The NIMBY (“Not in my back yard!”) movement bears the contemptuous brand assigned by the industrial media to people who oppose things such as power plants, refineries, power lines and urban sprawl. “Not in my back yard” campaigns directed against industrial projects are thought to be fundamentally different (progressive) from those against renewable-energy projects (regressive). ![]() This is how it’s likely to go: Continue reading → Tagged energy independence, fracking, hydraulic fracturing, industrial collapse, peak oil, President Obama, state of the union But for us in America, the collapse of the bogus New American Oil Revolution is the fire that’s burning hottest and spreading fastest. It’s a potent mix of flammable situations, from an unhinged stock market to a drought-ravaged West to the fiscal convulsions of China, Russia and Europe. In reality (a state that presidents and candidates for president never seem to visit) 2015 is shaping up to be one of the worst any of us have ever seen. The economy of the United States and the world is on fire, and with the flames and smoke visible in any direction one cared to look, the President of the United States declared last night that the worst is over, “the shadow of crisis has passed,” and happy days are here again. Can you just hold it right there, please? We’ve decided we like it the way it is…. Hold on a second, we’ve changed our minds. Continue reading → Tagged energy independence, fracking, hydraulic fracturing, oil prices, shale oil Consider a brief compendium of the lies, damned lies and statistics the oil guys have sold the country in the past few years. They did a pretty good job, but then they’ve had a lot of practice.Their theory, apparently when you’re kicking the can down the road, a myth is as good as a mile. Since oil prices tanked last summer, the industry has drawn down its strategic reserves of whitewash, pig lipstick, shinola and embalming fluid to keep things looking good even as they were decomposing. In the same sense that brave individuals are said to “fight” stage four cancer, the American oil industry has spent a harrowing year fighting reality. ![]() (You and I know, of course, that grasshopper pumps are not used in fracking, but have become a universal symbol for the oil bidness in the Mainstream Media, so there you go. Oil pumpjacks starting to suck oil instead of money. Continue reading → Tagged energy independence, fracking, oil prices The new American oil revolution was going to put us on the road back in the general direction of North American energy independence (as long as you counted Mexican and Canadian oil, too) and we would be the number one oil producer if you included in your definition of “oil” such things as biofuels, refinery gains from heat expansion, spillage and, if necessary, drippings from leaky transmissions in shopping mall parking lots. Okay, there were weasel words salted into those assurances all along, words that we didn’t realize were there until too late. (I am not making this stuff up: the headline is right there on Bloomberg Business, hardly a chicken-little medium.) This is - shortly to be was - the oil that just a few months ago (Remember? When we were young, and happy?) was to return us to energy independence, to make us the number one oil producer in the world, to bring the happy days here again for good. In a few weeks, several billion barrels of American oil will vanish in an instant. That’s one way to make a bunch of oil disappear, but accountants can do it faster. ![]() An oil refinery in Puerto Rico burns in 2009.
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