Author: rbshreve2

  • Mailbox Money

    The shale gas propaganda and disinformation folks are at it again. They claim that New York State families could get $27,000 a year in income from gas production if the state had not banned it. But what they don’t mention is the damage to the local environment, the health of the kids, not to mention the terrible cost of climate change. The massive cost of wildfires, epic weather events, and coastal flooding are all “externals” not to be discussed.

    It’s not surprising that the Heritage Foundation is the source. They spawn many of the bad ideas that plague America today.

    https://amac.us/newsline/economy/nys-ban-on-fracking-has-cost-states-residents-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars/

  • Sunset of Fossil Fuel?

    Midnight Oil

    While oil companies continue to extract petroleum from the ground, taking a step back, the health of the carbon extraction industry is not particularly strong. Since 2021, the 5 largest independent oil majors (Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total) have been in the habit of sending more money back to shareholders than they are developing new business. This is a sign that the corporate brass is less interested in the long-term future of the firm than in extracting value from the present. Even more interesting is the oil majors’ reserves, which in many cases are depleting to less than 10 years: BP has 7.2 years of reserves left, while Chevron has 8.03 and Shell has 9.27 years. Exxon Mobil (12.4 years) and Total (12.6 years) are the only firms that have more than a decade’s worth of juice in the ground, which implies that the business is a sunset industry.

    David Fickling, Bloomberg as quoted in NumLock news.

    They remain a corrupting influence on US politics, and a threat to environmental sustainability.

  • Locals Protest to Protect Water

    “Because the majority of Ohioans rely on groundwater for their drinking water, the threat of fracking byproducts, like radioactive brine, seeping into their drinking water supplies is not a small one. For example, in Athens County, fracking-produced brine has been found migrating over a mile away from its source since 2019 — inching its way toward groundwater drinking wells. The migratory activity of fracking byproducts makes fracking a statewide concern, including in Southwest Ohio.

    “If just one aquifer is poisoned in Ohio from migrating radioactive gas and oil waste brine, it could affect the drinking water for tens of thousands people who rely on well water for drinking,” Zemper said.

    Read more. Click the box below.

  • Shapiro Criticized

  • Who Will Protect the Public Interest?

    Fracking does nothing to improve the landscape, the roads, the air, the water, or the lives of the locals. And energy companies are devious and without honor in these matters. Who will safeguard the parks?

  • Can’t Make it Go Away

    When you throw something away, where is “away?” The Westmoreland County Landfill is one “away” place where fracking waste is disposed of. But there is no away. The fluids leach out of the landfill and must be disposed of, or should we say disposed of again. WSL currently transports radioactive leachate and other chemically-laced liquid waste to treatment plants, but is seeking a new National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit to discharge liquid waste directly into the Monongahela River, via a pipeline. What could be wrong with that idea?

  • Climat News

  • The Waste Doesn’t Just Go “Away”

    Fracking does nothing good for the environment.

  • Information and Propaganda

    If you read the following article, you would think that fracking was a benign technical option. The problem with articles like this one should be obvious. It fails to address the history of things that can and do go wrong. Nor does it discuss the issue of sealing abandoned wells, which may be a practical impossibility once we punch holes through layers of rock. Steel rusts, concrete cracks, but the hole they attempt to seal with those materials is there forever. There is a long history with plenty of evidence that wells leak, and companies drill negligently, or exhaust their financial resources and fail to do as they should. The locals bear the long-term risks and costs. The lie is in what’s not said.

  • Guess Who Pays the Bill?

    Players in the energy industry know how to skip on their cleanup obligations. Nobody wants to admit to it, but there are ways to game the system so that investors can take the money and leave behind a shell that has no capacity to clean up the mess they leave behind. “IBG/YBG” means “I’ll be gone and you’ll be gone when the bill comes due.” Those “good paying jobs” are gone too, such as they were.

    The bill is coming sooner that expected.

    Fires in California, violent weather elsewhere, floods, tornad