The Ground Beneath US

Turns out the revolution wasn't televised. It was buried underground.

I'm talking about the revolution that is USA energy independence. In 2007, we imported more than 40% of our energy. By 2019, for the first time in over 60 years, we exported more energy than we imported.

For everything that it bought us--geopolitical leverage, less dependence on unstable or authoritarian oil producers--it wasn't the green revolution many hoped for. We got it out the mud. More specifically, from creatures long dead, buried, and decomposed under the ground, excavated back above ground to fuel our modern life. Fracking.

Hydraulic fracturing blasts high-pressure fluid and sand into dense rock formations, cracking them open so oil and natural gas trapped inside can finally flow. Since 2007, crude oil production is up roughly 60%, and natural gas nearly 90%.

Despite the hero we didn't want, the U.S. is still one of the world's largest producers of renewable energy, second only to China.

So why does the U.S. have so much fossil fuel sitting under it in the first place? The short answer is geology and deep time. Fossil fuels are the compressed remains of plants and microorganisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, slowly transformed by heat and pressure into coal, oil, and natural gas. Ancient biological energy, repurposed for modern civilization. Talk about life after life!

Seven regions changed our country. Three of them sit in Texas alone: the Permian Basin (Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose!), Eagle Ford, and Haynesville. The other four are Appalachia, the Anadarko Basin, the Niobrara, and the Bakken. Fossil fuels form where ancient swamps, marshes, and seas once sat, so these regions, built on old sedimentary basins along the Gulf Coast, the Rockies, and Appalachia, were always going to be the prime targets once the technology caught up.

Here's the rub.

They weren't rewarded for it. Many of these regions still lag the rest of our country on basic measures of well-being. Lower educational attainment, higher unemployment, and family structures under more strain, including a larger share of grandparent-led households and single-parent homes. Appalachia, the nation's highest-producing gas region, has spent decades dealing with deindustrialization, population loss, and public health crises, the kind of decline you find documented in Demon Copperhead, Hillbilly Elegy, and The Glass Castle.

The Blue Ridge Mountains, in particular, have become a kind of mirror for the American condition: extraordinary natural wealth existing alongside a declining quality of life.

It's a pattern I keep noticing. The people who move our country forward rarely share in the benefits. Veterans. Energy counties. Now we're asking those same counties to share their resources with data centers. Why should they?

AI runs on personal, behavioral, and collective data generated by millions of people every day. Data has quickly become the world's most valuable commodity, and we still haven't seriously answered how its benefits should be shared. If everyone contributes the raw material, why should the gains accrue to a narrow set of owners?

This isn't an ad for socialism, or for some cute "capitalism with a heart" slogan. It's a call to demand the government perform its basic function: increase the well-being of the masses. Link progress and people. We have the means. We just need the political will.