Political power, social construction, and the Marcellus Shale

This exercise asks us to examine public perception and political power of parties involved in our problem (Marcellus Shale development). I have a pet interest in the psychology of social power, especially as it relates to political processes, so I was happy to see this exercise in the workbook. Thus far, the authors’ claim of ecological economics being transdisciplinary seems to hold true.

The two dimensions on which we are instructed to evaluate each group are:

· Social construction (SC): how they are perceived by society, and

· Political power (PP): the extent to which they can effect societal outcomes.

Setting the two orthogonally, we can group people into four categories, which the text labels:

· Advantaged: High SC and high PP, eg., newspaper editors

· Dependents: High SC and low PP, eg., teachers

· Contenders: Low SC and high PP, eg., corporate executives

· Deviants: Low SC and low PP, eg., urban poor people

While political power is relatively straight-forward to determine, social construction is trickier, because different sections of society view various groups differently. This becomes clear as soon as one tries to label any group as having low social construction – some people will always have higher opinions of that group. This is especially important with regard to our problem, as energy extraction in West Virginia is extremely contentious. It often feels that we live in a fissured society, where you’re either with the energy companies (cars with “friends of coal” bumper stickers abound) or against them (“I love mountains” bumper stickers are nearly as common, if more often stuck to things other than cars. The now-disgraced Massey Energy even produced a response bumper sticker to the I Love Mountains campaign.)

All that is to say that it will be tough to evaluate social construction of all the affected groups. I will try to take an “average," but I think it's important to acknowledge that my evaluation will be influenced by the cross-section of society I come into contact with via my work, personal life, and media consumption.

So, on a scale of 1 (very low) to 10 (very high), how do the following groups operate in society?

· Surface rights owners, often farmers. For clarification, for most of the land around here, the owner of the surface does not own the minerals that are under the land, the coal, gas, etc. Obviously, the surface owner is more likely to incur costs of gas development, while the mineral owner receives more benefit. See the excellent documentary Split Estate for more on this.

o PP – 3. Though they often cannot stop their land from being developed, my understanding is that they can have some influence on how wells are put in, and they may receive enough pay to relocate.

o SC – 7. Salt of the earth.

· Energy company executives

o PP – 10. Chesapeke Energy is one of the biggest players in the Marcellus Shale. Their CEO made $112 million in 2008, making him the best paid CEO in the country. In a political system where money is power, and in a state where politicians live and die by the support of energy industries, no one has more power.

o SC – 2. Maybe there are people who think more highly of these guys, but if there are, I don’t know them. I bump them one point from the bottom because I assume there are business students for whom these people are idols.

· Energy company labor

o PP – 5. West Virginia was the epicenter of the labor battles of the early 20^th century. The unions are alive and well, and coal and gas employees are paid more than twice the state average. However, their influence on political processes is dubious -- one need look no further than last year to see that the political system has failed to institute regulations to keep these workers safe: see the Upper Big Branch disaster or the Inidana Township gas well explosion.

o SC – 8. Among the pro-coal, pro-gas folks, these guys are heroes. Though there are some on the other side who malign them, I think there is a wide-spread differentiation of the executives and the labor. For example, the anti-mountaintop removal group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth followed up their “friends of the mountains” bumper sticker with on that read “friends of mountains and miners.” You might be against the war, but everyone respects the troops.

· Local residents

o PP – 2. What do you do if your neighbor sells her gas rights and the fracturing destroys your water well? You probably just take it. This is a poor area of the country, so folks’ legal options and prospects for relocation are limited. The residents of Morgantown recently put an exceeding amount of pressure on City Council that lead to a ban of hydraulic fracturing in and around town. However, that is the exception that demonstrates the rule, the outcome of the ordinance is in legal-limbo, and it does nothing to protect the air and water coming into town from further than the 1 mile buffer extends.

o SC – 4. I was going to say 5, since we are of all stripes, but the places where hydraulic fracturing is happening—rural Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Texas, western Colorado and Wyoming—are rural and poor. As Steven Colbert points out, “Most of the stream poisoning [from mountaintop removal] happens in Appalachia, and the only people it affects are the one remaining group that everybody still feels comfortable making fun of: hillbillies."

