"Christmas Eve in Space and Communion on the Moon"

Christmas Night 2016

On Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 orbited the Moon, the first manned space vehicle to do so.   The astronauts on board,  Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and Bill Anders commemorated the occasion by reading the first 10 verses of Genesis as millions of people around the world watched a special telecast from the spacecraft.

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal[1], Eric Metaxas writes of this and then describes for us an occurrence on Apollo 11, the following July, in which Buzz Aldrin partakes of Holy Communion inside the lunar landing module on the Moon itself.  Herewith some segments of the story:

[W]hat could one do to mark the first time human beings landed on another heavenly body? He asked Dean Woodruff, the pastor of his church in Webster, Texas, who had an idea. 

What if he were to take communion? What is more basic to humanity than bread and wine? He could do it as his own way of thanking God—for the Earth and for everyone on it, and for our amazing ability to do things like build spacecraft that could fly to the moon. So the pastor gave him a small amount of consecrated bread and wine and a tiny chalice, and Mr. Aldrin took them with him to the moon. After the Eagle had landed and he and Neil Armstrong sat in the Lunar Module, Mr. Aldrin said this over the radio: 

“This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”

 He then ended radio communication and there, on the silent surface of the moon, read a Bible verse, and took communion. For reasons he explains in his own account, none of this was made public until Mr. Aldrin wrote about it in Guideposts magazine the following year: 

 “In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup.” 

 Then Mr. Aldrin read Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.” He explained that he had wanted to read this over the radio back to Earth, but at the last minute NASA asked him not to because the agency was in a legal battle with the outspoken atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. As it happened, she was suing over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis on Christmas Eve. And that of course is why so few people have heard of this amazing story. 

 [In a personal interview with Metaxas about 10 years ago, Mr. Aldrin explained more]: “I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.” 

 And of course right now, as Christians around the world are celebrating the birth of Jesus, it’s fascinating to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were his words, the powerless newborn in the dirty manger who came to Earth from heaven, and who made the Earth and the moon and all of us, in His own image. And who, in the immortal words of Dante, is himself the “Love that moves the Sun and other stars.” 

Merry Christmas.

[1]Eric Metaxas.  “Christmas Eve in Space and Communion on the Moon,” The Wall Street Journal, December 24-25, 2016.  Page A13.

A Threesome: Some Prayers, a Prime Minister, and a Parable

Prayers for Police and for Peace

In these tense days of troubles among African-Americans and law enforcement officers, we suggest these prayers from A New Zealand Prayer Book*. 

FOR THE JUDICIARY AND POLICE

God of truth and justice;
we ask you to help the men and women
who administer and police our laws;
grant them insight, courage and compassion,
protect them from corruption and arrogance
and grant that we, whom they seek to serve,
may give them the support and affection they need;
so may our people be strengthened more and more in respect and concern for one another.
We make this prayer through Jesus Christ. Amen.

ON THE 25^TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST: For Our World

Universal and unchanging God,
we are one, unalterably one,
with all the human race.
Grant that we who share Christ’s blood
may, through your unifying Spirit,
break down the walls that divide us.
This we ask through Christ our Mediator. Amen.

 __________

*http://anglicanprayerbook.nz/index.html  1988.  Pages 139 and 637.

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Theresa May To Become U.K. Prime Minister

On July 13, the U.K. will get its second woman Prime Minister when Theresa May, currently Home Secretary, assumes that higher office.  As we wrote last week, David Cameron resigned immediately after the Brexit vote on June 23; he will do that formally July 13 by presenting himself and his letter of resignation to the Queen; he will inform her that Ms. May is available and in his view would be worthy of the appointment.  Later in the day, Ms. May will be presented to the Queen.

We give you this follow-up information for a couple of reasons.  Obviously, it is an important step forward in the U.K.’s new sense of itself.  Ms. May favored remaining in the EU, but she seems always to have understood what people wanted in breaking away and will work carefully on that process.  Comments we saw about her indicate that she is a most conscientious worker in government and concentrates on the substance of matters, rather than the perks and personality points of holding office.  “I don’t tour the TV studios,” she has stated.

This brings us to the second reason we want to give specific mention to this development.  We are struck by the “adult” attitudes of the U.K. leaders at this time.  Boris Johnson, who seemed to be a leading candidate early on, and Andrea Leadsom, the other finalist for election as Conservative Party leader, both pulled out to allow the selection to take place with the least controversy possible.  At this point in time, with much uncertainty, having the election process as brief as practicable helps significantly in both domestic and international affairs, and we are impressed that egos have not gotten in the way and that everyone has seemed to be in line to move forward, despite the shock of the Brexit vote outcome.  Concluding the Prime Minister decision promptly will permit more time on the substance of the conditions for the U.K.’s departure from the EU, and Ms. May seems to be someone who will give ample consideration to all concerns in this important step.

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Maybe the 3^rd Servant Was Right To Bury his Talent

The Gospel selection assigned for today’s (July 12) Daily Office readings in the U.S. Book of Common Prayer is the parable of the talents, Matthew 25:14-30.  A man of wealth is going off on a long journey and decides to let three slaves manage some of his funds while he is away.  To one slave, he gives 5 “talents”, to a second slave, 2 talents and to a third slave, 1 talent.  The first two make investments or form businesses, and each doubles his money.  When the master returns, he is very pleased with their performances and promises them promotions.  The third slave buries his talent in the ground; he doesn’t lose any money, but he doesn’t gain anything either.  As we know, the master is upset at this action – or non-action – by the third slave; he takes back the talent and throws the slave out on the street, leaving him penniless and homeless.

In some dialogue this morning with Barbara Crafton, she and I both realized that there might be times when the third slave actually did the right thing in burying the talent.  Last week in Japan, for instance, that government issued 10-year bonds with a yield of  -0.243%; that is, there is negative interest on the bonds, so that investors are paying the government a fee to keep their money safe for 10 years and return it to them.  Similarly, in Germany, a recent auction of 30-year government bonds carried a negative yield of -0.76%.  So investors there also are paying the government to keep their money for them and return it at the designated time.

Thus, simply by burying the talent in the ground and returning it to the master at the proper time, the slave might have fulfilled an important function, keeping the master’s money safe and keeping it from eroding in value.

However – you knew there had to be a “however” – the broader economic environment that surrounds these negative bond yields is hardly one that produces many business opportunities that result in doubling someone’s active investment.  So it’s unlikely that the other two slaves would have been nearly as successful in this scenario. The German stock market is down 13% from a year ago, the Japanese stock market 21%.  The U.S. market is up, but by only 1.3%.  Investors would have done all right with gold, at a gain of almost 15% from a year ago, but a broad index of industrial and agricultural commodities is down 13%.

