Category Archives: Energy

War Criminal Charged in War on Coal

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Farmington-Mine-Disaster-smoke

A battlefield in the real War on Coal (the 1968 Farmington Mine disaster in West Virginia). The aggressor is not who you think it is, nor are the victims. (Wikipedia Photo)

A long, long list of lies have been perpetrated by industrialists to confuse ordinary people about how, and by whom, the world is being destroyed. Proceedings in a Federal courthouse in West Virginia are about to bring some clarity to the issue. The quality of the lies has been uniformly low — none of them stands up to a moment’s rational examination. Their success rate, on the other hand, has been high; a dismaying proportion of Americans believes that the people who are exploiting them the most are their best friends, and the people who are trying to save them are their enemies. There is no worse example than the bogus “War on Coal,” imagineered by coal-mine operators as a unifying theory of everything bad that happens: Obama did it, as part of his “War on Coal.”

As propaganda, the War on Coal was a brilliant stroke. How else could an industry whose air pollution is destabilizing the entire planet, whose operations are obliterating mountain ranges, poisoning groundwater, and routinely killing and sickening its employees, instantly make itself seem a blameless victim of outside aggression? Its audacity was exceeded only by the gullibility of a grateful nation, which never paused to remark on the oddity of Coal declaring a war on itself, on behalf of an enemy that did not seem to be aware of it. Continue reading →

International Energy Agency Says: Brace for Impact

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What America will look like of the frackers have their way -- and what Huntington Beach, California looked like in 1926. But according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, we shouldn’t be too concerned about what the frackers are going to be able to do. (Photo courtesy Orange County Archives)

What America will look like of the frackers have their way — and what Huntington Beach, California looked like in 1926. But according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, we shouldn’t be too concerned about what the frackers are going to be able to do. (Photo courtesy Orange County Archives)

The customarily cheery International Energy Agency (IEA), created to advise the member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has taken a more somber tone in its latest annual World Energy Outlook released today. The agency dismisses the wildly hyped shale-oil and -gas “boom” in the United States as a band-aid on a malignant tumor, a temporary mask distracting the world from the pervasive illness afflicting its oil supply. Continue reading →

Epidemic: Countries Falling Ill from Oil Anemia

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Oil: we can afford to buy it now, but they really can't afford to sell it to us.

Oil: we can afford to buy it now, but they really can’t afford to sell it to us.

An epidemic of oil anemia is spreading around the world with the speed of an airborne virus, leaving scores of countries gasping for breath as their financial arteries shrivel for lack of cash. The price of oil has dropped to about $80 a barrel from $100 just a few weeks ago. And just as oil burning countries begin to shrivel when they have to pay more than $100, oil producing countries start to suffocate on anything less. The sickest examples: Continue reading →

Bulls Running: Frackers Getting Trampled

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It's bulls v. bears on Wall Street, and the collateral damage is substantial.

It’s bulls v. bears on Wall Street, and the collateral damage is substantial.

Overtaken by arithmetic and logic, the Wall Street bulls are trying to find a place to hide their money, and while they don’t agree on where to put it, they are beginning to agree that it definitely should not be in the fracking patch. The stock of fracking operators has been in bear country for weeks now as the strain of trying to pretend everything is all right gets worse by the hour.

A Ponzi scheme requires the operator to get new suckers in the door fast enough to use their money to pay off the old suckers, so they don’t blow the whistle on the  con. Continue reading →

Twin Peaks: Stock-Market Fear, Oil Panic

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This is where stock and gas prices are going. To see the panic index, turn your screen upside down.

This is where stock and gas prices are going. To see the panic index, read from right to left.

Gasoline is below three dollars a gallon and the stock market is at an all-time high. Well, yes, that was last week but still. What could be wrong with this picture? Like a face that has had way too many plastic surgeries, this one is stretched a little thin, with eyes bugged out and droplets of sweat all over it. The market, which all concerned promised would go up and up and never come down (Does anybody remember them saying the same thing about real estate? Anybody?) has lost 7% of its value in a week and, yesterday at least, could not pull out of the nose dive. A 10 percent drop is a correction. Twenty percent is a crash. And the low gas prices are being celebrated by everyone but the frackers who brought them to us. For them, low oil prices mean almost-immediate ruin. Continue reading →

Letting Go of the Tar (Sands) Baby

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A tar sands mine and plant near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. The recipe is simple: scrape the skin off the earth, boil what you find, wash the residue, dilute it with explosive fluids and send it 3,000 miles to where someone can make an inferior product with it. For some reason, the business model isn’t working. (Wikipedia Photo)

A tar sands mine and plant near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. The recipe is simple: scrape the skin off the earth, boil what you find, wash the residue, dilute it with explosive fluids and send it 3,000 miles to where someone can make an inferior product with it. For some reason, the business model isn’t working. (Wikipedia Photo)

