As tersely reported in the Canadian business press—
A long anticipated development

By Michael McCullough  | CanadianBusiness.com
(Originally: March 19, 2012)

U.S. President Barack Obama has made clear that when it comes to “fracking,” he is siding with the oil and gas industry. (Photo by Owen Sweeney / Rex Features)

Environmentalists heartened by Barack Obama’s refusal to issue a permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline didn’t have long to bask in their victory. Just days later, the U.S. president made clear in his State of the Union address that when it came to the other big eco-controversy in America—hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to access natural gas reserves—he was siding with the oil and gas industry.

“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy,” Obama proclaimed. His remarks were a clear indication that, while environmental groups, celebrity protesters and a handful of jurisdictions including Quebec and New York state continue to resist, the mainstream is prepared to ramp up gas production—and abide with the environmental risks involved.

Obama later spelled out that his administration’s support of the natural gas economy would entail a requirement that gas producers disclose the chemicals they pump under public lands to crack gas-bearing rock. But he also revealed plans to promote consumption by converting federal fleets to natural gas, offering tax incentives to transport companies for converting their vehicles, and creating five highway corridors, each with a string of natural gas fuel stations.

For Canada, America’s commitment to gas is a mixed bag. On the plus side, it promises to boost demand for gas producers hit by the lowest prices in 14 years. Right now, prices are so low leading producers such as ConocoPhillips and Chesapeake Energy are not only slashing budgets for new drilling but shutting inactive wells. As EnCana Corp. CEO Randy Eresman noted in the Calgary-based company’s 2011 year-end results: “For the industry as a whole, near-term natural gas prices are at levels below what it costs to add most new production, and in some places, may even be below what it costs to produce from existing wells.” In many cases, it’s only use-it-or-lose-it land leases, pipeline contracts and forward hedging that keeps the gas flowing.

Obama’s gas stimulus will likely make the U.S. more self-sufficient, which could accelerate the slide in Canada’s market share. The value of Canadian gas exports last year fell to $13.1 billion, from a peak of $35.6 billion in 2005, and analysts project the U.S. will become a net gas exporter within a decade.

Hope for exporting Canada’s surplus production, especially from the mammoth shale fields in northeastern B.C., now rests on the construction of terminals on the B.C. coast to liquefy the gas and ship it to Asia, where prices are currently six times higher than they are here. But though the N a t i o n a l Energy Board has granted permits for two such terminals, neither project has yet broken ground, and the window for taking advantage of high prices in Asia could soon close a North American production techniques spread to shale-rich China.

U.S. presidents since Richard Nixon have talked about weaning America off imported oil, but Obama is the only one who can claim to have succeeded in any great measure. Much of that is due to the drop in demand during the recession, combined with the growth in domestic oil production from states such as North Dakota. Natural gas is poised to further displace oil imports, especially in the commercial transportation sector.

That is no comfort to fracking opponents such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, who fear for everything from surface and groundwater contamination to the unintentional release of greenhouse gases.

“We don’t know anything about this. There’s been no credible study,” actor Mark Ruffalo says in a video on the NRDC’s website. Such complaints gained credence last December when a preliminary Environmental Protection Agency study found fracking by EnCana had sullied groundwater in Wyoming.

But when weighed against the need for energy security, all that now looks like a tolerable risk to Democrats and Republicans alike. America, desperate for a break on fuel, may well settle for a fracture.

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By Black Agenda Report  managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Fracking is about as ethical and responsible as the brain deciding to mine the liver and sell its contents…But the US is run by capitalists, and for them fracking makes good sense. Capitalism after all, is based upon externalizing, offloading your cost onto someone less powerful, or onto nature itself.

Fracking is the energy industry’s answer to peak oil, catastrophically offloading the increased cost of oil and gas extraction onto farmers, ranchers, humans who drink water, and the environment itself. It’s about as ethical and responsible as the brain deciding to mine the liver and sell the contents. And it’s national energy policy under the Obama administration.

Any time someone mentions corporate American technological innovation, you should think of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Fracking is how enormous amounts of oil and gas that used to be beyond the reach of energy companies is now being extracted across much of the United States. Barack Obama is the Fracking President. In his 2012 State of the Union he repeated the oil industry’s absurd and irresponsible claim that fracking would create 600,000 jobs.

