“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 25

Not everyone, though, was enthused. Geologists fought over how
much natural gas could really be extracted from the ground. Neighbors
argued over whether the jobs and money that industry brought were
outweighed by the environmental risks and community disruption
that happened when gas drillers started moving their trucks into town
and when some people got rich quick while others didn't. Economists
debated precisely how transformative gas might be for the national
economy, while strategists sparred over exactly what the boom in gas
production might mean for U.S. national security. Others warned that
cheap gas would kill renewable power, and along with it any hope of
confronting climate change. One thing was for certain: shale gas chal-
lenged almost every assumption that had been made only a few years
before. As Bill Dix put it, recalling the iconic 1980s TV show, “It's
Dallas!” He was enjoying the change of pace. “I've been milking cows
for twenty years, man. I'm bored!”

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Shale gas was shaking up the U.S. economy. It's usually dii cult to i gure
out how much credit to give any particular development for a big gain
in jobs. Most economists would say that when the economy is working
properly, it doesn't even make much sense to try. h ey call this “full
employment,” and it means that, most of the time, the unemployment
rate in the country is basically i xed. h e number is a consequence of
basic factors including how many people are able and want to work,
how l exible they are when it comes to switching jobs, and what the
Federal Reserve in Washington does with interest rates; add a job in
one industry, theory says, and you'll ultimately i nd someone out of
work in another. 12 But when the economy is in the dumps, and the
unemployment rate is abnormally high, the usual rules don't apply: new
jobs are much more of an unalloyed good, and jobs added in one part
of the economy don't clearly come at the expense of others. When the
shale gas boom took of , around 2009, there was no question that the
U.S. economy was in awfully poor health.
h e shale boom had another feature that made it relatively easy
to pin down its impact: it came out of nowhere. People studying the