Extending affordable Internet access to everyone in the world who wants it is probably a worthwhile endeavor. Information has economic value, after all.
Today, Internet.org launched, a new industry coalition that includes Facebook, Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia, Opera, and Mediatek. It's fronted, at least for the launch, by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
The initial goal of the organization, as it laid out in a press release and associatedNew York Times article, are to "cut the cost of providing mobile Internet services to one percent of its current level within five to 10 years by improving the efficiency of Internet networks and mobile phone software."
Right now, Internet.org features exactly one thing above the fold on the site: a video of scenes from around the world, cut in Facebook's characteristic style. A piano tinkles in the background as we see children playing in Africa, agricultural workers in south Asia, people playing games, chasing pigeons, swinging on an amusement park ride, hair blowing in the wind. Friends bicycling along a road in Latin America. Et cetera.
And over the top of these scenes of the globe, we hear John F. Kennedy's New England oratory. He's talking about peace. Here's a complete transcript of what he says in Internet.org's video:
I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace. This will require a new effort, a new context for world discussions. It will require increased understanding and increased understanding will require increased contact. So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests. Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
Who doesn't want to cheer after that? Let's go to the moon!
And who knew that John F. Kennedy delivered such a perfectly crafted speech to emphasize the importance of communications to the concept of practical peace: "a new context for world discussion." Why, that sounds like Facebook! Or at leastone of those peculiarly apt quotes you see on Facebook after a major world event.
So, I looked up the speech from which these lines are drawn. It was given atAmerican University on June 10, 1963. The video is cobbled together from lines across the text.
And what's left out is fascinating. The Internet.org audio highlighted in the context of a portion of Kennedy's speech. Click to enlarge. (Alexis Madrigal)For one, it's stripped of all context. Kennedy gave the speech in the middle of the Cold War. The world was seven months out from the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy frankly acknowledged that "the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace." These were nuclear weapons, of course. And that was back when saying billions meant something more like saying hundreds of billions now.
Kennedy asked the graduates of the school to look inward, and contemplate their own attitudes towards peace. This was not a general peace, but a specific one designed to stave off nuclear apocalypse. And it's not that Kennedy's words cannot resound beyond their original intent, but rather that their global scope and heft comes from those stakes. As he makes clear earlier in the speech, peace had to be maintained because human technologies had, for the first time, made the actual destruction of the world possible. ("[War] makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.") The humans had to contain the possibilities of technology ("Our problems are manmade--therefore, they can be solved by man.").
Now to the speech itself. The excerpted portion begins: "I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream." Then, the following line is cut, "I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal."
The video returns to the speech for this line, "Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace." But then cuts the rest of that paragraph:
based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions--on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace--no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process--a way of solving problems.
This cut is important because it elides Kennedy's actual answer for how to attain peace -- "a series of concrete actions and effective agreements" -- and replaces it with the kind of "single, simple key" that he warns against: "a new context for world discussions."
And here is the context for the context line itself:
This will require a new effort to achieve world law--a new context for world discussions. It will require increased understanding between the Soviets and ourselves. And increased understanding will require increased contact and communication.
This will require a new effort to achieve world law. How different that sounds from, "This will require a new effort, a new context for world discussions." One is a call for a program; the other is a call for a platform. And what's strange about this moment in the Internet's cultural evolution is that we were presented with a platform, but it turns out it was also a program, "a new effort to achieve world law."
Within the United States, we might be able to cling to the rather flimsy safeguards we have for preventing the NSA from collecting data Americans submit to Internet services. But in a discussion of global Internet access, that is no comfort, however cold. The hard fact is that what is in web companies' self-interest -- getting more people using the Internet -- also expands the reach of American surveillance. That may not be Facebook or Google's fault, but it is the reality we're all living with now. And just like the average person has to adjust, so do these companies, in rhetoric at the very, very least.
The Internet.org video cut another bit from Kennedy's speech to make the end punchier (the cuts are bolded).
So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
The hint of politics -- the "means" of resolving differences -- and the hint of doubt that underpins wisdom, are both gone. And so is the line about making "the world safe for diversity." These lines complicate the simple story Internet.org wants to tell about the universality of the human experience. So, they don't belong in this slide deck.
