America is poaching European business investment:
American government got out of the way of innovative drilling companies and allowed the shale boom to take off. Europe took the opposite tack, choosing to stick to its green policies and snub shale. As a result, natural gas prices in the US are a quarter of what they are in Europe. And as industry departs, unemployment in the Euro zone is hitting a record high. That’s yet another failure that can be laid at the feet of Europe’s greens.
Just imagine how much better we’d be doing if we had a reasonable (i.e., zero) corporate income tax.
An interesting consequence of shale gas extraction is the reduced costs of feedstock chemicals for plastics, fertilizers, and other chemical products that can be derived from methane or ethane. These European companies are getting in on some interesting action.
That’s a remarkably bad choice on the part of Europe. Shale gas isn’t going to be forever, but you can build a lot of future even from short term gold rushes. All the new chemical infrastructure being built in the US won’t disappear when the frenzy moves on. It’ll probably get used for other things.
Heh. It took more than a century and a half for California to run out of future, though the actual California gold rush that started it all had all ran maybe two years before the easy gold was gone.
Someday our shale will be gone and they will still have shale.
Will it be worth more or less then?
BEWARE PEAK SHALE!!!!!1!!!!
They’ll have used are their shales as traditional European roofing tiles or sold the drilling rights to China.
In somewhat related news, Drudge linked this AP story about the Italians seizing 1.7 Billion Euros from an alleged Mafia figure whose huge investments were in solar and wind power. When the mafia thinks solar and wind fits right in with their traditional business portfolio of gambling, prostitution, money-laundering, and fraud, what more need be said?
Is it news that the Italians went ahead and seized the largest amount of cash from an individual in the history of European law enforcement, or is it news that the largest single seizure was mafia involvement in wind and solar, or that the largest source of mafia corruption seems to be the European mandates and kickbacks in green energy?