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I honestly do not fault Europe for not pursuing fracking. If you haven't spent much time over here it's not easy as an American to appreciate just how little "e

I honestly do not fault Europe for not pursuing fracking. If you haven't spent much time over here it's not easy as an American to appreciate just how little "empty space" there is on the continent. There is really no where that doesn't impact communities of people. The us can easily afford to basically throw a few little towns in Oklahoma under the bus and no one really notices or cares. That's just possible here. Too many damned humans, and too many teetering systems. Could you imagine the outcry if a fracking induced earthquake took down a 13th century church someplace? No one wants that.

mytailorisrich 3y ago
Plenty of empty space to do fracking in Europe. This is a case of ideology over strategic thinking for Europe, IMHO, and we've seen, and are seeing, the consequences of relying of foreign imports instead.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  We just care more about pollution in Europe. Greenhouse emissions aren't the only environmental problems (and those are also worsened by fracking of course as it's still a means of producing fossil fuels) I totally support our stance against fracking. And the dependency on Russia was a bit of an issue for the first winter of the war but prices are back to normal now.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    Dependency has not gone away. We still import plenty but now from US and Qatar (I.e US are again winning while we are again losing). It's not even about pollution. To say banalities like "we care more about pollution" means nothing and is not aligned with reality. Again, the issue is ideology. This is failing Europe in many areas, not just this.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      We do care a hell of a lot more about pollution that most of the world. In the Netherlands half the country is at a standstill because some Nitrogen levels are too high. Building projects are stopped, farmers have to reduce fertilising etc. Even the maximum speed was reduced nationwide, not because of CO2 emissions but because of nitrogen messing with local ecosystems. I support that, but it's very important to realise that this is pretty unique in the world. "Green parties" are a huge thing and often even part of governments, is there even one in the US? :) And yeah we still import but you can't change things from one day to another.
    - bigfudge 3y ago
      You are wrong. Paris literally this week voted to tax SUVs from the city, in part because of pollution. It also speaks to a wider concern here not to allow commerce to dominate other public goods.
      - mytailorisrich 3y ago
        The Paris' mayor has very poor approval ratings and has organised a populist referendum on a dubious proposal to try to prop herself up... not a very good example, IMHO. "Not allow commerce to..." thrown left and right: if that's not a typical ideological stance in Europe, I don't know what is.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        > "Not allow commerce to..." thrown left and right: if that's not a typical ideological stance in Europe, I don't know what is. Yeah but that's a good thing in my book. The US tends to be very unbalanced in this regard, commerce all the way and not much attention to externalities, both environmental and societal (e.g. welfare and labour rights) Europe is substantially different from an ideological perspective and that provides us with a much better quality of life (much lower violent crime, much better public transport, no crazy healthcare prices, greener cities etc). Of course the US does better economically but economy isn't everything. And it's a self-defeating goal anyway, the more money people have, the more they spend on scarce housing and other goods which means the housing crisis is just as bad in the US as it is here despite the higher salaries there. > The Paris' mayor has very poor approval ratings and has organised a populist referendum on a dubious proposal to try to prop herself up... not a very good example, IMHO. Paris is far from the only city in Europe banning the most polluting vehicles. Almost every major city does this now. And the air quality really did improve due to this. And our cities are just a lot more smaller scale due to the longer history - there's a reason the smart was invented here :)
  - mk89 3y ago
    > And the dependency on Russia was a bit of an issue for the first winter of the war but prices are back to normal now. I am all for "let's cut the gas" blabla, but it's a bit unfair to say "prices are back to normal" (which is also not entirely true from the consumer perspective): lots of companies had to shut down, some will, some left to go to other "better" places, some fired thousands of people because of energy prices. I don't see that coming back any time soon, to be honest.
- mk89 3y ago
  > we've seen, and are seeing, the consequences of relying of foreign imports instead. In my opinion, you're confusing bad political choices (=let's get addicted to Russian gas, then we will see about it in 10 years) with everything else. Germany could have done more in the past 10 years to not get to the point in 2022 to be threatened by a country - they didn't, now they have to brute-force innovation/renovation. I would just like to remind you that US is still buying a quarter of necessary enriched uranium from Russia, and US doesn't seem a country of "ideology" as you claim. If Russia wants to retaliate today, it's really bad news.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    Germany's energy policy is the best example in Europe of ideology over pragmatism. The most glaring example is how they decided to exit nuclear with no clean alternative for ideological reasons. Ban of fracking is not pragmatic, either. If gas isn't imported from Russia, it is from the US or Qatar, which is the same in terms of foreign power dependency and balance on foreign payments, when shale gas/fracking provides an alternative.
    - mk89 3y ago
