But he speaks in complete sentences!

Thu, 05/12/2011 - 11:00am — lambert

Obama stacks fracking panel with Big Energy weasels:

The Obama administration panel named May 5 to study hydraulic fracturing, a natural gas drilling technique that injects thousands of gallons of chemical-laced water into the ground, is dominated by oil and gas industry professionals.

Notably, the panel does not include citizens from communities concerned about the damage to health, water and private property posed by the surge in natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

The new panel’s seven members include:

Panel chair John Deutch, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, now on the board of Cheniere Energy, Inc., a Houston-based liquified natural gas company that, according to Forbes Magazine online, paid Deutch about $882,000 from 2006 through 2009. During a stint on the board of Schlumberger Ltd., one of the world’s three largest hydraulic fracturing companies, Deutch received about $563,000 in 2006 and 2007, according to Forbes.

Stephen Holditch, head of the petroleum engineering department at Texas A&M University and a leader in the field of hydraulic fracturing designs, first at Shell Oil, later as head of his own firm, acquired by Schlumberger in 1997. Today, he is engineering committee chairman at Matador Resources, a Dallas oil and gas exploration company.

Mark Zoback, a geophysics professor at Stanford and senior advisor to Baker Hughes, Inc., a Houston-based oilfield services company engaged in hydraulic fracturing. Zoback is chair of GeoMechanics International, a consulting firm that advises on various oil and gas drilling problems and that was acquired by Baker Hughes in 2008.

Kathleen McGinty, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Clinton administration and a former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, now senior vice president of Weston Solutions, Inc., which consults for the oil and gas industry, including leading natural gas driller Chesapeake Energy, and a director of NRG Energy, a Princeton, N.J., wholesale power generation company whose assets include more than two dozen natural gas companies.

Susan Tierney, assistant secretary of the Energy department under President Clinton, now managing principal of Analysis Group, which consults for utilities that use natural gas and for the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, the natural gas pipeline industry association.

Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Prize, a 1991 book about the oil industry, and co-founder, chairman and executive vice president of IHS CERA, originally called Cambridge Energy Research Associates, acquired in 2004 by IHS, an international consulting firm whose clients include the oil, natural gas, coal, power and clean energy communities.

But... But... It's bi-partisan! _{MR SUBLIMINAL Indeed!}

NOTE As an example of the kind of community member Obama might have picked, if he were organizing any other "community" than the top 0.01% , is our own PA Lady, who educated herself on the technology, the players, and the issues and raised the alarm at Corrente (long before any of the A listers picked up on it, I might add). Now, PA Lady's moving out of state to pursue a degree, driven by the economy, as all of us are. She ought to be moving to Washington to work on this commission! But n-o-o-o-o! Nobody's on that commission who doesn't buy into the foregone conclusion, and nobody's on the commission who would even notice whatever honorarium commission members get.

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Comments

Climate change we can believe in! n/t

By vastleft on Thu, 05/12/2011 - 11:58am

The subject cannot be predicate

By malagodi on Thu, 05/12/2011 - 12:48pm

So isn't it better ~from a revolutionary perspective~ to have the US CEO speaking in complete sentences? That way his actions can't be universally dismissed as those of a beer drinking idiot. They must eventually be seen as a coherent exercise of presidential power.

Look, Barack Obama is not an idiot. He's the latest occupant of the Office of the Presidency, an office that is, and alway always has been the executor of a State which serves the larger business of economic activity.

The U.S. government is the maintenance department of USA Inc. Or plant operations. You get the picture.

Personally, I prefer the erudite speech and the urban attire to the roadside bar/tumbleweed sneer of the last occupant. It's a stylistic preference, that's all.

I got what I expected; complete sentences. I don't expect revolutionary social change to come from the offices of government.

I don't shop for shoes in a bakery.

Counsels of despair?

By gob on Fri, 05/13/2011 - 8:53am

No one here is such an idiot as to expect revolutionary social change from the offices of government. We're also not such idiots as to just roll over and go back to sleep becuase Barack Obama is not an idiot, is just doing what presidents do, etc. etc. etc.

We will push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.

It's Tai Chi, not Rock-Em-Sock-Em.

By malagodi on Sat, 05/14/2011 - 3:43pm

Right, but that's a false choice.

I'm not saying go to sleep or more accurately, retreat into a safe comfort zone of American affluence. What I'm saying is that when you push against something (see italics above), it tends to resist or push back. In doing so, one actually strengthens what one is opposing.

