In Brea, residents started researching fracking, gathering information about polluted water wells and increased seismic activity in other areas across the country, such as Oklahoma, where scientists have linked wastewater injection wells with an increased number of earthquakes.

Initially, Fujioka – the Brea fracktivist – didn’t even know fracking was happening near homes and schools, but she soon found out using online mapping tools.

So, Fujioka scheduled a meeting before the City Council. It transformed into a presentation by the main driller in the region, LINN Energy.

At an alternative meeting, 100 residents showed up seeking information on fracking. Another meeting followed, this one sponsored by Cal State Fullerton and paneled by academics and industry representatives, at which 500 residents sought information.

Residents in other Orange County cities are joining the movement. At the very southern end of the hills, Yorba Linda activists are just getting started. Karen Hill, an active member of Brea Congregational United Church of Christ, an anti-fracking hotspot, believes fracking will contaminate groundwater near her community, even though most water is imported.

Given that the California media still refuse to report that the Obama administration considers fracking safe, this alarmism isn’t that surprising.

But what’s also interesting is that the international and national media increasingly have figured out that fracking has been profoundly good for the U.S. economy. This is from a Financial Times analysis of how cheaper energy was helping U.S. exporters:

The price gap has led to a 6 per cent average increase in US manufactured product exports, the IMF wrote in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook. […]

Lower prices for natural gas favour energy- and gas-intensive industries, such as steelmaking, oil refining, and nitrogen fertiliser production. The International Energy Agency has previously warned that Europe will lose a third of its share of global energy-intensive exports over the next two decades because its energy prices will remain stubbornly higher than those in the US.

And then there’s this remarkable development. At a time when international opinion of the U.S. seems to be largely negative and even baffled — a president sending mixed messages for years will do that — fracking has created a positive aura around the U.S.

New York Times: Fracking ‘gust’ lifts U.S. reputation

Who says so? Lots of analysts and academics, including the Harvard professor who popularized the idea that nations wield not just military might but “soft power” that influences global opinion. This is from the New York Times:

It has become fashionable to note a decline of American global power and influence, but don’t tell that to the energy experts.

Many see increased domestic production of oil and gas as driving more muscular United States energy diplomacy, power that exists in curious tandem with the Obama administration’s efforts to wean the world off fossil fuels.

“The rapid rise in U.S. oil and gas production, together with the decline in oil consumption and the elevation of climate change as a priority, is completely scrambling the way policy makers think about energy diplomacy,” said Michael A. Levi, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., the Harvard professor who articulated the notion of “soft power” in international affairs, sees a “shale gale” propelling America’s status: “If you are attracted to a country or any leader, a lot has to do with the feeling, ‘Do they have momentum? Is the wind in their sails or are their sails flapping?’ We’ve got a gust.”

Carlos Pascual, a former senior American diplomat, agrees. Increased energy production “strengthens our hand.” he said.

Will California’s vast Monterey Shale ever be tapped to add to this U.S. momentum? I’m not optimistic. But if it does happen, it would produce more middle-class jobs for California than any dozen government initiatives.

And it would also yield vast new revenue. Which state has seen the sharpest percentage increase in education spending in recent years? The state that has the lowest unemployment and the fastest economic growth.

That would be North Dakota, global ground zero for the fracking revolution.

But this summer, we’re seeing something freaky. Prices are going down, even with unrest in many oil-producing nations and rising tensions throughout the Middle East. The Christian Science Monitor has the details:

The average US gas price is now $3.52 per gallon, according to a Thursday report released by automotive group AAA, making current prices the lowest since March of this year. This July, US consumers saw a bigger drop in gas prices than in any July over the last six years. The price at the pump fell every day but one over the course of the month, according to AAA. Gas prices generally rise in the summer months, as Americans hit the road and drive up demand for gas. The federal government also mandates that refineries produce a more costly, lower-emission blend of gas in the summer – and those increased costs are passed onto motorists. …

Though forecasters expected that expanded domestic oil production would translate into good prices for consumers, they couldn’t have predicted prices quite this low.