The lesson for investors in these differential results is that we need to assess the whole environment and be aware of the risks.  As Barbara wrote in her own comments on this parable, the underlying issue is not money but risk.  For the three slaves and for us, probably the best answer is a mix of assets with varying risks.  We see that sometimes, burying the talent in the ground can be the best thing.  And perhaps all of the time, at least some of the funds should be in something with a guaranteed outcome.  Otherwise, nothing is totally sure.

What the _______ Just Happened Between the U.K. and the EU?

The people of the U.K. voted in a referendum on June 23 that tells their own government they want to disaffiliate from the EU.  This outcome was clearly a major surprise.  Even though, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, results of opinion polls had gone back and forth in the months running up to the vote, no one really expected the Leaves to come out ahead.  But they did, 51.9% to 48.1%.

First, why did this happen?  Second, what happens next?  Third, do we know what it all means? What follows is hardly complete, but we’ll try to make some response to these questions.

First, why did people want to leave the EU?

There seem to be two main proximate causes: discomfort with immigration and impatience with EU bureaucracy.  In our commentary on June 20, we noted that many people in the U.K. are concerned about immigration, and we drew a parallel to the interest in Donald Trump in the U.S. elections.  We’re hardly the only observers making this comparison.  Citizens of an EU member country can live anywhere in the EU they want at any given time, and these days, among other implications, this causes nervousness about terror threats.  Notably, however, the U.K. does not have the most liberal border policy it might have; it is not an adherent to the EU’s so-called “Schengen Agreement,” which allows totally free travel, basically passport-less, among almost all the other EU countries.  But EU citizens can move into the U.K. without undergoing any approval process.

In addition, a country’s membership in the EU means that it participates in the EU’s joint regulatory system, which amounts to a huge bureaucracy.  The EU administration consists of seven different bodies, most of which are headquartered in Brussels.  These include the European Council, which is the summit of the heads of each member nation; the EU Parliament & Council of Ministers, which together constitute the legislative body; the European Commission, which is the executive branch; the Court of Justice; the European Court of Auditors; and the European Central Bank.  Since the U.K. has its own currency, it does not participate in the Central Bank.  

The functions of each of these institutions are classified by “competences”, some of which are “exclusive” to the EU, some “shared” with member nations’ governments and some “supportive” of member governments.  A few examples might give some sense of the reach of the EU into each member’s internal affairs.  Clearly, since the EU is a free-trade zone, customs regulations are “exclusive” to the joint organization, and many international agreements are also reserved for the joint system.  Much commercial policy, including antitrust laws, is managed by the European Commission, which has just brought new charges against Google, for instance.

Much of the “shared competence” work also involves businesses, such as consumer protection, energy and the environment and agriculture.  Social policies and public health matters are also managed by the Commission.  Among the “supportive” competences, the Commission helps members with disaster response, tourism and education, among other functions.

Thus, there is a lot of bureaucracy – the Commission itself has 32,900 employees – and many kinds of business decisions are governed or influenced by policies, not made in London, Paris or Madrid, but in Brussels by people who may not be directly associated with the specific country having a particular need.

Again, then, we see the parallel to the Trump model in the U.S.   Many people in the U.K. – more than had been understood – want to “take their country back,” to bring decision-making powers back home.

All this is no small matter.  As you might imagine, trade is very important to the U.K. economy.  Total exports of goods and services were 27% of GDP last year, compared to 13% in the U.S.  Imports of goods and services were 29% of GDP, compared to 16% in the U.S.  Of goods exports, 55% go to the EU, and 47% of imports come from the EU.  If they lose export market share and also have to pay duties on imports that now enter without such fees, that will be costly in several ways.  Of course, one of the goals is to help domestic production by making imports more expensive.  So there are potential offsets.

Further, some private economists estimate that 3 million jobs are presently associated with EU trade, constituting about 10% of total employment.  The stakes are high.

Second, what happens now?

The referendum vote on June 23 was not the enactment of a law, but the expression of a viewpoint.  Now the U.K. Parliament must pass legislation instructing its government to invoke an article of the EU organizing document, Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007.  This will set in motion specific negotiations for the withdrawal of the U.K.; these negotiations could well last for two years and that may be extended.  Even before Parliament acts, however, the U.K. government will need to outline its needs, surely in consultation with a variety of business and other private institutions.  Prime Minister David Cameron has said he will resign to permit new government leadership to execute these very fundamental changes.  Two candidates have emerged in preliminary Conservative Party voting; a final choice will be made in September.

Thus, nothing structural will happen right away.  Surely there has been an immediate and dramatic reaction in financial markets as a result of the shock of the unexpected vote result.  However, where market valuations move from here depends on many factors currently unknown.  Some of the dust has settled, and the best-known stock index, the FTSE 100, is now running slightly higher than prior to the announcement of the vote result.  In contrast, the foreign exchange value of the pound fell immediately, and it has not recovered; it presently down 13%, to about $1.29 from $1.50 on June 23.  These differing market reactions highlight the overall uncertainty.  This exchange rate movement already means the U.K. exports have become cheaper.  The Motley Fool website points out that a trip there for U.S. tourists and business travelers is now already cheaper.  However, it just got much more expensive for U.K. residents to go anywhere else.

Third, do we know what this all means?

Not really.  There is no explicit timeframe for concrete actions, although we note with great interest that the Conservative Party is moving promptly with its election process.  And while the Article 50 authorization for the U.K. to leave the EU supposedly has a two-year time limit, associated negotiations on accompanying trade policies could drag out far longer than that.

Such basic questions mean economic growth, already sluggish, of course, is well likely to be restrained further.  Forecasts range widely, from a roughly 1% hit to growth in the near-term to 3 or 4%.

The effects on specific businesses are also uncertain.  Some analysts believe that international banks might leave London to better concentrate their work in Europe itself.  But other analysts point out that Parliament might take advantage of newfound flexibility to effect tax reductions, making the U.K. more attractive to businesses than locations on the Continent.

These notions apply broadly – even to the Arts.  We were startled to find a commentary in the weekly email from New York’s classical radio station, WQXR, titled “How ‘Brexit’ Affects Opera and the Arts.”  The drop in the U.K. exchange rate has already had a major impact on the value of European singers’ salaries when they perform at the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, for instance.  British conservatories also have two scales for their tuition fees, EU and non-EU, the latter as much as twice the former.  What will happen to those fees when the actual “Leave” takes place and will European students still come to study there?

