“Money is pouring in” from investors even though shale gas is “inherently unprofitable,” an analyst from PNC Wealth Management, an investment company, wrote to a contractor in a February e-mail. “Reminds you of dot-coms.”
“The word in the world of independents is that the shale plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work,” an analyst from IHS Drilling Data, an energy research company, wrote.
Yes, there are some complaints that fracking has polluted drinking water with methane gas. The story explains, "Methane is naturally occurring and isn't by itself harmful in drinking water, though it can explode at high concentrations." The stories of Pennsylvania residents who are able to set their tapwater on fire are apparently outliers and not statistically significant.
As a regulatory model, consider Pennsylvania. Recently departed Governor Ed Rendell is a Democrat, and as the shale boom progressed he worked with industry and regulators to develop a flexible regulatory environment that could keep pace with a rapidly growing industry. As questions arose about well casings, for instance, Pennsylvania imposed new casing and performance requirements. The state has also increased fees for processing shale permits, which has allowed it to hire more inspectors and permitting staff.
New York, by contrast, has missed the shale play by imposing a moratorium on fracking. The new state Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, recently sued the federal government to require an extensive environmental review of the entire Delaware River Basin. Meanwhile, the EPA is elbowing its way into the fracking debate, studying the impact on drinking water, animals and "environmental justice."
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| Any resemblance to Jerry Lewis back in the day is in your head, even if they're both big in France. |
The patriarch of a small family was becoming old and frail. His children were worried about him, so they started preparing a special chicken for him to eat. They fed the chicken grain and corn and helped it become fat, so that their father might eat the chicken and the chicken soup and regain his strength.
The local ruffians saw the family's efforts. When the chicken was at its plumpest, just before it was to be butchered, the scoundrels stole the chicken and ate it themselves.
The patriarch's children were angry, and the sons wanted to confront the blackguards and demand payment. But the weak old man said No, just leave it alone, it'll be OK.
The oldest son wouldn't listen, and he confronted the man he knew was the thief. The thief and his cohort beat the son and left him in a heap on the family's doorstep.
The situation persisted for two days, and the ruffians took to taunting and jeering at the family members when they walked on the streets.
On the third day, the gang seized the daughter and raped her.
The old man said, leave them alone, nothing good will come of this. His two sons wouldn't listen and sought revenge. Emboldened by their progressive successes, the gang set upon the two sons and killed them.
One lesson is: competitors and predators can discern weakness and will exploit the perception to their advantage.
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I do believe that in the matter of a potential battlefield like Yemen, strikes against known terrorists trying to kill Americans are warranted, if we are sure we can kill or capture the enemy with accuracy and minimal civilian casualties. Sending in a SEAL team to capture or kill bin Laden is not at the level of a full-scale war with Pakistan - although we should note that does not seem that way to Pakistanis, hence the huge wave of anti-Americanism that has resulted.
There must come a point, however, when you are not targeting a one-off specific figure or cell, but launching round after round of drone missiles into a country, as into the Af-Pak border. The drone attacks into Pakistan are mighty close to warfare, it seems to me. There comes a point, in other words, at which a military kinetic action becomes a war.
Drones are particularly dangerous instruments in this respect. They allow a president to pick war at will, and placate the public with no military casualties. This is precisely what the Founders were scared of. We have created a King with an automated army, and no Congressional or public check outside of elections, when the damage may have already been done.
Maybe the line between targeted anti-terror strikes and de facto, ongoing warfare is hard to define. Sometimes, the executive may need to act urgently and unilaterally to counter an imminent military threat. But we are so far away from that now it's almost irrelevant. I guess ongoing, routine military attacks constitute war in my book. (One good test is: if it were happening to us, would we consider it an act of war? If a foreign power dropped a drone missile on your block, would you call it a military kinetic action?)
But my point is that it is this inherent lack of clarity is what guided the Founders to do what they did. They set the standard for warfare very high. They wanted to restrain the Prince. And that restraint on presidential power is at the core of the American experiment of divided powers. Which is why, the Bush-Cheney position was not only, in my view, imprudent, but deeply hostile to the core founding values of this country.
The thing about war, as the Founders understood, is that you rarely end up with anything like the state of affairs you started with.