July gas prices drop by amount they usually increase

Gas prices have averaged going up 16 cents in July in the U.S. This July, they went down 16 cents.

The fracking revolution is real. The 21st century was supposed to be when green-energy sources took over from fossil fuels. But instead, fossil fuels are having a renaissance, almost entirely based in the U.S.

It’s why the U.S. is now the world’s leading producer of both oil and natural gas. It’s why a nation that used to consider energy independence a major foreign-policy goal could soon be on the brink of becoming a major exporter of oil and natural gas. And it’s why we see freaky things like plunging gasoline prices in the summer in a world of rising unrest and discord.

California could join in this Texas- and North Dakota-led revolution. Occidental Petroleum believes the state has more recoverable oil than Texas and North Dakota combined.

But so long as the green religionists control so much of state government, the Golden State is likely to stay on the sidelines — and only enjoy the indirect benefits of fracking: lower gas prices. Not the direct benefits of well-paying jobs and a revenue gusher.

Great. Just great.

Rarely do accounts offer stark statistics that illustrate just how big the boom has been. Thankfully, a new American Enterprise Institute analysis does so in dramatic fashion.

In a dozen years, North Dakota went from being one of the nation’s poorest states, grouped with some Southern states, New Mexico and West Virginia, to one of the richest, trailing only another energy giant — Alaska. That’s a pretty stunning success story — comparable to Japan’s and West Germany’s delayed post-World War II rebound in the 1960s and early 1970s, or to South Korea’s emergence in the last 20 years as a nation that’s wealthier than most of Europe.

Here are the details from AEI:

“In 2000, North Dakota was the 8th least economically prosperous US states, ranking No. 43 in the country for per-capita real GDP that year … with GDP per person ($35,738) that was more than 20% below the national average ($44,808). In that year, North Dakota was a relatively minor oil-producing state, ranking ninth among the US states for oil production … .

“Starting around 2007, private oil drillers started successfully drilling for shale oil in North Dakota, thanks to advances in drilling and extraction technologies that allowed ‘petropreneurs’ to finally tap into oceans of previously inaccessible unconventional oil in the Bakken oil fields in the western part of the state. … In just the three years between 2007 and 2010, North Dakota moved up 18 places in state rankings for per-capita real GDP, from No. 30 in 2007 to No. 12 in 2010. …

“After more than doubling from 2007 to 2010, annual oil production in the Peace Garden State more than doubled again in the two-year period from 2010 to 2012 … North Dakota was producing so much shale oil in the Bakken that it surpassed both Alaska and California to become the nation’s second-largest oil-producing state in 2012, behind only Texas. … by 2012, the energy-driven stimulus to the state’s economy moved North Dakota to the No. 2 spot in the country for per-capita real GDP at $64,871 behind only Alaska at $72,281, and 33.6% above the national average of $48,567. 

“In 2013, for the second year in a row, North Dakota again ranked No. 2 among US states for real GDP per capita at $68,804 … more than 40% above the national average.”

California could enjoy a similar miracle

The AEI number-crunching bears huge relevance to California, where the Monterey Shale’s oil reserves in the Central Valley and central Pacific coastal counties are believed to be several times as big as those in the Bakken Shale.

Federal energy officials have recently been more downbeat on California’s chances of accessing those reserves than they used to be, allegedly because of new concerns about geologic obstacles that they didn’t used to have. This doesn’t make sense — energy companies are better than ever at overcoming such obstacles. But it wasn’t all that surprising, given how often green bureaucrats pursue their own agendas.

Unsurprisingly, Occidental and other oil energy-exploration firms are far less apprehensive and continue to show great interest in expanding fracking of California’s shale. In its reports to shareholders — reports that Occidental must answer to the SEC for if they are judged deceptive — the energy company has estimated that California has more than 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil in its shale.

