When I choose a banker, I want one with enough savvy that he would never say the following:
“Call me naïve, but I’m inclined to trust the industry to be good stewards of this land until they prove me otherwise.”
Naïve? Nah, that’s a profound lack of judgment and ignorance of the historical abuses of the oil and gas industry.
The quote comes from a Texas Observer article about the Eagle Ford Shale, Cuero Bets on Fracking by Saul Elbein. The banker is excited about all the new development—RV parks that house the roughnecks—in the formerly quaint, quiet town of Cuero. He envisions Cuero as a vacation spot filled with tourists some day.
“THEY’RE GOING to bring tourists?” Sister Elizabeth Reibschlager asked me when I told her about my conversations with the mayor and Kleinecke. “What are people going to come look at, oil wells?
“They have their shiny idea of what’s going to happen, and they don’t want to hear anything else.”
Sister Elizabeth, a nun of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and a Cuero native, has spent the last two years raising concerns about the drilling.
Well Sister, as Upton Sinclair said: “It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.”
How is that “trust” working in the Eagle Ford Shale?