People from other EU countries who currently live and work in the U.K. face uncertainty.  They will no longer have automatic authorization to live there.  Some of them have already applied to the U.K. Home Office for permanent residency or outright citizenship.  Some may have to leave.

Another issue is that Scotland voted heavily to Remain in the EU, and its government is already trying to figure out if there is a way to handle that.  The “United Kingdom” might then be less “united” if Scotland remains while Great Britain leaves.

Prayer for Healing

The distress over the vote and the nasty campaign ahead of it, marked by the tragic murder of MP Jo Cox, has brought a response from Church leaders.  As we in the U.S. struggle with our own political divisions, we might take note of the following selection from a Church of England litany for these days:

Guide our nation in the days and months ahead

to walk the paths of peace and reconciliation.
Hear us, Lord of life.

Lord, graciously hear us.

Give to our leaders wisdom and sensitivity

to work for unity and the common good.
Hear us, Lord of life.

Lord, graciously hear us.

Mend broken relationships

and restore to wholeness whatever has been damaged by heated debate.
Hear us, Lord of life.

Lord, graciously hear us.

Sustain and support the anxious and fearful

and lift up all who are dejected.
Hear us, Lord of life.

Lord, graciously hear us.

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Sources:

Various issues of The Wall Street Journal and associated website www.wsj.com

U.K. economic data from the Office of National Statistics.  Sourced from Haver Analytics, Inc., databases.

Wikipedia entry: European Union Politics.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union#Politics

Dominic Webb and Matthew Keep. In brief: UK-EU economic relations.  U.K. Parliament:  House of Commons Library.  Briefing Paper number 06091, 13 June 2016.  www.parliament.uk/commons-library.

Sean Williams.  “8 Ways Brexit could directly affect you and your money.”  June 27, 2016.  http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/27/8-ways-brexit-could-directly-affect-you-and-your-m.aspx.  Some of Williams other ideas besides cheap trips to the U.K. also include the fact that anticipated sluggish economic performance will keep interest rates low, making mortgages cheap and keeping credit card rates from rising.  However, the sluggish economies could also keep house prices under pressure.

Church of England.  A prayer for reconciliation after the EU Referendum.  https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-worship/topical-prayers/a-prayer-for-reconciliation-after-the-eu-referendum.aspx

Fred Plotkin.  “Operavore: How ‘Brexit’ Affects Opera and the Arts.” www.wqxr.org/#!/ July 1, 2016.

Jo Cox and the EU

Most of what you’ve been hearing about since June 12 pertains to the mass shooting in Orlando.  Clearly we are upset about that horrible tragedy.  But we want also to give attention to a not-totally-unrelated event in northern England on June 16.

This Thursday, June 23, people in the U.K. will vote on whether to remain in the EU or leave.  The EU is an association of 28 European nations enjoying free trade among each other and whose citizens can move freely among the countries, living anywhere they choose at any time.  Nineteen of these countries, obviously not including the U.K., also use a common currency, the euro.

There is dissatisfaction among some U.K. citizens over belonging to the EU, such that when he ran for re-election to Parliament in 2013, the current Prime Minister David Cameron promised that Parliament would authorize a public election over whether to stay in it.

This hardly sounds like an issue that should spawn violence.  But as the voting date has approached, two vociferous camps have emerged and campaigning has been raucous and nasty.

Still, the nation – and many others – was shocked last Thursday, when Jo Cox, a Member of Parliament supporting the Remain camp, was shot and stabbed in front of the public library in her town of Birstall.

Violence.  What is it about these days that political disagreements seem to be spurring such deadly violence?  The gentleman who murdered Jo Cox on Thursday was known to have mental problems, but still, outright killing is extreme.  Tommie Mair even used a sawed-off shotgun to do this in a country where almost all guns are outlawed, and most police don’t even carry them.

We have to talk first about Jo Cox herself.

An extraordinary person.  She is from Birstall in Northern England, just north of Leicester and south of Nottingham.  The region is a factory community; it includes a large Muslim population, apparently mainly from India, as workers were needed for factories.  Jo Cox’s father worked in a factory.  She apparently always presumed she would do the same.  But she had the opportunity to attend Cambridge and she was the first member of her family to attend university.  She spent 10 years as an aid worker, affiliated with Oxfam, the Gates Foundation and the Freedom Fund, this last an organization that fights modern slavery.  The Wall Street Journal explains that in Parliament “she pushed for international action to help Syrians who had been caught up in fighting there .” She was also a vocal proponent of the UK staying in the EU.

She lived simply, with her husband and two children on a houseboat, and, according to The Economist magazine, she commuted to Parliament on a bicycle.  Ms. Cox was on her way to conduct constituent appointments at the local library in Birstall when she was attacked.  A witness reported that the attacker shouted “Britain first” as he struck her.  In Mr. Mair’s court appearance, the prosecutor stated that he had said, “Britain first, keep Britain independent, Britain always comes first.”  Perhaps coincidentally, “Britain First” is actually an organization committed to banning Islam in the U.K.  The group denied responsibility, however, although they are concerned that immigration is the root of many of the U.K.’s current problems.  When asked to state his name during his court appearance Saturday, June 18, he replied, “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

Thus, we seem to face three forces here.  First, the awful killing of a highly regarded public servant, popular in her community and respected in Parliament.  A bright, relatively young woman, age 41, who obviously had much to say and do toward the benefit of the people she represents.  Second, a raucous, divisive campaign about whether the U.K. should Remain in the EU or Leave it; indeed the groups in support of each side are “Remain” and “Vote Leave”.  Polls show sentiment is almost evenly divided and oscillates from one preference to the other, so it is not at all clear which will come out ahead in the vote.  Campaigning was suspended altogether from Thursday after Jo Cox’s death through Saturday.  Third, there is the immigration issue.  Being part of the EU means that immigration into the U.K. from Europe is relatively easy.

This last issue, immigration, even strikes us as bearing some resemblance to at least one of the factors in the Donald Trump campaign in the U.S.  Trump’s supporters tend to blame immigrants for some of our problems, similar to the U.K. citizens who blame immigrants for whatever distress they are feeling.

