Britannia Radio

Green Evil

With immaculate timing, our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, has again demonstrated why it is hard to think of any minister in history less fitted for his job. Last month, it was announced that 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas had been discovered, embedded in the shales under Lancashire, which could herald an energy resource even larger than North Sea oil and gas. Yet that same day, it was reported that Huhne had been telling an audience of Lib Dems that we must halt the “dash for gas”, because this would prevent us from meeting our commitment under the Climate Change Act to cut our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent within 40 years. So lost is Huhne in his green dreamworld that he somehow imagines that we can centre our future energy policy on building thousands of wind turbines. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 2 October 2011

EU Carbon Trading Rocked By Mass Killings

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations in Honduras is forcing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) executive board to reconsider its stakeholder consultation processes.In Brussels, the reported killings have triggered European policymakers into action, with Green MEP Bas Eickhout calling the alleged human rights abuses "a disgrace". -- EurActiv, 3 October 2011

Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against “global warming.” The evictions were ordered by New Forests Company, an outfit that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the “carbon credits” on to transnational corporations. --Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet, 23 September 2011

Harold Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, the government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties. That's more than the U.S. national debt. --Stephen Moore, The Wall Street Journal, 1 October 2011

The Barnett Shale natural gas field has generated $65.4 billion in economic activity and created more than 100,200 jobs over the 24-county area since 2001, according to a new study commissioned by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. -- Dalles Business Journal, 27 September 2011

Robert Laughlin, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics, takes a rather different view. He thinks that "one can't find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations" and that "the final demise of carbon burning is so far away, perhaps ten generations, that it's quite irrelevant to energy problems of today." --Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal, 3 September 2011

1) EU Carbon Trading Rocked By Mass Killings - EurActiv, 3 October 2011

2) Armed Troops Burn Down Homes, Kill Children To Evict Ugandans In Name Of Global Warming - Prison Planet, 23 September 2011

3) How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia - The Wall Street Journal, 1 October 2011

4) Barnett Shale Has Created 100,00 Jobs, $65 Billion In Economic Activity - Dalles Business Journal, 27 September 2011

5) Christopher Booker: Clueless Huhne Turns His Back On Cheap Gas - The Sunday Telegraph, 2 October 2011

6) Matt Ridley: Post-Carbon America - The Wall Street Journal, 3 September 2011

1) EU Carbon Trading Rocked By Mass Killings EurActiv, 3 October 2011

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations in Honduras is forcing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) executive board to reconsider its stakeholder consultation processes.

In Brussels, the reported killings have triggered European policymakers into action, with Green MEP Bas Eickhout calling the alleged human rights abuses "a disgrace". The Dutch member of the European Parliament told EurActiv he would be pushing the European Commission to bar carbon credits from the plantations from being used under the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Several members of the CDM board have been "personally distressed" by the events in Bajo Aguán, northern Honduras, according to the board's chairman, Martin Hession, who said they had "caused us great difficulties."

"Plainly, the events that have been described are deplorable," he told EurActiv. "There is no excuse for them."

But because they took place after the CDM's stakeholder consultations had been held, and fell outside the board's primary remit to investigate emissions reductions and environmental impacts, it had been powerless to block project registrations.

Hot potato for the EU's cap-and-trade scheme

Another board member told EurActiv that Aguán was a "hot potato," which struck at the heart of the emissions trading scheme's integrity. "We all regret the situation extremely," he said. At issue are the reported murders of 23 local farmers who tried to recover land, which they say was illegally sold to big palm oil plantations, such as Grupo Dinant, in a country scarred by widespread human rights abuses.

In July, a report by an International Fact Finding Mission was presented to the European Parliament's Human Rights Sub-committee, alleging that 23 peasants, one journalist and his partner, had all been murdered in the Bajo Aguán region, between January 2010 and March 2011.

The deaths were facilitated by the "direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials," the report said. In some cases it cited "feigned accidents" in which peasants were run over by security guards working for two named palm oil businessmen. In other cases, the farmers were simply shot, or "disappeared". The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will be holding a hearing into the report on 24 October, and a delegation of MEPs will be visiting the region between 31 October and 4 November. But because of a three-year gap between the stakeholder consultation process and the biogas project approvals, the CDM board recently ruled that the project had met the criteria of its mandate.