In a post-Snowden world, the kinds of soaring declarations about connectedness that we see in this video just don't feel right. They sound a little absurd even. Simply look at the comments on the Internet.org YouTube video for evidence:
"Nice try, Facebook, NSA." "Yup! FREE! FREE! FREE! but more advertising to Connect The World, that's how that make $ --don't see that coming hah?" "It's all about money, once again. :)" "Its all for money , for your money actually dont pretend to be saints, we are not stupid"
And that's really the point here: Don't pretend to be saints. We are not stupid.
Because the narrow scope of Internet.org's actual mission sounds both reasonable and, perhaps, attainable, given the 60-year decrease in costs associated with all semiconductor-based technologies.
Not even a grump could take issue with an industry trying to make itself cheaper, so that more people could use its products.
But that's only one level of what Internet.org is trying to do. The public facing-side of Internet.org is not satisfied with looking and sounding like an industry collaboration to increase technical efficiency. It's also working at an ideological level to reinforce the idea that connectedness means peace, that Internet access means progress (or even Progress), that working for a tech company is about making the world a better place.
At some point, it may (may) have made sense to associate Facebook with peace. But that time is over.
The thing is: People love the Internet, and they'll hop on it if it's available, even given all privacy concerns. The tech business is safe. But its leaders also want our adulation.
And we shouldn't have to worship web products, or the people who make them, or the values they hold, to use the Internet.
What Is Medium?
The site from Twitter's co-founders is one year old, and still mysterious
Just about a year ago, a new website from two of the founders of Twitter launched. It was called Medium. The new site was invite-only, but outsiders could read from various collections. Ev Williams announced the site in a post. Medium, he said, was "a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends." While Medium might look like a standard blogging platform, a content management system, it had been "designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world." And yet "it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say."
At the time, I didn't notice the contradiction between the normative idea that Medium was some particular kind of publication -- that "a Medium" was a genre -- and the platform idea that Medium was for anyone to do anything and "find the right audience."
Over the last year, Medium's momentum has been building, and as it grows, the tensions between these sentiments is beginning to show. In the last couple weeks, five very different posts circulated widely in social media, all housed at Medium.com. They were:
The first two pieces are awesome. The second two are the opposite of awesome. And Catalano's story was fascinating, even if ultimately proved that her husband's former employer was paranoid more than it proved anything about the nature of government surveillance. The posts on Medium are arrived at in different ways. The Norton and Davis articles were clearly driven by Medium's in-house editors like former Wired.com chief Evan Hansen (for whom I used to work). McConlogue and Shih were just blogging, as people have done since Blogger and Wordpress evolved.
From the outside, Medium's strategy has seemed to be the following: 1) Create a beautiful, simple blogging platform, which Medium most certainly is. 2) Very slowly release control of who can use Medium to create cachet. 3) Pay some people to post to the site, but not most of them. (Sub-strategy: Don't disclose who's working for Medium and who's working on Medium.) 4) Promote the people they've paid along with a very small subset of everyone else.
All this built the idea that Medium was something more than yet another blogging platform. It was a place to be seen. Pieces that might have run on The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or Wired would pop up on Medium, and I'd be like, "Dang. How'd that happen?"
Medium seemed to be a machine for generating the kind of passaroundable content that does so well on Twitter. You want a smart "second-day" take on the news? Oh, here's this post on Medium.
All that made sense, too, given that the company was hiring elite web editors. Medium wasn't building a magazine, I realized, but a magazine killer.
They would and could do what we could do, but merely as a component of their overall strategy. It would be as if LiveJournal simultaneously built The Verge. It was almost an evolved Huffington Post or Forbes, with similar editorial chops at the high end and a better blogging platform at the low end (minus the relentless social media stuff).
Until recent weeks, this seemed like a tremendous strategy. They could skim the cream, and let the bad posts just sink, unloved and unshared. They got a bunch of great free stuff they could promote and any crap that got published on Medium didn't besmirch the great work they were doing with their paid-for stories. They could have their cake and a free one, too. (In this analogy, I suppose eating it would be making money, and so far, there's no sign Medium is doing anything but stockpiling cake.)
While people wondered why anyone would publish on Medium, as Marco Arment did, the big questions about what Medium was and what Medium was doing were relegated to footnotes. Indeed, Arment's post included this one: "[Medium] will also face a problem I'm familiar with: If the plan is to grow frontpage traffic and be more like a magazine, what kind of magazine is Medium? What's it about? Who's it for? And if they narrow the focus enough to make that easier to answer, who gets left out?"
