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A report from the financial auditing firm Deloitte says the “reality is that the shale boom peaked without making money for the industry in aggregate. In fact, the US shale industry registered net negative free cash flows of $300 billion, impaired more than $450 billion of invested capital, and saw more than 190 bankruptcies since 2010.”

The unthinkable could soon be thinkable.

They are used to standing shoulder to shoulder in the face of adversity fighting for their country. But next weekend, hundreds of veterans will come together again, potentially for one last time. Their mission this time is not to fight for their Government. But against it.

New technologies like fracking––along with government subsidies––have ushered in an energy boom reliant on extreme extraction methods to produce oil and natural gas. Now the Uinta Basin is ground zero for what threatens to become the next phase in extreme energy extraction: strip mining for tar sands and oil shale.

Through public land leases, infrastructure subsidies, and some very expensive tax breaks, taxpayer money is supporting what could become one of the dirtiest, most destructive chapters in American energy history.

Last Sunday was a grim and painful anniversary for the people of Lac-Mégantic in Quebec. It was a year ago that a crude by rail train, which was carrying highly volatile crude from America’s Bakken fracking fields, derailed and exploded, effectively incinerating 47 people.

The barricades have been drawn. On the one side stands one of Britain’s leading unconventional energy companies, Cuadrilla. On the other side stands the rural village of Balcombe in the rolling hills of rural Sussex.

Fracking has led to a boom in sand mining in the US, with nearly 50 million tons of sand mined in 2011.

Is the fracking boom set to go spectacularly bust?

The volume of gas flared in the US has tripled in just five years due to the boom in shale oil. And the flares from the main oil shale fields are now so great they are visible from space