“Hands down easiest prediction for 2012: Boulder’s hyper-active activists will take time out from their busy schedule of sabotaging American food production to sabotage American oil and gas production.”
Paul Danish writes in the Boulder Weekly:
The attack on food production took the form of an attack on genetically modified organisms (or “crops,” as we used to call them). Local activists launched a three-year campaign against growing sugar beets on Boulder County open space that had been genetically modified to resist the pesticide Roundup. Both the beets and Roundup are produced by Monsanto Corp.
The campaign had no discernable purpose other than to give activists a platform from which they could talk Marxist trash against Monsanto and American business generally. Since 99 percent of the sugar beets grown in the U.S. are Roundup Ready, banning them from open space would be like slamming the barn door after the chimera got out. So after listening to hours of testimony from dozens of earnest, knuckle-dragging little green luddites, the county commissioners approved the beets and a process for vetting other GM crops.
Time to Move On, as they say in the activist game. And the obvious place to move on to is oil and gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”…
These arguments for and against fracking are largely beside the point, however — because the activists’ real objection to fracking has nothing to do with fracking. The real objection to fracking is that it will extend the age of oil, and delay the age of green energy.
But the fracking genie is already out of the bottle and can’t be stuffed back in.
The real counter-argument to anti-frackers is that even if fracking is as bad as they say, even 10 times as bad, the damage is acceptable, given the benefits.
Those include U.S. self-sufficiency in natural gas for the foreseeable future, and a dramatic reduction in U.S. oil imports. If those imports could be cut in half, it would save at least $300 billion dollars a year. A 50 percent cut in U.S. oil imports could also break the global price of oil and defund the oil states that sponsor and enable Islamic terrorism.
Fracking is vital to national security, in other words — never mind the environmental benefits that would come from replacing a billion tons of coal with natural gas, which would produce about 1.5 billion fewer tons of CO2 a year.
Those who attack it are indifferent to both greenhouse gas production and the “blood for oil” implications of continued reliance on imported crude.
Read Danish’s entire commentary.