This problem of how corporate management has become unmoored from its investors and from the larger society is part of a much larger cultural phenomenon. The cultural curmudgeon Jacques Barzun is not optimistic and believes Western society has descended into fullblown, irreversible decadence. "The point at which good intentions exceeded the power to fulfill them marked for the culture the onset of decadence," he writes in From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life.

The veteran pollster and lay philosopher Daniel Yankelovich is much more explicit, but much more optimistic that our ship can once again be uprighted:

In recent years, America has put consumption ahead of production, spending ahead of saving, immediate gratification ahead of working for the future, the welfare of old people ahead of the interests of the young, greed ahead of sacrifice, self-interest ahead of long-term growth, expediency ahead of quality, and the needs of the individual ahead of the needs of the society. In the conflict between market values and communal ones, market values have dominated.

--Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World

I sure know the price
8$ -> 100tcf
9$ -> 2000tcf
13$ -> Wow! neither fusion nor fision necessary

NG is just like oil - reserves have nothing to do with adequate flows, and flows are about profits and affordability.

Thank you for that very helpful post.

ROCKMAN,

I don't dispute anything you say. There may indeed be plentiful natural gas reserves to be produced from these shale plays.

What I do disagree with is that these shales will provide natural gas that is both plentiful and inexpensive. When donkeys fly!

It's like these babbling idiots who come on here and other blogs and say you can produce oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands for $60 a barrel. Anybody who can read a financial statement knows that's pure poppycock. The forward-looking cost is over $100 per barrel, which a 15-minute glance at Suncor's or any other operator's financials readily demonstrates.

But it is entirely one thing for some annonymous blogger or some air-headed pundit to say you can produce natural gas from the Barnett shale for $6.00 per MMBTU and for an executive of a company, like Chesapeake, who is in that business, with his fiduciary and social responsibilities and access to superior proprietary knowledge, to say the same thing. It is derelict. And it is a lie. And he knows it.

It's what happens when you have people with a car salesman's mentality rise to positions of power and prestige. In speaking of the fall of the Spanish empire, J.H. Elliot called it the "moral and intellectural bankruptcy of the...ruling class," the "triumph of mediocrity" where the Cortes of Castile "had long since shown itself to be little more than a forum in which the procuradores watched over the interests of their own privileged class."