Slate reports: The United States will pass Russia this year to lead the world in production of oil and natural gas, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports.

America has been closing in on Russia since 2008 thanks to a boom in both oil and gas production, primarily on private lands. This year it’s on track to out-produce it by a substantial margin. Saudi Arabia is third overall and remains the world’s largest oil producer — though the United States may be on track to take that title as well.

“This is a remarkable turn of events,” the head of the EIA told the Wall Street Journal. “This is a new era of thinking about market conditions, and opportunities created by these conditions, that you wouldn’t in a million years have dreamed about.”

As recently as 2007, economists were writing things like, “the amount of oil produced in America each year has been on a path of inexorable decline now for two generations.” Turns out the path was exorable after all. All it took was a whole lot of fracking. [Continue reading…]

DeSmogBlog: What’s it like living in a small town that’s gone from rust belt farmland to fracking boomtown?

First, residents often say, there’s the traffic. Communities have been unexpectedly flooded with heavy tractor trailers that locals say turn 10 minute commutes into hour-long ordeals, choke back roads and decimate pavement so badly that in some areas, drilling companies are barred from entering until they agree to pay for road repairs. “The traffic here is horrendous,” Towanda, PA resident Joe Benjamin told NPR.

Others often describe the impacts on the social fabric – a “wild west” atmosphere that brings with it increased crime and public health problems.

But these reports have been largely anecdotal, with little to quantify how big these impacts are or how much of it is due to fracking. Until now.

A new report by Food and Water Watch examines the social impacts of fracking, comparing traffic, crime and sexually transmitted infections in rural Pennsylvania counties. Using a decade worth of county-level data, they compare the differences between counties with substantial fracking and without, and how these counties have changed over time, from before the boom until after it set in. [Continue reading…]