The energy boom will be messy. Get over it.

Walter Russell Mead:

Sadly for the genteel minded among us, America’s era of brusque and rough growth isn’t over.  The oil and gas underneath our country is coming up one way or another, and rough, uncouth boom towns will be springing up all over Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and the Dakotas.  They will have saloons; they will have insalubrious dives.  But they will also provide the basis for middle class prosperity in regions that are currently on the rocks.  They will provide new hope for a generation that does not know where to turn.

Get over it.  Economic growth .... is sudden, disruptive, often inconvenient.       Decline is so much more decorous. ...  Reporters from the Times write haunting and moving stories about the gentle, drifting sadness of it all

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