You can begin with a few "military advisers" in South Vietnam and end up in years of brutal, counter-productive warfare. You can start with Wolfowitz's fantasy of a quick and cheap Iraq intervention and end up a decade later a trillion dollars short and with a real anxiety that the whole place will go to hell when and if the US really does pull out. You can help some Afghan rebels defeat the Soviets and set in train a war that is now at its most intensive decades later.
But at least we did have a debate and vote with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no Congressional debate over Libya or now the escalation in Yemen. The administration's argument on Libya, as revealed yesterday, is that the conflict is too constrained and limited to be called a war. Please. Tell that to those hearing shells and missiles explode in military installations around their neighborhoods in Tripoli. Thousands of air raids and sorties have occurred since this not-war was not-declared.
Second: mission creep is not some lefty fantasy. It's a historic reality. The deployment of violence wreaks its own consequences that are often uncontrollable except through more force. And the notion that we are not trying to install regime change in Libya through military action is ludicrous. What was justifed as a one-off attempt to prevent an alleged massacre of "tens of thousands" is now an on-going, soon to be billion-dollar war that's going nowhere slowly, but clearly trying to kill and traumatize a dictator and destroy the physical components of his regime. On what grounds does an American president in a fiscal hole like ours borrow another billion dollars to finance an intervention in a civil war in ... Libya?
And I do think the military/CIA distinction matters. One thing I've learned this past decade is that the CIA is pretty much its own judge, jury and executioner. It is much less accountable to the public, more likely to break the laws of war and destroy the evidence, more likely to do things that could escalate rather than ameliorate a conflict. To read that the CIA has been given a green light to do what it wants to do in Yemen with drones seems to me easily over the trip-wire for war that requires Congressional buy-in.
Technology has made this more problematic. If the CIA, based on its own intelligence, can launch a war or wars with weapons that can incur no US fatalities, the propensity to be permanently at war, permanently making America enemies, permanently requiring more wars to put out the flames previous wars started, then the Founders' vision is essentially over. I think it's a duty to make sure their vision survives this twenty-first century test.
You're about to exclaim to your companions Wow this is great! when you notice a Scandinavian couple at the next table, pursuing the same scenario. The customer asks for a bit more cheesecake, and the staff brings him another full-size slice of cheesecake. Now you're feeling, I would have liked that.| Life Expectancy (Years), 1987 and 2007, by County/Gender | ||||
| County | LE Men 1987 | LE Women 1987 | LE Men 2007 | LE Women 2007 |
| Allegheny | 71.1 | 77.6 | 74.7 | 80.2 |
| Beaver | 71.8 | 78.2 | 74.6 | 80.4 |
| Butler | 71.8 | 78.2 | 75.9 | 80.8 |
| Washington | 71.5 | 78.3 | 75.1 | 80.6 |
| Westmoreland | 71.8 | 78.7 | 75.8 | 80.9 |
| Fairfax County, VA | 75.4 | 80.1 | 81.8 | 83.8 |
| Scissors Cut Paper Paper Covers Rock Rock Breaks Scissors | People want Butter Industry wants Money Guns Beat Butter |
Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1953, President Eisenhower said, 
The Panama Canal is a money-maker. As shipping between Asia/China and the United States has increased, the number of ships trying to move materiel to the US East Coast has exceeded the capacity of the Panama Canal (which is fixed in terms of ship size, ships per hour, etc). Demand exceeds supply, costs go up, schedules slip, China looks for another path and starts sending more and more ships to the West Coast. 
The Panama Canal is nearly 2,200 miles from Pittsburgh, but ripples from a $5.25 billion canal expansion will be felt here... when construction crews are expected to excavate the grassy strip in SouthSide Works known as Tunnel Park. There's a railroad tunnel down there, and CSX Transportation wants to raise the roof on it.
They hope to finish the work by 2015, when bigger ships that will be able to use the expanded Panama Canal will start plying East Coast ports, including Philadelphia, generating more demand for trains to move goods in the East and Midwest.
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| A floating barge connection from Point State Park, out into the river and around the pilings, then back on shore at the Whorf Trail. | A switchback ramp from the Smithfield street bridge down to the Mon-Whorf trail and parking lot. |
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