Persistence is part of fighting smart

By gob on Sat, 05/14/2011 - 5:48pm

as our opponents (like David Addington, author of my tagline) well know. Seems to be working quite well for them.

We will push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.

Yes, that is pretty much a

By Hugh on Thu, 05/12/2011 - 1:47pm

Yes, that is pretty much a rogue's gallery of industry hacks. It's stacked much as the Cat Food Commission was. It shows once again that the principal purpose of these entities is a stamp of approval for corporatist policies from a pseudo-"independent group of experts". The one name that jumped out at me was Daniel Yergin. He is a bigtime cornucopian, that is someone who believes Peak Oil and Peak Energy don't exist.

Hugh

This was so egregious that I

By Hugh on Thu, 05/12/2011 - 3:12pm

This was so egregious that I included it in my Obama scandals list even though I am currently in a period where I find writing new entries almost too depressing:

261. In our corrupt politics, it has been true for years that panels and commissions supposed to objectively and fairly evaluate issues are, in fact, stacked with pseudo-independent "experts" guaranteed to validate whatever our corporatist elites want. As an example of this, on May 5, 2011, Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the creation of an expert panel to study the environmentally damaging practice of fracking, the injection of solutions under pressure underground to concentrate and facilitate the extraction of natural gas. The panel is to be chaired by John Deutch, an ex-head of the CIA, who used to be on the board of Schlumberger, a major fracking concern, and is currently on the board at Cheniere Energy, a liquified natural gas company. Other member are Stephen Holditch, a fracking design engineer; Mark Zoback, a senior advisor at Baker Hughes, another fracking company; Kathleen McGinty, former chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality under Clinton and now a senior vice president at Weston Solutions whose clients include gas drilling and natural gas companies; Susan Tierney, another Clintonista who was an assistant secretary of Energy and who is now the managing principal at the Analysis Group, another consulting company to natural gas using utilities and natural gas pipeline companies; and Daniel Yergin, the archtypal denier of Peak Oil and Peak Energy (cornucopian) who consults for a variety of energy interests. Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is also on the panel. It is important to understand that the EDF is something of a Trojan horse. It advocates market based, that is corporate friendly "solutions" to environmental problems. Krupp also was a founder of US Climate Action Partnership in association with big corporate polluters like Alcoa, GE, and DuPont who ostensibly want to work for limits on greenhouse gases in so far as it does not get in the way of their own pollution practices.

Noticeably missing from this lineup is any bona fide representative of the environmental community or critic of fracking. This is, of course, a feature , not a bug. This is all very reminiscent of Dick Cheney's Energy Taskforce and Obama's Cat Food Commission. It is quite simply a propaganda exercise. The interests of the environment and of ordinary Americans are totally excluded.

The one addition to the panel is Fred Krupp.

Hugh

Why...it's almost like they

By PA_Lady on Thu, 05/12/2011 - 10:32pm

Why...it's almost like they WANT the recommendations of the committee to benefit the oil and gas industry. But you can tell it's a TOTALLY impartial group since they have one lone soul from the EWG. *sigh*

Not being a billionaire polluter making record profits while destroying the environment and possibly the human beings living near my money makers, I obviously don't qualify.

sounds like the deciders at the table for health care leg.

By libbyliberal on Fri, 05/13/2011 - 12:25am

... You know tonight on the NewsHour Jim Lehrer began his goodbyes as he will only be appearing on Friday nights hosting the conversation of Mark Shields and David Brooks. He called that dialogue "remarkably civilized."

"remarkably civilized"???????? naw, just cronyism gone amok ... and the sell out Dems are more on the side of the Repubs than they are on the side of real liberals. so it goes.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. (Japanese proverb)

and the "environmental representative"?

By gob on Fri, 05/13/2011 - 8:51am

It's

Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund, a New York-based nonprofit that focuses on environmental issues. Scott Anderson, EDF’s senior policy advisor for energy and spokesman on hydraulic fracturing is a member of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, which opposes extending the federal Safe Drinking Water Act to hydraulic fracturing. The commission website asserts that fracking “needs no further study." Anderson is a former executive vice president and general counsel for the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association.

[From the same source, and emphases mine]

We will push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.

The headline is, I think, a useful one-liner

By lambert on Sat, 05/14/2011 - 4:25pm

That's all I wanted from this post and the other of the same headline; a way to poke some gentle fun at people who support Obama based on class and cultural markers.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi