My thoughts on how the world works

Scientific American: Fracking to Free Natural Gas?

The news about the  BP oil spill is public property. But information about what really happened there is not public property; it is private property: proprietary information. This situation has become too familiar – the companies get the profits, if they don’t screw up too badly – and the public gets the bill for the damages, if they do.

This doesn’t seem fair.

But life isn’t fair, you may say – and you would be right. But that is only part of the picture. What has been going on, for the last several centuries, has been the gradual takeover of public property by private organizations. This is especially true of intellectual property, where companies are on a big land grab to fence off information that is essentially public -such as genome information.

Let me give you another example: information about what lies under the earth. I traveled past Butte, Montana not too long ago, and read the highway sign The Richest Hill on Earth. It’s not a hill anymore, its actually a small depression, so much wealth has been taken out of it. Now only weeds remain.

The same could be said of almost any factory town – or entire manufacturing areas, such as Detroit. Where did all the wealth go? But I have digressed, I started to write about our knowledge of what is below us, in the earth in general. This information has become critical because new mining technologies can be so destructive.

I am thinking of fracking (hydraulic fracturing) in particular. The basic facts are impressive: the Marcellus shale in the US could supply the nation’s natural gas needs for 40 years. And burning natural gas causes 40 percent less carbon dioxide than burning coal. The process is simple in theory: hydraulic fluids are pumped into these shale formations to fracture the rock and release the gas. There is only one problem: no one knows, in any detail, what the rock formations are like down there. They are often quite complicated with nature fractures everywhere. And some of these proprietary hydraulic fluids are nasty stuff – not something you would want popping up in your back yard. The drilling companies refuse to say what is in them.

Ironically, much of this underground information is already known – many natural gas wells have already been dug in these areas, and the drilling companies carefully log the kind of rock encountered as the wells are drilled. And then carefully guard this proprietary information. In reality, it just gets lost as exploration moves elsewhere. This information should have been considered public property, and it could have been used to predict the success and dangers of fracking.

I used to go running on Summerland Beach, just north of Santa Barbara, California. It was one of my favorite areas. But one day part of the beach was fenced off – because an old oil well was leaking. I was astonished, oil wells there? But sure enough, the park service showed us pictures of oil derricks on the beach some time ago. The oil companies pumped the oil and then left – without cleaning up properly. It was this way all over Southern California – there was oil everywhere. Now it is gone and California is becoming a waste land.

I have been running off the mouth about the power complex, but that term hasn’t grabbed many people – it is too abstract for them to relate to. So I have decided to simplify and call it corporate power, which everyone can relate to – because everyone has worked for some kind of large organization, which is basically some kind of corporation – at least in people’s minds. Organization power, for some reason doesn’t hit them as hard – although technically it is more correct.

The corporation sounds evil – and they can relate to that for sure.

Corporations work constantly to convince the public of their benevolence. People, especially employees, agree – on a superficial level – but in their heart of hearts they know that something that only thinks of itself cannot be very nice.

Examples of corporate malfeasance are so blatant and so common they cannot be ignored. It has been always been known that power corrupts – and business is all about power – getting it and keeping it.

I do not intend to continue corporation-bashing – because that would simply be tilting against windmills. The wind will continue to blow (create power) and people who crave power, for various reasons, will figure out ways of getting power – often at the expense of other people. It has alway been thus.

However, it must be said that corporate power, in its present form (sometimes called globalization) is something new and especially frightening – because people have no natural immunity to it – and even are not aware of its existence.

Indeed, many of my readers are probably convinced that my paranoia is talking now, not my brain. They may be saying “Yes, there is plenty of corporate malfeasance out there, and always will be, but that does not mean corporations as a whole are a threat to humanity.”

Thank you for clarifying my point: I do believe they are a threat to humanity. Why? Because they have made humans, in the humanistic sense, obsolete. They only want people who will serve them, and ignore their human needs – such as their needs for justice and compassion – to name only two.

You may say “Be realistic, you want too much!” I am willing to compromise, but not on certain principles, especially the one that people are important. The corporations do not agree: only they are important, and human needs have to take second place to their needs – including their need to control everything – which, let’s face it, they have already.