Got your fingers in your ears, Huhne?

US gas prices are already well below Europe's. Some predict a further drop in 2012. Indeed

Adam Sieminski, Chief Energy Economist, Global Markets, at Deutsche Bank, questioned whether advances in shale and tight oil drilling, which are building on technology developed for natural gas shales, might open up so many new oil resources that they would upend everyone's expectations in a couple of years, as the technology did for gas.

Nick Grealy suggests that "the key word here is advances".

Shale is effectively a once in a generation game changer in energy, built not only on luck but also on technology. The increase in computing power of this century is what really made the technology possible. But those whose idea is of a future as model based, i.e. the future is simply a continutation of the past, are not able to handle inflection points.

We've been here before: Conventional energy wisdom is as relevant as Blockbuster Video, any Post Office in any country, bookstores, the music industry and any number of indestructible models that were too big to fail - but did thanks to technology.

Our industrial revolution depended on plentiful, cheap energy. China is pressing ahead with shale. So are large emerging economies. Opponents of shale have to ignore this international picture and pretend the shale issue concerns only the US and the EU. It doesn't.

Opponents of shale want to make us poorer while the rest of the world gets richer.

Government plans to spend taxpayers' money on insulating homes assume that gas will keep getting dearer (government of course plan on making things worse with their insane levies). It won't.

Government has this huge good news to offer us, but are trapped in the insular failed theory that carbon dioxide is triggering uncontrollable warming. (It isn't, and if it is the UK can do nothing about it at all.)

This is incompetence in politics and leadership of the highest order. Grealy predicts that "technology and geology will combine to make 2012 one amazing year for the US economy".

Suddenly Europeans are going to have to ask themselves what is happening to the US, and more to the point, why isn't it happening in Europe.