The biggest threat to American energy independence comes from […] the environmental movement and the assortment of government agencies with which the environmental movement has been cooperating now for decades. You see, what is a blessing for landowners in the Marcellus Shale area (with the sad exception of New York, but we hope that changes), what has been a blessing for these communities in Pennsylvania and North Dakota and elsewhere is an absolute nightmare for the environmental movement. Indeed for them, the shale revolution has been a black swan. […] Now natural gas poses an enormous threat to the world view of the environmentalists, simply because there is so much of it. And so much of that natural gas, and as well as the oil in various formations, is on private land, meaning that the ability of the environmental movement to block exploitation of those natural resources is limited.