The suicide stage of capitalism

Capitalism's glory days are fast fading in the rear-view mirror. All the low-hanging fruit has been plucked. The easy oil, the easy timber, the easy gold and silver are long gone.

But capital needs to be deployed somewhere. Therefore, once the possibility of more Oklahoma gushers was exhausted, you got offshore drilling. That got us underwater gushers, which sometimes kept gushing even when equipment breakdowns prevented the capture of that oil.

BP's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe may have destroyed the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem for the next thousand years, but that was an accident, not a deliberate strategy.

That is where it differs from the next stage of exploiting ever higher hanging fruit. With offshore drilling we may have been taking foolish risks, but we were still basically drilling a hole in the earth to let the oil come out.

Fracking is an entirely different matter. We are not drilling a hole to "let" the oil and gas out; we are using industrial-scale technology to drill holes, into which we pump poisons under tremendous pressure, to force out oil and gas that doesn't want to come out.

How any person with an ounce of sense can let this pass is a mystery. Maybe it's the reassurances of all those industry experts. Maybe it's the promise of easy money. Maybe it's the promise of jobs.

Whatever it is, entire national economies are doubling down on a process that entails grave long-term risks in return for short-term gains.

UK PM David Cameron recently declared his country wide open for fracking. Poland's Tusk has gone down the same road. Hopefully local opposition can stop the madness.

Fracking is also part of the salvation strategy being foisted on the hapless Ukrainian people by their "friends" in Washington. No less a Washington insider than the son of VP Biden is helping to bring fracking to Ukraine.

While industry shills continue to deny it, there is a rapidly accumulating body of evidence linking fracking to contamination of groundwater and to seismic events in American states that have permitted the practice.

We can survive without oil. We cannot survive without water. Water resources must, in a sane world, trump the need for capital to maximize its profits.

Fracking; a 60 year track record of safety

Don't take my word for it; here's the truth straight from the website of a major fracking contractor!

In fact, Devon Energy bill themselves as a pioneer in the evolution of hydraulic fracturing technologies, and have won awards by the bushel-full for their environmentally sensitive and employee-friendly initiatives.

So what's with all these folks and their myriad claims of mysterious ill effects that they attribute to fracking practices?

Obviously the regulatory environment in which the gas and oil companies operate is geared to serve the interests of the industry, not the interests of the public whom they are supposedly charged with protecting.

Shouldn't the burden of proof lie with those who claim that injecting poisonous chemicals deep into the earth is safe, rather than with the small people whose lives are being destroyed by the practice?

Prescription for Canadian prosperity: more fracking!

The Conference Board of Canada is a blue-chip business lobby. When they speak, the Harper gang pays attention.

The Conference Board knows what it's going to take to revive Canada's moribund natural gas industry.

Fracking!

Now the reason that Canada's natural gas industry is moribund in the first place is because the wholesale adaptation of industrial-scale fracking in the US has created a glut in the market. They've got the solution. They figure we can over-produce our way right out of this glut.

Canada has to diversify away from selling all it's oil and gas to the US. What we need is a network of Liquified Natural Gas terminals up and down the West Coast, to deliver that surplus gas to the energy-starved Asian economies.

And while they don't say so, why not supplement that with a few LNG terminals on the East Coast?
Hell, just building all those LNG terminals will keep the economy afloat for a generation!

There's one little nagging doubt I have about this fracking mania that has overtaken the world. Seems to me that fracking more or less involves pumping various toxins into the earths skin under extreme pressure.

Isn't the world's fresh water down there somewhere?

When the US House of Representatives held hearings into fracking practices in 2011, they came up with a list of 650 carcinogens that were commonly used in fracking solutions. So what the Conference Board of Canada is telling us is that we should not hesitate, we should not dilly-dally, we should not lose a moment before pumping 650 carcinogens into the earth's mantle at 15,000 PSI.

Is it just me, or does that seem like a really stupid idea?