"We are not investigators of crimes," a board member told EurActiv. "We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed." Last week, Hession submitted proposals to a CDM board meeting in Quito, Ecuador, addressing the time-lag between project consultations and registrations.

The CDM secretariat is also preparing an analysis report for a UN meeting next year, and a report on the CDM's integrity is expected to be published later this month. But carbon credits from the plantations can still be freely traded on the EU ETS, which allows polluters to offset their carbon emissions by nominally clean energy investments.

Charities like the Lutheran World Federation are particularly concerned, as they say the situation in Bajo Aguán is deteriorating. "There are worrying signs that the Honduran government is moving 1200 police officers and military personnel into the area," Toni Sandell a rights worker with the Christian NGO Aprodev told EurActiv. "That has previously been a source of conflict."

Other human rights workers in the region claim indirect linkages between Honduran state forces and the landowner's militias they protect, which are said to have connections to local narco-traffickers.

EU urged to act

Green MEPs have been moved to demand that Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard act now against carbon credits from the Honduran palm oil plantations. "As a big buyer [of carbon credits], as an EU, we can say that these kind of human rights allegations are so fundamental that we will not allow them to be bought," the Green MEP Bas Eickhout told EurActiv."We should throw these Honduran projects out of the system," he added, "as we did with the HFC 23s."

Martin Hession said that he felt "extreme sympathy" for Eickhout's suggestion but was concerned that the EU might not have optimal resources to effectively investigate rights violations. "Ideally human rights problems need to be dealt with through the appropriate channels of the UN," he told EurActiv. "But there may well be structures in the EU which could deal with the issue," he said. Eickhout held a meeting on integrity in the carbon market at the European Parliament last week, which he described as a "launch pad" for putting Aguán on the Parliament's agenda and "building up pressure on the Commission to come forward with new proposals".

An official with the European Commission's directorate-general for Energy told EurActiv that including human rights in the criteria for assessing CDM projects would be "very difficult". "You can say that 'human rights' means the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and check every project for compliance, but I think that takes us very far and the practicalities of it would be very difficult," he said.

But for now, business continues as usual in Aguán and the world's carbon markets, despite the "systemic and grave human rights violations" noted by the IACHR report. "If this is really a direct consequence of Europe's climate policies then I would like to send my sincere apologies to the people of Honduras," Bas Eickhout said. "The CDM is supposed to be offering environmental benefits and sustainable development but these kinds of stories are really terrible. I don't want to hear them anymore."

2) Armed Troops Burn Down Homes, Kill Children To Evict Ugandans In Name Of Global Warming

Prison Planet, 23 September 2011 Paul Joseph Watson

Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against “global warming,” a shocking illustration of how the climate change con is a barbarian form of neo-colonialism. The evictions were ordered by New Forests Company, an outfit that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the “carbon credits” on to transnational corporations. The company is backed by the World Bank and HSBC. Its Board of Directors includes HSBC Managing Director Sajjad Sabur, as well as other former Goldman Sachs investment bankers.

The company claims residents of Kicucula left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner, and yet the people tell a story of terror and bloodshed. Villagers told of how armed “security forces” stormed their village and torched houses, burning an eight-year-child to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating others. “We were in church,” recalled Jean-Marie Tushabe, 26, a father of two. “I heard bullets being shot into the air.”

“Cars were coming with police,” Mr. Tushabe said, sitting among the ruins of his old home. “They headed straight to the houses. They took our plates, cups, mattresses, bed, pillows. Then we saw them getting a matchbox out of their pockets.”

“But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming,” reports the New York Times.

An Oxfam report documents how the British outfit has worked with the Ugandan government to forcibly expel over 20,000 people from their homes using terror and violence as part of a lucrative scramble for arable land that can be used to satisfy the multi-billion dollar carbon trading ponzi scheme, which is worth $1.8 million a year to the company.