“…the U.S. president made clear in his State of the Union address that when it came to the other big eco-controversy in America—hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to access natural gas reserves—he was siding with the oil and gas industry.

“’We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy,’ Obama proclaimed. His remarks were a clear indication that, while environmental groups, celebrity protesters and a handful of jurisdictions including Quebec and New York state continue to resist, the mainstream is prepared to ramp up gas production—and abide with the environmental risks involved.”

But the risks are beyond rational calculation.

Fracking is the explosive injection of huge volumes of water combined with secret mixes of toxic chemicals, heated hundreds of degrees past the boiling point of water and at hundreds of atmospheric pressures into deep underground rock formations where the amounts of gas or oil used to be too small to be worth going after. Some of that poisoned water seeps off to pollute finite underground water reserves. The rest is pulled back to the surface mixed with the oil, gas or whatever is being sought. When those things are removed, vast amounts of what used to be water, now irretrievably poisoned, are pumped deep into the earth.

That “water” eventually returns to us. It comes back in springs which are the sources of streams and rivers, and in wells used for irrigation and drinking water. People in areas where fracking has gone on for some time can often set afire whatever issues from their household plumbing. Fracking and disposal of large quantities of waste water may even be implicated in some seismic activity; earthquakes.

Fracking is the energy industry’s answer to peak oil. It keeps oil companies profitable by catastrophically offloading the cost of oil and gas extraction onto farmers, ranchers, humans who drink water, and the environment itself. And it’s national energy policy [3] under the Obama administration.

Let’s be clear. Fracking is about as ethical and responsible as the brain deciding to mine the liver and sell its contents.

But the US is run by capitalists, and for them fracking makes good sense. Capitalism after all, is based upon externalizing, offloading your cost onto someone less powerful, or onto nature itself. Thus capitalists make workers pay their costs by keeping wages and safety standards low. They make the public at large pay their costs by getting public subsidies and tax breaks, also by keeping safety standards lax or nonexistent, or sometimes through privatization, the handing over of public assets to private operators.

Nobody offloads costs onto the public and the environment like energy companies. Think about the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which everybody is paying for except BP. Fracking allows energy companies to use million-year old underground water reserves (that’s why they are called “fossil waters”) their private toxic sewers.

In 2008 Obama supporters projected their environmentalist beliefs on him, pretending that he stood for “green jobs” and conservation. Since Obama announced himself, at the 2008 Democratic convention as the candidate of “clean coal and safe nuclear power” this was quite a stretch. They will have to stretch even further in 2012. The Obama administration is bullish on fracking [4].

There’s an enormous amount of local organizing across the country, from Ohio and New York to Colorado and California, opposing hydraulic fracking. But such efforts get little news coverage locally, and are invisible in national corporate media news. Thus environmentalists who want to support Obama can, if they try really hard, console themselves with administration fairy tales of “safe fracking,” or be content with regulations that might require companies to tell us what toxic chemicals are used in the process.

Fracking is reckless, irresponsible and downright evil. But the unwillingness of environmentalists to oppose energy policies from the Obama White House that they would never have tolerated from Republicans makes Barack Obama, as Glen Ford frequently puts it, “the more effective” not the “lesser” evil. Of course Mitt Romney is evil as well, and one of them will be president until the end of 2016.

What with choices limited to greater and lesser evils, or more and less effective evils, it might be time to ask ourselves, how is this politics of choosing evil working out for us? Can we, and why should we hold our tongues and noses to re-elect this fracking president?

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him through this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/should-we-really-re-elect-fracking-president

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By Shamus Cooke, Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org)

The heat wave has helped convince tens of millions of Americans that climate change is real, overpowering the fake science and right-wing media – funded by corporate cash – to convince Americans otherwise.

The U.S. heat wave is slowly shaking the foundations of American politics. It may take years for the deep rumble to evolve into an above ground, institution-shattering earthquake, but U.S. society has changed for good. 

The heat wave has helped convince tens of millions of Americans that climate change is real, overpowering the fake science and right-wing media – funded by corporate cash – to convince Americans otherwise.

