Who will rid us of this poisonous Huhne?

Huhne's latest contribution on shale is down with his usual gutter standards of honesty.

His case for so called renewables has to assume that serious AGW exists. Hm. As Fred Singer has pointed out, a recent study

reported that one-third [of weather stations] showed cooling — not warming. They covered ... "less than 30% of the Earth's surface" housing recording stations that are poorly distributed, mainly in the US and Western Europe. They state that 70% of US stations are badly sited and don't meet the standards set by government; the rest of the world is likely worse.

But unlike the land surface, the atmosphere has shown no warming trend, either over land or over ocean — according to satellites and independent data from weather balloons. This indicates to me that there is something very wrong with the land surface data. And did you know that climate models, run on super-computers, all insist that the atmosphere must warm faster than the surface? And so does theory.

And finally, we have non-thermometer temperature data from so-called "proxies": tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, stalagmites. They don't show any global warming since 1940!

What did happen after 1940? Jo Nova entertainingly points out that thermometers used to show cooling between 1940 and 1970. But not any more. What, she asks, could have caused both mercury and alcohol thermometers to malfunction simultaneously all over the world?

So all the stuff about carbon dioxide threatening future life on the earth as we know it is probably nonsense. Indeed, with the temperature data we have now, who would propose that as a new theory?

This means the environmental case for so called renewables collapses.

Let's now look at Huhne's comment on shale:

Unconventional gas has not yet lit a single room nor cooked a single roast dinner in the UK. Yet those who clamour loudest for "realistic" energy policies would have us hitch our wagon to shale alone.

This shows astonishing dishonesty even by Huhne's standards of intellectual depravity.

I have not heard anyone propose that UK energy policy should be based on shale alone. It should be based on reliability, cheapness, safety, public acceptability, and lack of subsidies. (Note that so called renewables fail all these tests. Not just some, all.)

Why should it be impossible to burn UK shale gas to make electricity, when the US manages that pretty well? It's important to Huhne's dishonesty that we ignore the dash for cheaper unconventional gas happening in many parts of the world. Poland, for instance, and little backwaters like China. They've chosen their path already.

“The fossil fuel age will be extended for decades,” said Ivan Sandrea, president of the Energy Intelligence Group, a research publisher. “Unconventional oil and gas are at the beginning of a technological cycle that can last 60 years. They are really in their infancy.”

Cheap gas (the US already has it, and it will come to the rest of the world) will be terrible for vile fanatics like the disgusting Huhne:

Expensive gas makes nuclear, renewables, CCS, off-shore wind, gas storage(!) and pipelines to nowhere like Nabucco seem if not cheap, then halfway workable. Cheap gas? That would be great for consumers, great for society and completely destroying for most energy models.

It's striking how often shale has been featuring in the press lately - The Express and The Telegraph for instance - but until Huhne's speech Westminster had been oddly silent about this boon which nature has given the UK. Cheaper energy? No thanks.

Cheaper energy brings economic prosperity, but we don't want to give you that. We'd rather make you poorer, by spending your money (which by the way we're continuing to spend too much of) on giving the world "moral leadership" towards a "green" future of expensive and intermittent energy - a future that the rest of the world is rejecting.

Even if the CPS don't charge former euro-enthusiast Huhne, his electorate will surely boot him out at the next election, if not for lying to them over his family arrangements, then as a member of the increasingly unpopular Lib Dems. God only knows how much he will have cost the UK by then.

At least the political environment will be less polluted.