“I no longer own any land. It’s impossible to feed my children – they have suffered so much. Some days all they eat is porridge from maize flour. When people can’t eat well their bodies become weak – there have been lots of cases of malaria and diarrhoea. Some days we don’t eat anything at all,” said former farmer Francis Longoli, whose land was stolen by New Forests. As we have previously documented, the manufactured threat of man-made global warming is being used as a tool of neo-colonialism in the third world, not only through the seizure of land and infrastructure, thereby preventing poor nations from using their resources to develop, but by literally starving poverty-stricken people to death.

Climate change alarmism and implementation of global warming policies is a crime of the highest nature, because it is already having a genocidal impact in countries like Haiti, where the doubling of food prices is resulting in a substantial increase in starvation, poverty and death, with the population being forced to live on mud pies.

As a National Geographic Report confirmed, “With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some must take desperate measures to fill their bellies,” by “eating mud,” partly as a consequence of “increasing global demand for biofuels.”

In April 2008, World Bank President Robert Zoellick admitted that biofuels were a “significant contributor” to soaring food prices that have led to poor people dying from starvation as a result of biofuels dominating land that would normally be used to harvest food. Even man-made global warming advocate George Monbiot admits that promotion of biofuels “is causing starvation in the poor world,” particularly in Swaziland, where the decision to allocate several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production despite the country being in the grip of a famine was labeled “a crime against humanity” by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur.

But it’s not just biofuels, a product of global warming alarmism, that are unleashing a genocide against black people in poorer countries, it’s the whole anti-development mantra embraced by climate change activists that is being enforced by supranational organizations like the World Bank and the IMF in the name of reducing carbon dioxide, the evil life-giving gas that plants breathe and humans exhale.

Indeed, poorer countries rejected the 2009 Copenhagen climate agreement precisely because it discriminated against third world nations. In addition, the Obama administration, firmly supported by Al Gore, last year ordered the World Bank to keep “developing” countries underdeveloped by blocking them from building coal-fired power plants, ensuring that poorer countries remain in poverty as a result of energy demands not being met.

By preventing poor nations from becoming self-sufficient in blocking them from producing their own energy, the Obama administration is ensuring that millions more will die from starvation and lack of access to hospitals and medical treatment. While ignorant environmentalist leftists preach all day about the effects of global warming having the most impact on poorer countries, it is in fact the poorer countries and their people who are suffering most from global warming alarmism, and predators like the banker-backed New Forests Company. The seizure of arable land in the name of “global warming” is set to become big business, which is why the United Nations recently announced it is preparing to roll out an army of green helmeted “climate peacekeepers” to intervene in poorer countries to protect “shrinking resources”.

Transnational corporations, in league with western governments and offshore banks, have seized upon the climate change scam to carry out genocidal policies and land grabs in the pursuit of selling carbon credits to other transnational corporations who then merely pass on the cost to the consumer.

3) How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia

The Wall Street Journal, 1 October 2011 Stephen Moore

Harold Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, the government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties. That's more than the U.S. national debt. Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century."

"President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy," he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into "green energy" sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas. You'd expect an oilman to make the "drill, baby, drill" pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation's fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.

How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: "No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels." If he's right, that'll double America's proven oil reserves. "Bakken is almost twice as big as the oil reserve in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska," he continues. According to Department of Energy data, North Dakota is on pace to surpass California in oil production in the next few years. Mr. Hamm explains over lunch in Washington, D.C., that the more his company drills, the more oil it finds. Continental Resources has seen its "proved reserves" of oil and natural gas (mostly in North Dakota) skyrocket to 421 million barrels this summer from 118 million barrels in 2006.

"We expect our reserves and production to triple over the next five years." And for those who think this oil find is only making Mr. Hamm rich, he notes that today in America "there are 10 million royalty owners across the country" who receive payments for the oil drilled on their land. "The wealth is being widely shared."

One reason for the renaissance has been OPEC's erosion of market power. "For nearly 50 years in this country nobody looked for oil here and drilling was in steady decline. Every time the domestic industry picked itself up, the Saudis would open the taps and drown us with cheap oil," he recalls. "They had unlimited production capacity, and company after company would go bust."

