Speaking of “educating” (ahem) the public, one of my favorite soap boxes is about oil - namely, the institutionalize obfuscation, and just downright lying, about “oil”.

There are many dimensions to this “education”.

For example, now owned by a local wingnut, the SDUT ran a DRILL BABY DRILL! editorial about how California could be swimming in oil if it just wasn’t for those nasty environmentalists:

California should lead oil-shale revolution

[…]

A 2011 federal report on California’s biggest oil shale resource, known as the Monterey Formation, estimated it had at least 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil. That’s four times bigger than the Bakken formation, where oil drilling has turned North Dakota into an economic dynamo. Our state’s shale resource extends from the eastern edge of Silicon Valley south to Kern County.

[…]

There is so much to write about this but frankly few people care because in general people want to believe what they perceive as good news, and since most everyone thinks lower gasoline prices is “good news”, everyone wants to believe that magic happens.

As with the Bakken formation, the Monterey formation is not new knowledge. These type of hydrocarbon “resources” (and that term has a particular definition in the eyes of the financial world) were not profitable to explore because the effort to produce anything from them required an petroleum price higher than the market could bear for much of oil-producing history. Only in the past few years with sustained high prices internationally can companies spend the effort to produce from such formations.

Now the next paragraph in the SDUT editorial:

On Dec. 12, the federal Bureau of Land Management is set to auction off drilling rights to nearly 18,000 acres in Monterey, San Benito and Fresno counties. We hope Gov. Jerry Brown and state regulators talk a calm look at fracking and its long history. Environmentalists’ griping about fracking’s allegedly huge downside only ramped up when new methods proved transformative for oil and gas exploration.

What the editorial ignores totally is the price of the product. When petroleum prices go up so does drilling activity, and when prices go down drilling ceases. Secondly, that bolded sentence is very much a tautology; the editors are acting as if those nasty “environmentalists” only gripe when, well, something actually happens in the environment. Who would have figured?