Discussion for article #243617
Reminds me of an old school chum’s story about a guy who rented his parents farm, with a carefully worded lease that he then interpreted as a right to bring in a logging company to cut down and sell every tree on the property. By the time the farmers geared up to fight the deception in court, the deed was done. So not just cheating property owners out of income from their mineral rights, but even billing them for the company’s own operating expenses sounds about right. Hope they nail these bastards.
The same people have been fighting to route gas pipelines across heritage farms, pipelines not to deliver gas to local customers, but to pipe the gas to terminals, load it on ships, and export to foreign customers.
This is the oil industry in action, working hard to maximize their own profits while they cheat everybody else. We may have lots of gas right now, at the expense of wells destroyed by fracking, but after they plunder it all, we’ll be importing again in a generation or two when it’s all gone. They make money both ways.
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Been reading Grisham’s Gray Mountain. Not his best work but passable. Sometimes fiction tells the truth better than non-fiction. The book described much of the kind underhanded dealings found in this article but from coal companies. If all energy companies are like this then I can see why countries nationalize the energy sector.
Coal companies operate the same. I remember back in the 60s small legacy land owners in eastern Kentucky were deceived into selling their mineral rights with no warning that their entire property would be strip mined to depths up to 30 feet - right up to the front door of their cabins - and left that way. Not only was their land destroyed of course but I remember seeing pictures of homes left sitting atop “cliffs” created by strip mining around them, which eventually collapsed into the sulphur-laden, polluted pits the coal company left behind, leaving the owners homeless and with land that was then virtually worthless. Of course it was all “legal” and it made the predatory, immoral Mellon family richer than ever.
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