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Fracking Fraud
Fracking Fraud
Photo by Jacques del Conte.
Hucksters for high volume hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling, the intensely industrial process by which x percent of natural gas and oil are mined in the United States today, loudly tout multiple benefits of the practice. Fracking reduces dependence on imports of crude oil. It generates jobs, profits and tax revenues. Fracked gas burns cleaner than coal, reducing smog and carbon pollution. Fracking leads to lower prices for gasoline and other petroleum products. It’s a variant of the last claim I examine here.
I live in Upstate New York, a place spared the direct ravages of hydrofracking by an especially vigorous years long opposition campaign that led Governor Andrew Cuomo to “ban” the process in 2014 (the next governor could reverse Cuomo’s decision). The state still suffers myriad indirect insults from fracking, including mile-long oil trains from the Bakken Shale, and a network of proposed pipelines, storage facilities and giant compressors to move fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New York and New England. Setting aside the grievous environmental damage of pipeline construction and the ‘round-the-clock threat of another Lac Megantic, New Yorkers were supposed to benefit from the lower costs of heating fuels promised by fracking supporters.
Northeasterners use a wide variety of fuels to ward off the winter chill: electricity, wood, corn, pellets, propane, kerosene, oil, natural gas, even coal. Natural gas is most common. Despite the promises, fracking has not prevented spikes in fuel costs. In recent years, several severe winters caused heating oil and electricity prices to skyrocket.
Given the flood of fracked gas from shale formations as close as the Marcellus, the price ought to have followed that of gasoline. Yet, while current wholesale natural gas prices are twenty-four percent lower than last year, Capital Region of New York customers of National Grid (the local utility) can expect a two percent drop in their bills.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Death Of Hopium
The Death Of Hopium
As many readers know, I spent 13 years living and working in Silicon Valley before partnering up with Chris to start Peak Prosperity.
I got my MBA at Stanford in 1999 when the dot-com bubble was at its zenith, and worked for both a VC-funded start-up as well as one of the biggest Internet juggernauts (Yahoo!). I lived in Palo Alto, the central core of the tech scene.
As a result, I have a pretty good read on how Silicon Valley works. Many of the folks I worked and went to school with are now in leadership positions at the big operating companies, VC firms and hedge funds in that ecosystem — so I have personal knowledge of who’s making the decisions.
And it’s no secret that I think things have degenerated into a steaming pile of hucksterism.
The “engine of our economy”, the “cradle of innovation”, the “land of tomorrow” — whatever breathless hyperbole the fawning media is using this week — is a sham. Silicon Valley has become a factory of hype, funneling gobs of early-stage capital into whatever half-credible concepts it can think of, and then pimping the artificially-inflated initial results of those tarted-up ventures to whichever “greater fool” is willing to acquire it or buy its IPO. Let that idiot figure out if it will ever turn a profit…
Like the too-cozy relationship between DC and Wall Street, I see a similar one between Wall Street and the Tech sector. They collude to pump out as many opportunities as they can — private placements, acquisitions, IPOs, secondary offerings — to cash out the insiders and foist the long-term financial risk onto the “dumb money” (pension funds, foreign capital, retail investors, corporations desperate to enter the “digital age”).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The battle with bullshit
The battle with bullshit
No Future For You, edited by John Summers, Chris Lehmann and Thomas Frank. MIT Press, 2014.
One of my pleasures over the holiday period has been readingThe Baffler‘s third book-length collection of articles, No Future For You. (I read the first one, Commodify Your Dissent in the early 2000s, but missed the second one.) For those new to The Baffler: it is a radical American magazine, published three times a year, that has mostly been going since 1988. The list of authors in this latest collection is impressive, from Baffler founder Thomas Frank to Susan Faludi, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein, Barbara Ehrenreich, and David Graeber. The collection of subjects ranges wide across the sociopathies of our late Potemkin-capitalism, from gentrification to LinkedIn, toVice, NewsCorp and the Washington Post, to Sheryl Sandberg and the Waltons, to Fifty Shades of Grey andPrometheus to all of the President’s biographers. I bought the book to have a print copy of David Graeber’s magisterial essay “Of Flying Cars And The Declining Rate of Profit” on the failure of innovation in the digital age.
Hucksters
If there is a theme that binds these different authors and their disparate subjects, it is that The Baffler has a sharp eye for hucksters and hucksterism. And more: that in our present era of late capitalism, with its “morbid symptoms” manifested by a failed order desperately trying to keep itself and its privileges afloat, hucksterism is the latest, or last, symptom of therentier economy.
Some examples.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
