Rumpelstiltskin

*The text below offers the first few lines of an essay concerning what I am calling the “magical thinking” of mid-stream energy corporation Kinder Morgan. I argue that Richard Kinder-who I profile after the self-aggrandizing imp from the fable Rumpelstiltskin-epitomizes magical thinking insofar as he holds to the view that the massive pipeline transport and export projects KMEP has leveraged over the course of the shale gas boom will be worth the billions of dollars of investment-despite the fact that, as Deborah Rogers persuasively argues, the scale of gas in the ground (the resource) is unlikely ever to become gas in the pipeline. Kinder-Skiltskin exemplifies the mad-imp rush to do whatever it takes to get the gas into the pipelines-and at potentially enormous environmental and human expense. if we thought […]