In other words: what are the boundaries and limits of Medium? If anything defines a publication, it is what it *doesn't* do. More specifically: is Medium a place where Peter Shih should post about San Francisco women he thinks are ugly? Is Medium a better place on the Internet or is it any old place on the Internet?
Why does this matter?
For us media producers, we have to decide whether Medium is a friend or a foe. They don't appear to have the financial constraints we have (like making money through advertising or subscriptions), which gives them a design leg up, and they also don't have the ethical constraints we have in what runs on their site. If we publish something plagiarized, it reflects poorly on us. If Medium publishes something plagiarized, it reflects poorly on the writer.
In fact, in five minutes exploring Medium's latest posts, I found a post that came right up to the plagiarism line. The content marketing company that created it quickly pulled it down after I tweeted about it. But who takes the brand hit for that kind of mistake? And if the answer is not Medium, have they managed to create a system in which only positive attributes can be attributed to the posts they pull from their platform bloggers? That doesn't seem like a tenable long-term situation. (This is the Internet, after all.)
Individual writers, too, should probably know what it means that their writing is going up on Medium. If Medium is a publication, their work is situated within the journalistic tradition, with goals separate from corporate imperatives. If Medium is a platform and the goal is for it to acquire more users, then everything that gets posted on its site is marketing for that platform itself, even the very best stuff. The payments to writers get filed under user acquisition, and belong in the business category "growth hacking."
Maybe, though, I'm applying old-line thinking to this new creation. Perhaps Medium can continue to do precisely what it has been doing, and their brand value will continue to grow while these major questions remain unresolved. The center will hold because there is no center. In a world when every post stands on its own, atomistically, perhaps it's silly to think a publication can't be incoherent. Maybe a platform can sometimes be a magazine, when it sends out a newsletter of its best content, or when a visitor comes to its home page, but not to an individual story.
So what is Medium? Medium is a place to read articles on the Internet. Medium is a blogging platform, like Wordpress or Blogger. Medium is the new project from the guys who brought you Twitter. Medium is chaotically, arrhythmically produced by a combination of top-notch editors, paid writers, PR flacks, startup bros, and hacks.
Is it the publication for our particular moment?
5 Ways of Understanding the New, Feminist MOOC That's Not a MOOC
When professors go online, it doesn't have to look like any one particular thing.
(Robinson Meyer/Evan Bench)Yesterday, we received word of the newest innovation in higher education. Across the world this fall, it was said, students and professors would sit down at computer screens, breathe deeply, and plunge themselves into open learning.
But they would not be taking a MOOC.
They'll be taking a DOCC: a Distributed Open Collaborative Course. Its name rhymes with "lock."
It is a feminist MOOC.
Here are five ways of understanding it.
1. As a not-for-profit MOOC When people criticize MOOCs, Anna Balsamotold Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed (IHE) yesterday, they tend to focus on two things: the massiveness of MOOCs, and the fact that MOOCs have to make money.
Or they're trying to make money. Or they are making money. Or at some point in the future their content will be connected to something which has a profit motive.
The MOOC companies are still rather unclear about all this, but, in short, they're run by for-profit companies. The DOCC, on the other hand, is a phenomenon, an organized event, a happening, and, as such, is not for-profit.
A large number of participating colleges -- private and public, domestic and international -- are sponsoring the DOCC. (They include Yale, Bowling Green State, and the University of London.) The DOCC's faculty will be provided by those institutions, so the course doesn't have to pay to hire teachers. In fact, all they have to fund is the cost of video production, which, according to the IHE report, the New School and Brown University have provided, in two grants of $10,000 each. Pitzer College has also pitched in $7,000.
How does that compare to MOOCs? Saving on teaching costs by using faculty time for free is straight out of the MOOC playbook: A provider like Udacity isn't paying professors, either. And the DOCC's $27,000 bill is only a little more thanthe $25,000 which Stanford allots to each MOOCifying project.
2. As a non-massive open online course. (An "OOC.") Balsamo's other criticism is that MOOCs are too massive. The business model of the venture-funded, for-profit MOOC depends on applying the same pedagogical process to every student, and accomplishing this mass-application through the Internet.
The DOCC's classes are 15 to 30 people. How does that work?