Today OPEC's market share is falling and no longer dictates the world price. This is huge, Mr. Hamm says. "Finally we have an opportunity to go out and explore for oil and drill without fear of price collapse." When OPEC was at its peak in the 1990s, the U.S. imported about two-thirds of its oil. Now we import less than half of it, and about 40% of what we do import comes from Mexico and Canada. That's why Mr. Hamm thinks North America can achieve oil independence.

The other reason for America's abundant supply of oil and natural gas has been the development of new drilling techniques. "Horizontal drilling" allows rigs to reach two miles into the ground and then spread horizontally by thousands of feet. Mr. Hamm was one of the pioneers of this method in the 1990s, and it has done for the oil industry what hydraulic fracturing has done for natural gas drilling in places like the Marcellus Shale in the Northeast. Both innovations have unlocked decades worth of new sources of domestic fossil fuels that previously couldn't be extracted at affordable cost.

Mr. Hamm's rags to riches success is the quintessential "only in America" story. He was the last of 13 kids, growing up in rural Oklahoma "the son of sharecroppers who never owned land." He didn't have money to go to college, so as a teenager he went to work in the oil fields and developed a passion. "I always wanted to find oil. It was always an irresistible calling." He became a wildcat driller and his success rate became legendary in the industry. "People started to say I have ESP," he remarks. "I was fortunate, I guess. Next year it will be 45 years in the business."

Mr. Hamm ranks 33rd on the Forbes wealth list for America, but given the massive amount of oil that he owns, much still in the ground, and the dizzying growth of Continental's output and profits (up 34% last year alone), his wealth could rise above $20 billion and he could soon be rubbing elbows with the likes of Warren Buffett. His only beef these days is with Washington. Mr. Hamm was invited to the White House for a "giving summit" with wealthy Americans who have pledged to donate at least half their wealth to charity. (He's given tens of millions of dollars already to schools like Oklahoma State and for diabetes research.) "Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, they were all there," he recalls.

When it was Mr. Hamm's turn to talk briefly with President Obama, "I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this." The president's reaction? "He turned to me and said, 'Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.'" Mr. Hamm holds his head in his hands and says, "Even if you believed that, why would you want to stop oil and gas development? It was pretty disappointing."

Washington keeps "sticking a regulatory boot at our necks and then turns around and asks: 'Why aren't you creating more jobs,'" he says. He roils at the Interior Department delays of months and sometimes years to get permits for drilling. "These delays kill projects," he says. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is now tightening the screws on the oil industry, requiring companies like Continental to report their production and federal royalties on thousands of individual leases under the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules. "I could go to jail because a local operator misreported the production in the field," he says.

The White House proposal to raise $40 billion of taxes on oil and gas by excluding those industries from credits that go to all domestic manufacturers is also a major hindrance to exploration and drilling. "That just stops the drilling," Mr. Hamm believes. "I've seen these things come about before, like [Jimmy] Carter's windfall profits tax." He says America's rig count on active wells went from 4,500 to less than 55 in a matter of months. "That was a dumb idea. Thank God, Reagan got rid of that."

A few months ago the Obama Justice Department brought charges against Continental and six other oil companies in North Dakota for causing the death of 28 migratory birds, in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. Continental's crime was killing one bird "the size of a sparrow" in its oil pits. The charges carry criminal penalties of up to six months in jail. "It's not even a rare bird. There're jillions of them," he explains. He says that "people in North Dakota are really outraged by these legal actions," which he views as "completely discriminatory" because the feds have rarely if ever prosecuted the Obama administration's beloved wind industry, which kills hundreds of thousands of birds each year.

Continental pleaded not guilty to the charges last week in federal court. For Mr. Hamm the whole incident is tantamount to harassment. "This shouldn't happen in America," he says. To him the case is further proof that Washington "is out to get us."