While we have no answers to any of this, we can offer you a prayer concerning the U.K. vote, published by the Church of England back in April.  It is obviously directed at this specific issue, but its themes can apply to many topics of public debate:

God of truth, give us grace to debate the issues in this referendum with honesty and openness. Give generosity to those who seek to form opinion and discernment to those who vote, that our nation may prosper and that with all the peoples of Europe we may work for peace and the common good; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

And among the myriad tributes to Jo Cox, here is one offered at a prayer service at a church in Birstall last Thursday and published on the website of the Diocese of West Yorkshire and the Dales:

Signs of Progress in Reducing Carbon Emissions

On Earth Day, the anti-climate change agreement that had been hammered out in Paris back in December was officially signed by representatives of 175 countries.

There’s no doubt about the importance of the Paris Agreement priorities.  We keep hearing about climate change and its dramatic consequences.  On the face of it, this seems to be an overwhelming situation and is full of challenges and bad press.  For instance, we hear that car companies in Germany – no less – have cheated in their reports of gas mileage.  We hear horror stories about the poor people in China who go around the streets of Beijing wearing face masks to filter out the extreme air pollution.  We hear that the Arctic ice cap is melting rapidly.

Thus, on the face of it, it seems that nothing good is happening.  Clearly there is lots to do to rectify these conditions.  But indicators we consulted from the International Energy Agency show that some trends are headed in the right direction.  Yes, there’s a long way to go in counteracting climate change, but there is progress. [1]

Lower Emissions in Several Parts of the World

Carbon dioxide emissions are already drifting lower in industrialized regions.  For the 34 major industrialized countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), total emissions peaked in 2005 and by 2013, the latest available, they had fallen 6.1%, overall.  In the U.S., emissions are down 10.2% in that timeframe, and in Europe, 11.7%.  Granted, there is more to do toward achieving the Paris Climate Change agreement goals.  But this is certainly a start.  We’ll come back with a couple of examples shortly.

Emissions are, though, still rising in many of the world’s regions.  China and India are two obvious examples, with CO₂ output up 67.5% in China from 2005 to 2013, and 72% in India.  Emissions in Africa are up 25.3%.

Even in these places, there are some signs of improvement.  In both China and India, the increase in emissions is evidently tied to economic growth, which has been quite rapid.  But notably, emissions have increased by less than GDP.  In China, GDP was up at a 10% average pace from 2005 to 2013, while emissions increased at “only” a 6.7% rate.  Two positive developments are producing the slower rise in emissions:  energy usage is also expanding less than GDP and the energy that’s being used produces somewhat less emissions over time.  In India, GDP grew at a 7.5% rate, while emissions rose at 7.0% pace.  There, energy use is also growing more slowly than GDP, although the specific kinds of energy used there are still producing increasing amounts of CO₂.

By contrast in Europe and the U.S., the decline in emissions is resulting from declines in energy use and declines in the CO₂ content of the energy used.  So there’s a shift toward “cleaner” energy.  Here is a little bit about the efforts of two major U.S. companies to reduce their own carbon footprints.

Specific Companies Take Specific Actions

General Electric reduced its energy use by almost 19% from 2004 to 2014.[2]  For carbon emissions, companies’ carbon footprints are often characterized as emissions per dollar of revenue, and over that ten-year period, GE cut down that measure from 59 metric tons per million dollars of revenue to 33.9 metric tons.  Among other projects, it has redesigned the engines it makes for Boeing aircraft, and it has restructured operations at a power plant in Greenville, South Carolina, by simply installing real-time sensors and instituting a measuring system.  Its plans going forward are directly tied to the 2-degree-Celsius formula emphasized in the Paris agreement

American Airlines has found several interesting ways of reducing fuel consumption, obviously the main source of any airline’s carbon emissions.[3]  They’ve learned they can taxi around airports using just one engine.  They’ve learned they can reduce the weight of a flight meaningfully by switching from paper flight plans to using iPads and also having flight attendants use small Samsung tablets instead of a 5-pound paper instruction manual on the planes.  Finally, they attached “winglets” to the tips of the wings of 240 of American’s planes, improving the planes’ “lift”; this change alone saves 700,000 metric tons of carbon emissions a year.

Low-Carbon Investment Strategies

In addition, from a different perspective, we note with considerable interest that companies with low carbon emissions or small carbon footprints constitute a growing theme for investors.  Standard & Poor’s has even devised indexes of stocks for low-carbon-emissions companies and fossil-fuel-free companies.[4]  The “S&P 500 Carbon Efficient Index” has been marginally stronger than the full S&P 500 index over most time periods in the last several years.  Since the beginning of 2012, an index of fossil-fuel-free companies has outrun the overall market by 5%.  While that’s not a huge difference, it does suggest that investors view lower-energy or clean-energy companies in a favorable light.

Here are two examples of that investment strategy.  At that Paris Climate Change conference, the New York State Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, announced that the New York State Common Retirement Fund would invest $2 billion in a fund created by Goldman Sachs which emphasizes companies with small carbon footprints.  The Common Retirement Fund is the pension fund for New York State employees and is said to be the country’s third largest pension fund.[5]  Similarly, the non-profit McKnight Foundation, with a total of $2.1 billion in assets, can perhaps be identified as a pioneer here; back in 2014, it invested $100 million in a broad-based carbon-efficient fund managed by Mellon Capital.[6]

The distinction for these two investment initiatives is that they are active in-vestment strategies.  Previously, funds that wanted to emphasize climate and environment concerns generally used a di-vestment strategy, eliminating coal and possibly oil companies from their portfolios.  But selling these shares has had little impact because those companies are so large that having a few shareholders sell out doesn’t mean much.  Instead, enlisting fund managers to devise investment strategies for companies that operate using desirable practices makes a more positive, constructive statement.[7]

Thus, there are tangible efforts at individual investor and company levels that encourage and support the implementation of carbon reduction actions.  Environmental issues have the advantage that they are clearly measurable, so we can see progress.  As we said at the outset, there is a lot to do, but there is progress.

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[1] International Energy Agency.  CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion Highlights (2015 Edition).  http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/CO2EmissionsFromFuelCombustionHighlights2015.pdf.  All the country data cited comes from Chapter 6, “Summary Tables”.

[2] GE Sustainability.  http://www.gesustainability.com/performance-data/building-things-that-matter-goals-metrics/ .  Accessed May 1, 2016. 

[3]  American Airlines. https://www.aa.com/i18n/aboutUs/corporateResponsibility/environment.jsp .  Accessed May 2, 2016.

[4]  Standard & Poor’s Indices.  http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-500-carbon-efficient-index.  An option on this page permits the comparison with the S&P 500; those daily data can all be downloaded for as much as the last 10 years.  Other pages include the Fossil-Fuel Free Index and similar indicators.  Accessed April 29, 2016.

