Erica Levine Powers and Beth E. Kinne (editors)
4 stars. Useful contribution badly marketed and badly priced
The authors, being from New York, know what the NYT and Mother Jones both missed in their stories on Governor Cuomo banning fracking in New York: that it was a legal couple Helen and David Slottje that went village by village educating townships that then passed anti-fracking ordnances. Search for this headline to get to the photo essay: Dryden: The Town That Changed The Fracking Game. To everyone's delight, the Appeals Court upheld those local decisions instead of doing what they usually do, yield to federal and corporate corruption. Today fracking has been banned in Quebec, many US states at various levels of governance, and world-wide (search for List of Franking Bans Worldwide) for the simple reason that it uses clean water we cannot spare, contaminates what is left of the clean water in rapidly falling aquifers, and creates earthquakes — a new CRS Report is just out, free, Human-Induced Earthquakes from Deep-Well Injection: A Brief Overview, easily found online.
This book desperately needs Look Inside the Book to show the contents, and its price needs to come down to under $40 before it will be reasonably available to the folks that should be reading it. It is however cheaper at Amazon than at the publisher's site!
I am helping Virginians fight three pipelines for fracking from West Virginia, it is tough going because the two-party tyranny has been bought and paid for by Dominion and other two pipeline sponsors — even Tom Steyer's money could not keep Virginia's current Governor informed on this specific issue. However, to end on a positive note, I believe that Dominion will eventually see that renewables — where it has started to invest — are the sustainable win-win (as should the other two sponsors but we are focusing on Dominion first) ; that public education is going to illuminate all the lies about projected economic benefits along with the truth about “true cost economics” and the real burden that will be imposed by their land grabs, and that there are enough angry wealthy people — and endangered species — to turn all three of the pipelines into legal and publicity and financial nightmares.
By the by, fracking is a derivatives futures bubble that is about to burst. Fracking wells being sold on the market today as investments are the equivalent of homes known to contain toxic mold — within the year, I speculate, the City of London and Wall Street are going to be treating fracking as a toxic investment to be avoided at all costs (after they dump what they have on the ever naive labor pension funds).
This is a timely book, particularly as the price of oil collapses and the price of water is starting to rise.
