“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 22

to gas drillers. Nor was Taylor, whom I had i rst seen the previous day
sermonizing at the rally in Columbus, a Luddite who just wanted tech-
nology to go away. A few minutes spent listening to him extol the virtues
of the latest milk-processing equipment and marveling at his cut ing-
edge creamery were enough to dispel that suspicion.
“My parents bought woodland property down here in the early
1960s,” Taylor recalled. “Beautiful, not a virgin forest, but a damaged
World War II vet had moved onto it in 1945 and hadn't allowed any
logging since. So by the 1960s, unlike most places around here, where
they're constantly being logged for a lit le pit ance, this was a beautiful
woods.” Later, at er living in California, Taylor moved back to the area.
“h e farm adjacent to the property my parents bought, I bought a year
at er I moved here, and its corn bot om had won a blue ribbon at the
Meigs County Fair as the i nest corn bot om in the county. Two years
later the neighbor strip-mined his place, and the runof from those high
walls destroyed that corn bot om that was the basis of the proi tability
of a six-hundred-and-forty-acre farm.” Taylor could barely contain his
emotion. “At er we moved here and bought the place, a guy did a PhD
in geology from Ohio State University examining that exact place and
concluded that it would be a thousand years before it would return to
being what it had been. Now you do the economic analysis for me on
a thousand years of corn versus one year of coal.” He recounted one
more tale of pollution for which no one had been punished. “Now,”
Taylor said, his face red with anger and not far away from mine, “do
you understand my perspective about fracking?”
Shale gas came fast, transforming communities that had long been
set in their ways. Only a few years earlier, high and volatile natural gas
prices seemed inevitable. 1 People speak about natural gas in terms of
thousands of cubic feet: the United States uses about seventy million
thousand cubic feet each day, and the typical household uses about sev-
enty thousand cubic feet each year. 2 At er averaging about two dollars
for a thousand cubic feet of natural gas during the 1990s, prices began
an upward climb. h e i rst peak, in early 2001, reached nine dollars;
at er quickly crashing, prices started heading up again, reaching a stag-
gering fourteen dollars in late 2005. h en the cycle repeated, with prices
sliced in half a few months later before bouncing back close to their