By the way, another problem they recently discovered is that states are ignoring or not properly doing air quality testing around fracking and some seriously bad chemicals are being released into the air.
It is insane how we are going gung-ho into this with basically the whole USA as a testing ground, so what if it causes cancer clusters a decade later, the wells and the owners will be long gone.
How so exactly? Less research funding? Offsetting the global prices making it cheaper in euro therefore more expensive to go green? Just curious. I wouldn't have thought it would be that big of a deal.
I also wouldn't call fracking cheap in any sense of the word, far more expensive than liquid oil extraction and the repercussions of it are at least somewhat unknown so far. (Yeah yeah I know its totally safe if you do it right and Exxon et al are soo trustworthy when it comes to this stuff.)
It's amazing to me how people keep being so ignorant about the likely most troubling issue for the next two centuries. Climate prognosis for the next 80 years keeps getting worse. The most recent studies suggest one degree of warming per decadeon average, assuming that CO2 production levels out just about now. Until humans are CO2 balanced, every ton we blow into the atmosphere simply keeps raising temperature with some time delay. 8 degrees warming on average worldwide means that some outlier regions, potentially the ones where raising temperatures are the most damaging, will see a temperature increase of 15 degrees.
We're the frog inside the heating pot, except we even steer the gas burner - and we're still discussing which way to cook ourselves would be the most economical.
I was halfway through my post when I reworded it to avoid this point. Not really sure how hn likes the doom talk yet, but seeing as you brought it up.. I watched a ted talk a while back where the speaker basically laid it out like this:
2 degrees c = screwy weather patterns, extreme storms
4 degrees c = sea level rise, no real seasons anymore, just a big swinging mess from extreme drought to extreme storms
6 degrees c = mad max
8 degrees c, he basically said humans were long gone at this point.
Remember, 1 degree average = massive localised changes.
Hmm now that I've written all this, I'm not sure, were you speaking in celsius or fahrenheit?
I would place a bet that at 5c rise they still would let all the behaviors in the USA that are causing the warming to continue.
Because the corporate lobbys would insist "jobs jobs jobs" even while the Florida keys would be completely under water - all the ceos and politicians would just literally sit in their towers and keep voting to continue.
I was talking Celsius / Kelvin. I'm assuming the speaker was referring to Fahrenheit - I'm thinking mankind as a whole might be able to survive +8 degree K iff we find efficient synthetic food sources that work in such a climate (which I assume we will) - however it would probably be at a fraction of the population we have today - whether our civilization could survive an indirect genocide on a global scale to have the infrastructure to do this is another question.
edit: re your edit: if it's true that +6 degrees sets perpetual heating mechanisms in motion which lead to +12 degrees by 2300 (as suggested in the ted talk), yes, we probably wouldn't survive +8 in the long run. it's damn scary, really - if we screw this up in the next 20 years, we basically damn the whole planet.
I meant Celsius, but see my edit - I have to revise that guess. Given that +6 degree C will probably cause runaway warming processes to initiate (which I wasn't thinking about before), surviving for even a few more centuries suddenly becomes a tough order.
> The most recent studies suggest one degree of warming per decade on average
There's been a total of approximately 0.8 degrees C increase in temperature since about 1880, at about 1.5 degrees C per doubling of CO2 concentration. Although part of that increase may be due to the increase in solar activity over the period. And, it hasn't gotten any warmer since 1998.
I'm no big proponent of fracking, but in general peak oil/gas is a much more pressing issue than global warming. I'm pretty much convinced at this point global warming is just a front used to push anti-peak oil policies.
So, you're sitting in a car driving 100mph towards a wall. The car's safety system warns you, saying 'collision ahead, break NOW'. You're thinking "hey, no problem, no car since 1880 has driven into this wall, it must be a hallucination - I'm keeping my foot down baby".
Analogies used here:
The car - Energy policies
The safety system - Climate models
The warning - Result of these models
You driving into a wall - Laymen's opinions about why these models don't apply.
To put it differently:
1) There's a time delay of several decades between putting out the CO2 and temperature rise. What we're feeling now is the effects of energy policies in the 60ies and 70ies.
2) Since the 70ies our CO2 output has risen considerably, mainly due to emerging markets.
3) Most of this 0.8 degree warming you're talking about has occurred in the last 30 years.
Well - would you bet on the wall being an illusion, or would you rather brake just in case?
If my car's system had the same track record and fundamental flaws as the climate models commonly cited, I would be inclined to ignore it. By track record I mean predicting a 3 degree C increase per doubling of CO2 and experience showing only half of that. The fundamental flaw is the assumption that positive feedback effects will triple the 1 degree C per doubling CO2 greenhouse effect, when these feedback effects (clouds and water vapour) are so difficult to model correctly.
