Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Define Irony

The WSJ is reporting that a boom in natural gas and oil is creating U.S. jobs. According to Russell Gold's article a total of 158,500 direct new jobs were created over the last five year. More jobs have been created in secondary industries like Fleetwood Homes, in Idaho, for shipment to North Dakota oil fields.

Who would have thought that this administration would be presiding over an oil and gas boom? Well they wouldn't be if the those resources had been found on federal land. But Obama will reap the benefit anyway.

About those Dakota homes, here's some video.



A few quotes from the WSJ:



The staccato of nail guns echoes across a cavernous building here as workers piece together manufactured houses with easy-to-clean linoleum floors and rugged interiors for muddy oil-field workers.
. . .
The economic benefits of rising energy production are spreading far beyond the traditional oil patch, to Ohio and Pennsylvania, Nebraska and New York, North Carolina and Idaho. Truck drivers from pretty much anywhere can find work related to the surging energy business. Private-equity firms completed $24.8 billion of energy deals of all types last year, up from $8.5 billion in 2010, according to data tracker Preqin. Manufacturing plants are returning to the U.S. to take advantage of cheap natural gas, spurring major investments in petrochemical and steel production in the Gulf Coast and Midwest.
. . .
During his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama said, "The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper."

3 comments:

  1. No one said that fraking development shouldn't happen. But we should know what fraking fluid is, why it was so important that Cheney campaigned to deregulate fraking, and how people with flaming well water will be compensated/protected

    Is that too much to ask?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fraking fluid, aka water and natural gas that is already in the ground leaking up. Happy?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I believe the flaming well water as a result of fracking has not been proved, and is often the result of drilling the well itself, not of fracking.

    ReplyDelete