Fracking is awesome. While it has been in existence since the 1940s it really only took off in the last decade. Natural gas is cleaner than coal and now it is even cost competitive. Emissions from the energy sector are back at early 1990s levels, just like we all wanted. And coal is back at early 1980s levels. If our migration toward cleaner energy continues, pretty soon the government will need to subsidize the coal industry for their union voters. Fracking means people win and the environment wins.
Sure, anti-science hippies will protest over that too but their claims are goofy – ‘you can’t prove it won’t harm us’ or ‘the Earth will deflate’ or ‘someone started fracking and someone I know got cancer and died’ nonsense.
And fracking has a big upside: Venezuela, Iran and a bunch of other troublemakers that we’ve only even heard of because they have oil are in a panic about prices. Without scarcity pricing of oil, they are irrelevant.
Venezuela, for all of the chaos they try to create, is so badly managed they can’t buy toilet paper even with expensive oil. And Algeria has riots over
riots over food and housing
that can’t subside unless oil is $121 a barrel.
I had long thought that one way to get conservatives to think ‘green’ would be to remind them that less oil used in the US meant less money in the hands of dictators who want to blow us up. But cheap oil is just as good.
Fracking is Pitting OPEC Members Against Each Other. It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Bunch of Cartel Members by Megan McArdle, The Daily Beast