That’s more than twice as much as the rest of the U.S. combined. That’s 30 percent higher than the highest federal estimate before officials suddenly began to see geologic obstacles they hadn’t before.

2.8 million new CA jobs. Repeat: 2.8 million new CA jobs

That translates into a ton of money, to put it modestly. If anti-fossil fuel religious crusaders could be overcome, what might that mean for California? The USC report from March 2013 still seems like a good guide.

“Development of oil-shale deposits through Central California using fracking and other techniques may boost the state’s economic activity by as much as 14.3 percent, a University of Southern California study said.

“Such drilling in the Monterey Shale Formation, in addition to increasing per-capita gross domestic product, may add as much as $24.6 billion in state and local tax revenue and as many as 2.8 million jobs by 2020, according to the report … .”

Those numbers seemed outlandish to some folks when they came out 16 months ago. If you look at the AEI’s report on North Dakota, they don’t seem outlandish at all.

Why? Because …

“The North Dakota oil boom has resulted in more trains going boom. At least 10 trains hauling crude oil from the Bakken Shale across North America have derailed and spilled, often setting off explosions. The deadliest killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, on July 6, 2013. As California refineries seek to adapt their operations to bring in Bakken crude by rail, Bay Area residents in refinery towns want to know: Will they be safe? …

“Air pollution is the top-line concern for these communities, followed by fear of spills and explosions. Some protests are tied to the larger political debate over importing tar sands oil from Canada.”

No one can be trusted to protect us!

SOME protesters have ulterior motives? SOME????

More from the loony editorial:

“A state Senate committee will meet Monday to begin investigating whether California is prepared to receive hundreds of railcars a day of highly flammable Bakken crude. The legislators are asking: Should we have confidence that the agencies with oversight, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California Public Utilities Commission and Caltrans, are up to the job?

“We need to know how theses railroads will run safely before more Bakken crude comes in by rail.”

Oh, me, oh, my, as Ralph Lawler would say. There is nothing different about these rail shipments than tens of thousands of rail shipments into California over the past century that the San Francisco Chronicle somehow chose to overlook.

It’s impossible to see the Chon editorial as journalism. Instead, the editorial page is functioning as a wing of the anti-fossil fuel religionists, who are akin to abolitionists. Nothing — literally nothing — is too extreme to say in defense of The Cause.

If you can read this editorial without laughing, I don’t know how. Truly nutty stuff.

Now there’s fresh evidence of this from a U.S. neighbor that doesn’t exactly have a history of smart governance. Walter Russell Mead has the details:

“Mexico’s Senate voted [Tuesday] 95 to 28 in favor of an historic energy reform bill last night, setting the stage for a massive turnaround of the country’s oil and gas production. The bill is now headed to the lower house, which is expected to pass it later this week.  The reform, if passed, will be a defining victory for President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has already made a name for himself as a reformer in his first year in office.

“But this is much more than a boost to his legacy; it’s a chance for Mexico to really take advantage of its resource bounty. Mexico has large reserves of conventional onshore and offshore oil and gas, and the world’s sixth and eighth largest shale gas and shale oil reserves, respectively. …

“The reforms will be especially beneficial for Mexican shale exploration. Fracking was so successful in the US because of our relatively simple geology—geology Mexico shares—and our deep pool of firms willing to compete with one another to develop the technology and take the risks on unproven techniques and reserves—something Mexico lacks. But that could change if this bill goes through. These changes could help the country realize the Pemex CEO’s dream of becoming the world’s ‘new Middle East.'”

Will CA join the ‘phenomenon’ or not?

Mead concludes that …

“Mexico is poised to join the US and Canada as new major players in the global oil and gas market, and if these reforms are successful, it will make the shale boom a truly North American phenomenon.”

But will California join in this “North American phenomenon” or not? Maybe not, given the dishonest media coverage of fracking.