Attributes of resources associated with gas well development

This exercise asks us to take several of the major resources associated with our problem and label them with the characteristics defined in chapter 4 of the text: stock-flow vs. fund-service, rival vs. non-rival, etc., and the extent of human knowledge about their condition. Our tentative problem is high-volume hydraulic fracturing of shale for gas extraction.

Resource web for a hydrofracked gas well

Prompt: Sketch a resource web for your ecological-economic problem.

I’m not a huge fan of visual/artistic approaches to problems, but I sketched this out as far as I could, and then I addressed a bunch of the questions the workbook asked in text, below the diagram.

We are planning on addressing some aspect of the explosion in high-volume hydraulic fracturing gas wells in the Marcellus Shale for our problem. Here is my resource web for such a gas well pad. Please let me know via comments what I’ve overlooked.

Opportunity costs of material and energy use­ – The primary opportunity cost seems to be that of the water that is used in drilling. That water comes from rivers and streams where it is the medium of ecosystems. Obviously, it cannot be used by humans for drinking or recreation once it has been pulled from its source.

There are profound ecological impacts stemming from the extraction and processing of the materials used as inputs. Metals have to be mined, purified, reduced, and shaped into their usable forms, all of which have associated ecological costs, some of which are severe. The production of oil for use as fuel on site and in trucks and in the production of chemicals and plastic liners comes with serious ecological costs.

At this point, the workbook asks, for each of the resources that flow into your system, what other resources were required to acquire this resource and transform it into a desired good or service? I appreciate the point on which they want students to dwell—that production chains are long and complex and are associated with a wide variety of pollution and opportunity costs—but to make even a half-assed attempt at answering this question to any depth is far beyond the scope of this assignment.

Opportunity costs of waste production – Obviously, atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide and methane have tremendous consequences for ecosystems throughout the world vis-à-vis climate change. Locally, the input to ecosystems of wastewater is a serious problem. It is sometimes delivered directly to land surfaces, sometimes taken to treatment plants (that are not equipped to deal with the range of pollutants it contains), and sometimes injected underground, all of which have associated consequences. Furthermore, there have been numerous reports of illegal disposal of wastewater, into streams, on roads, on site, etc. The high total dissolved solids (TDS) of wastewater is a serious problem as the water makes its way into streams (which often already have high TDS from coal mining), the biological functioning of which can be severely impaired by high TDS.

Opportunity costs of the physical system – In Appalachia, well pads are often located on farms. There have been reports of farm land, beyond the physical boundaries of the well pad, becoming unusable due to pollution associated with drilling, fracturing, and emissions. The documentary Split Estate, which I recommend highly, shows homeowners in Colorado being forced to leave their homes due to air pollution from nearby wells.

Stock-Flow & Fund-Service Resources

Prompt: Think about a specific ecosystem (even an urban ecosystem if you like)-or better yet, go visit one, and take along a field notebook. Make a list of three stock-flow resources found in that ecosystem, and three fund-service resources.

Is the resource rival or non-rival? In general, can you think of any stock-flow resources that are non-rival? Can you think of any fund-service resources provided by nature that are rival?

Is the resource excludable or non-excludable? If it is non-excludable, can you think of an institution or technology that could make it excludable? Do you think it should be made excludable? Why or why not?

Is the resource a market good or a nonmarket good?

In general, can you think of any stock-flow resources that cannot be made excludable? Can you think of fund-service resources provided by nature that can be made excludable?

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Ecosystem – WVU Core Arboretum (small, deciduous forest in urban environment)

Stock-flow resources

1. Paw-paws (fruit)

2. Timber

3. Deer (for food)

Fund-service resources

1. Temperature regulation

2. Carbon absorption

3. Water retention (rain, urban runoff)

All three stock-flow resources are rival; that is, the more of them I use, the less there is for you to use. They are also all excludable. Because the arboretum is owned by a university and open to the public without restriction, the resources that can be harvested (paw paws) are non-market. Regulations prevent the harvest of timber or deer from the forest, but if they were harvested, timber would very likely become a market good, and deer would almost certainly be a non-market good.