Pretty sure the time lag of decades for temperature increase is simply false. Most of these models were predicting temperature increases since 1998 which haven't happened.
Finally, I probably would consider not braking at all if I couldn't possibly come close to stopping in time to prevent a fatal impact. If you really think a 3-6 degree C temperature increase is coming, the only thing that is going to do anything is something like a 50% drop in fossil fuel consumption. The world can't even agree on a 10% cut that won't do anything. EDIT: That's why I think these are really anti-peak oil policies, because a 10% cut actually helps there.
I see where you're coming from. When it comes to climate models, lots of feedback loop, both positive and negative ones, are being thrown around - you can basically adjust models arbitrarily to your political liking. Adjusting these models to real data is a never-ending process as long as we don't have the computational power to both resolve much denser grids and timesteps and include more parts of the equation than we do now. However, when it comes to balancing these things out to give an accurate prediction, I tend to trust organizations like NASA, IPCC and NOAA over the typical right wing think tanks that you see throwing together these denialist reports. Yes, we do know about negative feedback loops, the scientific consensus is just that they're much weaker than what we're doing to the atmosphere. Also, the 1998 measurement that gets thrown around is very misleading - have a look at [1].
Noone is claiming these models are perfect and the temperature increase estimates may be off by some margin - all I'm saying is that as long as we're sure current CO2 levels aren't going to kill our future, we better stop increasing them, given scientific consensus. When the doomsday scenarios come from scientific studies and stop including low probabilities, it's better to take them seriously rather than bet our home planet on them being all wrong.
I don't trust the IPCC because the actual results haven't matched their models, regardless of what the "scientific consensus" is on negative feedback loops.
And again, stopping the increase of CO2 would require massive global emissions cuts, which would require a new energy infrastructure.
Less oil consumption by the US. Natural gas isn't as easy to transport or store, so it tends to get consumed locally.
It's actually a good thing as it should displace some of the dirtier coal-fired power plants. Not to mention that gas-fired power plants should be easier to spin up and down with power demand.
However, it lets the US off the hook in terms of political will to remove themselves from fossil fuels because the economics demands it.
Fortunately, it seems like the world is now paying enough attention that green energy companies now can make their own way economically.
Actually, its going to be pretty awesome. We're going to start shipping our coal to China, since we'll have switched aging coal plants to combined natural gas turbines. The price of natgas will then go up in the future (duh); at that point, we'll either have to try to outbid China for the coal or drive more money into renewables.
I'd like to think we'll go the right route, but this is America. We don't do the right thing until we've tried everything else.
You can convert natural gas into synthetic petrol pretty easily these days. New Zealand has been subsidizing its fuel usage this way with a 20%?synthetic at the pump mandate since the 70s?. As the price rises america will do the same if it isn't already. I thought that was kind of the point for fracking?
Basically yes. "Going green" increases energy prices and thus comes with a disadvantage regarding the cost of production/doing business. This cost is proportional to the relative offset to the global energy prices caused by green energy.
So if the shale gas revolution drags down energy prices, it becomes politically harder to maintain the "go green" plan over here.
The actual lawsuit isn't against fracking itself. It is to prevent construction of a 160 water tower that would be used to fill trucks with water for fracking and other oil/gas exploration activities and this is in violation of the existing zoning ordinances in the ranching community in which he lives.
While it appears a subtle distinction to those looking for an example of glaring hypocrisy, would it be any different if he (and his other rancher neighbors) were protesting a construction of a 160ft water tower intended for some other purpose?
When you can afford the best lawyers, you can always find some way to be in the right. He would never directly fight against the right to frack. He needs to find something else that would prevent the fracking without affecting the right that he lobbied so hard to get.
I see that there appears to a link in the story that is dead now, which I suppose didn't used to be dead. Is there an authoritative text of the lawsuit pleadings we can all link to and look up, or is this a game of "telephone" ("Chinese whispers") in which each successive person who tells the story makes up more details about what the man is objecting to? Without the text of the lawsuit pleadings in view, I don't want to make up my own opinion about the balance of right and wrong or consistency and hypocrisy in this case.
You do know that there are no communities that have zoning ordinances allowing 160ft water towers, right?
So there's always a variance of some sort involved if fracking is done near any residential community, but I don't think that's stopped the guy or Dick before. I still think the hypocrite card can quite validly be played here.
Seriously? IANAL or a Texas attorney either but I can read...
Page 4...Section 211.003..."The governing body of a municipality may regulate...the height, number of stories, and size of buildings and other structures"
Sorry but infrastructural parts of fracking count as fracking. It's not like people are complaining solely about injection or leaking. Or the constant convoys of diesel vehicles, the expansive works they drive to and from.
In this case one tower is highlighted, but the process the tower is involved in is... Fracking.