Mr. Hamm believes that if Mr. Obama truly wants more job creation, he should study North Dakota, the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 3.5%. He swears that number is overstated: "We can't find any unemployed people up there. The state has 18,000 unfilled jobs," Mr. Hamm insists. "And these are jobs that pay $60,000 to $80,000 a year." The economy is expanding so fast that North Dakota has a housing shortage. Thanks to the oil boom Continental pays more than $50 million in state taxes a year the state has a budget surplus and is considering ending income and property taxes. It's hard to disagree with Mr. Hamm's assessment that Barack Obama has the energy story in America wrong. The government floods green energy a niche market that supplies 2.5% of our energy needs with billions of dollars of subsidies a year. "Wind isn't commercially feasible with natural gas prices below $6" per thousand cubic feet, notes Mr. Hamm. Right now its price is below $4. This may explain the administration's hostility to the fossil-fuel renaissance.

Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, "I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties." That's more than the U.S. national debt, I say. He smiles.

This estimate sounds implausibly high, but Mr. Hamm has a lifelong habit of proving skeptics wrong. And even if he's wrong by half, it's a stunning number to think about. So this America-first energy story isn't just about jobs and economic revival. It's also about repairing America's battered balance sheet. Someone should get this man in front of the congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee.

4) Barnett Shale Has Created 100,00 Jobs, $65 Billion In Economic Activity Dalles Business Journal, 27 September 2011

The Barnett Shale natural gas field has generated $65.4 billion in economic activity and created more than 100,200 jobs over the 24-county area since 2001, according to a new study commissioned by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.

Ray Perryman, founder and president of Waco-based The Perryman Group, presented his findings Tuesday to the Fort Worth City Council. The study examined the impact of Barnett Shale activity on local, regional and state businesses from 2001 to 2011. “We commissioned the study to see how or if the economic downturn had impacted past projections about the industry,” said Bill Thornton, chamber president and CEO. “What we found was that it’s a bulwark of our economy.”

The economic activity generated by the Barnett Shale includes exploration and drilling, pipeline investments and related operations, royalties and lease bonuses, local and state tax revenues, and direct and indirect jobs and increased business in the private sector, according to The Perryman Group.

Here are some of The Perryman’s Group's findings:

About 38.5 percent of the region’s economic growth since 2001 stems from Barnett Shale activity. That activity constitutes about 8.5 percent of the local business complex.

The regional effect of Barnett Shale activity is estimated $11.1 billion in annual output.

Barnett Shale-related activity has created 100,268 jobs in the 24-county region, including direct employment by the energy industry and related jobs.

Wage and salary employment in the region is about 8.7 percent higher than it would be without the Barnett Shale.

Personal income in the region is almost 8.5 percent higher than it would be in the absence of Barnett Shale-related activity.

Over the 2001 through 2011 period, local taxing entities received an estimated $5.3 billion in tax receipts. The state received $5.8 billion.

This year, the Barnett Shale and related activity will generate around $730 million in additional revenues for counties, cities and school districts in the region. The state will likely receive another $911.8 million, for a total gain in local and state taxes of an estimated $1.6 billion.

In 2010, independent school districts in the Barnett Shale region received approximately $2.7 million in royalty payments, $2.5 million in bonuses, and $45.8 million in tax revenue from natural gas and mineral rights.

In 2010, oil and gas companies donated at least $9 million to organizations in the Barnett Shale region.

6) Matt Ridley: Post-Carbon America

The Wall Street Journal, 3 September 2011

Forget about 'peak oil' and global warming. What about two centuries from now, when we'll really need help?

Many environmentalists believe that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels will cause a climate crisis toward the end of this century. Environmentalists also raise the alarm that we have reached "peak oil" and that fossil fuels will run out by the middle of the century. That both views cannot be true rarely seems to bother those who hold them. Either consequence, we're told, makes the world's conversion to a low-carbon energy system an urgent matter. Robert Laughlin, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics, takes a rather different view. He thinks that "one can't find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations" and that "the final demise of carbon burning is so far away, perhaps ten generations, that it's quite irrelevant to energy problems of today." And so in "Powering the Future" he takes up the problem of energy use two centuries from now, on the assumption that it will take that long for us to run out of, or give up, fossil fuels. The book is written with a cheerfully can-do brio and is full of fascinating calculations he says that damming Canadian rivers and flooding 0.5% of its land surface, for instance, would provide hydro-power to meet all the world's electricity needs for a month. As a physicist he brings useful insights to the solar, nuclear and even garbage-incineration debate.

