I was reading this interesting article (likely too long for many readers) about one of the personalities behind the whole Fracking issue and thought I would use that as incentive to talk about some of my thoughts on the issues of personalities behind the technology. It isn’t necessarily important to read this article before reading my comments, unlike most of my posts which presume you have read the article. Here is the article:
The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom
It’s not only toxic – it’s driven by a right-wing billionaire who profits more from flipping land than drilling for gas.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-big-fracking-bubble-the-scam-behind-the-gas-boom-20120301
In addition to the above article these thoughts were further triggered by an article I was exposed to via a LinkedIn group:
Shale Gas: The True Story
http://www.dailyenergyreport.com/2012/02/shale-gas-the-true-story/
Reading this rather glowing potential on fracking _assuming that no mistakes are made_ triggered a recollection of an article I had read much earlier (before I started blogging, I think) that laid out in terms I found very easy to understand the primary complaint the author had against the nuclear industry (from a tree hugger’s perspective). I somewhat summarize what I recall from my post to the LinkedIn group discussion:
I am a fervent supporter of the nuclear industry but read an article some time ago that was finally written in such a way to allow me to understand the problem from the ‘tree huggers’ perspective. The problem is not with the use of nuclear reactors itself, the problem is that because of the NIMBY issues that have unnecessarily driven up the costs of construction and operation the most moral and ethical operators have been driven out of the business (either from economic considerations or simple frustration) leaving the industry, on average, operated by unethical people who lack the moral compunction to ensure that all the regulations are met. Couple that with the raging plethora of idiotic regulations (for instance: I worked in a university lab that used as much radioisotopes as the entire rest of the university combined (and it is a major public university) and even though the radioactivity would decay to immeasurable in a year or so we had to account for every jot and tittle of the material. Yet I know with absolute certainty that I could have swallowed the entire contents of the stock bottle when it was fresh from the reactor and wouldn’t have suffered any tiny possibility of health concerns) that lead even the people who care to get frustrated and you have a recipe for the willy nilly adherence to regulation. So, with unethical owners and managers encouraging people to cut corners because even well educated, caring and thoughtful people think that a lot of the regulations are idiotic, you wind up with a culture that ignores regulations and minimizes maintenance, etc. As such, the real problem with fraking, just like the real problem in the nuclear industry, is that the owners and operators don’t care and take short cuts that will inevitably lead to problems. Then, because they know they are violating regulations, when the inevitable does happen they immediately leap to cover ups and attacking the victims.
Solution? In my mind the regulations need to be established by rational people who use real science and evaluate economic tradeoffs, cost/benefit, etc. so that thoughtful caring people will agree that the regulations are meaningful, then, something else sadly lacking in our current government, require strict enforcement so that all industry participants are operating in a level playing field. Those that game the system need to be punished in such a way that the economic cost of violating the regulations is too high to consider.
Not all regulation is bad. For instance I am a strong believer in building codes and while I do find bits arguable, on the whole I find the emphasis on safety that encompasses a realistic cost/benefit analysis to be spot on, so much so that when I find something arguable I tend to go along without (much; no one who knows me would expect me to not bitch about it) fuss. However, when regulation is done without sane cost/benefit analysis and further, when extrapolations are done without any scientific merit, you wind up with nonsensical regulations that encourage the industry to ignore them.
A for instance I used during my discussion (oration)… When engineers evaluate a material for construction, for example steel, they build some examples and test them to failure. With that information the general engineering rule of thumb is to halve the load, then halve it again, so basically operating at design loads leaves you with a 75% margin of error. Since the engineers working from the design loads reported by those doing the testing tend to halve the load once again you are often now looking at something designed at close to 10% of its ultimate failure load. Engineers tend to be very conservative and since they are literally putting their professional lives on the line every time they sign something, it is the smart thing to do. Additionally, from an economic stand point, the cost of a steel beam (compared to the cost of the overall project) that is rated at 10% of its ultimate design load vs one that is rated to, say, 90% of its ultimate design load, is so trivial to be inconsequential. Thus the cost/benefit tradeoff is such that the cost is very low and the benefit quite high, so these sorts of rules (much like the building codes (which, of course, are on top of much of the engineering testing mentioned)) generally find very few in the industry who advocate ignoring them or taking shortcuts to get around.
What happens when you have nonsensical regulations (like the ones on radioisotopes I mention in my quote above)? Well, business owners hire experts to manage the technical aspects of the business and when those experts express frustration at regulation, belittle the people who produced the regulation and actively suggest ways to get around the often expensive adherence, what would the business owner come to think? That _all_ the regulations are dumb and _all_ the regulations should be ignored and avoided. Since the expert is expert by virtue of a substantial life-time of effort in a very technical area, he (or she; while women are still finding it hard to break into senior management (in business or politics), they have made substantial headway in technical areas) finds it very difficult to communicate when certain elements of the regulation are sane and need to be addressed.
Personalities of the people at the very top of organizations (particularly organizations that have been quickly built by those at the top) tend to be reflected in the organization throughout and it seems to me that once a culture of ignoring the rules and regulation has been established at the very top, the ‘trickle down effect’ pretty much ensures that the organization as a whole will reflect that lack of respect. It is not so much that moral and ethical people lose their morals and ethics when they join such companies, it is more about the self selection that goes on when people in their youth examine industries and those with high moral and ethical character choose not to explore industries that have a long history of corruption and rule breaking. Thus there is more than a bit of feedback leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy where once NIMBY has targeted some industry for a heaping serving of idiotic regulation, which often leads to the potential for substantial profit margins for those willing to ignore said regulations, leading to a loop where additional idiotic regulations are heaped on until any moral or ethical people in the ‘biz have been driven out. Naturally, once it becomes impossible to be profitable only by ignoring the regulations then you are basically guaranteed that only criminals or people acting ever-so-slightly within the bounds of the law (laws, btw, that they tend to use their ill-gotten profits to tailor to allow them more freedom) will be in the industry.
To me fracking and nuclear energy has been over regulated to the point where nonsense has got involved, which has lead to blanket rejection of all regulation and the subsequent criminal activity. Of course people will point out that even good regulations are worthless without strict oversight, but my immediate response is that it cost just as much to enforce an idiotic regulation as a sane one and if your regulators get sucked into the culture that some regulations are OK to ignore, then even that will be suspect. There is the additional problem that the excess profits generated through the illegal (immoral, unethical) behavior is used to water down the enforcement of the regulations, so this is hardly a magic bullet, but it seems to me that nonsensical regulations implemented without a peer (i.e., no tree huggers allowed) accepted cost/benefit analysis are at the core of the problem. Clearly not even ideal regulations are meaningful if there is no enforcement and enforcement must be economically more costly than the cost of the regulations or enforcement is useless. Which means, of course, that fines need to inflate as the industry profits inflate and larger companies need to be subject to higher fines than smaller companies else they simply factor it in as a cost of doing business.
This is not to say that I am anti-regulation. I am just anti-idiotic regulation and I know personally that the nuclear industry has a huge share of idiotic regulations (based in large part that you cannot extrapolate the health effects of radiation effectively; our bodies have extensive mechanisms in place to minimize the effects of radiation as after all, we are ourselves made of radioactive material). What this country needs is a required course on risk assessment and what it means to do an economic cost/benefit analysis.
Of course, like most other topics here at TFOUI, it is all meaningless electrons tossed into the wind.
