hopefully at some point they will. we can t wait for them. you have to give congress the appetite to make the to put the politics into the climate and into the energy equation, and this is the way you do it. i think this president has a tremendous opportunity, one no other president has because of the infancy nature of fracking of natural gas and shale oil and what s going on deep water in the gulf of mexico. we re at a moment of time where we re at the infancy of a great revolution where the president can say i have a consolidated energy policy, the first of ipts kind in the last 50 years where if you want $5 billion in subsidies for big oil, then you have to pay for that with $5 billion of getting us further aalong the way towards a renewable future. if you don t do this, you re not entitled to. this you have to integrate everything so you can use the hammer of money against the big oil companies to make that move forward in the renewables they won t do themselves.
you re saying either. we re at a really bad impasse. at some point we have to come together and decide what is and what is not. the people don t you say they don t believe what the industry is saying, as if we were all inherently naturally skeptics if there s not a history to lend to that. we have people in towns whose water is flammable, whose livestock are delivering calfs and breeds that die before the year is over. disproportionately two instances before there was fracking, right? this country has a long history in terms of the industry dominating and saying one thing, and people actually putting their trust that what they say is the truth and turning around sxending up with billions of dollars in public health issues degradation of their environment, disinvestment of their local economic development. of course, i wouldn t believe what you said. you re asking the fox to watch
it s run almost haphazardly in three different directions from the industry, which has gone into a land grabow nan. and much regulation and oversight. i m not saying what s been done has been badly done. most of it has been well-done, but there s bad examples of bad wells fracked out there. what it is is it s going at a break neck pace trying to capture what is what you say is a book that s just begun. dave, i guess at the top line you say, look, there s this huge, plentiful source of energy. here s the president talking about fracking and its promise in ohio in july. not only are we blessed with incredible natural gas resources that are now accessible because of new technologies, but natural gas actually burns cleaner than some other fossil fuels and is
an ideal fuel energy source that we potentially can use for the next 100 years. there are a lot of folks right now that are engaging in hydraulic fracking doing it safely. the problem is we haven t established clear guidelines for how to do it safely and informed the public so that neighbors know what s going on. you know, your family, you can make sure that any industry that s operating in your area, that they re being responsible. yeah. part of the fracking being so new, like you said, especially deep fracking being so new is there s a lot we don t know about it. it does burn cleaner than coal in power plants. that s pretty uncontested, but if you go look at the methane released by fracking and by transporting this stuff through pipeline there s a lot of
coal-burning power plants are shuting down across the country. there s a war on coal as you may have heard during the campaign, but the aggressors aren t bureaucra bureaucrats but it s natural gas. specifically the technology radically transformed natural gas production something called hydraulic fracturing or fracking. the name is opaque but the goal is simple. tens of thousands of feet below the surface there are deposits of natural gas trapped up within giant rock formations. fracking lets energy companies drill down to release the gas. that process has fundamentally revolutionized america s energy economy in a few years. the average annual price of natural gas is less than half what it was in 2008. large swaths of the united states from colorado to texas to ohio to upup state new york have massive natural gas reserves making them right for fracking. rhetts rebel based on concerns about health and the safety of