The message of shale gas is: scrap the Climate Act
The news that we have such rich shale-gas reserves makes a further mockery of our energy policy
3:57PM BST 29 Jun 2013
164 Comments
Who could doubt that the Almighty has a sense of humour when, on the very day headlines were filled with warnings that our electricity system is now in such a parlous state that we can soon expect power cuts and electricity “rationing”, we were also told that Britain is now sitting on what has been called “by far the biggest shale gas basin in the world”.
There may have been some journalistic licence in how the two reports from which these claims derived were written. Even so, the cautious predictions of the British Geological Survey confirmed that Britain has a potential shale-gas resource as significant as the oil and gas we found in the North Sea, and enough to meet all the UK’s energy needs for many decades to come.
The point about these two contrasting announcements is that they highlight more starkly than ever the barely credible shambles successive governments have made of our national energy policy, how ludicrously skewed it has become by their obsession with global warming and the delusion that, by cutting down our “carbon emissions”, we can somehow change the Earth’s climate.
The Government’s current policy, as I have repeatedly explored here, is twofold.
On one hand, it is based on building tens of thousands of useless and ludicrously expensive wind turbines, made possible only by forcing us to pay double or treble the normal cost of the pitiful amount of electricity they so unreliably produce. On the other, by taxes and regulations designed to make “renewables” seem competitive, they plan to double the cost of any power from other sources, whether fossil fuels or nuclear. In short, they want to make our electricity more expensive than anywhere else in the world.
Then, just as they have cobbled this crazy joke of a policy together, we discover that we are sitting on what is potentially the world’s largest resource of a fuel so cheap that it has halved the price of gas across the Atlantic in just five years.
The last time I observed that the Almighty must have a sense of humour was in October 2008 when, just as our MPs were voting almost unanimously for Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act, committing us to economic suicide by cutting CO2 emissions by 80 per cent in 40 years, the first October snow was falling in London for 74 years.
We will not see an end to this insanity until our politicians recover their senses, struggle back into the real world and strike that Act from the statute book.
Media deluded over 'cuts’
As usual it was weird to observe how studiously, in their coverage of the nation’s finances, the BBC and Channel 4 News last week managed to avoid any mention of the mighty elephant trumpeting in the room. When George Osborne unveiled his plans to cut public spending in two years' time by £11.5 billion, one might have thought that this was striking a devastating blow to our public budget (as Jon Snow excitably put it “the public sector under siege”).
But one listened in vain for any of these cuts-obsessed journalists to make the most obvious point about Osborne’s £11.5 billion cut – that this is pretty well what he is still having to borrow every single month, to cover the relentless rise in our Government’s overspending.
In May Mr Osborne had to borrow £15.3 billion, slightly more than he did in the same month last year. Far from being cut, our public spending, even in real terms, is still rising. By next year, our national debt is projected to have doubled since this Government came to power, from £600 billion to £1,200 billion. Despite headline claims that some government departments are facing swingeing cuts of 25 per cent, the overall picture is of a public sector still expanding out of control. There cannot be any sign of reality breaking in on our plight so long as the TaxPayers’ Alliance can report, as it did last month, that no fewer than 2,525 local-authority employees earn £100,000 or more a year. But we can hardly expect the BBC to take notice of such things when the number of its staff being similarly rewarded is now 360.
Posts