Classes in the DOCC will begin with a common, couple-minute video, then discussion in which students and faculty share their own expertise and experience. There are fifteen courses at participating universities, so -- with about 20 students per course -- there will be about 300 students taking the class in person this fall. But the course also allows students to take it remotely: "We don't know how many 'drop-in' or 'self-directed learners,'" they'll get, Balsamo wrote to me in an email. "We've got a month to get the word out."
It presents a profoundly different vision of what education through the Internet might be, especially "open" education that "scales." As Ian Bogost wrote this weekend on MOOCs and the concept of growth:
The growth of private MOOC companies is driven almost entirely from financial speculation, speculation with an interest in private, short-term gain via industrialized scale. It's worth imagining what other kinds of growth might be possible if we had the stomach for a different kind of speculation meant to benefit long-term social institutions like schools instead of just the market.
The DOCC posits that other forms of growth might be possible: something smaller, something more personalized.
3. As a feminist project. And Balsamo, in her email to me, portrayed that alternate form of growth as feminist, saying they were purposefully playing on the word "massive," because the DOCC's topic, "Feminism and Technology" is so rarely discussed in universities. She wrote:
To be able to gather 300 students + 30 instructors to engage these topics, for 10 weeks, is a major step forward in educating a new generation on the important histories and innovative thinking that is ALWAYS left out of the official records.
In the words of Balsamo, MOOCs which triumph the singular, genius professor, lecturing from the middle of the invented digital world, are troubling, too: "The idea of the one best talking head, the best expert in the world, that couldn't be more patriarchal," she told IHE. "That displays a hubris that is unthinkable from a feminist perspective."
Students in the DOCC, according to Jaschick, will also "storm Wikipedia," analyzing how the website represents notable female contributors to science and technology. As such, it seems to be a statement about the worth and value of digital institutions, even if those institutions are (at the moment) imperfect.
4. As a continuation.When pundits of a certain class debate MOOCs, they often decry the lack of innovation that occurs in institutions of higher education. (Though, when they decry these things, they usually mean a very narrow set of schools: elite, mostly private, four-year.)
It seems to me, looking at the DOCC that this, too, is innovation. This is the innovation you are looking for. And it comes as another step in an ongoing, long-lasting tradition of pedagogy meant to serve those that teaching hasn't historically served or hasn't historically covered.
5. As an initialism. Alas, alas, some paradigms of MOOC-dom might never be shifted.
3D Printing Goes Mainstream Retail
Just another day at UPS: Photocopy the ol' resume, ship back shoes to Zappos, print a car part.
UPSAbout a month ago, a UPS store in eastern San Diego started offering a new service: 3D printing. Six weeks ago, store owner Burke Jones says, "I didn't know anything about 3D printing."
"I'd love to take credit for the idea because it's been really successful, but the truth is UPS came up with it," he adds. "They wanted to test the market." Last week, UPS rolled out another 3D printer, at a shop in Northwest DC, and it plans to open up four more over the next few months, at locations that have yet to be finalized.
Since the printer arrived at his store (a uPrint SE Plus), Jones has faced a pretty steep learning curve, he says, experimenting with the technology right alongside his clientele, who range from basement tinkerers looking to test some far-fetched idea to big businesses whose engineers just need to prototype something quickly and the company's equipment is otherwise occupied. Those are the easy jobs, Jones says, "They call us up and say I have an [STL] file and I need to print three of them." No problem.
Jones doesn't want to give anyone's ideas away, but he's seen people come in and print things ranging from "pet-feeding apparatuses to high-tech gadgets you attach to your smartphone." Several people have come in needing a car part, such as the little plastic gizmos you used to pull to unlock a manual door. "There was a guy who had some old cars and those had broken off and he wanted those," Jones says. It's not exactly cheap -- something as simple as a ball bearing can cost $15 and prices go up from there -- but for companies trying to get a quick prototype, that can be well within the budget for a project.
3D printing is not unlike the normal old-fashioned 2D printing process, according to Jones. Say someone wants to print business cards. She'll come in with a rough idea of what she's looking for. One of the staff members will begin asking questions: What color did you have in mind? What kind of paper do you like? How do you feel about this font? Then you'll print out a first-go, and it'll be close but not perfect, and you'll improve it from there.
For those who come in with an idea for a 3D object, they'll come in and work with Jones and an engineer he's hired, Tei Newman-Lehman, and, "between the three of us, we get your idea on the paper." (Newman-Lehman, Jones says, used to design airplane parts for the military, but, "with sequestration and stuff, he's now doing this. But he's got a degree in nuclear engineering. I mean, that's a little overkill, but he's happy.") And then from paper to software to printer, the object transitions from idea to a physical fact.