All of the fund-service resources are, for practical purposes, non-rival and non-excludable. All are, at present, non-market. However, temperature regulation could be made excludable and marketed by charge for entrance. I don’t think that should be done, as I believe that access to our evolutionary environment, not to mention shade, should be a birthright. Carbon absorption is absolutely non-excludable, and it is non-rival in that your carbon emissions can’t be differentiated from mine. However, it could be made marketable via, eg., a cap-and-trade system. There would be myriad challenges associated with developing and implementing such a system; however, it doesn’t seem like an all-together bad idea to me, especially if it could be developed in an international framework.

I cannot think of a stock-flow resource that is necessarily non-excludable. Fresh water is the closest thing I can think of, but, of course, efforts are in place to make it an excludable resource both via regulation, eg., the Colorado River Compact and technology, eg., dams.

Some fund-service resources can be made excludable. For example, a hot springs provides the service of warm bathing. At least within our conception of property rights, one could buy the land surrounding the springs and fence them off, thereby excluding anyone else from receiving the service of the springs.

Climate change and ecological economics paradigm

Prompt: Consider one of the serious problems that society faces today. Is there a relationship between this problem and conventional market economics? Does ecological economics offer useful insights into this problem? Would this problem have emerged if society had adopted an ecological economics perspective 100 years ago? Why didn’t we adopt ecological economics 100 years ago? Why have we still failed to adopt it today?

Global climate change is among the most serious problems our society must address. Conventional market economics has not only failed to address the problem of climate change, it has spurred it onward. Our economies are highly dependent on cheap fossil energy for growth, and conventional economics sees growth as the ultimate goal. Thus, the more energy used, the better. To this end, not only have costs associated with fossil fuel extraction, transport, preparation, use, and waste handling been externalized from the companies carrying out those activities, but the US government, among others, has actively subsidized energy industries and has repeatedly deployed the military to further those industries’ access to fossil fuels.

Ecological economics (EE) offers multiple insights into the problem of, and solutions to, global climate change. In contrast to conventional economics, EE recognizes that the economic system is a subsystem of the global ecosystem. Therefore, the waste from the economic system, including greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, end up in the ecological system. The blatant fallacy of conventional economics’ notion that the economic system is the whole is readily apparent when one considers what happens to waste from that system: where can it go?

Furthermore, ecological economics prioritizes an appropriate scale of the economy and a just distribution of its resources. By asking, what is an appropriate size for our economic system? EE suggests that we should consider how much fossil energy the economy should use before asking how we can most efficiently use it.

Concern for just distribution of resources in EE extends to intergenerational distribution. So, as we continue to burn fossil fuels at a rate that provides each of us in the rich world with the energy equivalent of hundreds of slaves, the ecological economist asks whether that is fair to a Bangladeshi whose home will be flooded as sea levels rise or to a child born in the Chihuahuan Desert in 2100 who will face warmer temperatures and less precipitation than they would have if we had lived more modestly.

Had ecological economics guided our actions through the twenthieth century, we would undoubtedly be in much less of a predicament. It seems to me that considerations of sustainability and justice would have prevented the much, if not all, of the extraction fossil fuels, obviating all concerns regarding climate change. For example, residents of Appalachia who live near mountaintop removal coal mining have higher rates of birth defects, die younger, and are poorer than other residents of Appalachia. If justice were a primary concern of economists for the last 100 years, it is hard to imagine that this type of mining would ever have been practiced.

Of course, we didn’t adopt an ecological economical paradigm 100 years ago, and we still haven’t today. That made more sense 100 years ago, when there were “only” a couple billion people on the planet and vast areas of land and sea were untapped and still fecund. Now, however, we have filled the world with humans, depleted non-renewable resources, hyper-exploited renewable resources, and filled waste sinks. It is clearly beyond time to adopt a full world paradigm. I suspect we haven’t for three primary reasons:

1. Inertia. We have been doing industrial capitalism under an empty world/conventional economical paradigm for a long time. Our systems are so large that they cannot change course rapidly.

2. Entitlement. We quite naturally enjoy having tomatoes in January, air conditioning in July, and jet travel whenever we want it. Unfortunately, as a society, we seem to have the maturity level of a toddler regarding getting what we want when we want it.

