How Do You Fight 3.87 Billion Dollars?

The depress­ing, cyn­i­cal answer? You don't. This report was writ­ten by the ener­gy indus­try, so I'd imme­di­ate­ly sus­pect it, except that it dove­tails nice­ly with every­thing else I've read. See page 19–20 of this report.

The Eco­nom­ic Impacts of the Mar­cel­lus Shale: Impli­ca­tions for New York, Penn­syl­va­nia, and West Virginia

Our analy­sis indi­cates that the Mar­cel­lus gas indus­try in Penn­syl­va­nia directly
added $1.98 bil­lion in val­ue added to the econ­o­my dur­ing 2009, which then generated
indi­rect and induced impacts that increased the total val­ue added by $1.89 bil­lion. Hence,
the total eco­nom­ic impact of the Mar­cel­lus indus­try in Penn­syl­va­nia is $3.87 billion
dur­ing cal­en­dar year 2009, which com­pris­es 0.68 per­cent of the $573.7 bil­lion in total
val­ue added in the Penn­syl­va­nia econ­o­my dur­ing 2009.

I don't know. Today I'm depressed about many prospects, not least of which is the water in my home coun­ty. I went home this past week or so and took a bunch of pic­tures with the inten­tion of writ­ing some­thing com­pre­hen­sive about the indus­try and its effects, but now I find myself ques­tion­ing the point. The over­all feel among the peo­ple I spoke with seemed to be some­thing along the lines of, they're going to take the gas any­way so might as well try to make some mon­ey while they do. And I've heard at least some of the ener­gy com­pa­nies seem very good: respon­sive to phone calls, quick to dig a new well if your old one gets gas in it, try­ing to lessen the impact of their work. And I keep look­ing at that num­ber in the head­er. I don't know if you can fight some­thing that's bring­ing that kind of cash in. I don't even live there any­more and I'm resigned to the place look­ing like hell. But then my broth­er remind­ed me, our water as kids was no good any­way, and the water in the barn and pas­ture could be lit on fire even in the 70s, and we sur­vived. We'll sur­vive. That's the bitch of it, to look for­ward to for­est scenes of capped wells and crap-ass roads and who knows what else. I'm not going to link to shale arti­cles for a while. I need to take some time away from it to learn more, straight­en my opin­ions out and well, learn more. I feel like I've been going at it half-cocked, and that's no good.