      > The most glaring example is how they decided to exit nuclear with no clean alternative for ideological reasons. I would have said fear rather than ideology, to be honest. It was the times of Chernobyl and later Fukushima gave the last blow. It's a bit unfair to "forget" what happened 40 and 20 years ago - things must be contextualized. > If gas isn't imported from Russia, it is from the US or Qatar, which is the same in terms of foreign power dependency and balance on foreign payments, when shale gas/fracking provides an alternative. It's different in the sense that you don't depend entirely on a single country for your gas (like it was before), so that particular country cannot threaten you like they did. The goal of this governement is to drastically reduce energy consumption and use renewables, while at the same time "buying" gas from wherever else. This was for a political reason, otherwise they would have kept on buying gas from Russia and implemented slowly their green/eco program. The issue is not fracking yes or no, but the fact that in the previous 10-15 years it wasn't done enough to avoid what happened in 2022.
imp0cat 3y ago
They put their churches on rails and move them out of the way as required instead. No, seriously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnJwbhos9eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnJwbhos9eM The heaviest building ever moved on wheels Between September 30 and October 27, 1975, the church was moved a distance of 841.1 meters at a velocity of 13 centimeters per minute to the vicinity of the old hospital, and it was set on an iron-concrete two-storied foundation. A small church of St. Ghost was also moved during October. After the move was completed, restoration work went on until 1988, and the church was solemnly blessed again in 1993.
eru 3y ago
> Could you imagine the outcry if a fracking induced earthquake took down a 13th century church someplace? No one wants that. Seems like an straightforward case of externalities? Coasian bargaining and/or Pigovian taxes can deal with them. Yes, 13th century churches have value, but so do a lot of other things, like convenience or reducing CO2 emissions. You can fix teetering systems with money. Politically, you'd want to be careful to align who benefits from fracking (eg via taxes) and who bears the burden (eg from minor earthquakes). So if the dangers of fracking extent to about, say, 30km from the side of where the well sits, you'd want to make sure that the tax revenues and authority to decide on whether to allow fracking and what obligations to put on frackers should also roughly occur on that level of 30km. Eg within a county perhaps. This way the voters in different counties can make up their mind about what they want to allow, and what they ask for in return. Perhaps they want the frackers to post a billion dollar bond underwritten by a major re-insurance company as insurance for that 13th century church, before they allow fracking. Write the contract in such a way that any earthquake damage to that church would be covered, without need for proof that fracking was to blame.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  This is so wonderfully naive to the realities of contract negotiations between large corporates and governments. There is an asymmetry here which works agains the public good. Corporations tend to only have to corrupt an offici or capture a regulatory body once to extract long term concessions, which rarely if ever get rolled back. The same is not true in reverse. In practice this means governments aren’t able to effectively exert democratic mandates over policy areas like this.
  - eru 3y ago
    The government is vastly more powerful than companies. The government can make arbitrary rules (= laws) that the company has to abide by. The company has no such power. > In practice this means governments aren’t able to effectively exert democratic mandates over policy areas like this. How did the Germans ever shut down their nuclear power plants? They were already up and running, so they were literally printing money for their corporate owners? How did GDPR pass in Europe? Why can't Google build housing for their employees in Mountain View? I would like to live in your utopia where companies are all powerful!
nehal3m 3y ago
I happen to live in a very old European village that is being damaged by fracking to the point where homes became uninhabitable. I’ve been fighting the government for the money to replace the house they’ve forced me out of for the past 5 years. There are some who respond to you by saying this can be solved with money but that ignores a significant humanitarian cost. Responsible parties will do whatever they can to shirk responsibility and affected parties will have to waste years of their lives trying to regain safe shelter through bureaucracy. Sometimes it feels hopeless.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's just the local version of the resource curse. Imagine living in a whole country like that. The world economy is when you look at it rationally completely bonkers, we dig stuff up in one place to burn it elsewhere, we make stuff here to use it thousands of km away. Without all that cheap transportation, which in itself is a big contributor to the emissions we'd be forced to solve our problems locally. All that we do today is to destroy the planet whilst pretend externalizing the costs. But it is one planet, and there is no externalization happening so in the end it all goes down, the only thing we are doing is to lower the lows and to raise the peaks temporarily at the expense of the future.
amatecha 3y ago
Well, Europe isn't exactly saintly, unfortunately. Germany is literally tearing down entire towns to make way for lignite ("brown coal") mining: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/635911260/germany-turns-to-brown-coal-to-fill-its-energy-gap https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/635911260/germany-turns-to-br... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine "Nearly 50 villages in this region have been evacuated and destroyed for the ever-expanding mines, and Winzen's village of Keyenberg — more than a thousand years old — is set to be next.": https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010956116/a-coal-mining-monster-is-threatening-to-swallow-a-small-town-in-germany https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010956116/a-coal-mining-mons... Just as an aside, apparently the company doing this, RWE, was the #1 producer of CO2 emissions in Europe in 2018 ( https://archive.is/Qe9KJ https://archive.is/Qe9KJ ). All I can say is, the sooner renewable energy takes over, the better.

