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Comment by banku_brougham | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised at all, nor am I surprised by the brutal effectiveness of corporate funded influence on legal, regulatory, and community remedies to these problems. Its as if the system 'wants' people to suffer.

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People in places like Wyoming pretty regularly vote for less government interference and regulation of that kind of industry, so I guess they get what they're voting for.

And meanwhile, the rest of the US is extremely car-centric, so we do our part to increase demand for oil.

>> And meanwhile, the rest of the US is extremely car-centric, so we do our part to increase demand for oil.

This is the one thing I'll never understand.

We always talk about getting off of foreign oil so we don't need to invade middle eastern countries for their oil (a crazy conspiracy theory, but a belief held by many) and other things yet we. . .

1) Don't support US oil companies when OPEC floods the market, crashes the oil markets here and puts American companies out of business - keeping OEPC's grip on oil production intact.

2) Absolutely refuse to build more refineries or seek out new areas where we can drill for oil to create our own supply

3) Are totally against new technologies that make drilling for oil easier (not necessarily fracking but other technologies as well) and thus do not support an industry trying to find a better way to create a US oil supply and compete with middle eastern oil countries.

Everybody in the US complains about gas prices being so high, but literally everything we do to try and get off of foreign oil gets killed by environmentalists, lobbyists and other special interest groups because of some reason or another. It's such a contradiction, it's maddening at times.

We want one thing, but we do everything to make sure it can never happen.

For that matter, it's also illegal in most places to build cities that are denser and thus encourage use of old technologies like bicycles that are extremely efficient in their use of energy. The most efficient form of human transportation, in fact, on anything resembling a road.

Bailing out companies is generally fraught with problems and there are good reasons to avoid it. It quickly becomes very political.

maybe war-for-oil is

> (a crazy conspiracy theory,

but it remains

> a belief held by many)

because it is more consistent than the false claim of WMD (while ignoring those in nearby Israel), or the justification after-the-fact of defending the rights of women (while ignoring nearby Saudi Arabia)

> the false claim of WMD (while ignoring those in nearby Israel)

We're friends with Israel. We want them to have weapons. What does being nearby have to do with anything?

Trying to compete in the oil industry is a race to the bottom. Why would I want to further subsidize an industry that's destroying the environment when I could instead invest that money into researching/building cleaner sources and improved efficiency of homes and electronic devices?

My partner works in civil engineering and water remediation throughout Wyoming. Most farmers and ranchers there aren't too keen on fracking, because they suffer from the practice more than anyone (runoff/polluted water tables). But, there's no chance for any sort of political opposition, because the vast majority of people simply won't vote blue, no matter what. Often times, on the city/county level, there is no alternative candidate, it's red vs. red and neither want to "take away jobs" by buying into "leftist tree-hugger" nonsense.

It will only change when the "jobs" are cleaning up the mess, which has already started, but most roughnecks aren't qualified; cleanup requires educated city-folk from out of town, which widens the us vs. them gap even more.

I'm generalizing, but the above is often exactly the case.

My guess is that a lot of these places are going to be doubly screwed, because of the shakeout in that industry due to the falling oil prices: even in cases where a company is provably causing damage via bad practices, there may not be a company left to sue for damages.

Dealing with this is a large part of the job. Picture a small community, or group of families, fighting a major corporation that just repeats "the science isn't conclusive" and "we worked within legal guidelines and can't be blamed". Outside firms have to be hired, by people whose livelihoods have been squashed, to do extensive, and expensive, testing. It's frustrating and sad.

Farmers and ranchers don't need to allow oil and gas drilling if they don't want to. It's the point of private property.

What happens on ranch X may affect the groundwater on farm Y or in town Z, a few kilometers away. I have no idea about the distances involved, and presumably they vary a lot depending on a number of factors that you'd have to ask scientists about.

Ideally, you would be able to detect pollutants moseying off the property underground, just as you would cattle wandering off the ranch above ground, and your property system would work fine ("Bob, yer frackin' byproducts done cross over into mah property yesterday, an I cain't abide by that") , but presumably it's not easy.

Wow, you just solved everything!

Seriously though, water tables don't respect property borders, and runoff doesn't stop at fence lines. If that happened, there would be no issue.

These people aren't stupid, and the last thing they want to do is ostracize themselves from their peers by raising environmental concerns. They're forced into these positions by a lack of alternatives.

Property rights often do not include 'mineral rights' and they definately don't include neighboring properties' (mineral) rights.

Edit: The owners of mineral rights may legally drill a well in your front yard, if they comply with current laws & ordinances.

