resources

In this edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, research fellow Isaac Orr and Roberta Walls, the point person for industrial sand mining at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, discuss a new document produced by the DNR to educate the general public and decision makers about the environmental, economic, and social impacts of industrial sand mining in the state.

On Monday, May 2 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on what the New York Times (NYT) called: “a lengthy battle for energy production.” The court’s unanimous decision to strike down two cities’ limits on fracking is a victory for oil-and-gas companies and a “disappointment” to anti-fossil-fuel activists. Several states, including Colorado’s neighbors, New Mexico and Texas, have faced similar anti-oil-and-gas initiatives that have also been shot down.

The world has changed. Although few yet understand it, the revolution in the production of oil and natural gas from shale has altered the course of global energy, affecting most of the world’s people. This is not a short-term event. Citizens, industries and nations will be impacted for decades to come.

Multi-well drilling and walking rigs have become important because the fracking revolution has dramatically changed the way we produce oil and natural gas over the past 10 years. Unlike conventional oil and gas production, which takes place in permeable rock formations such as sandstone, fracking develops oil and gas from shale, which requires fracking. Multiple wells must be drilled in different directions to tap these resources from the rocks below.

Pope Francis’ highly anticipated papal encyclical “Laudato Si,” which means “Praised Be to You,” was released on June 18 by the Vatican, and the potential fallout from the pope’s assault on fossil fuels will devastate the world’s most impoverished people and cause untold unnecessary deaths.

Green zealots believe that we can and should run modern societies exclusively on “Green” energies, and they have embarked on a war on hydrocarbons. They need to be told that their green energy favourites are just stealing from the biosphere – they are not as green as they claim.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, managing editor of Environment and Climate News, H. Sterling Burnett talks with E. Calvin Beisner. Beisner is the founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance, a volunteer network of about 60 Christian theologians, scientists, economists, and other scholars who teach or do research at various universities and colleges around North America. The Cornwall Alliance focuses on the biblical perspective on environmental and natural resource use issues. Beisner was the recipient of the 2014 Outstanding Spokesperson of Faith, Science, and Stewardship Award at The Heartland Institute’s Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 8th in Las Vegas.

On January 16 The New York Times reported the lies NASA keeps telling about global warming with an article titled “2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics.” We have reached the point where neither a famed government agency nor a famed daily newspaper can be believed simply because both are lying to advance the greatest hoax of the modern era.

One-and-a-half million to 2 million men and women served in America’s defense during the Global War on Terror. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 250,000 service members enter civilian life each year—and that number will rise with the drawdown of soldiers from Afghanistan. As troops return home, they face a new fight: finding a job in a competitive labor market that doesn’t understand how their military experience translates into employees with discipline, organization, and motivation.

The joke is that Jimmy Carter is happy that Barack Obama has replaced him as the worst President of the modern era. It is a supreme irony that Obama’s campaign theme was “Hope and Change” when Americans have lost a great deal of hope about their personal futures and the only change they want is to see Obama gone from office.

U.S. oil and natural gas production has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to hydraulic fracturing, a technology that allows engineers to access deep-underground resources from rock formations once too expensive to develop. This technology has made the United States the largest producer of natural gas in the world and on track to surpass Saudi Arabia as the leading producer of oil by 2015. The entire U.S. public benefits from this inexpensive domestic source of fuel.

Take the food out of our gas tanks and put it back on the table. Reinvigorate high-yield farming research. Our ancestors coped with the “resource crises” as long as they could eat.