"I've been in the printing business for a good solid 15 years, and it's a similar process initially, it's just that when we hit the print button, it does a different thing."
"That's the part that I get to enjoy -- to watch people go through the process of the birth of their idea," Jones says, "You should see their faces! When they see their part, it's like, it's amazing. It's not like they're an engineer. We've had many engineers come in and many doctors come in. And they come in with files that are perfect and they print perfectly and they get exactly what they expect. But other people, come in and they're like, in a couple of days or a week, they're holding their part, and it's a magical moment." "My parents are going to get me a comma for my birthday someday," Jones jokes, "because I tend to just ramble on in a stream of consciousness." (UPS)It's this process, from idea to object, that excites Jones. "It is astounding to me, as a 51-year-old, that I can literally take my idea, if I was willing to put in the hours today, I could take an idea out of my head, or out of somebody's head, and by the end of the day I could have a hard plastic prototype in their hand."
For Jones, the technical capacity of 3D printing is inspiring him to think differently. "It could literally change our daily perceptions, change our lives. Because, who knows? We don't know what we haven't thought of yet. Just the thought process -- that I can do that --stimulates a part of my brain that is more creative than it was six weeks ago."
One of Jones's favorite customers is a team of two students, old friends who grew up together, who got a grant to work together to build a robotic hand. "They're so funny; it's kinda like the Big Bang Theory -- you know, they make jokes that nobody else gets."
"They're really good guys," he continues, "and they're just really smart. And I like them. And it kind of gives me hope, because, you know, I don't interact with those people that much. They're just uber smart guys. They have this big plan to ultimately get it so reacts to your skin.
"You know," he adds, "their dreams are different from my dreams." But Jones, with his machine, is helping to get them there. The printer (UPS)
Promo Video Cut From the Kennedy Speech It Quotes
The tech industry continues to make soaring declarations about connectedness, which sound increasingly out of tune in the post-Snowden era
Extending affordable Internet access to everyone in the world who wants it is probably a worthwhile endeavor. Information has economic value, after all.
Today, Internet.org launched, a new industry coalition that includes Facebook, Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia, Opera, and Mediatek. It's fronted, at least for the launch, by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
The initial goal of the organization, as it laid out in a press release and associatedNew York Times article, are to "cut the cost of providing mobile Internet services to one percent of its current level within five to 10 years by improving the efficiency of Internet networks and mobile phone software."
Right now, Internet.org features exactly one thing above the fold on the site: a video of scenes from around the world, cut in Facebook's characteristic style. A piano tinkles in the background as we see children playing in Africa, agricultural workers in south Asia, people playing games, chasing pigeons, swinging on an amusement park ride, hair blowing in the wind. Friends bicycling along a road in Latin America. Et cetera.
The Natural Gas Boom: Processes, Production, and Problems
The best reportage and analysis about the possibilities and dangers of fracking
A gas flare at a fracking site in Bradford County, Pennsylvania (Reuters).
Alexis Madrigal explains how energy really works in America Read more
The key technologies behind the U.S. natural gas boom are "hydraulic fracturing" (fracking), and "horizontal drilling". For a good look at the way these processes are used to access shale deposits, check out this interactive info-graphic from National Geographic.
To get an outline of shale gas itself, here's the overview provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The origins of fracking extend into the 19th century, but it's only in the last 30 years that much progress was made, according to the EIA.
Deposits are globally abundant, too, though it's too early to say whether a U.S. style take-off will be seen elsewhere in the world:
Because they have proven to be quickly producible in large volumes at a relatively low cost, shale/tight oil and shale gas resources have revolutionized U.S. oil and natural gas production, providing 29 percent of total U.S. crude oil production and 40 percent of total U.S. natural gas production in 2012. However, given the variation across the world's shale formations in both geology and above-the-ground conditions, the extent to which global technically recoverable shale resources will prove to be economically recoverable is not yet clear." (EIA report)
The gas boom is so big, it's turned into a glut, and the U.S. is gearing up to export liquefied natural gas (L.N.G.) outside North America. Energy expert Michael Levi's piece in the New York Times lists the pros and cons, before going on to side with supporters of exports.