mytailorisrich 3y ago

Plenty of empty space to do fracking in Europe. This is a case of ideology over strategic thinking for Europe, IMHO, and we've seen, and are seeing, the consequences of relying of foreign imports instead.

wkat4242 3y ago
We just care more about pollution in Europe. Greenhouse emissions aren't the only environmental problems (and those are also worsened by fracking of course as it's still a means of producing fossil fuels) I totally support our stance against fracking. And the dependency on Russia was a bit of an issue for the first winter of the war but prices are back to normal now.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Dependency has not gone away. We still import plenty but now from US and Qatar (I.e US are again winning while we are again losing). It's not even about pollution. To say banalities like "we care more about pollution" means nothing and is not aligned with reality. Again, the issue is ideology. This is failing Europe in many areas, not just this.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    We do care a hell of a lot more about pollution that most of the world. In the Netherlands half the country is at a standstill because some Nitrogen levels are too high. Building projects are stopped, farmers have to reduce fertilising etc. Even the maximum speed was reduced nationwide, not because of CO2 emissions but because of nitrogen messing with local ecosystems. I support that, but it's very important to realise that this is pretty unique in the world. "Green parties" are a huge thing and often even part of governments, is there even one in the US? :) And yeah we still import but you can't change things from one day to another.
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    You are wrong. Paris literally this week voted to tax SUVs from the city, in part because of pollution. It also speaks to a wider concern here not to allow commerce to dominate other public goods.
    - mytailorisrich 3y ago
      The Paris' mayor has very poor approval ratings and has organised a populist referendum on a dubious proposal to try to prop herself up... not a very good example, IMHO. "Not allow commerce to..." thrown left and right: if that's not a typical ideological stance in Europe, I don't know what is.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        > "Not allow commerce to..." thrown left and right: if that's not a typical ideological stance in Europe, I don't know what is. Yeah but that's a good thing in my book. The US tends to be very unbalanced in this regard, commerce all the way and not much attention to externalities, both environmental and societal (e.g. welfare and labour rights) Europe is substantially different from an ideological perspective and that provides us with a much better quality of life (much lower violent crime, much better public transport, no crazy healthcare prices, greener cities etc). Of course the US does better economically but economy isn't everything. And it's a self-defeating goal anyway, the more money people have, the more they spend on scarce housing and other goods which means the housing crisis is just as bad in the US as it is here despite the higher salaries there. > The Paris' mayor has very poor approval ratings and has organised a populist referendum on a dubious proposal to try to prop herself up... not a very good example, IMHO. Paris is far from the only city in Europe banning the most polluting vehicles. Almost every major city does this now. And the air quality really did improve due to this. And our cities are just a lot more smaller scale due to the longer history - there's a reason the smart was invented here :)
- mk89 3y ago
  > And the dependency on Russia was a bit of an issue for the first winter of the war but prices are back to normal now. I am all for "let's cut the gas" blabla, but it's a bit unfair to say "prices are back to normal" (which is also not entirely true from the consumer perspective): lots of companies had to shut down, some will, some left to go to other "better" places, some fired thousands of people because of energy prices. I don't see that coming back any time soon, to be honest.
mk89 3y ago
> we've seen, and are seeing, the consequences of relying of foreign imports instead. In my opinion, you're confusing bad political choices (=let's get addicted to Russian gas, then we will see about it in 10 years) with everything else. Germany could have done more in the past 10 years to not get to the point in 2022 to be threatened by a country - they didn't, now they have to brute-force innovation/renovation. I would just like to remind you that US is still buying a quarter of necessary enriched uranium from Russia, and US doesn't seem a country of "ideology" as you claim. If Russia wants to retaliate today, it's really bad news.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Germany's energy policy is the best example in Europe of ideology over pragmatism. The most glaring example is how they decided to exit nuclear with no clean alternative for ideological reasons. Ban of fracking is not pragmatic, either. If gas isn't imported from Russia, it is from the US or Qatar, which is the same in terms of foreign power dependency and balance on foreign payments, when shale gas/fracking provides an alternative.
  - mk89 3y ago
    > The most glaring example is how they decided to exit nuclear with no clean alternative for ideological reasons. I would have said fear rather than ideology, to be honest. It was the times of Chernobyl and later Fukushima gave the last blow. It's a bit unfair to "forget" what happened 40 and 20 years ago - things must be contextualized. > If gas isn't imported from Russia, it is from the US or Qatar, which is the same in terms of foreign power dependency and balance on foreign payments, when shale gas/fracking provides an alternative. It's different in the sense that you don't depend entirely on a single country for your gas (like it was before), so that particular country cannot threaten you like they did. The goal of this governement is to drastically reduce energy consumption and use renewables, while at the same time "buying" gas from wherever else. This was for a political reason, otherwise they would have kept on buying gas from Russia and implemented slowly their green/eco program. The issue is not fracking yes or no, but the fact that in the previous 10-15 years it wasn't done enough to avoid what happened in 2022.

