New York Times’s David Brooks on shale gas: “a crime if we squandered this blessing”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0239
“The United States seems to possess a 100-year supply of natural gas, a cleaner, cheaper energy source than other fossil fuels.” So declared the New York Times website’s blurb for David Brooks’s 4 November column, “ Shale gas revolution .” The blurb asked, “Will America blow this blessing?”
America “has received many blessings,” the column’s opening says, “and once upon a time you could assume that Americans would come together to take advantage of them.” Now, though, the “country is more divided and more clogged by special interests,” and “we groan to absorb even the most wondrous gifts,” writes Brooks.
The column cites energy historian Daniel Yergin’s belief that fracking, the controversial drilling method for extracting trapped gas, is transforming the energy marketplace. Brooks also enlists the views of John Rowe, the chief executive of the nuclear-focused utility Exelon, and of Amy Jaffe of Rice University, who sees natural gas as a bridge to a future when wind and solar have matured.
Brooks notes that from 2000 to today, shale gas moved from 1% to 30% of American supplies of natural gas; that it has already generated more than half a million new jobs, and that if trends continue, hundreds of thousands more will appear; that certain states stand to “reap billions"; that consumers will get lower prices; and that America will become “less reliant on foreign suppliers.”
But Brooks also warns about the technopolitics of shale gas:
The U.S. is polarized between “drill, baby, drill” conservatives, who seem suspicious of most regulation, and some environmentalists, who seem to regard fossil fuels as morally corrupt and imagine we can switch to wind and solar overnight.
The shale gas revolution challenges the coal industry, renders new nuclear plants uneconomic and changes the economics for the renewable energy companies, which are now much further from viability. So forces have gathered against shale gas, with predictable results.
The clashes between the industry and the environmentalists are now becoming brutal and totalistic, dehumanizing each side. Not-in-my-backyard activists are organizing to prevent exploration. Environmentalists and their publicists wax apocalyptic.
Brooks acknowledges problems but calls them “surmountable.” He laments the polarization, and closes by declaring that it “would be a crime if we squandered this blessing.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.