Just as is the case in the American tight (shale) oil plays, things in the Canadian tar sands are breaking down fast, and for the same reason: wringing the last few barrels of oil out of the earth is proving to be far more expensive than hoped. Two weeks ago the Norwegian energy giant Statoil postponed for at least three years building a new tar sands project designed to pump 40,000 barrels a day; earlier this year Total SA of France, the fifth-largest oil company in the world, suspended operations at its $10 billion oil sands mine while it tries to figure out a way to make a profit; and Shell announced in February indefinite suspension of work on a prospective 200,000-barrel-a-day mine. (The same Shell that has been quietly folding its 13-billion-dollar hand in the US shale-oil bonanza and tiptoeing from the building? Yes, the very same.) Continue reading →

Shale Oil Boom Breaking Down

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No, this is not a Dallas suburb, it’s a fracking field. If you don’t like it now, imagine it in a few years, when it has been abandoned. (Photo by Simon Fraser University)

No, this is not a Dallas suburb, it’s a fracking field. If you don’t like it now, imagine it in a few years, when it has been abandoned. (Photo by Simon Fraser University)

Recent research suggests that fracking causes earthquakes; they have no doubt of that at the fourth largest trading and investment company in Japan — Sumitomo Corporation — which has just experienced a Magnitude 10. The profit Sumitomo expected to make this year, a hefty $2.27 billion, has been all but wiped out. News of the disaster atomized 13 per cent of its stock value in one day.  Its credit rating went to “negative.” And almost all of this was caused by hideous losses incurred in fracking for tight oil in Texas.

Sumitomo samurai rolled into Texas just two years ago (seems like only yesterday) with a $2 billion dollar investment in the Permian shale-oil play, in partnership with Devon Energy of Oklahoma. So here we have Japan’s fourth-largest trading company, along with one of the largest US fracking companies, going into the (potentially, according to the oil interests) richest tight-oil basin in the United States in the midst of a tight oil boom. What could possibly go wrong? Continue reading →

Rats Start to Leave the Fracking Ship

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What top oil people are starting to do about the fracking revolution. Abandoning ship.

What top oil people are starting to do about the fracking revolution. Abandoning ship.

The first sign of a doomed ship is said to be the urgent departure of its rats; the first sign of fire in a crowded theater is not the guy who shouts it out, but the several people with good noses who start to sidle quietly but purposefully toward the exits. In the world of America’s bogus oil and gas fracking revolution, the nostrils of the rats and the smoke-sensitive alike are beginning to twitch. Let us watch those noses.

Must we review the industry’s propaganda again here? How hydraulic fracking has changed everything, America now has abundant gas and oil, we’re surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia, we’re number one in the world again, we’re headed for energy independence? (No one has yet had the chutzpah to predict we’re going to get to energy independence, since it’s mathematically impossible, but it shouldn’t be long now, they’re getting desperate.) The latest iteration of the industry line is an essay that appeared in the New York Times  titled “America’s Oil Bonanza,” a song of oil without end, amen. Continue reading →

The Scariest Picture in the World

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Just a garden-variety protest in some Middle Eastern county, you say, nothing to be afraid of here? Wait till you find out where these people are. (BBC Photo by Safa Al-Ahmad)

Just a garden-variety protest in some Middle Eastern county, you say, nothing to be afraid of here? Wait till you find out where these people are. (BBC Photo by Safa Al-Ahmad)

What, this picture? It’s almost a cliche, right, more Arab Spring stuff? Yes, except for one thing. This uprising, inspired by the so-called Arab Spring three years ago, and unquenched since then, is happening in Saudi Arabia. The protesters are minority Shia Muslims in Saudi’s Eastern Province, the center of gravity of the country’s oil industry. This picture represents the worst nightmare of the Saudi royal family, and of all industrialized nations. If Saudi Arabia comes unglued, so do we all. Continue reading →

Oil Storm Flags Up: Take More Cover

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Coming soon to an economy near you: a two-train wreck.

Coming soon to an economy near you: a two-train wreck.

The second train wreck about to sledgehammer the world’s economies is the implosion of the oil-and-gas renaissance scam. This implosion, most likely to occur in 2015, may occur before Train Wreck Number One (the financial “correction,” see the previous post, Financial Storm Flags Up: Take Cover) and bring it on, or it could kick in just afterward as the panicked Masters of the Universe run for the lifeboats. The cumulative effect of the two events will be devastating and lasting. They are not likely to bring on, quite yet, the ultimate crash of the industrial age — there is a lot of momentum left in the old battleship yet. But they will come close. Because while the financial implosion may not be quite as bad as that of 2008, the end of the oil scam, in itself, will be devastating to the world. Continue reading →