Republicans and Democrats alike also erect roadblocks to understanding climate change. By the politicians’ complete lack of action towards addressing the issue, the “climate change is fake” movement was strengthened, since Americans presumed that any sane government would be actively trying to address an issue that had the potential to destroy civilization.

But working people have finally made up their mind. A recent poll showed that70 percent of Americans now believe that climate change is real, up from 52 percent in 2010. And a growing number of people are recognizing that the warming of the planet is caused by human activity.

Business Week explains: “A record heat wave, drought and catastrophic wildfires are accomplishing what climate scientists could not: convincing a wide swath of Americans that global temperatures are rising.”

This means that working class families throughout the Midwest and southern states simply don’t believe what their media and politicians are telling them.

It also implies that these millions of Americans are being further politicized in a deeper sense. Believing that climate change exists implies that you are somewhat aware about the massive consequences to humanity if the global economy doesn’t drastically change, and fast.

This awareness has revolutionary implications. As millions of Americans watch the environment destroyed – for their grandchildren or themselves – while politicians do absolutely nothing in response, or make tiny token gestures – a growing number of Americans will demand political alternatives, and fight to see them created. The American political system as it exists today cannot cope with this inevitable happening.

The New York Times explains why: “…the American political system is not ready to agree to a [climate] treaty that would force the United States, over time, to accept profound changes in its energy [coal, oil], transport [trucking and airline industry] and manufacturing [corporate] sectors.”

In short, the U.S. government will not force corporations to make less profit by behaving more eco-friendly. This is the essence of the problem.

In order for humanity to survive climate change, the economy must be radically transformed; massive investments must be made in renewable energy, public transportation, and recycling, while dirty energy sources must be quickly swept into the dustbin of history.

But the economy is currently owned by giant, privately run corporations, that will continue destroying the earth if it earns them huge profits, and they make massive “contributions” to political parties to ensure this remains so. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that government inaction on climate change is directly linked to the “special interests” of corporations that dominate these governments.

This fact of U.S. politics is present in every other capitalist country as well, which means that international agreements on reducing greenhouse gasses will remain impossible, as each country’s corporations vie for market domination, reducing pollution simply puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

This dynamic has already caused massive delays in the UN’s already inadequate efforts at addressing climate change. The Kyoto climate agreement was the by-product of years of cooperation and planning between many nations that included legally binding agreements to reduce greenhouse gasses. The Bush and Obama administrations helped destroy these efforts.

For example, Instead of building upon the foundation of the Kyoto Protocol, the Obama administration demanded a whole new structure, something that would take years to achieve. The Kyoto framework (itself insufficient) was abandoned because it included legally binding agreements, and was based on multilateral, agreed-upon reductions of greenhouse gasses.

In an article by the Guardian entitled  ” US Planning to Weaken Copenhagen Climate Deal,” the Obama administration’s UN position is exposed, as he dismisses the Kyoto Protocol by proposing that “”each country set its own rules and to decide unilaterally how to meet its target.”

Obama’s proposal came straight from the mouth of U.S. corporations, who wanted to ensure that there was zero accountability, zero oversight, zero climate progress, and therefore no dent to their profits. Instead of using its massive international leverage for climate justice, the U.S. has used it to promote divisiveness and inaction, to the potential detriment of billions of people globally.

The stakes are too high to hold out any hope that governments will act boldly. The Business Week article below explains the profound changes happening to the climate:

“The average temperature for the U.S. during June was 71.2 degrees Fahrenheit (21.7 Celsius), which is 2 degrees higher than the average for the 20th century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The June temperatures made the preceding 12 months the warmest since record-keeping began in 1895, the government agency said.”

Activists who are radicalized by this global problem face a crisis of what to do about it. It is difficult to put forth a positive climate change demand, since the problem is global.  Demanding that governments “act boldly” to address climate change hasn’t worked, and lesser demands seem inadequate.

The environmental rights movement continues to go through a variety of phases: individual and small group eco-“terrorism,” causing property damage to environmentally damaging companies; corporate campaigns that target especially bad polluters with high-profile direct action; and massive education programs that have been highly successful, but fall short when it comes to winning change.

Ultimately, climate activists must come face to face with political and corporate power. Corporate-owned governments are the ones with the power to adequately address the climate change issue, and they will not be swayed by good science, common sense, basic decency, or even a torched planet.

