Massive shale oil reserves could give California one of the biggest oil booms on Earth, but the uber-powerful California green lobby is gearing up for the fight of its life. The stakes of the battle could be huge. Hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs for Californians, versus environmental concerns about fracking, pipelines, and greenhouse gasses. The intrigues in this drama are many. Will black gold bail out big blue California? Bring lots of popcorn. This is going to be a terrific show. --Walter Russell Mead,
Via Meadia, 4 February 2013
Comprising two-thirds of the United States’s total estimated shale oil reserves and covering 1,750 square miles from Southern to Central California, the Monterey Shale could turn California into the nation’s top oil-producing state and yield the kind of riches that far smaller shale oil deposits have showered on North Dakota and Texas. --Norimitsu Onishi,
The New York Times , 3 February 2013
What many fail to recognize is that North America’s oil and gas renaissance, which has the potential to fuel a U.S. industrial recovery with cheaper energy, is not a happy accident of geology and lucky drilling. The dramatic rise in shale-gas extraction and the tight-oil revolution happened in the United States and Canada because open access, sound government policy, stable property rights and the incentive offered by market pricing unleashed the skills of good engineers. Policy, not geology, is driving the extraordinary turn of events that is boosting America’s oil industry. --Christof Rühl,
International Herald Tribune, 5 February 2013
Imagine all of the additional shovel-ready, energy-related jobs (direct and indirect) that could have been created since 2008 in the oil and gas industry (and its supporting industries), if the Obama administration had been a little less friendly to the taxpayer-subsidy-dependent, high-cost, unreliable but politically-favored “green” energies, and instead had been a little more friendly to the low-cost, job-creating, dependable fossil fuel industry (think Keystone XL pipeline) that doesn’t require picking the pockets of the taxpayers. --Mark J. Perry,
AEIdeas, 4 February 2013
The Japanese government has revealed that its Japan Oil, Gas, and Metals National Corp. has dispatched a mining ship that will begin the world’s first offshore test to excavate methane hydrate from the seabed. As a potential new energy source, the search for methane hydrate will take place in the eastern Nankai Trough, roughly 70 kilometers off Aichi Prefecture’s Atsumi Peninsula, in central Japan. Estimates say that Japan’s coastal waters hold nearly 100 times the amount of natural gas that the country uses per year. --
The Japan Daily Press, 4 February 2013
In 1939, Poland was invaded by the Nazis. At the end of World War II, Soviet oppression returned. In the 1980s, there was martial law. And now, in the 21st century, Poland is being besieged by environmentalists. --Donna Lamframboise,
No Frakking Consensus, 2 February 2013
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a tally of "billion dollar disasters" which have occurred in the United States. The number of disasters which exceed the billion dollar threshold has increased since 1980. This increase has been often cited as evidence that the climate has become more extreme and is attributable to emissions of carbon dioxide. A new peer-reviewed paper from NOAA pours cold water on both claims. --
Roger Pielke Jr., 3 February 2013
