To Tiny:
Visit the fracking disaster called the Bakken in North Dakota.
Originally Posted by Muy Largo
I've visited areas where fracking occurs in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming and never saw anything remotely resembling a disaster.
Read, sir, about how fracking was performed there. Find out about Missouri River water used to facilitate fracking.
Originally Posted by Muy Largo
According to the North Dakota Water Commission, in 2018 fracking accounted for 10% of the State's consumptive water use. Oil and gas also accounted for 53% of North Dakota state government revenues. And it provided 25% of the state's total salaries and wages. It directly employed 48,300 people, and accounted for an additional 23,980 jobs in terms of secondary employment. Altogether oil and gas account for 20% of private employment in the state.
Sounds like a fair trade to me. Do you want to ban the fracking and put tens of thousands in North Dakota out of work? Let them make the decision. It shouldn't be the decision of out of state politicians who don't know the difference between their heads and a hole in the ground.
Visit, sir, the area in southeastern Minnesota (yep, not far from where I reside) where fracking sands for the Bakken and other areas were collected in immense quantities.
Originally Posted by Muy Largo
The people employed in those sand extraction projects undoubtedly have a far different perception of the situation than you do. Are you referring to the effect on the landscape? The footprint is small. If you want to do away with mining and oil and gas you better be ready for humanity to go back to living off the land. I'm not ready to do that.
Learn about North Dakota legislative actions that allowed fracking to proceed, irrespective of environmental problems that were finally acknowledged as the fracking disaster there closed up.
Originally Posted by Muy Largo
Where are you reading that? A Sierra Club or Greenpeace publication? That's ridiculous, there's no environmental disaster. Yeah, if Biden bankrupts the oil and gas industry so that the companies don't have the money to properly plug the wells when they're abandoned, yes the state will have to pick up the tab.
Ask the people who live/lived in the Bakken area how they enjoyed fracking development there.
Originally Posted by Muy Largo
Let's see, 20% of the population is employed in oil and gas. The landowners made money hand over foot from their royalties. The state's getting half its revenues from oil and gas. I'm sure they just hate this.
In areas I'm familiar with people approve fracking. I know people who happily leased the land UNDER their houses for oil and gas development. If they don't want fracking they won't lease to the oil companies. Or their representative governments will ban or tightly regulate it, like in eastern Colorado.
Hey, check out the bonding process that fracking companies lobbied for -- so they didn't have to pay to properly and safely close up their holes. Some of them just ducked out, maybe filed bankruptcy after paying themselves a nice tidy fortune for a few years.
Originally Posted by Muy Largo
I don't know anything about that, except that as I said, if Democratic politicians from other states make it where the oil and gas can't be exploited, the companies will go under and they' won't plug their wells.
This isn't a huge deal in Texas. The regulatory commission has funds to plug wells when operators disappear and the amount the state has to spend on it is not huge.
One more thing. All this talk of socialism, and I'm no socialist, but think about how the research and development of fracking's breakthrough innovations were achieved. If you're not a socialist, and if you bemoan creeping socialism, find out the details of how fracking was made possible. Taxpayers, my friend, funded a measurable share of that development, not the private sector.
Originally Posted by Muy Largo
I don't favor taxpayer funded research for the oil and gas industry. That said, I bet the amount that was spent by the government on fracking research was a drop in the bucket compared to what the industry has spent. When Biden says he's going to end subsidies for oil and gas I laugh my ass off, because they're very small compared to the size of the industry. The oil industry actually has to pay severance taxes and gasoline taxes, which aren't levied on other industries. So overall it's subsidizing the U.S.A., not vice versa.