[5]  Tina Rosenberg.  “An Investment Strategy to Save the Planet,” The New York Times. “Fixes” blog.  January 5, 2016.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/an-investment-strategy-to-save-the-planet/ .  Accessed April 30, 2016.

[6] Marc Gunther.  “McKnight Foundation: Investing for climate Impact,” Nonprofit Chronicles, April 24, 2016.  https://nonprofitchronicles.com/2016/04/24/mcknight-foundation-investing-for-climate-impact/.   Accessed April 29, 2016.

[7] Tina Rosenberg.  Op. cit.

Earth Day and the Industrial Revolution in 3 Graphs

It's Earth Day.  Or it was three days ago.  But what we write is still relevant to the season.  In any event, why would we begin with a picture of world population growth?  Well, the number of people on Earth should have an obvious connection to Earth Day.  But the key to the immediate connection we want to highlight is the blue line in the graph showing the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  A neighbor of mine, a gentleman who's fairly in-the-know about economic issues, stopped me on the street the other day to ask if I understood how much difference the Industrial Revolution made to the world's population.  He had just learned this, he explained, in an online course he had taken, and he was stunned.  So I figure if Steve is stunned, maybe some of you are too.  So here's some of the story and why we pay particular attention on Earth Day.  It's not just the numbers of people, but their standards of living that matter.

The key is the bend in line.   The world's population was basically flat from the year 1 A.D. to 500 A.D. at about 200 million people; estimates show that by 1000 A.D., it was still no more than 250-300 million.  Population reached about 500 million by 1500 and 1 billion in 1800.  Now, just 215 years later, there are about 7.2 billion people.  The addition of the last half of that, 3.6 billion, has taken only 45 years.  So clearly some very dramatic things happened around and after 1800.

We often think of the Industrial Revolution in terms of the cotton gin and other machinery, but advances in health care and public facilities are also important.  As examples, Edward Jenner's small pox vaccine came in 1798.  John Wilkinson, an Englishman, developed the iron pipe that made a new water supply system in Paris in 1786.   John Snow realized in 1854 that contaminated water could contribute to the spread of cholera.  Before this period, life expectancy at birth hovered around 24 years in the medieval period and got to 35 in England by the mid-18^th Century.  By 1900, it reached the late-40s and was about 80 years in 2010.  In other words, death rates declined markedly.  This is so all over the world.

At the same time, birth rates have also declined.  This latter factor has been pronounced enough that population growth rates have actually moderated in recent decades.  Big as the numbers are, they are no longer accelerating.

Robert Lucas, a consulting economist to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, has written about these birth and death rate trends.  As the Industrial Revolution took place, along with accompanying gains in agricultural output and the improvements to health, population did expand dramatically.  The gains in production supported the population growth.  Thomas Malthus and other economists of his day – around 1800 – began to fear that this population growth trend would consume much of the earth's resources, leading to increased poverty.  While there is quite justified concern over that eventuality, Lucas offers some mitigating notions.

At the outset of the industrial and agricultural revolutions during the 18^th Century, most of society was agricultural, and as farmers obtained larger yields for their crops and had healthier animals, they used their increased income to enlarge their families, so they could produce bigger crops still.  Living standards – income per person – thus didn't change much at first.   From 1700 to 1820, world GDP firmed from 0.2% growth per year to about 0.5%.  But population had almost the same movement, so each person was associated with about $665 worth of output in 1820, only mildly larger than the $596 in 1600.

But starting around 1820, that relationship shifted.  Those health improvements we mentioned before, clean water and similar improvements to sewage disposal, made conditions much better in cities and people began moving to them and doing more industrial work.  This coincided with diminishing birth rates, enough so that total production gains were associated with more production per person; by 1900, that had nearly doubled to $1,260.  By 2008, the latest year for which we have this specific calculation, world output per person was just over $7,600, as seen here.

We're writing about all this because it's Earth Day.  What is the connection?  As the line in the above graph was moving definitively higher in the early 1960s, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that grabbed everyone's attention about how more people were using more of the earth's resources, much of that in an ironically unhealthy way.  For the first time, many people came to understand that they could not just plow ahead unconcerned about what they were doing to the earth and its environment.  Would this new realization slow growth?

It took some time, but progress in making the right use of the earth is taking place.  Robert Lucas, in the material we reference here, counters some environmental naysayers' arguments by highlighting the role of technology.  He points out that we should use a theory of economic growth that embodies not just numbers of people and amounts of consumption, but the application of technology, ingenuity and adaptability.

This notion prompted us to check out the amount of energy used in producing today's GDP compared to some historical period.  If GDP growth just uses more and more energy resources, then the naysayers will be right; succeeding generations of people will indeed be less well off because pure air, clean water and all kinds of material resources will be scarcer for everyone.

What we found with some brief searching, is just 20 years' worth of information on this.  But it tells a positive, hopeful story.  Data from the World Bank show that a fixed unit of energy would yield $5.40 of world GDP in 1990.  By 2010, the same amount of energy made $7.20 of GDP. 

Further, in 1990, each dollar of GDP was associated with 0.5 kilogram of carbon emissions, but in 2010, this had fallen to 0.4 kilogram.  Energy use per person has increased for the world as a whole, but this is happening in middle income regions in Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa, not in high income regions.  In fact, in many places per capita energy use has gone down; in the U.S., for example, each person used 7,700 kilograms of energy in 1990, but just over 7,000 kilograms in 2011.

So perhaps Lucas is correct.  If we know and understand a situation, we can quite probably find ways to deal with it.   Thus, growth can continue to the extent that we become more efficient in using energy, and we can even develop new energy sources and/or improve the way we manage current sources.  We can further reduce pollution without severely restricting our general ways of life.  This isn't automatic, and we have to be mindful and deliberate in our efforts, but we have a good shot at continuing to improve our lives and the life of the Earth itself.

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Sources:

Robert Lucas.  "The Industrial Revolution: Past and Future." Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Annual Report Essay, 2003 Annual Report, published May 1, 2004.  https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/annual-reports/the-industrial-revolution-past-and-future.  Accessed April 24, 2015.

Eric McLamb.  "The Ecological Impact of the Industrial Revolution".  Ecology Global Network.  September 18, 2011.  http://www.ecology.com/2011/09/18/ecological-impact-industrial-revolution.  Accessed April 24, 2015.  Also see McLamb's Earth Day commentary from 2014: "Earth Day and the Human Revolution"  http://www.ecology.com/2014/04/22/earth-day-human-revolution/.  Accessed April 24, 2015.

