Selecting the right words is important

I'm probably overstepping my boundaries by questioning an article by one of my betters, a Pulitzer prize-winning and best-selling author, who serves on the U.S. Secretary of Energy Advisory Board and chaired the US Department of Energy’s Task Force on Strategic Energy Research and Development - Daniel Yergin. He went to Yale and earned a PhD from Cambridge.  He mixes with people like Bill Gates, appears on television as an energy expert. And I, an old man from East Cambridge, find Dr. Yergin's article in the NY Times somewhat lacking in considering the environmental costs of "America's New Energy Reality".

It's quite interesting that the word "fracking" is not used in the article, yet the reason for our new energy reality is, in fact, the arrival of fracking on the scene.  Yergin speaks of the natural gas market having been "transformed by the rapid expansion of shale gas production".  As for the increased availability of oil, Yergin attributes it to " tight oil. That is the term for oil produced from tight rock formations with the same technology used to produce shale gas."

Fracking is a real cost of our new energy reality.  Is the cost worth it?  Yergin does acknowledge in a somewhat off-hand way that there may be environmental costs, but you have to read the article a couple of times to pick this up.