Shale in the news again

Shale is in the news again. Good.

Andrew Gilligan has got half a page in The Sunday Telegraph to tell us that "bids for shale gas exploration licences are expected to surge" in a new licensing round next year.

He takes the opportunity to debunk some of the opponents' lies, telling us that

Fracking is not new and has been used without previous controversy since the 1940s. A spokesman for Cuadrilla said that an existing gas well at Elswick, near one of its sites in Lancashire, was fracked 20 years ago by its then owners, British Gas, in “almost exactly the same way” as at Cuadrilla’s shale sites now.

Even The Tyndall Centre doesn't buy the earthquakes argument.

Cuadrilla admits that its operations in Lancashire “triggered” two small earthquakes, one of 2.3 magnitude and the other of 1.5. Fracking has been suspended ever since. However, earthquakes of such magnitude occur in the UK almost every week, with six in the last month alone, according to the British Geological Survey.

Scientists investigating the Lancashire incident said the “maximum seismic event” from the fracking would be magnitude 3, described as “minor, often felt, but rarely causing damage” and said that coal mining had caused just as many such earthquakes in northern England in the past. Prof Anderson said that earthquakes were “not an argument we use against shale gas in any way”.

He prefers to focus on a claim that shale gas would “fundamentally undermine” Britain’s commitment to tackling climate change.

Repeat after me:

1. Global temperatures haven't risen over the past ten years.
2. Global temperatures are way out of line with the rising output of carbon dioxide.
3. There's increasing questioning of the IPCC's science, its methodology, and the morality of its leaders.
4. Even if carbon dioxide were driving global temperatures, economic suicide by a small country responsible for under 2% of carbon dioxide output would have no effect except to make its people poorer, while other countries pressed on with getting cheaper energy from their shale.

Nick Grealy has pointed out many errors in the (at best) careless Tyndall report. It does not deserve to become a point of reference.

The ineffable Huhne has only been dragged to acknowledge the physical existence of shale by repeated highlighting in the media. The coalition seemingly would prefer that we didn't have this energy bonanza beneath our feet at all, so that they could go on making us poorer by confiscating our money for those huge, expensive windmills that nobody wants.

The Duke makes more sense on this than anyone in The Commons. Charles Hendry, though, may be an honourable exception, as he continues to insist that permissions for shale will be treated in the same way as other sorts of energy.

Matt Ridley suggests:

To persist with a policy of pursuing subsidized renewable energy in the midst of a terrible recession, at a time when vast reserves of cheap low-carbon gas have suddenly become available is so perverse it borders on the insane. Nothing but
bureaucratic inertia and vested interest can explain it.

It's worse than that. It's messianic peacock vanity.