it s all settled out, but that s what our water looked like. that came out of the tap? out of the tap. so in three weeks they contacted mike by phone and said, we ve tested your water. there s nothing wrong with your water. with this? with this. there s nothing wrong with the water that can be affected by the oil and gas production in your area. whoa, jesus christ. that s the iconic moex from the gasland documentary. it s incredibly effecting. you made it this point about water contamination. you re drilling down. there s the water table. you are fracturing the shale. the aquifer tends to be much, much higher in the earth than where the fracking is happening. a mile maybe, but the question of ground water contamination looming large, and i want to get
sluggish job growth and the labor market of one town in north dakota is so tight and employers are desperate, they re offering a signing bonus for a job slinging fries. unemployment in the entire state in north dakota is 3.1%. gdp growth in the rate is a whooping 7.6%, and housing there is in such short supply that one bedrooms rent for more than $1,000. what economic miracle has taken place to bring this about? the answer is the bacan formulation which has oil in relatively hard rocks. the revolution including fracking helped to unlock the oil, and some speculate the amount of extractible oil from one gjigeological formation cou surpass the reserves of iraq and kuwait combined. this pushes u.s. oil production
recession where the jobs narrative overtook the climate narrative. but the lesson is that there are oil companies, big oil companies in the coalition that was working to pass that carbon price. the reason is they have a great business. it s incredibly durable and incredibly profitable. what they want is price certainty. they want to be able to plan, and they re willing to accept a carbon price, some of them, if they have to if it s made clear that it s inevitable politically because they can still run a great business and still believe in the viability of the oil and gas business. they provide a different story in public, but in private they re planning for this price. so the politics we see these politics as impossible and captured by lobbyists and frozen. the reality is in 2009 we as a country were that close to doing it. we re going to be that close again. we have to here s the deeper question, right? i think this structures our conversation about fracking as well, which i
we re talking about fracking which is an incredibly pitch battle. it s transforming economics in the country and transforming many local landscapes places that are farms or little league fields now sporting wells. there s a rush of capital into natural gas. i think in 2011 i want to say five of the top ten performing stocks were associated with natural gas extraction. it s true. look it up. not the ones that i own. there s lots of fears about what its environmental effects will be, what the health effects will be. we re trying to tease through some of that. we re talking about water contamination and my sense of the literature here is that the ground water contamination through the fracking process itself has been documented in extremely rare cases. but contamination of water because you have all this wastewater, right? i won t call it toxic.
the henhouse essentially. so there is a lot of investment in telling people, you know not telling them anything, right? chemicals are looked at like trade secrets, so you put tons of chemicals potentially into the water table, and you re not telling them because it could help the competition. look. there are real environmental challenges with fracking. they are real. they are measurable. we are getting a handle on these, but the idea that they are infecting water tables is a bit overwrought. we ve had 40,000 fracked in the country. the epa has has found one example of some sort of water table activity in wyoming. even they re not sure about that one. it seems the water table now, a greenhouse gas effect of loose methane, that s real. in terms of water that sle coming up, recyclable water