Red vs. red doesn't necessarily mean no debate on environmental issues. If there's enough disagreement among the state's population, it just gets moved to the primary. For example, Texas is almost exclusively GOP-controlled on a state level, and yet has implemented an extensive plan of government support for wind power development [1]. There are hardline small-government conservatives who thought that was a bad idea, but they didn't win enough primaries and lobbying battles to set policy. In this case the winning coalition was a mixture of environmentalists (who like wind energy), West Texas landowners (who like a new source of revenue), and state budget wonks (who like a new source of tax revenue that isn't an income tax). There aren't enough pure environmentalists in a state like Texas (or, I'd guess, Wyoming) to win only with their support, but if it can be aligned with preferences of a significant share of say, farmers, ranchers, and other landowners, it's possible to pass things.

[1] http://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/14/7-billion-crez-projec...

That's a good point, but in your example, wind energy is basically an 'extra', rather than the government regulating an industry. I'd be curious to hear examples of the latter in places like Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Just finished reading Sen. Warren's book A Fighting Chance. It was remarkable how cozy the lobbyists got with "our" congressional representatives, how they continuously bombarded them with lobbyists to drown out the citizen perspective, and how many billions they spent on lobbying. All the bellyaching about not being able to afford regulation rings hollow given the huge scads of money corporations spend on elections and lobbyists.

It seems you vastly overestimate the citizenry; there is a great deal of evidence that elected representatives listen when their constituents have a strong view, but the citizens rarely bother to take a side.

Partly because citizens expect the representatives to make the effort to ask them of their opinions. It's like software: most people won't file a bug report if it's broken, they'll just look for some other program that works properly.

In addition, it is a bit naive to expect a typical two income family that struggles to pay its bill to set up camp in DC or engage in a concerted letter writing campaign to outline their grievances to their congressional representative. For those that do stick their necks out, their alleged corporate-brought "representatives" often tell them to leave: http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/03/ms-state-rep-to-constit... .

Most people aren't aware of any particular industry or business that causes difficulty for a minority or permanent damage to the environment somewhere most don't see or some critical infrastructure most people aren't aware of unless some media choose to point it out. There's no way to be aware of every scam that some faction with a bunch of lobbyists and business connections to media outlets is running - they thrive on silence and/or misdirection and the effort to keep it is a predictable business expense and an industry in itself.

edit: If our government, in order to act, has to rely on the majority of the population both understanding every critical subject and forming a similar opinion on those subjects that is in opposition to current policy, then our government has become purely parasitic.

Honestly, it's called policing, and it doesn't just have to happen to poor people.

This overlooks the fact that citizens are expressing a "strong view" when they vote for said representatives and their platforms.

An important factor on what a corporation might be able to "afford" is the return on that spending. There's a nice short story from NPR's Planet Money [1] estimating on the order of a 22,000% return for money spent on lobbying.

Granted that estimate was for tax breaks specifically, but it rather suggests big industries can't afford /not/ to lobby.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forge...

I don't think the system wants people to suffer. It just cares only about few people and the rest don't matter.

A given "system" will defend itself if it perceives a threat.

I don't think you realize how pernicious the long term consequences of USA v. RJR will turn out to be. Fracking looks like one front and CO2 another for similar with respect to oil operations.

And I don't mean there aren't oil operators that do things wrong ( Macondo much?) . But that's really not what we're talking about here, is it? Vanishingly few stories about "fracking" are not essentially terrorism stories with "terrorism" lined thru and "fracking" substituted.

The problem is that neither you nor I know as much as the "corporate funded influence" and we don't have anyone who works for us who does . The information asymmetries are profound. So the easiest thing to do is to cooperate with regulators, and have regulators cooperate with the regulated , which affords influence.

The best example of this is perhaps the IBEW.

Not necessarily. Check out the evidence first. The picture is definitely different from what the Stanford researchers claim in the press release: http://energyindepth.org/mtn-states/stanford-researchers-rep...

Its as if the system 'wants' people to suffer.

It's as if "the system" knows that without fracking, oil sands, and enhanced oil recovery technologies, with conventional crude and gas having peaked a decade ago, we would be facing a fairly significant energy shortage today, and an even worse one a decade hence.

Everyone wants to eat the bacon but nobody wants to butcher the hog. Energy supply is THE NUMBER ONE THING that enables modern civilization to repel entropy as well as it does. We, as a species, will do whatever it takes to ensure the energy supply remains. We will accept climate change and poisoned water because the alternative, short of a miracle in solar capture, is the death of several billion people.

The Spice must flow.

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