When private enterprise should be saying 'thank you' to the government
Fracking Developed With Decades Of Government Investment
AP | By KEVIN BEGOS Posted: 09/23/2012 10:13 am EDT Updated: 09/23/2012 1:43 pm EDT
PITTSBURGH (AP) — It sounds like a free-market success story: a natural gas boom created by drilling company innovation, delivering a vast new source of cheap energy without the government subsidies that solar and wind power demand.
"The free market has worked its magic," the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, an industry group, claimed over the summer.
The boom happened "away from the greedy grasp of Washington," the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, wrote in an essay this year.
If bureaucrats "had known this was going on," the essay went on, "surely Washington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop it altogether."
But those who helped pioneer the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, recall a different path. Over three decades, from the shale fields of Texas and Wyoming to the Marcellus in the Northeast, the federal government contributed more than $100 million in research to develop fracking, and billions more in tax breaks.
AP | By KEVIN BEGOS Posted: 09/23/2012 10:13 am EDT Updated: 09/23/2012 1:43 pm EDT
PITTSBURGH (AP) — It sounds like a free-market success story: a natural gas boom created by drilling company innovation, delivering a vast new source of cheap energy without the government subsidies that solar and wind power demand.
"The free market has worked its magic," the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, an industry group, claimed over the summer.
The boom happened "away from the greedy grasp of Washington," the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, wrote in an essay this year.
If bureaucrats "had known this was going on," the essay went on, "surely Washington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop it altogether."
But those who helped pioneer the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, recall a different path. Over three decades, from the shale fields of Texas and Wyoming to the Marcellus in the Northeast, the federal government contributed more than $100 million in research to develop fracking, and billions more in tax breaks.
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1 Comments:
Those on the left side of the aisle must be really conflicted, fracking is bad but, it was a government program that helped to bring it about....
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