"World-Class" Ethane Cracker in Louisiana? -- Not a Bakken Story

This is great news for Louisiana, hit hard by the moratorium and now the permitorium.

Chevron Phillips Chemical Company is mulling a "world-class" ethane cracker in Louisiana.

I was going to write what I really thought about this story but I was not ready to absorb all the arrows that would have been shot my way, so I will leave it at that.

I wish the Louisiana folks the best; they certainly deserve a better hand than they've been dealt.

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On Luck, or Being Dealt a Good (or Bad) Hand

I am re-reading Tom Shippey's J.R.R.Tolkien: Author of the Century for the third time. In this book, Shippey discusses The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as other Tolkien works. Shippey has a great section on "luck"and how Tolkien approached it:

As with the ironies of interlace, the logic of luck (or chance, or fate, or fortune, or accident, or even wyrd) seems in Tolkien's view to be this: there is no knowing how events will turn out, and it is certainly never a good idea for anyone to give up trying, whether out of despair or out of a passive confidence that some external power will intervene. 

It seems as if that line could have been written with New Orleans in mind.