Would it be different if it was a municipal water tower? Yes, since the man's job is to promote drilling and pumping hydrocarbons, not piping municipal water supplies. Of course it would be different.
That's some fairly tortured logic. Legally it has no bearing.
If the lawsuit was judged with your standards, a CEO of a water utility would be a hypocrite for opposing the same water tower being built "for municipal use" next to his ranch.
To dig deeper, do you question the motives of the other parties to the lawsuit - his ranching neighbors and other members of the community? Are they washed with your brush of perceived "hypocrisy" because they happen to live next to the CEO of Exxon?
Yes, the CEO of a water utility would be a hypocrite for opposing the development of a water tower next to eir ranch. Presumably the CEO of a water utility would understand that water towers are a useful part of municipal water distribution (though they have been largely replaced by pumps these days) and would have been involved in the selection of a location as part of his role in the utility.
On the other hand, a water utility CEO who didn't want that water tower near eir place for aesthetic reasons might ensure that there are multiple sites proposed, then start campaigning on environmental grounds to prevent the necessary roads being bulldozed to the site(s) where E doesn't want the tower: the NIMBY situation can be expressed in terms that everyone else with agree with ("there's a rare butterfly which only breeds in this area. Disrupting the environment would be awful!").
And that's what's happening here: "I don't want a fracking project messing up my backyard, so I'll protest against the stuff required to make that project viable."
The CEO is fully aware of the infrastructure requirements of the project, and if E wasn't concerned about the environmental impacts would otherwise have been proud to have a project nearby because it's a visible sign that the USA is taking responsibility for its own fuel supplies.
That is effectively what I was attempting to highlight. No minds read.
On the topic of tortured logic, I would love to know why you don't think the lawsuit[0] is about fracking when it involves water and the infrastructure that supplies it for those activities.
This lawsuit is about repeated assurances to the MANY plantiffs that the only plans for the property were for "low rise" (below the tree line) water tanks and the company later deciding to violate existing zoning regulations and seek to built the 160 ft water tank.
Your bias on this issue is only exceeded by your laziness.
And if you would direct your attention to the man's profession, you can see where people's idea of hypocrisy stems from. Thanks for calling me lazy, easy out that is.
You seem to be reaching to put the man on level ground with his peers. He is the CEO of a company that is partially responsible for many such installations sprouting up near other peoples regular homes. The man is complaining about his luxury mansion depreciating in value because of development.
He should listen to Exxon and other energy company lawyers and move away from progress if he doesn't like the smell or sight of it.
I am a lazy troll according to you. I earned this by referencing the free market principles that define the Exxon CEO's home as being in the path of progress. If he doesn't want his 'luxury' (according to court doc) home value to decline he wouldn't build it around natural resources the likes of which he aims to profit personally from to buy things like 'luxury' housing.
This is a situation many have to deal with yet are not news-worthy because they are not personally profiting of the types of ventures that they raise lawsuits over.
You can call me a troll for pointing that out as that is your right but you cannot accuse me of altering my comments to askew context, because that is rubbish.
I'm calling you a troll for re-writing your comments without even noting the "edit" -- 4 hours later in a lame attempt to refine your propaganda. This isn't Reddit.
What propaganda? You are the one that started this thread propagandizing your position that the man was not a hypocrite regardless of him being an energy company CEO and the case was not about fracking since it involves a company that just happens to provide services for fracking.
As others have pointed out, the CEO is a hypocrite for wanting to hinder the health of his local economy since he is in a position that directly profits off such ventures. That his luxury home wouldn't be if not for the eminent domain of infrastructural energy works next to residents across the globe. Residents who don't have the money or time to fight his and his company's legion of lawyers.
The heinous act of editing comments to be more grammatically correct or readable is worthy of this type of reaction from you? Of course this isn't Reddit, no one referenced it aside from you. Try to engage the topic instead of pounding sand about unsubstantial edits.
Just some food for thought here....Many proponents of green energy (e.g., the Kennedys) in the form of wind farms throughout the Midwest put up a huge fight when plans for a wind farm off of Nantucket Sound got a little too close to home for them as well. This doesn't excuse the behavior taking place here, but it happens on both sides of the aisle.
I think there's a difference. Windmills can spoil the view for some people (I personally think they're beautiful) but that's a tradeoff for clean power; nobody denies that, even the Kennedys. The pro-fracking people actually deny that fracking is bad for anyone.
Rex Tillerson has denied that fracking is bad for people who are burdened with it in their communities. The Kennedys don't deny that other people may be burdened with the loss of a scenic vista from windmills, they just don't want it to be them.
So, you see, Rex Tillerson is a hypocrite while the Kennedys are merely arrogant.
Funny, I was just thinking of that when I read this article. This isn't really so much a matter of hypocritical energy company CEOs as much as it is a reflection on the behaviors of the rich and privileged.
