Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology...
Category: fracking
Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology journalism platform that publishes one long story a month.
I wrote a couple of critical posts on Matter last November (here and here), mostly about problems I had downloading stories to my Kindle. One of Matter's founders, Bobbie Johnson, asked that I try the site again, because there were still "a lot of wrinkles to iron out."
Start-up issues aside, I confess that I don't get Matter. I'm always happy to see a new...
29Mar 2013
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell wrote an op-ed piece Wednesday in The New York Daily News in which he urged New York Gov...
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell wrote an op-ed piece Wednesday in The New York Daily News in which he urged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to embrace fracking and encourage greater production of natural gas.
That was followed yesterday by this noisy headline at ProPublica: "More Than a Matter of Opinion: Ed Rendell’s Plea for Fracking Fails to Disclose Industry Ties." Under that headline, Justin Elliott wrote that Rendell has worked "as a paid consultant to a private equity firm with investments in the natural gas industry."
I have no argument about the disclosure of this relationship. Rendell should have told...
Sometimes a news story's structure has just the right cadence and sequence of thought to hit the reader with its most cogent point like a hammer blow- not on the first swing (ie in the lede) but just a bit below. And it's not the smack that readers may expect.
- The...
Sometimes a news story's structure has just the right cadence and sequence of thought to hit the reader with its most cogent point like a hammer blow- not on the first swing (ie in the lede) but just a bit below. And it's not the smack that readers may expect.
- The Guardian - Fiona Harvey: Peak oil theories 'increasingly groundless', says BP chief/ The US will be self-sufficient in energy by 2030, with only 1% coming from imports, the company's analysts predict.
One learns here that advanced methods of extraction, including of "unconventional and high-carbon oil" - such as from the Alberta oil sands that are glimpsed in that AP photo that the Guardian used - means that fears are probably groundless that worldwide economic turmoil is looming when oil and...
The January issue of Esquire is out with an almost 8,000-word story called "Thank You for Fracking" by Tom Chiarella, which wants to be a manly, Esquire-ish, ultrahip analysis of...
The January issue of Esquire is out with an almost 8,000-word story called "Thank You for Fracking" by Tom Chiarella, which wants to be a manly, Esquire-ish, ultrahip analysis of a current environmental policy debate. It falls far short of that. Chiarella has a point; but the overheated prose so distracts from the substance of the article that it's hard to say what that point is.
Fracking is a way to expand energy reserves by pumping fluids into the ground to fracture rock, allowing the extraction of otherwise unreachable reservoirs of oil or natural gas. The oil and natural gas industries say it's an important tool to help us meet our energy needs; environmental activists say it poses unacceptable risks.
Chiarella sets the stage by describing fracking as an inevitability, as our destiny. It "doesn't...
30May 2012
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About ten days ago, the University of Buffalo released a peer-reviewed study - or so it described it at that moment - which seemed to cast a positive light on the way regulators were able to managing the risks of the controversial method of gas extraction known as fracking.
The researchers at Buffalo's Shale Resources and Society Institute had...
Everybody (especially in the news biz) likes a fight. One may not approve of...
Everybody (especially in the news biz) likes a fight. One may not approve of the behavior, but it is difficult to look away. Maybe there should be an emotion named for such rapt attention (see today's post on NYT Science Times, annoyance, and disgust).
Case in point: the continuing loud debate among environmentalists, energy industrialists, and atmospheric scientists over the green merit of natural gas, especially that recovered by hydraulic fracturing or fracking. It got intense after Cornell biologist Robert Howarth and two co-authors reported last spring in the journal Climatic Change Letters that so much natural gas (methane) leaks into the air unburnt from such drilling that the industry's overall addition to greenhouse forcing is worse...
As this site has recognized, several vociferous writers have argued that a front-page installment in the New York Times's series on hydrofracturing, or fracking, in shale country did not back up its theme. Yesterday, the Times's public editor, or ombudsman, Arthur S. Brisbane essentially agreed with the critics. His account yesterday says not only that the story's sourcing is thin and some of it not adequately portrayed, but also that it conflates two issues - whether the overall shale oil and gas boom could be a speculative...
When one burns natural gas, which has four nicely combustible...
When one burns natural gas, which has four nicely combustible hydrogens for every nasty CO2-making carbon, that’s better for the atmosphere and the climate than getting the same heat from burning carbon alone, which pretty much is what coal is (Correx note: initial, brain-cramp edition of this post had three hydrogens per carbon).
Now along comes a Cornell study that got heavy media attention this week. The conclusion is a slap in the face for some. What was green for go just turned red for stop. It says that natural gas, especially the sort extracted by hydrofracturing from shale, is just about as potent as a climate changer when one factors in the methane – its primary component – that leaks unburned into the air during...
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The Times's big series on natural gas recovery with the help of hydraulic fracturing of deep shale formations turned from evidence of lax regulation and potentially serious pollution hazards to a deeper and, for these eyes, more engrossing topic today: reporter...
Grrrrrr. The NYTimes's...
Grrrrrr. The NYTimes's Ian Urbina is a terrific writer, turning into fully readable and absorbing prose his stolid march through piles of statistics - many of which he obtained by hard investigative work - on the scale of potential hazards from lightly regulated and manifestly highly polluted waste water the booming natural gas industry produces. Part II of his series Drilling Down: Gas Wells Recycle Water, but Toxic Risks Persist today further explores the sheer magnitude of the challenge facing regulators who stand between this waste and the...
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