Long-term historical data on population and world GDP are based on Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective.  Paris, France: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.  2001 and 2006.  http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/the-world-economy_9789264022621-en.  A pdf may be purchased or the book may be read in an e-book format on that site.  Barnes & Noble and Amazon also have it available.

Maddison was professor at the University of Groningen from 1978 to 1997 and a founder of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre.  He passed away in 2010.  His data are recognized as the primary compilation of long-term world-wide GDP and other economic and demographic indicators; they are now maintained and made available in spreadsheets on a site managed by his colleagues at that research center  http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/oriindex.htm.

Data on the relationship of energy to GDP, energy use per person and carbon emissions come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators.  The 2015 edition of these was published just on April 14, 2015, and includes these energy data through 2011.  See http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/3.6 "Energy production and use" and http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/3.8 "Energy dependency, efficiency and carbon dioxide emissions".  Accessed April 24, 2015.

Toward Some Understanding of ISIS

We write today to urge you to do some reading, the Graeme Wood article in the new issue of The Atlantic "What ISIS Really Wants".  Perhaps you are well ahead of us and have in fact already read it.   Here is a link to it:  http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ .  Further, just today (February 24), Mr. Wood has posted a follow-up of responses to the article from people he originally interviewed and from others.  Here's that link: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants-reader-response-atlantic/385710/.

We were inspired to plow through the lengthy piece in part by the Obama Administration's care to avoid referring to ISIS as "radical Islamists" or even religiously motivated.  So the publication of some thoughtful discussion defining the background and goals of ISIS looked to be helpful.  And it does seem that fundamentalist Islam is exactly what ISIS is about, according to Mr. Wood's commentary.   The term "fundamentalist" is not used here in any judgmental sense, but as a pure description of a group that takes the Koran and the words of Muhammad quite literally.

Wood further describes that ISIS is concerned mainly with a specific territory in Syria and Iraq, not with capturing or destroying other parts of the world.  So, for instance, the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in December was not an ISIS event, but apparently led by an al Qaeda affiliate.  Control over specific territory is part of the definition of the caliphate ISIS believes it is, so taking action in places far removed from that location is less important to their mission.  Eventually, spreading the caliphate across the world is important, but only as an outward movement from their present position.

State Department spokespeople have also suggested that the most effective way to put down the evil of ISIS may well lie in social and economic programs to promote the welfare of its people, to create job opportunities for them perhaps.  We would agree with that to some extent.  If the populace of the ISIS region were prosperous, they might be less interested in fighting against people they see as enemies.  However, Wood's material makes clear that economics is well down the list of ISIS priorities.  Its priorities are better defined by religious rubrics and Sharia social arrangements.  We'd guess that its adherents are genuinely less interested in material prosperity and in devising projects to bring that about.

Finally, among the highlights we emphasize for you here,  Wood suggests that the Obama Administration approach using air strikes and "proxy warfare" may well be the best way to wear ISIS down.  A major armed invasion, rather than scaring them, could actually please them: they believe an apocalypse is coming and a huge onrush of Western troops might simply signal the start of that process.

We don't know enough to express reasoned opinions on these views, but at least they now have some context and definition.  If you have more elaborate thoughts, please do share them.  We ourselves are left, this Lenten season, with a simple sentence that has been personal to us since 9/11:  "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

Praying for Peace: It's All We Can Do

The Rev. F. M. Buddy Stallings, Rector of St. Bart's on Park Avenue in Manhattan, is an Associate of the Geranium Farm; his pieces run on the Farm's website page "A Few Good Writers".  This morning, what he emailed sounds exactly like what we feel about the two simultaneous awful-nesses that are impacting the world right now, the shooting down of the plane in eastern Ukraine and the fighting in Gaza.

We mourn the loss of some AIDS scientists who were traveling on the plane, as well as a member of the Dutch Senate, a nun returning to a teaching job in Sydney after a study sabbatical in Europe, and the numerous others traveling to Asia.  We learned that Ukraine was, until yesterday, on a major flying route from Europe to Asia; planes are apparently now being rerouted over Turkey.  How will the conflict over that region be reconciled?

We also wish over and over that the terrorism and the Arab/Israeli distresses could be eased.  We were in the World Trade Center on 9/11, so this is a very personal notion.

Those thoughts prompt us to respond here on Ways of the World, and we take the liberty of copying Buddy's comments so our own readers may see them.  

Nothing I had planned to write today seems weighty enough in light of the events of yesterday: the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner and Israel's ground operation into Gaza. . . .

And yet, each of us is required to have some sort of public reaction -- not a position piece for sure, but some orientation or perhaps world-view through which we process such events. Over the years I have in some ways hidden from many of the hard conversations about conflict and turmoil in the world by claiming that my positions are theological not political: peace over war, non-violence over violence, negotiation over action. Though lofty and pious, they also are not, as I have been told with some regularity, particularly practical or easily reduced to logistics about how we actually are to live together on an ever- shrinking globe. I almost envy the bellicose, who at every turn say in a million ways "there is going to be hell to pay for this; let's go blow somebody up," and the equally certain, who seem to know in every case the absolute moral decision to make.

I pray for peace; and though that seems pretty weak and small, it is all I have. Though God may clearly expect more, I am not sure what it is and at this point can only wait until I have further light.

Fracking and Methane: Response to a Comment

In a Comment to the "Follow-up on Fracking" post below, Reader Chris Johnson calls us to task for not mentioning the methane issue.  This Reader Chris is quite right.  It is an important consideration.  If fracked gas wells and/or pipes have leaks, methane will escape.   Methane is the main chemical component of "natural gas".   It has good uses in making fabric, plastics, anti-freeze and fertilizer, among others.  But if it leaks uncontrolled into the atmosphere, it acts as a greenhouse gas that is at least as harmful as carbon dioxide.  Recent academic research, cited by our favorite author on these topics, Russell Gold, in a February Wall Street Journal blog article, suggests that methane emissions are quite sizable.  Indeed, he describes that using natural gas as fuel for transportation in cars and trucks, because it can leak out, may not be any better for the climate than regular gasoline.  However, in the confined space of a power plant producing electricity or a home producing heat, natural gas does have significant net benefits over coal and fuel oil.

Another important point is one we alluded to in our original article.  Building the fracking wells themselves and then transporting the gas must be done carefully.  If the cement shell of the well cracks, methane will escape.  Notably, the leakage of methane does not come from the inherent design of the fracking wells, but rather from flaws in the materials and construction of wells and pipeline.  These can be fixed by the oil companies, or better yet, prevented by careful construction in the first place.