Those in power only respond to power, and the only power capable of displacing corporate power is when people unite and act collectively, as was done in Egypt, Tunisia, and is still developing throughout Europe.

Climate groups cannot view their issue as separate from other groups that are organizing against corporate power. The social movements that have emerged to battle austerity measures are natural allies, as are anti-war and labor activists. The climate solution will inevitably require revolutionary measures, which first requires that alliances and demands are put forward that unite Labor, working people in general, community, and student groups towards collective action.

One possible immediate demand is for environmental activists to unite with Labor groups over a federal jobs program, paid  for by taxing the rich, that makes massive investments in jobs that are climate related, such as solar panel production, transportation, building recycling centers, home retro-fitting, etc.

Another demand could be to insist that the government convene the most knowledgeable scientists in the area of clean energy. These scientists should be given all the resources they need in order to collectively create alternative sources of clean energy that would allow for a realistic alternative to the current polluting and toxic sources of energy.

However, any type of immediate demand will meet giant corporate resistance from both political parties. Fighting for a uniting demand will thus strengthen the movement, and for this reason it is important to link climate solutions to the creation of jobs, which are the number one concern of most Americans. This unity will in turn lead allies toward a deeper understanding of the problem, and therefore deeper solutions will emerge that challenge the whole economic structure that is deaf to the needs of humans and the climate and sacrifices everything to the private profit of a few.

 ________________________

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org), living in Portland Oregon.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-18/record-heat-wave-pushes-u-dot-s-dot-belief-in-climate-change-to-70-percent

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/weekinreview/13broder.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/15/europe-us-copenhagen

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WHILE THE ENTIRE BANKRUPT POLITICAL CLASS and the current slimy administration sit on their hands waiting for another Deepwater-class ecocide to happen, British Petroleum, one of the most shameless corporate criminals around (perhaps in history, and in a very crowded field), is busily trying to sell the public the idea that all’s hunky-dory again in the Gulf.  Here’s but one example of this audacious and grotesquely mendacious campaign. People who eagerly help these criminals foist their lies on the American public to sell ecocidal and anti-democratic agendas truly belong behind bars. —PG

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alert is HERE.—PG

Hi, I am Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and if you care about justice and the future of the Internet freedom, Demand Progress and I need your help. 

TVShack.net – which linked (similarly to a search-engine) to places to watch TV and movies online.

O’Dwyer is not a US citizen, he’s lived in the UK all his life, his site was not hosted there, and most of his users were not from the US. America is trying to prosecute a UK citizen for an alleged crime which took place on UK soil.

The Internet as a whole must not tolerate censorship in response to mere allegations of copyright infringement. As citizens we must stand up for our rights online.

 Please click here to join me in demanding that British authorities refuse to extradite O’Dwyer, and that US officials cease persecuting him.

When operating his site, Richard O’Dwyer always did his best to play by the rules: on the few occasions he received requests to remove content from copyright holders, he complied. His site hosted links, not copyrighted content, and these were submitted by users.

Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that does not mean that copyright can or should be unlimited.

It does not mean that we should abandon time-honored moral and legal principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood.

This is but one of several recent attempts by the US government and Hollywood to expand the definition of copyright infringement to include those who simply link to other sites that are accused of housing infringing content.   

Please click here to join us in standing up for Richard O’Dwyer and Internet freedom.

Those who are being prosecuted face huge fines, and multiple years in prison.  These actions represent an unacceptable attack on Internet freedom — and one of questionable legality.

Congress should act to reign in US prosecutors and protect Internet freedom — and the UK should refuse to extradite O’Dwyer.

Richard O’Dwyer is the human face of the battle between the content industry and the interests of the general public.

Earlier this year, in the fight against SOPA and PIPA, the public won its first big victory. This could be our second.

This is why I am petitioning the UK’s Home Secretary Theresa May to stop the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer, and asking the United States to end his prosecution. 

I hope you will join me — please click here to stand up for Richard O’Dwyer and Internet freedom.

Thanks. 

– Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder

PS- We’ll only win if we get as many people as possible to pressure the authorities.  Please forward this email or use these links to get your friends involved:

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