From last month, here’s the latest L.A. Times editorial on fracking to not even mention that the Obama administration has repeatedly signed off on fracking’s safety, seeing it as just another heavy industry that can be made safe with proper regulation.

The latest Sac Bee editorial on fracking, which came in September, is not available for free online, but it too never even mentions that the Obama administration has repeatedly signed off on fracking’s safety.

The latest San Francisco Chronicle editorial on fracking also never even mentions that the Obama administration has repeatedly signed off on fracking’s safety. It’s from last month.

Only one editorial from a prominent liberal paper even hinted at the Obama administration’s views of fracking. It was the San Jose Mercury-News piece posted Sept. 15.

“Some environmentalists won’t be happy unless there is a complete ban on fracking or a moratorium until the environmental impact review is complete. But studies by the Environmental Protection Agency have not linked fracking by oil companies to groundwater contamination.”

Both edit page, reporters in on LAT’s anti-fracking agenda

Boy, such context would sure by valuable in all coverage of California and fracking, dontcha think? But so would the comments of U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at a May press conference, as reported by The New York Times.

“Anticipating criticism from environmental advocates, she said: ‘I know there are those who say fracking is dangerous and should be curtailed, full stop. That ignores the reality that it has been done for decades and has the potential for developing significant domestic resources and strengthening our economy and will be done for decades to come.’”

The Los Angeles Times also covered Jewell’s press conference. It didn’t mention Jewell’s strong support for fracking. Instead, it went to an oil-industry spokesman to make the claim that fracking is safe — not President Obama’s secretary of the interior.

So it’s not just the LAT editorial page with an agenda on fracking. It’s the newsroom, too.

Great, just great.

By Chris Reed

Greens were doing some chest-thumping this week after a new study came out that said California led the nation in 2012 in creation of green jobs.

“Environmental Entrepreneurs tracks the creation of green jobs on a monthly basis. The 2012 wrap-up found firms announced the creation of 110,000 green jobs last year. About 26,000 of those jobs were in California.”

But that’s a puny number by almost any objective standard. It confirms that green jobs are just a small niche and will never be a core sector of the economy, just as the respected McKinsey consulting firm predicted, and just as Barack Obama’s economics advisers told him in winter 2008-09 as they put together what would become the 2009 stimulus bill, and just as I told Gov. Jerry Brown when he touted the same myths as Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Meanwhile, let’s look at the employment numbers in North Dakota, where leaders emphasize brown jobs — created by the fracking boom — not subsidized, corporate crony green jobs. From 2010 to 2012, this tiny little state went from 370,000 employed residents to 421,000 employed residents — a stunning 14 percent increase with few parallels in recent U.S. history. Equivalent growth in the California workforce would mean 2 million new jobs.

Let’s trade governors with North Dakota

Instead, as of December, the Golden State continued to have the third highest unemployment rate in the nation, and North Dakota continued to have the lowest — a tiny 3.2 percent — and a different set of worker problems than those seen in any other state.

If only we could trade governors and legislatures. Bill Clinton had that great post-presidential gig in Argentina, remember?

Oh, wait. That was in The Onion’s world. It’s stranger than ours. But not by too much. Consider that California easily could be the Saudi Arabia of the First World, but that the majority party that controls the state thinks this is a bad thing. Instead of the 21st-century version of “There Will Be Blood,” in Sacramento, it’s more like “There Will Be Duds.”

By Chris Reed

In my research for a U-T San Diego editorial that’s running today about fracking’s immense promise in California, I was astounded to find that Occidental, one of the largest oil/gas companies in the U.S., says it has already secured control of drillable land in the Central Valley with quintuple the potential oil reserves of the Bakken formation in North Dakota:

“Even if California’s media haven’t caught on to the state’s potential for a Bakken-style economic boom, the oil industry has. By far the BLM’s biggest 2011 lease [for use of federal land for oil and gas exploration in California] was the $180,000 paid for a 200-acre parcel by Vintage Production California, a Bakersfield-based subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, the third-largest U.S. oil and gas producer. On Oxy’s website, it estimates the shale reserves on California land it already controls to have over 20 billion barrels of potential oil — a claim that the company says is made in accordance with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rule that only ‘economically producible’ reserves can be cited in SEC filings.”