All this underscores our basic conclusion yet again.  Use less energy to begin with.  But we can use natural gas quite effectively in electricity plants and furnaces, as long as the gas is obtained through safe fracking practices.  This is important to know.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/14/despite-leaky-methane-is-natural-gas-is-still-worth-the-switch/

Some Follow-Up on Fracking

In response to our Earth Day article on fracking, three helpful readers posed questions about natural gas and fracking or gave us additional information resources.  This topic is a hot one and press reports and journals present new material nearly every day.  To wit:

1.  Reader Chris wants to know what difference fracking has made in US production of petroleum and natural gas.  In other words, is it such a big deal in our overall energy supply situation?

The answer is "plenty" of difference.

See this graph of production data from the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (shaded areas are recession periods).

This includes crude oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydroelectric and other renewables; you can see the upturn in 2007, a pause during the Great Recession and since then a sharp uptrend.  Earlier years had seen at best a flat pattern in these production numbers, with crude oil in particular falling consistently.

Now, if we are producing more of our own energy, are we then using more energy?  Well, no.  What our increased production has meant is a pronounced decline in imports, as visible here:

In fact, the amounts imported during 2013 have returned to 1997 levels.  So the new production from fracking has already eased our dependence on foreign energy producers.

2.  Our article mentioned the potential for exporting fuels.  Reader Carolyn wants to know how it might work to export natural gas.  There are two aspects to the reply, one physical and the other regulatory.

From the physical standpoint, it obviously sounds impractical to ship natural gas in ships across oceans, doesn't it?  A quick Google on "how to export natural gas" brings us to a whole discussion by Shell Oil Company, which in fact does just that around various parts of the world.  They do it by chilling the gas into a liquid form; there are liquefaction plants in seaport cities and gas arrives at those plants via pipeline.  The gas is super-cooled to -260 degrees Fahrenheit (-162 degrees Celsius); this shrinks the volume some 600 times and produces a clear, toxin-free liquid, known as liquefied natural gas or LNG, which is easily shipped in tankers.  At the receiving end, it is heated at "regasification" plants and sent off in pipelines to final users.  The U.S. has imported lots of natural gas this way for decades.  [Source: http://www.shell.com/global/future-energy/natural-gas/liquefied-natural-gas/what-is-lng.html]

Now, the reverse is happening in the U.S.  Several liquefaction plants for exporting are either in the planning or construction stages in Louisiana, Texas, Maryland and Oregon.  But there is an important regulatory constraint:  according to a recent USA Today article, exporting natural gas requires a "public interest" ruling from the Energy Department if the buyers are located in countries where we do not have a free trade agreement.  So shipping to Europe, China, India and Japan, among others, must undergo extra regulatory processes.  Altogether, 31 plants have applied for this approval and the ones just mentioned have received at least a conditional OK.  One in Louisiana, owned by Cheniere Energy, is in final construction stages and should open next year. [Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/07/us-natural-gas-exports-to-begin/7204925/]

3.  Reader Mary, who lives in Colorado, calls our attention to a very informative website, www.studyfracking.com.  While the material is geared specifically to Colorado, much of the information is general and is accompanied by extremely helpful diagrams and pictures.  For instance, one of the diagrams is a cross-section showing how much farther below ground fracking occurs, compared with the location of groundwater.  Mary's own comments highlight one of the benefits of fracking that we also mention, the good jobs the drilling industry provides that can help people move up and succeed economically.

4.  We can elaborate on a couple of other points in our article.  One, we referred briefly to earthquakes that might be caused by fracking.  The U.S. Geological Survey announced last week that it plans to map "manmade earthquakes" in more detail, since the rate of seismic activity has increased in the last few years when fracking has been taking place.  The earthquakes are small, with Richter Scale magnitudes of around 3.0, but there are more of them.  Notably, the quaking seems to result from disposal of the wastewater used in the fracking, not from the fracking itself.  So all this bears keeping up with.  Source: [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303948104579535991486675268]

Two, we can point out that our general concluding mandate, "use less energy!" need not mean we have to feel deprived.  Here is a picture of a new BMW vehicle, the i8, which will be on sale in the U.S. in the fall.  It is a plug-In hybrid made of carbon-fiber reinforced plastic; this material is as strong as steel and weighs markedly less, more than offsetting the added weight of the necessary lithium-ion batteries.  While carbon fiber has been used in cars before, such as Lamborghinis and McLarens, this is the first adaptation of mass production for a carbon fiber body shell.  This sports car goes from 0 to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds, the same as a Porsche 911, but its gas mileage is 50-60 mpg, similar to a Toyota Prius.  Now, we won't all want to buy one; the price will evidently be something like $135,700.

We describe this to highlight that these environmental issues are technological.  Engineering and chemistry can work on them.   So innovation can advance products to meet new issues of the day and we don't have to sit in the dark and creep along in a slow car to save fuel.  We can still have fun.  [Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304677904579535612915387656]

On Earth Day 2014: Energy and Fracking

Occasionally on a main street in my neighborhood, groups appear with petitions asking the New York State government to ban fracking, the process of oil companies’ drilling wells deep into rock formations to release natural gas or crude oil.  I have always declined to sign because I have thought that New York State is losing out on the rural economic development that would result from the fracking operations and that the United States would be more secure in this troubled world if it used more of its own energy resources and relied less on imports.

These opinions are well grounded.  However, the anti-frackers have valid points as well.  We can list some, and we will.

First, though, in this Earth Day commentary, let me give one disclaimer and one general conclusion.  The disclaimer is that what follows here is a collection of thoughts and ideas, not a clean, well-conceived analysis that leads to a neat conclusion.  Partly, this is because there is not a neat conclusion, or all this would in fact be settled.  In addition, my own conclusions have lately become more fluid – no wordplay intended.

Use Less Energy!

There is the one general conclusion.  The best answer to these debates and their associated turmoil is for all of us to use less energy.  Turn out more lights.  Put the air-conditioner on a higher temperature and the heat on a lower temperature.  Combine errands you run in your car so you don’t waste gas.  All this feels like environmental kindergarten, but it’s really the best way to deal with pollution and the depletion of natural resources.

What About Renewables?

