17 thoughts on “Obama Delays Shale Drilling”

    1. Pandering to his environmentalist base who worries about groundwater contamination from fracking. What’s really amazing that it’s Ohio, almost a must-win state for him.

      1. “groundwater contamination from fracking.”

        IIRC Interior was forced to admit a month or two back that they really have no evidence of same.

  2. I’m guessing the lost jobs are in states he lost last time and figures to lose again, or aren’t obviously connected to the decision. So he gets an uptick from the anti-everythings, and the people who get screwed either don’t count, or don’t know they got screwed. (Everybody notices the guy who gets laid off, but the guy who just didn’t get hired is nearly invisible.)

  3. Obama and the Dems claim to want to invest tax dollars in infrasture. Something that is totally lost on the Obama and the Dems is that Shale drilling, offshore drilling, pipelines and refineries are infrastructure spending. The beauty of this type of infrastructure spending is that it requires no tax dollars, just a willingness by the government to get the f#ck out of the way.

    1. It’s not an “investment” if it won’t pay dividends or increase in value. And, excepting very large projects like the interstate highway system or running a war, if it satisfies those two criteria, government doesn’t need to be involved.

      1. I agree with you. That’s why I don’t believe in any kind of government spending on anything but national defense. Roads would yield steady dividends for private investors if the government would get out of the business of building them.

  4. Glenn,

    Ohio is a traditionally red state he carried last time marginally. I wonder if he really wants to win? If he does, this is like handing the opposition a loaded weapon to use against you.

    This will play wonderfully in Ohio and Pennsylvania next year!

    2. Ordinarily I’d agree M, but the media has got a lot of people here convinced that fracking = Death spewing into the air and water; so I’ve a feeling quite a few will see this as Dear Leader saving us from Evil Greedy Big Oil Gas™.

  6. I noticed that “Reasonable Views” was tooting their horn in the Enterprise Blog (which had the “sickening graph” article). The link above notes that we’ve had a full decade without any true economic growth.

    I don’t think it’s that helpful to know where the jobs were lost, since the construction sector was ripe for downsizing. IMHO, housing won’t come back unless there’s a big disaster (such as a huge California earthquake) or we do something colossally stupid that throws a vast amount of money into the sector (such as “cash for clunkers” using houses instead of used cars).

  7. I live about thirty miles away from a fracking pilot scheme that recently got shut down by court order. (I live in Northwest England.) The reason was that the fracking experiments (which in our case were aimed at extracting gas, not oil) led to minor earthquakes. Minor, sure – but much bigger than any recorded in Britain for the last century or so. I actually felt one of them; a very odd sensation indeed.

    North America is much less geologically stable than the UK, so the quakes might well be bigger. Wasn’t there a major earthquake in the Midwest in historical times?

  8. @Fletcher: No. The earthquakes supposedly triggered by fracking in Cumbria were *MUCH* smaller than naturally-occuring quakes in the recent past.

    A quake of 2.3 was felt on the Fylde coast:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-15550458

    and the BGS thought that possibly-maybe in a worst case scenario, fracking could give rise to a magnitude 3.

    …whereas Market Rasen, Lincolnshire was hit by a 5.2 on 27 Feb 2008

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Lincolnshire_earthquake

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