We can expect an immense battle over fracking in California, starting soon. The environmentalists are hugely powerful here. But with tens of billions of dollars at stake, Occidental and other oil companies won’t be scared to take them on.

By Chriss Street

This is a crucial development for California, which recently slipped to fourth among the 50 states in oil production. Texas remains first, followed by North Dakota and its lucrative new Bakken formation, then Alaska in third place.

The United States is on track to achieve independence from imported Middle East oil within the next seven years due to the boom in domestic and North American energy development.  Consequently, the United States would have eventually ratcheted down our huge military presence in the Middle East defending oil imports.

But just like television scenes of the attack on the United States embassy during the 1968 TET Offensive destroyed public support for the Vietnam War, last week’s television images of protests against American embassies has devastated public support for a continuing military presence in the Middle East.  The American public will soon demand a crash program to exploit domestic energy resources to facilitate a Middle East withdrawal.

American Exceptionalism’s military and economic triumphs in the first half of the 20th Century were directly attributable to secure domestic access to immense amounts of oil. President Coolidge wrote in 1924 after WW I, “the supremacy of nations may be determined by the possession of available petroleum and its products.”

World War II

During World War II, the United States’ domestic gasoline output for the military grew 18 times and the production of aviation fuel jumped by 80 times.  Half the total weight of supplies shipped overseas to U.S. allies during the war consisted of petroleum products.

Following defeat of Germany’s Afrika Korps in 1943, Middle East oil resources were rapidly commercialized.  After the war, massive new volumes of cheap Middle East oil froze the world price of oil at between $2.77 and $3.60 a barrel from 1948 to 1972.  During that period, American domestic production withered and the bulk of U.S. oil refining capacity was relocated to coastal ports on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

On December 2, 1970, just as oil prices were about to climb, Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency, which had a huge negative financial impact on the domestic oil industry.  The number operating oil refineries in the U.S. fell from 301 in 1970 to 134 today.  Land-based oil production fell from 9.6 million barrels a day in 1970 to only 5.1 million in 2005.

Even with new off-shore production in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, total U.S. domestic oil production fell from 10.8 million barrels a day in 1980 to 8.3 million barrels in 2005.  To cover the shortfall as demand continued to grow, imports rose from 1.3 million barrels a day in 1970, providing 12 percent of supply, to a peak of more than 12 million barrels in 2005, accounting for 63 percent of all U.S. oil supply. 

Fracking

But since 2008, fracking and other new drilling technologies have fostered a domestic 25 percwent surge in oil production and a 40 percent jump in natural gas production.  Demand for imported oil has fallen to less than 45 percent of supply, the lowest level since 1997.  Cheap new supplies from Canadian tar sands drove down imports of Middle East oil to less than 10 percent of U.S. supply.

Radical Islam’s coordinated attacks against American embassies across the Middle East have fractured the region’s respect for U.S. military power and emboldened our enemies.  Taliban forces this weekend brazenly penetrated the perimeter of a the joint U.S. and British air base in Afghanistan, blew up 6 Marine Harrier “jump jets” and killed one of the Marines’ highest decorated Air Squadron leaders.  After NATO forces suffered their 51st murder by Afghan government forces, the U.S. military suspended all operations patrolling with Afghan troops.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson claimed a military victory as American and South Vietnam forces slaughtered 10 times as many Viet Cong as Americans were lost in the TET Offensive.  But bloody television images of the battle at the U.S. embassy in Saigon convinced Americans that the Vietnamese could never be pacified.  Similar television images of anti-American violence in the Middle East has convinced the American public that the Middle East cannot be pacified.