“But there are also alternative sources of energy, Carol!”  Right.  Solar, say.  That has sounded attractive, especially as solar panels become less expensive.  But we learned not long ago that if there’s a fire in a house with panels on the roof, firefighters who might have to be on the roof can be badly injured by the electricity in the panels.  Oh, dear.  Wind?  By its very nature, wind is intermittent and cannot be counted on to deliver specified amounts of power at any specified time.  Birds fly into the blades of the windmills.  For wind, the timing issue can be at least partially dealt with by installing storage devices.

These alternative sources are thus not perfect.  Obviously they have the great advantage of being “renewable” and also not carrying the burden of carbon emissions.  But delivery is not perfect.  Also, they account for very little of the world’s energy consumption, providing only 1.8% of the world’s total in 2011 and 2.2% in the US[1].  There is also hydroelectric, which certainly yields high quality energy, but long ago reached its generating capacity.

So we are sent back to our look at fracking as a source of meaningful energy growth to – literally – fuel the world’s population and economic growth.

If you are particularly interested in the issues about fracking, go right away to a brand new book, The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World, by Russell Gold.  It was published just a couple of weeks ago by Simon & Schuster[2].  Gold is a senior energy writer for the Wall Street Journal.  Despite the impression one might get from his affiliation and the book’s title, the discussion is balanced.  Is fracking good, or is it bad?  His answer would be, “Yes”.

Positive Views on Fracking

Why is fracking good?  In particular, the fracking that brings out natural gas has several benefits.  While it’s still a fossil fuel, natural gas has the least carbon emissions of the three, crude oil, coal and gas, by a sizable margin.  Its CO2 emissions per BTU of energy are about 45% less than coal and 25% less than gasoline.  So it’s clearly the fuel of choice for heating and numerous other uses.  According to Russell Gold, backers of wind and solar believe energy production facilities using a mix of natural gas and the renewable source will work very well together; when the wind is still or clouds cover the sky, an associated natural gas plant can operate intermittently, while coal plants must be on consistently.  Gold also argues that the availability of ample supplies of natural gas gives developers of the renewable sources time to build their own production plants.  Finally, as we mentioned above, in this time of world turmoil that particularly involves many oil producing regions, the US can substantially reduce its fuel imports.  It can even export some fuels.

Fracking Negatives: the Environmental Ones

Fracking has drawbacks.  These are of two kinds, we realized, in reading Gold’s book.  First, the environmental issues, besides the fact that natural gas is still a fossil fuel.  We became uneasy reading the description of how fracking is done: a hole is drilled down about a mile into dirt and rock and then turns horizontal for another several thousand feet.  Cement is poured into the hole to make a pipe.  Water, lots of water, mixed with chemicals, is poured down the pipe.  The water coming out at the end of the pipe exerts such enormous pressure on the surrounding rocks, that they crack – they fracture – and natural gas comes out of the cracks and flows to the surface.  There are thousands of these wells in any given shale deposit.  It is water pressure, not any explosive, that is used to make the cracks, so the process is “hydraulic fracturing”.  Much of the water can be recycled in the fracking of other nearby wells, but the water is a brine and if it spills, it makes a huge mess.  The drilling goes down to what is known as “source rock”; on rare occasions, people at the surface can feel modest earthquakes.  This doesn’t sound good to us, although writers in a New York Times piece have argued that the quakes are so small that hardly anything is felt and certainly no damage is done.[3]  Hmmm.

One problem that really does seem to be less than many people believe is water supply contamination.  Fresh water sources generally lie several hundred feet below the surface.  Fracking wells are far deeper.  The NY Times writers point to a study in Pennsylvania in which only one water well in 200 showed any evidence of contamination.  Many complaints turn out to involve water that was already contaminated, but not complained about until the disruption from the fracking.  Over time, however, gas may leak into water sources if the fracking wells themselves are not carefully constructed.

Fracking Negatives: the Personnel Ones

This last point  brings us to the other kind of drawback to fracking.  Apparently, judging from the stories in Gold’s book, oil companies have not been particularly cordial or careful in many of their fracking operations.  We won’t outline the details here, but it seems that on many occasions, speed overtook manners as the oil company operators moved into a community in a huge hurry to dig as many wells as fast as they could.  The point can be made by highlighting the contrasting story of one town in north Texas, Bartonville, that finally got a grip on the situation and gathered citizens and oil company employees together to make some simple rules: don’t trundle truckloads of water through people’s backyards at midnight, erect sound barriers around drilling pads to limit the noise, whatever the time of day the drilling took place.  This has helped this community tremendously.  In addition, though, some of the haste has made waste too in the quality of materials used, especially the cement.  Efforts are now in process to develop tools for testing that before bad cement lets gas out of the pipe and into a water aquifer.

Should There Be Fracking in New York and Germany?

So we’re left with a hard question.  There are shale deposits in New York State – an extension of the Marcellus Shale that is in Pennsylvania.  Fracking brings good paying jobs as well as income to the owners of the land where it takes place, factors that are huge helps to local economies.  But the topic is so controversial in New York that the state energy commission has postponed promulgating rules until April 2015 – after the next state-wide elections this November.  There are shale deposits all across Europe, especially in France.  But France has already banned fracking.  And 40% of its energy needs are met by nuclear power plants; is that safer?  In Germany, solar and wind provide a much larger portion of energy needs than in other countries, but they still only made 8% of the total in 2011.  Fracking hasn’t been banned there, but there is an indefinite “moratorium”.  At the same time, of course, Russia threatens Ukraine with huge hikes in the cost of its natural gas or a complete embargo.  So the political advantages of being able to produce natural gas locally become more evident – and more urgent.

As we said, there is no neat conclusion.  Russell Gold suggests that oil companies are starting to get more careful, to realize that headlong rushes into people’s backyards with half-baked cement won’t really do anyone any good.  Indeed, he just wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal[4] that investors now appear to want the companies to conduct operations more prudently from a financial point of view and with more focus on quality.  The wildcatters and the wildcatters’ backers are perhaps growing up.  As they mature and balance their approach, perhaps the gas can flow more easily and more safely.

In the meantime, turn off the lights when you’re not in the room and buy a hybrid car!

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[1]Data on fuel use in various countries all come from the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration.  “International Energy Statistics”: http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm. Accessed April 19, 2014.

[2]Russell Gold.  The Boom:  How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World.  New York: Simon & Schuster.  April 2014.  Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers.

[3]Susan L. Brantley and Anna Meyendorff.  “The Facts on Fracking”.  The New York Times, www.nytimes.com.   March 13, 2013.  Accessed April 18, 2014.

[4]Russell Gold.  “The New Winners and Losers in America’s Shale Boom”.  The Wall Street Journal.  April 21, 2014.  Page B1.