3. Power structures. Those who benefit most from the systems that are in place are those who have the most influence on those systems. Conversely, those who have the most to gain from adopting an ecological paradigm—the global poor, future human generations, and almost all non-human beings—have very little influence on our systems.

The situation is dire; we urgently need to adopt an ecological economical paradigm. I think we have begun to move in that direction, but we have already done a great deal of damage. It remains to be seen whether we will be able to get our act together before we hit powerful tipping points – points at which feedback loops strengthen to cross points of no return.

Desirable ends for hydraulic fracturing

What follows is a free-write for exercise 1.2 in the workbook associated with this class. At this point, I'm suppose to have chosen a tentative "problem" for which I will do a project that involves defining and working toward a solution. The nascent explosion of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale for methane is a pretty big problem around here, so I'm thinking that will be my project topic. What follows is a free-write.... it was written as a stream-of-consciousness and has not been edited for content or grammar.

The Problem – Hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale for methane

Sustainable Scale

sustainable scale of gas well drilling!? Ha, there couldn’t be. or could there? in theory there’s an amount of CO2 we could burn that the ecosystem could absorb. but the drilling could never be sustainable, the gas is finite and consumed. on an empty planet, the problem wouldn’t be one of sustainability, because there might be enough gas for everyone to burn some without making a dent in total reserves, but problems of pollution and environmental injustice would remain.

If the rate of throughput increases?! HA! The rate of throughput is exploding, with disasterous consequences. The benefits – a few jobs, slightly cheaper natural gas, and we will be able to keep the lights on for a few years longer, if we don’t melt the planet first. The consequences – we’re befowling our streams, tearing apart our mountains, toxifying the air. And it’s falling on people that have lived with the disasterous consequences of coal mining for generations. My heart sinks to think that now they’ll be burdened with this. I can and will leave; it’s not really my battle. I’ll fight it while I’m here, but I’ve never felt like it was my water being polluted. But I see how beaten down these people are by the mining, and I see how divided they are about the industry. It breaks my heart to see it reving up in a new arena.

Just Dirstribution

Who benefits? The mineral owners (if they don’t plan to stay living near the wells) and the energy companies. And the population as a whole in a very dilute way by the pennies they save on their gas bills. Though I’m not sure that’s true…… if we were to not drill into unconventional gas reserves, increased prices would force conservation, which might lead to a happier way of life, and could slow encroaching disasters associated with climate change.

Who created the costs? The beneficiaries, of course. Duh.

Who bears the burden? The people of Appalachia. The poor, health-impacted, community-divided people of Appalachia. For those few who can lease gas rights and make enough money to retire and perhaps move away, who can blame them? And even more so when their neighbors have already leased gas rights. In that way, it spreads like a contagious disease.

who created the values that are affected? nature, first and formost – the streams, the hills, the forests, all raped and pillaged. but also people who have built houses, developed farms, and developed relationships with their local landbase.

who determines what is just and unjust? in what court? in the court of public opinion, I suppose each of us individually, with (sometimes coercive) guidance from the media. in the court with material consequences, the courts, armed with police and appointed by corrupt political processes.

Efficient Allocation

the external costs are many – I hope someone will do an analysis for Marcellus wells like the ‘true cost of coal’ analysis that Epstein recently published. if they had to pay for the potential risks and eventual costs, I suspect they wouldn’t be able to drill. externalized costs include pollution of waterways that is guaranteed: sedimentation runoff and some amount of organics, and the product of the probality of a blowout or other disaster times the costs of such a disaster—from the emergency crews that come to put the fires out, to the downstream ecological effects. there’s also the air pollution, the people who have to move off their farm lands or from their homes because they’re getting sick from the air pollution. there’s the lost aquifers, which are becoming all the more valuable as (clean) water becomes scarcer.

perhaps prices could be used to internalize some of these costs, and I think they should be as long as drilling is happening. but ultimately, our knowledge is insufficient to estimate the costs associated with these damages. the technology is five years old – how could we possibly know how it’s going to impact future generations?

Neoclassical vs. Ecological Economics

Prompt: Create a chart comparing and contrasting ecological economics and neoclassical economics. On each respective side put the main points for each school of thought. For each major point also write down the reasoning behind the development of these practices and their goals, these may be either historical or current needs.