As a follow-up to Jeff’s earlier post, California legislative Democrats are bound and determined to strangle energy production before the trade and middle class can profit.
California is on the verge of a new gold rush. Expanded hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — at the Monterey Shale formation is sparking estimates that 15 billion barrels of oil could be accessed, along with millions of jobs and huge contributions to the domestic energy supply.
Even the state’s green-friendly Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, says “the potential is extraordinary.”
But standing in the way is a flurry of anti-fracking bills. At last count, 10 were on the table, all introduced by Democrats seeking tighter controls over the controversial technology. […]
California State Sen. Fran Pavley, a longtime environmental activist, is pushing for a fracking moratorium until more is known about the potential risks, particularly to the groundwater supply — unless a comprehensive study is done by 2015.
Regardless of the fact that fracking has been a standard practice in California oil production for decades with a clean, uneventful record, the expansion of it to the huge Monterey Shale formation, with its estimated 15.4 billion barrels of oil, brings forth all manner of Chicken Little hysteria
While opposition to fracking in Wyoming, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania gains momentum, critics of the process in California are just now gearing up for what looks like a long fight ahead—a battle certain to be fraught with industry lies, flawed science and old-fashion fossil-fueled greed.
Opponents argue that uncontrolled fracking emits large amounts of methane and other air pollutants and undermines efforts to head off catastrophic climate change. […]
If fracking can take off in California as it has in North Dakota recently, the state could experience an oil surge that could make the Golden State the largest oil producer in the US, almost immediately.
“If nothing is done, large parts of our state could be transformed into industrialized oil and gas zones … as we’ve seen in other places like Pennsylvania and North Dakota,” says Kassie Siegel, a lawyer for the feisty Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). “Fracking the 15 billion barrels of oil in the Monterey shale is like lighting the fuse on a carbon bomb that would shatter California’s efforts to address the climate crisis. Given California’s leadership in addressing climate change, if we can’t stop a fracking boom in California, it’s difficult to see how we get our nation off of fossil fuels.”
There you have it. All the “ZOMG we must study this scientifically! Won’t you think of teh childrens!” is cover for halting all production of oil and natural gas.
Anemic CA Republicans are attempting to block these bills where they can, but the feudalist Dems, who look down the road we are now on — where the monied elites live in coastal splendor, serviced by an underclass confined to dense ghettos merely a bus-ride away inland — and refuse to let anything stand in the way.
Yeah, why would California want to experience an economic boom like North Dakota has? Who needs jobs? Or taxpayers, for that matter?
Been natural gas fracking here in Texas for years. No problems as of yet.
It could undermine the Peak Oil narrative! Intolerable!
Just a durned minute. I thought you all had a tax surplus to spend? This looks like just the project to fund without any federal money. Defaulting cities and pensions be damned!
Even when I still called myself a liberal (silly younger me, I actual thought LIBERAL meant liberal), I got into arguments about how the heck you expected to pay for all these social programs without revenue coming from somewhere.
I could never imagine Pat Brown putting up with such nonsense.
I don’t remember Pat Brown. I got disgusted with Jerry Brown and his lying about Prop 13 before he flipped and decided it wasn’t all that bad after he ran the numbers and discovered he wasn’t going to get elected otherwise. I left when Dukakis was in office.
Dukmajian, I mean.
We would have gotten off of oil and onto nuclear energy (for electricity anyway) if the idiot proggies hadn’t stopped it. That was the replacement technology.
Anyway, we will get off of coal and oil when we really start running out of them, because the cost of extraction will start to get higher than alternatives. One need not try to control that, and indeed, it’s a lost cause to do so.
Fracking is firing up in Illinois, too.
Salon is (predictably) having a screeching meltdown over it:
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/25/illinoiss_fracking_and_coal_rush_is_a_national_crisis_partner/
The idiot is comparing it to segregation. Seriously.
“We would have gotten off of oil and onto nuclear energy (for electricity anyway) if the idiot proggies hadn’t stopped it.”
Sure. Even the guy who started Greenpeace (as opposed to the whackjobs who have been running it in recent decades) is an advocate of nuclear energy. But then, he’s apparently a REAL environmentalist rather than a “MANKIND IS EVIL” cultist.
Hell, fracking’s had Minnesota in knots back in March, and there’s nothing in Minnesota to frack.
Pat Brown, Moonbeam’s dad, was Governor from the 1958 election to the 1966 election, or 1959-1967. He was a big goverment guy, but only in a Public Works way. He was keen on building dams and freeways and UC campuses and the like.
His son, Moonbeam, Governor from 1975 to 1983, after Uncle Ron from 1967-1975, and again Governor from 2011 to now.
Jerry Brown theme song.
I don’t know much about fracking, and in my ignorance have only one concern. Does it use lots of fresh water?
‘Cuz we don’t have any extra.
Don’t be a party-pooper, Lee. Surely there are more states out there from whom you can steal more water!
“Does it use lots of fresh water?”
I’m not an expert, but the basic idea is that you force water down the well under umpteen kabillion psi. This causes the rock to fracture and release the gas.
The water usually has “proppant” in it. That’s something like very fine sand — it gets forced into the cracks and props them open when the pressure is removed.
In principle, I don’t see any reason why salt water wouldn’t work just as well. There are various other additives in the fluid; some of those might need to be changed.
Google suggests that salt water testing is under way at Texas A&M.
““Does it use lots of fresh water?””
yes but you can recycle most of it
GreenHunter to Offer “Free” Recycled Frackwater at Wheeling Plant
Yup. Pat Brown lost to Reagan when he sought a third term in 1966.
Jerry wanted to be a Senator in 1982; Deukmejian got in then, and we all thought California was on the right track — but then he was succeeded by Pete “You [conservative legislators] are fucking irrelevant!” Wilson, and it all fell apart.
I was gone before he left office.
Pete Wilson was my mayor when I lived in San Diego. I knew we were doomed.
I don’t remember Pat Brown because I was too young. I know who he is/was of course.
Pat Brown was the guy who beat Nixon in 62 prompting the “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” whine to the press.
I was in Hayward then.
But there’s plenty to tie in knots…
Well, what I was referring to was the fact that a not insignificant (somewhere between “a whole lot”and “a whole shitload” of the sand used in fracking comes from Minnesota. There’s so much demand for it right now that there’s something of a silica sand boom going on. So naturally the greens and their allies in the DFL want (or wanted) to shut it all down with a moritorium so they could “study’ the environmental impact, or some damn thing.
In the mean time, they raised taxes here in MN to cover their bullshit projects, including, I imagine, the light rail.
I hadn’t heard about the sand contretemps in Minnesota, Ernst. It looks typical of the way these people operate, complete with “community organizers” (read: lying communists) purporting to speak for “the people” (read: their fellow travelers, along with a few local useful idiots to trot out for the cameras).
For all his RINOey flaws, Pete Wilson understood the illegal alien problem, and was damned by the national GOP, who believed (and sadly some of them STILL believe) in Hispandering.
That, or they really want their cheap gardeners and maids.
As for spending, by 1993, Wilson had begun to wise up. I miss him. Of course, at this point in Cali, I miss Gray Davis!
Wilson handled the immigration thing the same way he handled the legislative GOP — by pissing off everybody that he should have been winning over, and driving away everybody that would otherwise have been on his side.
It was as if he wanted to be as different as possible from Deukmejian, and the only way he could think of to accomplish that was to be an unmitigated bastard — and not in any good way.