Gov. Chris Christie missed the boat on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” with his misguided conditional veto of the New Jersey Legislature’s bold and forthright Frack Ban Bill. Through a united stand for the people and the environment by the state’s leaders, New Jersey could have been the first state in the nation to put clean drinking water before a dirty method of natural gas drilling. Instead, the governor has replaced a brilliant pro-active policy with a weak one-year moratorium on fracking. Read more »

The economic difference between drilling and automobile manufacturing is enormous: 100,268 drilling jobs vs. 2,633 direct and 14,500 indirect jobs from auto manufacturing; $11.1 billion delivered to North Texas annually by drilling versus $790 million to the annual gross state product by General Motors. Yet since Norman's admonishment against chasing dollars at the expense of quality of life and possible environmental toxicity is prudent, let's examine a couple of his concerns. Read more »

The oil industry has an overwhelmingly gloomy economic outlook, expecting recession in the next year, less demand for fuel and lower oil prices, a survey of delegates to a major industry conference showed this week.

Seventy-seven percent of participants at the annual Oil & Money conference on Tuesday and Wednesday in London said the chances of another recession in the world's developed economies of the OECD were high with only 23 percent seeing them as low.
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You don’t have to be a Pennsylvania farmer (or a Texas rancher) to get in on the shale boom. Plenty of publicly traded stocks let you do just that. But before investing, be aware of the perils: the political risk created by the controversy over fracking, the chance that production estimates may be overstated (something that the Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly looking into), and the possibility that natural gas prices will stay at current low levels. Read more »