http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/09/hillary-clinton-fracking-...

ONE ICY MORNING in February 2012, Hillary Clinton's plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria's bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read "Stop fracking with our water" and "Chevron go home." Bulgaria's parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.

Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the "best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people." But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania's parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Depart­ment's lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania's parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria's eased its moratorium.

For sure. There's pretty much nothing on this planet that can survive once we pollute our limited stores of freshwater. Except a few creepy spiders and desert creatures. *shiver*

So freaking short sighted it makes me want to scream. Like destroying the oceans and polluting the land isn't enough? Grrrr.

I remember years ago seeing a show on the old Discovery channel about evolution and what would possibly be here millions of years from now when humans were gone. And one of the ideas was the "silver spider" - a giant metallic-colored spider that reflected the sunlight and lived in the tops of trees. I don't remember the reasoning, I just remember being profoundly disturbed by it.

Does the name "Andrew Jackson" ring any bells?

... but that's where all my friends are"
and I sure don't care to hang out with the Hillary crew, wherever they are going.

I thought this was all behind us once the biggest CCS project flopped a few years ago, but then she says this and I can't think of a comment that could have undermined any confidence I had in her more...

would actually "work" -- in particular chemical mineralization.

And what I mean by "work" is, it is economically feasible as a means, over the next century, to first slow, and then unwind, the carbon damage we've done to the environment; meanwhile, of course, we'd be implementing the switchover to sustainable renewables.

The biggest problem with this approach is that the corresponding carbon tax that would pay for building the CCS infrastructure would render fossil fuels uncompetitive with other sources of energy -- and thus, it's opposed tooth and nail by Exxon et al.

The objection raised at your link -- that "everyone" thinks we are 30 to 50 years away from being on-line with a significant CCS capability -- is, to me, disturbingly similar to the "We'll never go solar, because it will take a hundred years to build it all," story that we've heard for the last decade. Think big, kids, think big. I ran the numbers a year or two ago, and I think I figured the cost of mineralization CCS would be somewhere in the single digit percentages of the world's GDP. All we need to do is agree to take that fraction of the GDP away from the plutocrats and redirect it to addressing this un-ignorable crisis.

I-37 so that both sides of freeway have traffic headed north towards San Antone. By the photo above it looks like that wasn't done up there in Ft M.

Lucky for me, I had good friends who lived near Beeville when we were warned to evacuate Corpus.

It's awful to leave your home not knowing if it will be there the next day.

world, 200 years or so for us humans to destroy it. I have great fear for the younger people in this world.

I'll take heaven for the climate and hell for the society.