imp0cat 3y ago

They put their churches on rails and move them out of the way as required instead. No, seriously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnJwbhos9eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnJwbhos9eM The heaviest building ever moved on wheels Between September 30 and October 27, 1975, the church was moved a distance of 841.1 meters at a velocity of 13 centimeters per minute to the vicinity of the old hospital, and it was set on an iron-concrete two-storied foundation. A small church of St. Ghost was also moved during October. After the move was completed, restoration work went on until 1988, and the church was solemnly blessed again in 1993.

eru 3y ago

> Could you imagine the outcry if a fracking induced earthquake took down a 13th century church someplace? No one wants that. Seems like an straightforward case of externalities? Coasian bargaining and/or Pigovian taxes can deal with them. Yes, 13th century churches have value, but so do a lot of other things, like convenience or reducing CO2 emissions. You can fix teetering systems with money. Politically, you'd want to be careful to align who benefits from fracking (eg via taxes) and who bears the burden (eg from minor earthquakes). So if the dangers of fracking extent to about, say, 30km from the side of where the well sits, you'd want to make sure that the tax revenues and authority to decide on whether to allow fracking and what obligations to put on frackers should also roughly occur on that level of 30km. Eg within a county perhaps. This way the voters in different counties can make up their mind about what they want to allow, and what they ask for in return. Perhaps they want the frackers to post a billion dollar bond underwritten by a major re-insurance company as insurance for that 13th century church, before they allow fracking. Write the contract in such a way that any earthquake damage to that church would be covered, without need for proof that fracking was to blame.

bigfudge 3y ago
This is so wonderfully naive to the realities of contract negotiations between large corporates and governments. There is an asymmetry here which works agains the public good. Corporations tend to only have to corrupt an offici or capture a regulatory body once to extract long term concessions, which rarely if ever get rolled back. The same is not true in reverse. In practice this means governments aren’t able to effectively exert democratic mandates over policy areas like this.
- eru 3y ago
  The government is vastly more powerful than companies. The government can make arbitrary rules (= laws) that the company has to abide by. The company has no such power. > In practice this means governments aren’t able to effectively exert democratic mandates over policy areas like this. How did the Germans ever shut down their nuclear power plants? They were already up and running, so they were literally printing money for their corporate owners? How did GDPR pass in Europe? Why can't Google build housing for their employees in Mountain View? I would like to live in your utopia where companies are all powerful!

nehal3m 3y ago

I happen to live in a very old European village that is being damaged by fracking to the point where homes became uninhabitable. I’ve been fighting the government for the money to replace the house they’ve forced me out of for the past 5 years. There are some who respond to you by saying this can be solved with money but that ignores a significant humanitarian cost. Responsible parties will do whatever they can to shirk responsibility and affected parties will have to waste years of their lives trying to regain safe shelter through bureaucracy. Sometimes it feels hopeless.

jacquesm 3y ago
That's just the local version of the resource curse. Imagine living in a whole country like that. The world economy is when you look at it rationally completely bonkers, we dig stuff up in one place to burn it elsewhere, we make stuff here to use it thousands of km away. Without all that cheap transportation, which in itself is a big contributor to the emissions we'd be forced to solve our problems locally. All that we do today is to destroy the planet whilst pretend externalizing the costs. But it is one planet, and there is no externalization happening so in the end it all goes down, the only thing we are doing is to lower the lows and to raise the peaks temporarily at the expense of the future.

amatecha 3y ago

Well, Europe isn't exactly saintly, unfortunately. Germany is literally tearing down entire towns to make way for lignite ("brown coal") mining: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/635911260/germany-turns-to-brown-coal-to-fill-its-energy-gap https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/635911260/germany-turns-to-br... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine "Nearly 50 villages in this region have been evacuated and destroyed for the ever-expanding mines, and Winzen's village of Keyenberg — more than a thousand years old — is set to be next.": https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010956116/a-coal-mining-monster-is-threatening-to-swallow-a-small-town-in-germany https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010956116/a-coal-mining-mons... Just as an aside, apparently the company doing this, RWE, was the #1 producer of CO2 emissions in Europe in 2018 ( https://archive.is/Qe9KJ https://archive.is/Qe9KJ ). All I can say is, the sooner renewable energy takes over, the better.