Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove for the Rule Five links!
Moving on: Of all the dumb mistakes made by all the Democratic candidates in the 2020 election, the calls to ban fracking may be one of the dumbest. Excerpt:
Modern fracking — horizontal hydraulic fracturing — combines two technologies in a way that only a few decades ago would have sounded more like witchcraft or alchemy than a viable business proposition. It was devised in the late Nineties by Texas entrepreneur George Mitchell, the son of Greek immigrants (his father had been a goatherd), who set out to solve a seemingly impossible problem: how to make the richly abundant but apparently inaccessible pockets of gas trapped in America’s shale formations economically viable.
After spending $6 million on research and development, Mitchell found the solution. He combined the existing process of fracking (invented in the 1940s) — forcing liquid at high pressure into the shale so as to break up the rock and release the gas — with horizontal drilling. Everyone told him he was wasting his time and money but Mitchell was vindicated. As the Economist wrote in 2012, the year before his death, ‘Few business people have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell.’
Here’s the kicker:
On the contrary, most of the Democratic presidential hopefuls either want to curtail its use or ban it altogether. Mike Bloomberg says that ‘gas isn’t as clean as we thought’. He wants to ‘get [it] out of as many homes and buildings as we can’ and stop the construction of new gas plants. Elizabeth Warren would like to take things a step further and has pledged to ban fracking as part of her $3 trillion ten-year plan to take America zero-carbon. Bernie Sanders also plans to ban fracking as part of his Green New Deal, which will nationalize the utility industry and end fossil-fuel use in buildings by 2030. Billionaire Tom Steyer — part of whose fortune was built on fossil-fuel investments, causing fracking tycoon Harold Hamm to label him ‘the world’s biggest hypocrite’ — hasn’t yet committed to banning fracking. But fracking seems unlikely to escape unscathed from the ‘national climate emergency’ that he plans to declare on day one, in the highly unlikely event that he ends up as president.
Seriously, if these people wanted to throw the 2020 election on purpose, they could hardly do a better job. By all means, campaign on returning us to a colder, darker world!
Cheap and abundant energy is one of the biggest, easiest ways to assure economic prosperity. The Democrats commit a threefold sin when weighing in on “climate change”:
They ignore the developing nations, including Brazil, India and China, who are the worst offenders in carbon emissions, and who are increasing, not decreasing, emissions.- They wallpaper over the fact that their various “green” energy initiative will never make up for the deficiency caused by the loss of natural gas.
- They ignore nuclear energy, which is not only safe and reliable but also clean.
But hey, by all means, campaign on this! It’s a donation in kind to the Trump 2020 campaign. Morons.
