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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tonto who wrote (67792)	3/19/2012 10:12:16 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	3 Recommendations Respond to of 103300

Paul Krugman Drills Dry Hole On Oil, Gas Fracking Energy: The economist at the newspaper of record defends the president's energy policy of Solyndra, Chevy Volts and algae while dismissing the oil boom on private lands as a small-town hiccup with no impact on price. New York Times columnist and Keynesian economist Paul Krugman asks in a recent column why gas prices are rising if we are in the middle of a domestic oil boom. Doesn't the "drill, baby, drill" crowd claim, he argues, that prices will drop "if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want"? Without our domestic oil boom, created by reinvested energy company profits largely on private and state lands, gas prices would be worse. Keynes did not repeal the law of supply and demand, Mr. Krugman, and increased worldwide demand from places like China has helped keep prices up. Oil prices are also affected by expectations of future supply and possible disruptions. One such disruption would be a war in the Middle East centered on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz while our campaigner in chief tries to persuade Israel to ignore the onrushing Armageddon promised by Tehran. While Krugman acknowledges these factors, he insists that because oil is a global commodity, the effect on gas prices of letting oil companies "drill freely in the Gulf of Mexico and punch holes in the tundra" would be "negligible." With a straight face, Krugman says "the oil and gas industry doesn't create many jobs," and he dismisses the Bakken shale formation's contribution to North Dakota's 3.2% unemployment rate as "only possible because the whole state has fewer residents than Albany." Well, the unemployment rate in Albany County in New York state was more than double North Dakota's in December 2011 at 6.7% and at 8.2% for the entire state. Perhaps New York could benefit from an equally vigorous development of the portion of the Marcellus Shale formation. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that, combining the operational and capital investment impacts, the U.S. oil and natural gas industry's total employment contribution to the national economy amounted to 9.2 million full-time and part-time jobs, accounting for 5.2% of the total employment in the country. Krugman claims the "fracking boom in Pennsylvania has had hardly any effect on the state's overall employment picture." Well, Pennsylvania's Department of Labor and Industry estimates that fracking in its part of the Marcellus created 72,000 jobs from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2011. Krugman opines that "the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored." Shale formations in which fracking is employed are thousands of feet deep. Drinking-water aquifers are generally only a hundred feet deep. There is solid rock between them. The New York Times has run a series of articles filled with hyperbole and questionable sourcing. One in particular contends shale gas and the fracking process have been "oversold." Seems the fluids injected into the rock are full of icky stuff and the wastewater produced is "often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium." The mixture used to fracture shale is in fact a benign blend of 90% water, 9.5% sand and 0.5% chemicals such as the sodium chloride of table salt and the citric acid of the orange juice you had for breakfast. A 2010 Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection report concluded that "no groundwater pollution or disruption of underground sources of drinking water have been attributed to hydraulic fracturing of deep gas formations." Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who was recently called an "oil whore" by that champion of civil discourse, actor and part-time environmentalist Alec Baldwin, notes that since fracking was first commercially applied in Oklahoma in 1949, there has not been a single documented case of contaminated groundwater in more than six decades. Maybe Paul Krugman would like to provide us with one.