Windfall

Over the last few months, excited murmurs have given way to boomtown glee over a bed of rock called the Haynesville Shale. In truth, it’s not the rock that has caused this hysteria, but what may be the world’s 4th largest natural gas deposit locked-up in it. Extraction companies are clamoring for mineral rights that have been made relevant by this discovery and by recent developments in extraction technology.
It’s in Dubai? The rich Canadian gas fields? Siberia? Nope. The Haynesville Shale spreads out around Shreveport, Louisiana, a burg of around 200,000 people. What’s interested the press lately is the fact that the shale also extends into some economically depressed areas in northwestern Louisiana. Stories have begun to appear about small-towners turned overnight millionaires by leasing their mineral rights. Unfortunately, there’s also been talk here and there about people being swindled out of mineral rights for a few thousand dollars.
I happened to read an article about the Haynesville rush today, moments after reading an article about the use of cyanobacteria to produce ostensibly carbon-neutral fuel. This begs a few questions, some of which I’ll put to the reader:
Should landowners in this situation lease their mineral rights? Is there an ethical question here vis-à-vis climate change? Does anyone outside the area being drilled have a right to weigh-in on this? Can anyone hold it against someone living in or near poverty for accepting an offer to make outlandishly rich? How about if the offer simply makes that landowner less poor?