His discussion of thermal storage is especially engaging. One of the challenges of large-scale solar-energy plants is what to do with excess heat generated during the day and how to keep the power going at night. Molten salt (a mixture of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate) turns out to be an excellent candidate for storing heat. The Andasol-1 solar-power plant in southern Spain and others like it are making promising use of the technology, he says. "The beauty of thermal storage is that it has virtually unlimited expansion capacity. One simply gets bigger tanks and puts more salt in them." An even more adventurous storage idea: using the ocean floors for "lakes" of saturated, heavier-than-saltwater brine, which could be pumped from a lower-level lake to one on a higher level and allowed to flow back downhill, releasing energy.

Mr. Laughlin's feet are planted too firmly on the ground for him to get carried away by such schemes; he recognises that the ocean floor is always going to be an expensive place to work. Such levelheadedness leads him into the trap that snares many futurists his theorising assumes a souped-up version of today's world rather than a radically changed world. Mr. Laughlin insists that he is considering the energy scene two centuries from now, but he sometimes seems stuck in today's debates about biofuels, uranium supplies and solar panels.

He assumes, for example, that the end of fossil fuels will mean more expensive energy. That's what today's energy alarmists insist, but over the course of the next two centuries it's just as likely that some form of nuclear or solar or geothermal power will become cheap and plentiful. Nuclear power from fusion might one day be an especially promising field, as may be the use of the radioactive chemical element thorium, which is more abundant than uranium and awaits harnessing. Mr. Laughlin is surprisingly incurious about thorium's potential.

He is also disturbingly cavalier about the problem that attends all discussion of a non-fossil-fuel world: land use. Every renewable-energy scheme for the future entails huge land grabs, because of the inherently low density of the power. As a Californian, the author recognises solar power's "voracious appetite for land," but he also airily suggests that we can grow biofuels on lands "presently too poor to farm"; that we can dry huge quantities of cattle dung "in the sun"; that "shoreline estuaries" might be suitable for "great farms" of algae, another biofuel candidate; and that nuclear waste should be dumped in the "truly awful" lands of the Russian far east.

Imagine the effect that such an approach would have on national parks and wildernesses (too poor to farm) and on the rich biodiversity of estuaries. Or imagine huge quantities of manure trucked into the desert you wouldn't want to be stuck in mid-August traffic with one of those truck convoys, and you wouldn't want to stand anywhere near a cow pie the size of Rhode Island. A note worth remembering: One of the marvellous benefits of fossil-fuel use has been the way it has reduced our need to wring energy from the landscape by damming rivers, felling forests and planting feed for horses.

Even Mr. Laughin's ingenious schemes for energy storage might leave readers scratching their heads. Why fill caverns with molten salt or pump compressed air to the seabed when Mother Nature has created a remarkably efficient form of stored energy called natural gas? The author reckons that we will need to use the ocean floor for energy storage by the turn of the century. He might have also mentioned that, according to the International Energy Agency, we'll still have 25 decades of shale gas waiting to be tapped. "Powering the Future" doesn't even discuss shale gas that extraordinary transformer of the energy debate over the past three years much less envision it powering the future.

But at least Mr. Laughlin brings a refreshing, upbeat outlook for our energy future. His oversights and overreaching can be pardoned: All forecasts miss their mark. After all, a book written 200 years ago imagining today's energy needs would discuss coal, but oil, gas and even electricity would not feature in the index. Most of the discussion would probably be devoted to the looming problem of hay scarcity.

Mr. Ridley, who writes the Journal's weekly Mind & Matter column, is the author of "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves." He is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 1 Carlton House, London SW1Y 5DB - Director: Dr Benny Peiser

http://www.thegwpf.org