"Export advocates] urged President Obama to move forward with approval, citing the benefits of free trade and the prospect of creating more jobs as demand for exports leads to growth in gas production. Critics pose a contrary set of arguments. They fear that demand for gas exports might encourage hydraulic fracturing, threatening water supplies, and they worry that siphoning off domestic gas for export will raise costs for domestic consumers and disadvantage American manufacturers that benefit from low-cost fuel. There are also national security concerns. Some see an opportunity to frustrate the two biggest holders of natural gas reserves: Russia and Iran. Critics would prefer that natural gas be used to replace oil in American automobiles.
In a New York Timesarticle from mid-2011, Ian Urbina questioned the hype behind the shale surge. The piece cited numerous sources involved in the industry, who expressed doubt about the sustainability of the industry's business model and suggested that natural gas development is an Enron-style financial scandal in the making:
In the e-mails, energy executives, industry lawyers, state geologists and market analysts voice skepticism about lofty forecasts and question whether companies are intentionally, and even illegally, overstating the productivity of their wells and the size of their reserves. Many of these e-mails also suggest a view that is in stark contrast to more bullish public comments made by the industry, in much the same way that insiders have raised doubts about previous financial bubbles.
However, Levi criticizes the article on his Council on Foreign Relations blog for taking what might be a problem for individual drilling firms, and labeling it a systemic crisis for the entire natural gas industry:
The Times repeatedly confuses the fortunes of various risk-hungry independents with the fortunes of the industry as a whole. Some investors will lose lots of money; some banks will regret having made loans. That's life.
ProPublica delved deeply into the regulatory environment surrounding the wellsused to inject fracking fluids. They found serious, unaddressed scientific questions and that oil and gas drillers have received some breaks on how they classify waste from the government.
The energy industry won a critical change in the federal government's legal definition of waste: Since 1988, all material resulting from the oil and gas drilling process is considered non-hazardous, regardless of its content or toxicity.
"It took a lot of talking to sell the EPA on that and there are still a lot of people that don't like it," said Bill Bryson, a geologist and former head of the Kansas Corporation Commission's Conservation Division, who lobbied for and helped draft the federal rules. "But it seemed the best way to protect the environment and to stop everybody from just having to test everything all the time."
In an article at CNN, Greenpeace exec Phil Radford and actor Mark Ruffalo raise concerns about the climate impact:
If we [develop shale gas] we'll go from 'spill, baby, spill' to 'fracked' in no time -- and put our long-term chances to solve the climate crisis in serious jeopardy...Although burning natural gas has less impact on the climate than other fossil fuels, once you take into account the damage done from extraction, it's clear natural gas is a lose-lose.
On Andy Revkin's energy blog at the New York Times, two climate researchers respond to fears about the impacts of natural gas extraction on greenhouse gas levels. Their posts can be found on the blog, but here is Revkin's brief summary of the issue:
Natural gas is mostly methane, a potent, but short-lived greenhouse gas. Careless gas drilling and development of pipelines and distribution systems can release substantial amounts of gas. Recognizing the pollution problems this poses, the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to tighten rules (too slowly, for sure). Both of these scientists say leakage is a problem, but feel the climate threat has been grossly overstated.
Green groups are also troubled by the potential negative effects of gas drilling on local communities. Levi's piece for CNN outlines these risks -- water and air pollution, earthquakes, and disruption to community life -- and goes on to suggest why solutions in the form of tougher regulation are workable, necessary, and would benefit the industry, rather than harming it:
The biggest risk for fracking, and to all the benefits it brings, isn't that drillers will have to spend a bit more to make sure that oil and gas production proceeds safely. It's that they won't -- and that the resulting backlash when things inevitably go wrong will deal the U.S. power surge a far more severe blow.
Clashes between fracking advocates and opponents look set to continue for at least the next few years in states sitting on big deposits -- like New York and California -- where Todd Woody at Quartzdescribes the ongoing battle in the legislature and the court system:
All but two of a dozen fracking-related bills have been shot down or are languishing in limbo in the California Legislature...The fight against fracking now continues on other battlefields. National environmental groups like the CBD and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are pressing the anti-fracking campaign in the courts and in communities that sit atop the Monterey Shale.
Just about a year ago, a new website from two of the founders of Twitter launched. It was called Medium. The new site was invite-only, but outsiders could read from various collections. Ev Williams announced the site in a post. Medium, he said, was "a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends." While Medium might look like a standard blogging platform, a content management system, it had been "designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world." And yet "it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say."
