“[Sean] Lennon fancifully likened drilling and gas production to awakening a sleeping dragon. His mother said later of the comparison, ‘That’s beautiful,’ but, thinking on it some more, suggested ‘it’s a sign of a devil, actually. In my mind it’s more like a snake. A dragon is too big; you’re giving too much respect for this thing.’”
– Eric Roston, “On New York Shale Gas, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon Say Let It Be,” Bloomberg.com (January 23, 2013).
That’s Sean Lennon and his famous mother, Yoko Ono, speaking to reporters taking a tour of Susquehanna County, Pa., in an effort to highlight the supposed dangers of natural gas development. They were accompanied by Susan Sarandon, Josh Fox (producer of Gasland) and Ghandi’s grandson, not to mention a bevy of local anti-development celebrities.…
Continue ReadingThe main thing you need to know about FrackNation is that you should watch it. More importantly, given that this blog’s audience is unusually educated about hydraulic fracturing–frac’ing–you should encourage friends and family to watch it.
The use of hydraulic fracturing and (less-publicized) horizontal drilling to extract oil and gas from shale rock is, to the best of my knowledge, the most important technological revolution of the last decade. The existence of enormous deposits of shale has long been known–some of the earliest experiments with kerosene involved shale–but the ability to affordably get oil and gas from these deposits has been elusive for over a century. In Ayn Rand’s 1957 Atlas Shrugged, one of the heroes manages to solve the problem, and it is rightly regarded as an epic achievement.…
Continue Reading“Hurrah” to the American Public Gas Association (APGA), a small trade group that was willing to step-up to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and other special-interest organizations that want energy efficiency at any cost to the American consumer. The APGA/DOE Furnace Rule Settlement prevented the unintended consequences of regulatory overreach by allowing consumers choices between regulated and unregulated (and less regulated) products.
This post, following APGA’s piece at MasterResource last week, provides historical background on the subject of energy efficiency regulations in order to better understand the significance of this settlement.
From EPCA (1975) to EISA (2007)
In 1975, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) was enacted largely as a Federal response to the Arab oil embargoes. EPCA was amended by the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987 and the Energy Policy Act of 1992 etc.,…
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