Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, June 13, 2010

The Price Of Carbon

Commentary By Ron Beasley



The coverage of the BP disaster is pretty much non stop but what we have not heard is that it may not be possible to stop it.  But there is another potential toxic invasion. 

This month has not been a quiet one for the booming Marcellus Shale
natural gas well drilling industry, and the commotion has the attention
of Debbie Borowiec of Upper Burrell, where two gas wells are planned
near 67 homes on Chapeldale Drive.



The industry noise began with a "blowout" on June 3 at a Marcellus
Shale well outside Penfield in rural Clearfield County. That well,
adjacent to the Moshannon State Forest, spewed natural gas and drilling
wastewater contaminated with toxic chemicals into the air for 16 hours.



On Monday, drillers hit a pocket of methane in an inactive deep mine,
causing an explosion and fire that flared 50-feet high for four days,
destroyed a drilling rig and burned all seven workers on the well pad,
located in a farm field near Moundsville in West Virginia's northern
panhandle.



"We're horrified by the possibilities of that happening here," Ms.
Borowiec said about Marcellus Shale wells planned for a pad 1,500 feet
from homes in Upper Burrell. "The more research we do the more horrific
it is, and I don't think a lot of people know what's going on."





Our lust for carbon fuel endangers our drinking water, our food sources and yes, even our lives.  And this is a bipartisan problem.  Both Democrats and Republicans have been purchased by big energy.  The problem goes back 40 years or more.  Big energy has always had lots of money and money buys both politicians and favorable editorial coverage in the corporate media.  The result was little research on alternate energy, inadequate fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, resistance to mass transit and the encouragement of still more urban sprawl.  And then there are the wars - would we be fighting hopeless battles in the middle east if it weren't for oil?  Someday the Cheney Energy Task Force documentation will be made public and the world will know that the invasion of Iraq was all about oil. 



We are addicted to carbon fuels and the pushers are just as nefarious as the pusher of crack cocaine.  Both make lots of money as long as your addiction continues.  They have something else in common - the addiction will eventually kill us.  Perhaps not us personally but our children and grandchildren.



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