In exchange for renaming the town, all residents of the town have received free basic television service for ten years and a free DVR from Dish Network. There was no formal opposition to renaming Clark; twelve citizens attended the council meeting to support the measure.

Obviously a town of serious people, even if there are only 225 of them.That detail alone is often overlooked and DISH is conflated in the European fractivist mind as being symptomatic of an entire city choking from widespread pollution. So the next time you hear about the poisoned city in Texas,  look out the window. Most people in Europe would see homes of 225 people. But, who needs reality, it's all about perception: thanks to Gasland, DISH plays the shale Fukushima to Dimock's Chernobyl in the eyes of the antis.  

This week,US National Public Radio did a series on the medical impacts of shale. It would be very hard for even the most paranoid shale anti to dismiss the reports from NPR as being biased, just as US/UK right wing BBC haters dismiss NPR as Radio Moscow. That makes the NPR report that much more significant:

The Karoo group is well funded and there has been talk of them creating a world alliance of fractitivists. One can go to any anti page worldwide and find South Africa's moratorium featured prominently and approvingly as example for the world to follow.

Luckily the resources of South Africa belong to all South Africans and the apartheid nostalgia fractivists of South Africa are going to be only a bizarre footnote to the fracking debate.

The Energy Ministry came out with all guns firing for hydraulic fracturing – referred to cautiously as the “f-word” on Tuesday – as it could help turn around Africa’s energy fortunes, reduce dependence on dirty fuels like coal and create masses of jobs in the Karoo.

The Balcombe antis have always known where the true dangers lie. Why concentrate on millions of barrels of oil when a couple of extra trucks might come through the village? Similarly, the new scare headline for Thursday's Guardian:

Cuadrilla plan to inject the equivalent of nearly 80,000 bottles of Bonnymans Patio Cleaner underneath Balcombe village

That's their take and this one is mine. 

Europe should focus on cutting carbon emissions, rather than just repeating an existing range of EU green policy targets that expire at the end of the decade, Britain's energy and climate chief said on Monday.

But I can report an obvious problem of US natural gas that was the number one topic of concern in Texas recently.It's ironic that this is the issue very rarely mentioned in Europe. This is the true "controversy" of shale gas that is never mentioned because people simply cannot envisage that such a problem could develop. Strange how people are happy to obsess about the imperceptible or the inconsequential but refuse to discuss the elephant in the room of North American shale gas:

There is so much gas that one cannot even begin to explain how much there is.  It is increasingly clear that the massive gaps developing between supply and demand could destabilise even world gas markets. Let's look first at this slide from the US Energy Information Administration. These are interesting in they show the impact of shale only in the modern era:

I decided then with a combination of European cynicism and my NYC bullshitometer, that this had a lot to do with money and zero to do with water. I particularly liked the the mega mansion being built (with gas royalties) on the same land that one land owner said Cabot had poisoned. Proof today, yet again on what that well known spawn of Dick Cheney says for the FOURTH time.That's right, but contrary to paranoid assertion, it is actually Barack Obama's EPA that discovers:

Federal environmental regulators say testing of scores of drinking-water wells in a northeastern Pennsylvania village has failed to show unsafe levels of contamination, a blow to residents who assert a gas driller tainted their water supply with hazardous chemicals nearly four years ago.