Dorothy Parker - Genius of Britain TV - Alexander Medvedev - The British at Work TV - Waldemar Januszczak TV - Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room 2005 - Crude Britannia: The Story of North Sea Oil TV - John Pilger TV - Ian R Crane - Carl Sagan - Jeff Goodell - Mark Williams TV - Gasland 2010 & Gasland II 2013 - Josh Fox - David Suzuki - Tonight TV - Mayor of Dish - Al Armendariz - Charles Dickens - Bill Nye - George W Bush - The Age of Stupid 2009 - James Burke TV - Fracking: Shattered Ground TV - Council of Canadian Academies Report - David Hughes - Alexander Medvedev - Misha Glenny - Shale Cowboys: Fracking Under Trump 2017 - The Pipe 2010 - Inside the Laughing Gas Market TV - How the Victorians Built Britain TV - Panorama TV - Seconds from Disaster TV -
Résumé:
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live. Dorothy Parker, Resume, 1937
Joseph Priestley is credited with identifying ten different gasses. Genius of Britain II: A Roomful of Brilliant Minds, Channel 4 2012
1995 ... When Cedric Brown, the Chief Executive of British Gas, was paid £475,000, an increase of 75%, there were howls of outrage. Kirsty Young, The British at Work: The Age of Uncertainty 1995 – Now, BBC 2011
Gas lighting was an interesting challenge to paint of course. Waldemar Januszczak, The Art of the Night ***** BBC 2013
Who was responsible for the downfall of Enron? Only a few years ago Enron was the nation’s seventh largest corporation. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, 2005
Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling had built their own plush state rooms. They were known as the smartest guys in the room. Captains of a ship too powerful to go down. ibid.
News of shredding at Enron raised more questions. ibid.
20,000 employees had lost their jobs. ibid.
In Washington, Lay became part of a new crusade to liberate businessmen from the rules and regulations of government. ibid.
George Bush senior helped secure billions in government subsidies for Enron International. ibid.
In 1987 two oil traders made bets for Enron on whether the price of oil would rise or fall ... Enron Oil always seemed to win. ibid.
At the board meeting the auditors told Lay that [Louis] Borget and his traders were manipulating earnings, destroying daily trading records and probably gambling way beyond their limits. ibid.
Lay encouraged his traders to gamble more. ibid.
Enron would become a kind of stock market for natural gas ... Transform energy into financial instruments that could be traded like stocks and bonds. ibid.
Market to market accounting allowed Enron to book future potential profits on the very day the deal was signed. ibid.
‘The insiders had sold off a billion dollars of their stock in the preceding several months.’ ibid. Bill Lerach, attorney for shareholders
Though Lou Pai flew away from Enron with $250 million the divisions he left behind lost a total of nearly $1 billion but Enron managed to disguise that fact. ibid.
Enron mounted a campaign to capture the hearts and minds of stock analysts. ibid.
The game was called Pump and Dump. Top execs would push the stock price up and then cash in their multi-million dollar options. ibid.
Enron had vast natural gas operations all over the world. They had cost billions to build and most were performing terribly. ibid.
The analysts weren’t analysing at all; they were willing to believe virtually anything Enron told them. ibid.
‘Enron has created the market to buy and sell bandwidth like a commodity. Ask why.’ ibid. Enron advert
Enron’s stock soared 34% in two days. ibid.
When Enron announced its latest plan to trade weather, people wondered whether it was good science or science fiction. ibid.
[Andrew] Fastow had to figure out a way to keep the stock price up by hiding the fact that Enron was $30 billion in debt. ibid.
Traders soon discovered that by shutting down power plants they could create artificial shortages that would push prices even higher. ibid.
The year-long energy crisis would cost the state of California $30 billion. ibid.
Ken Lay did have easy access to the Bush administration. ibid.
Jeff Skilling abruptly resigns. ibid.
The SEC launched an investigation when The Wall Street Journal published articles revealing Fastow’s murky deals. Enron announced massive financial restatements. ibid.
Enron’s accounting firm Arthur Anderson had begun destroying its Enron files. On October 23rd Anderson shredded more than one ton of paper. ibid.
Enron declared bankruptcy. ibid.
In August 1959 the world’s biggest gas field was discovered across the North Sea in Holland. Geologists started getting excited. If the same rock formation continued under the North Sea, we could be looking at a fabulously wealthy future. Crude Britannia 1/3: The Story of North Sea Oil, BBC 2009
Sea-Gem was about to become the first rig to strike gas ... Boxing Day 1965 they started to jack up the rig ready for the move: under the strain two of the steel legs shattered, plunging the platform and its crew into the sea ... 13 of the Sea-Gem’s 39 crew died in the disaster. ibid.
Contrary to popular belief the oil and gas don’t sit in great underground caverns. They seep between the particles of rock. Reservoirs are formed if a layer of harder rock above then traps the oil. ibid.
The generals’ power is backed by foreign money. One estimate is that since it crushed democracy in 1990 the Burmese regime has drawn 65% of its financial support from oil companies. The main backers are the French company Total and its American partner Unical. The oil pipeline they are building in the south of Burma will allow the generals to sell the country’s natural gas to Thailand. The deal will give them an estimated $400 million a year over 30 years. John Pilger, Burma – Land of Fear, ITV 1996
The phrase ‘Peak Oil’ has been coined to bring attention to the belief that the world is at, or very close to, the point where reserves of global hydro-carbon resources commence the downward path, which will ultimately lead to the complete exhaustion of global oil & gas resources.
Whilst the theory of ‘Peak Oil’ is popularized by a sympathetic media, the oil industry continues to produce in excess of 90 million barrels each day whilst enjoying record levels of profitability, yet remains remarkably silent on the issue.
The mainstream media is also strangely silent on the existence of alternative theories to ‘Peak Oil’. Why is this? Does everyone in the Oil & Gas industry agree with the forecasts that the world is entering the last days of an oil-based economy? If not, what is the alternative viewpoint and why is it not given coverage by the mainstream media?
In addition, the proponents of ‘Peak Oil’ conveniently ignore rapidly advancing well construction, reservoir management and stimulation techniques, which enable more than twice as much oil to be extracted than when oil was first discovered in the late 19th Century. Not to mention the development of production from unconventional sources, such as the massive shale oil deposits beneath Colorado, Utah & Wyoming. (Oil & Gas) Ian R Crane, Peak Oil: Myth or Reality? viz website
The process of fracking came about in the late 1940s ... You pump the water down the well under phenomenal pressure to fracture the rocks ... There’s 5% of this chemical cocktail ... What they don’t know is where it’s going to go. Ian R Crane, interview Richplanet TV
64% of England is sitting over shale gas or coal-bed methane. ibid.
Right now we've got a major propaganda PR campaign being mounted by the government and the corporations. ibid.
Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it’s filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas. Jeff Goodell
Nobody disputes that cheap natural gas would be a good thing for the economy. The question is, is this a sustainable new development that can be counted on for decades to come, or simply a ‘bubble’ brought on by a land grab and drilling frenzy? Jeff Goodell