Posted by DanielS on Wed, 01 Jun 2016 09:30 | #

I noticed an analogous situation when I first visited Poland back in the 1990s. U.S. Tobacco companies sales had suffered for bans on advertising, sin taxes, public space smoking bans, health service announcements and programs. As a result, there was a markedly observable difference between the 1960’s and 70’s when smoking was commonplace among Americans and the 80’s and 90’s when smoking for an American was rare.

The tobacco companies had no compunction about making up for their market decrease by turning around and selling their poison in Poland, where their product was not restricted as such.

It was disconcerting to come into a nation where young pretty girls were commonplace and to also find their smoking commonplace.

There have been studies which indicate that it is particularly bad for young girls to smoke as compared to young males because even if young women quit after a while they can incur irreversible genetic changes when smoking as teenagers - damage to their lungs that cannot be reversed.

Posted by Hillary fracks the globe on Tue, 07 Jun 2016 05:22 | #

Mother Jones, “How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World”, 15 May 2015:

A trove of secret documents details the US government’s global push for shale gas.

One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria’s bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read “Stop fracking with our water” and “Chevron go home.” Bulgaria’s parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.

Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people.” But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania’s parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Depart­ment’s lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania’s parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria’s eased its moratorium.

The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton’s diplomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe…

[...]

Poland alone had granted more than 100 shale concessions covering nearly a third of its territory. When the nation lit its first shale gas flare atop a Halliburton-drilled well that fall, the state-owned gas company ran full-page ads in the country’s largest newspapers showing a spindly rig rising above the hills in the tiny village of Lubocino, alongside the tagline: “Don’t put out the flame of hope.” Politicians promised that Poland would soon break free of its nemesis, Russia, which supplies the lion’s share of its gas. “After years of dependence on our large neighbor, today we can say that my generation will see the day when we will be independent in the area of natural gas,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared. “And we will be setting terms.”

But shale was not the godsend that industry leaders and foreign governments had hoped it would be. For one, new research from the US Geological Survey suggested that the EIA assessments had grossly overestimated shale deposits: The recoverable shale gas estimate for Poland shrank from 187 trillion cubic feet to 1.3 trillion cubic feet, a 99 percent drop. Geological conditions and other factors in Europe and Asia also made fracking more arduous and expensive; one industry study estimated that drilling shale gas in Poland would cost three times what it does in the United States.