that sense, but it is awesome for how it brings it all together.  Readers--whether or not they comment here--will benefit from reading that essay in its entirety.  It will be a disservice to quote anything from that essay in one of my favorite magazines ever--the New Yorker.  But, with an understanding that you--the reader--will read that essay, I will quote just a little.

There is a global oil glut; one major reason is the extraction via fracking in the US.  But, the extraction comes at a huge price:

Until 2008, Oklahoma experienced an average of one to two earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater each year. (Magnitude-3.0 earthquakes tend to be felt, while smaller earthquakes may be noticed only by scientific equipment or by people close to the epicenter.) In 2009, there were twenty. The next year, there were forty-two. In 2014, there were five hundred and eighty-five, nearly triple the rate of California. Including smaller earthquakes in the count, there were more than five thousand. This year, there has been an average of two earthquakes a day of magnitude 3.0 or greater.
William Ellsworth, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey, told me, “We can say with virtual certainty that the increased seismicity in Oklahoma has to do with recent changes in the way that oil and gas are being produced.” Many of the larger earthquakes are caused by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground. (Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.) Disposal wells trigger earthquakes when they are dug too deep, near or into basement rock, or when the wells impinge on a fault line. Ellsworth said, “Scientifically, it’s really quite clear.”

Scientifically clear.  But, throw in the social and economic conservative ideology, and add to that the powerful politics of the industry, and science gets tossed aside.  Scientific data and results get hidden from the public, and discredited.

In state government, oil money is both invisible and pervasive. In 2013, Mary Fallin, the governor, combined the positions of Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Environment. Michael Teague, whom she appointed to the position, when asked by the local NPR reporter Joe Wertz whether he believed in climate change, responded that he believed that the climate changed every day. Of the earthquakes, Teague has said that we need to learn more. Fallin’s first substantive response came in 2014, when she encouraged Oklahomans to buy earthquake insurance. (However, many earthquake-insurance policies in the state exclude coverage for induced earthquakes.)

Note how the market works with the reality--excluding coverage for the induced earthquakes--but the politics operates in an invented reality?  That approach to create a reality that does not exist started happening big time only a few years ago; recall that old shit from the Cheney/Bush people?  You forgot?

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

We ordinary people were powerless and couldn't stop the war machine from going to Iraq.  We ordinary people are powerless and cannot stop the machines from inducing earthquakes in Oklahoma.

That does not mean I won't stop worrying and commenting.  Stupid is as stupid does!  I am sriram, sriram khé ;)

Scientific American: food, fracking, and the first Americans

I loved every article in the November issue of the Scientific American (subscription required.)

It will be so wonderful to merely have this issue alone as reading material in an upper-division general education class and discuss with students the science, politics, economics, and philosophy explicitly and implicitly addressed in the articles.  But, such a course does not exist ... ergo, I blog!

The editorial, and an article, present a compelling argument on the need to slow down our gung-ho approach to fracking--the fracturing of the shale layer in order to release the natural gas from down below.  The editorial points out that the "states are flying blind."  It was encouraging to read that Governor Chris Christie--my choice for the 2016 presidential elections--"vetoed a bill that would permanently ban fracking, then approved a one-year moratorium so his state could consider the results of the federal studies."  I tell you, this guy makes sense way more than other people do.

Now that we have reached that attention-grabbing seven billion number, we naturally start worrying again whether we can feed them all, especially when we know we will easily add another two billion-plus in less fifty years.  The essay here is not any doomsday Malthusian, unlike this one by Lester Brown in an issue a couple of years ago, but it lays out a few important variables that we need to consider, and offers five solutions too.Improving yields in Africa, Central America, and Eastern Europe is a key part of the puzzle.  This article, too, points out how much we can increase food availability if only we didn't use grains to fatten up livestock.  We can even have world peace before this can be accomplished! 

It was neat to read about the revolution in the understanding of when and how the earliest humans reached the Americas.  "They were literally strangers in a strange land. ... they exemplify the spirit of survival and adventure that represents the very nest of humanity."

I sometimes worry that we have lost that adventure spirit.  Everywhere I look, it is more often than not only wimps like me.  Whatever happened to the adventurous and wandering gene in us?  Don't we anymore want to go where no man has never gone before?  Have we become a bunch of self-satisfied creatures content to sit stupefied in front of big screen TV sets?  I hope not--that will be the end of humanity.

BTW, a funny juxtapostion on page 26: The headline screams "Meet your newest ancestor" and the bottom of the page--at the end of the short piece--is an image of Rick Perry and one of his anti-science statements.  You think this was intentional? A dig? I hope so :)