I'd say it's the behavior of humans: selfishness is in our nature.
The same situation plays out time and again with cellphone towers. People bitch about poor coverage, but as soon as a tower is going to be installed in their neighbourhood... :-)
Similarly, people buy houses under the foot of airport runways, complain about the noise, and eventually the airports close...
I agree completely. It's almost humorous (I've been guilty of thinking some of these before sooooo...)
Though, I do wonder if it isn't completely selfishness, including instead a pinch of resistance to change as part of the social recipe that drives us. In some of my other comments, I've suggested it's entirely greed or selfish motivations, but reflecting on my own experiences, resistance to change fits the bill fairly well. (Excepting financial motivation as partial to the cause, mind you.)
I live about 30 min from one of the largest wind farms in the country. A few major negatives about them:
1) They are the creepiest structures you will ever drive by. They are not beautiful as described above. They are only beautiful to someone who has never been close to one in person.
2) In addition to the flicker you linked to, the sound/vibration from them is constant for those living near them. They are still bad for the people burdened with them in their communities, but because the efficiency of wind power is so low, no one else really benefits from the production of their energy.
3) The investors who put their money into them have an expected 99 year ROI on them. The only reason they went up was for some construction company to get energy credits from the government.
4) Environmentalists have taken to complaining about how the windmills are affecting migration patterns of birds and navigation of bats at night (it screws up their sonar). You can't win with environmentalists. You give in to their desires only to have them place new demands on you. They will never be happy.
>You see, while Tillerson believes that the inevitable noise pollution that accompanies the fracking process—not to mention the potential for water contamination and other dangerous side-effects even when it is done safely (and some would strenuously argue that it is not possible to frack safely)— is of no real significance when it affects someone else’s neighborhood, he surely thinks it to be a pretty big deal when someone dares to get involved in fracking in Rex Tillerson’s neighborhood.
I'm 99% certain it's about decreased land values, not any possible environmental issues.
Environmental issues include visual and noise pollution of the property and town. There is no clear line between 'pollution' that is bad for your health and 'pollution' that is just there descreasing the value of your land.
> There is no clear line between 'pollution' that is bad for your health and 'pollution' that is just there descreasing the value of your land.
It seems you're commenting solely to split hairs. I think Puer is right.
In Mr. Tillerson's case, it's almost certainly a matter of land value. And probably a little selfishness, i.e. "not in my backyard." Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if his concern was strictly a matter of worth and the dollar value of his property.
> And all the "little people" whose land value is negatively impacted? They don't count?
I don't see where I said this. I'm not even sure what you're arguing with me over.
The point is pretty clear, I think. It has more to do with this individual's greed and probably very little (if any) to do with environmental concerns.
I'm saying that the environment issues A are exactly equivalent to the decrease in land value B. The statement I was disagreeing with was stating that A != B whereas I was thinking that A == B.
But you're correct that in the quote in Puer's comment the article was talking about water contamination and safety issues.
To be clear I believe that Mr Tillerson is acting in a self interested hypocritical manner and I hope that the big fracking companies lose a significant portion of their real profits to compensation if it turns out that people's health or land values have been damaged by their activities.
I would hope that anyone in any other community fighting fracking would reference this lawsuit as evidence that Oil and its executives believe there are situations where they shouldn't be allowed access, at the least.
What a fracking joke! Hypocrisy at it's finest folks! This shows just how out of touch the 1% are with the 99%. ExxonMobil has bullied those cites, counties & homeowners that have tried to sue them to stop projects like the one Mr. Tillerson is so outraged about!!! So basically isn't he sorta just suing himself? People like this don't care about safety regulations, EPA regulations or people in general. It's the mighty dollar they have a relationship with! Watch as he uses his money to support a Tea Turd Candidate that wants less government, like The EPA to further their Fracking Cause. Gullible citizens that support their hand picked candidates do this by telling what you want hear not what the candidates are planning on doing once elected. These vultures just like the Koch Brothers don't care about these citizens they just want someone(candidate & special interest groups) to do their dirty work. They bankroll and fund the crap of their hand picked candidates campaigns all the while hiding in the shadows. They never speak in public or news interviews because people will do it for them. So my Question Is: "don't those supporting their idelogy & views realize their supporting something that is against their(your) best interest?"Wake up these slime balls are buying government to further their agenda. They want no regulations so they can deepen their pockets. They could care less about your home, land, town, city, county or state. Just read about the growing number of earthquakes in Oklahoma! If you vote for their candidates these scum support then you CAN NOT whine or moan once a well, water tower, pipeline or project like this runs right through your community! THINK!!!!' Think before voting this mid-election 2014. They could give a FRACK about your livelihood.
It is insane how we are going gung-ho into this with basically the whole USA as a testing ground, so what if it causes cancer clusters a decade later, the wells and the owners will be long gone.