The American public will soon politically coalesce around a major increase in domestic energy exploration and development in order to facilitate the elimination of reliance on imported Middle East oil.  Fortunately, America has the technology and resource potential to rapidly make this initiative a reality.

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By WAYNE LUSVARDI

New extraction technologies are creating an oil and gas boom that is lifting the economics of several states, as reported by the Wall Street Journal’s recent article “Oil and Gas Boom Lifts U.S. Economy.”

Median incomes are growing since 2007 in such states as Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas. Conspicuously absent is the State of California, which ironically has the third largest oil reserves in the United States and two-thirds of all the shale oil reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information Service.

About 158,500 new oil and gas jobs have been created over the last five years across America. But it is the economic multiplier effect that this boom is creating in the wider economy that is spreading the boom beyond the oil patch.  Jobs and incomes are growing for truck drivers, manufactured home builders, energy traders and landowners with oil and gas leases.   According to independent economist Tim Considine, every oil and gas sector job supports four additional jobs.

But perhaps more importantly, natural gas is providing such cheap energy that manufacturing plants are reportedly returning to the America, or considering a return.  Reportedly, Asian-based industries have to pay up to six times as much for natural gas as industries in Texas or Louisiana. To lay the base for reindustrialization, cheap energy may be the key.

The question remains: Why is California suffering from economic lag when other states are lifting their economies out of the recession through oil and gas drilling?

Red States Booming — Blue States Lagging

Perhaps California’s turn to expensive green power is one reason why, thus far, it has not been a part of this new oil and gas boom, or the reindustrialization. But Texas has been as expansive with green power as California.

Perhaps the table below is indicative of why California has not shown a recovery in median incomes since 2007.  The table shows the shale oil reserves in several oil and gas producing Western states compared with the change in median incomes since 2007.  Also shown is the political majority of the legislature of each state.   Red states are booming and Blue states are showing no recovery.

Since 2007, several western states have shown growth in median incomes. Most notable are those states with active oil and gas drilling.  Median income have grown since 2007 in Wyoming by 3.68 percent, in North Dakota by 2.9 percent, in Oklahoma by 1 percent and in Texas by 0.8 percent.  But the median income in California has dropped by -3.4 percent and in New Mexico by -0.2 percent.

Median Income Change in Oil & Gas Producing  States in Western U.S.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, communities that are benefitting from oil and gas drilling are seeing it as an economic “game changer.”

However, communities in California are faced with:

* The only active Cap and Trade tax on large industries in the United States.

* The only Green Chemistry Law that requires industries to prove at great cost that there chemical products do not have a safer alternative.

* A proposed near-zero standard for perchlorate in drinking water with no discernible health benefits, but huge cleanup costs on industries and water and electric utilities.

* The highest combined tax rates in the United States.

* An environmental impact law that can be gamed worse than Enron ever did to protect monopolies and erect trade barriers.

While California currently seems engrossed with High-Speed Rail projects, renewal of public funding for redundant stem cell research and putting more pro-tax initiatives on the upcoming November ballot, other states are proceeding with a renaissance of the oil and gas industries.  This has serious implications for the upcoming presidential and congressional elections outside California in November.

CA’s De-Modernization Model 

Going all the way back to when the state limited the influence of the monopoly Southern Pacific Railroad, California has embraced counter-modernization and de-industrialization as its economic and political model.  This has provided an alternative to the harshness and alienation of the modern world.  But the United States is on the verge of near energy self-sufficiency and re-industrialization that may leave California behind.

Conversely, California remains an over-regulated state whose only way to compete is to erect trade barriers and impose taxes wherever possible.  This will continue to wreak serious consequences on its state budget and the unsustainability of its government pension funds.

It is unlikely that California will change from de-modernization back to reindustrialization in the near future.  As such, California is likely to continue to lag behind other states that are benefitting from the oil and gas boom and the re-industrialization that comes with it.