NY Times Sees What Isn't There To Slime Oil Industry

This is kinda neat, although I must say that I was afraid that in the hands of the New York Crimes, this analysis might have taken on the typical moralistic tone of disapprobation that nearly every treatment of the energy industry gets in the Crimes.  The feature is somewhat free of that, but one can easily envision Crimes' readership getting the vapors, and no doubt the authors' purpose was to provoke that reaction sotto voce.

There are plenty of points to be made here, but this is the big one - those drilling pipes are NOT aboveground, which is probably the number two reason that fracking technology is AWESOME!  (The #1 reason being that it actually gets us oil to use as we have chosen to do.)  You can try to conjure up images of industrial scale despoliation of the Earth as much as you want, but the fact that we can draw resource efficiently an unobtrusively is cause for celebration.

Finally, one point that will obviously be missed by Crimesians, is that the alternatives they pine so fervently for (in the name of saving the planet) ARE ACTUALLY ABOVEGROUND!!  Lefties have to imagine and conjure a reality that doesn't exist in order to cast aspersions on hydrocarbons, while completely ignoring the reality of their preferences that are staring us all in the face.  Indeed, scientists have extrapolated how much of the Earth's surface would need to be covered by solar panels and/or wind farms in order to replace fossil fuels 100%, and the answer isn't pretty.

(HT: Mark Perry)