is much more nuanced, complicated and sometimes grossly different.

Yet there remains a number of other prominent cheerleaders of the "shale miracle." The magisterial George Friedman of the geopolitical website Stratfors.com, came on David McAlvaney's weekly podcast touting the prospects of massive gas exports to Europe and Asia. Friedman characterized it as:

"…a technological revolution as dramatic as Silicon Valley was in introducing the microchip. All the assumptions about energy in the world have been turned on their heads. The United States is now a major producer. The problem is logistic. How do you get it from here to there."

This is worse than a simplistic view of the situation. The shale gas industry has never been profitable at US prices seen since production ramped up bigtime around 2007. Currently it'sof this was the behavior of national leaders and the public in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. The system was hugely burdened by the debris of loans gone bad, a lot of it packaged into fraudulent bonds. The biggest banks in the nation were implicated in the creation of these frauds and left holding a lot of their own bad paper when the music stopped. Clearing the debris would have restored structural integrity to the banking system. Prosecuting financial criminals in the executive suites of the banks would have disincentivized racketeering and control fraud.

American leadership allowed neither restructuring or prosecution. Banks (except for Lehman Brothers, the unloved "fall guy") were not only prevented from failing, they were stuffed with taxpayer bailout money, plugged into a new