Labour shrinks from shale gas good news

The US produces huge amounts of shale gas, India has just discovered what they're calling "an unlimited reserve", but dim Labour has called for a temporary halt to drilling for shale gas while its safety is checked.

Bloomberg says that power from a natural gas-fired power plant costs about $54 a megawatt hour to produce, compared with $176 for energy coming from an offshore wind farm, and gas-fired power plants can take as little as 18 months to build.

So it's cheap, it's plentiful, and being widely extracted in North America, where it has led to a fall in the price of gas.

But the dim, slow Labour party can't see it.

And it doesn't cause a problem with carbon dioxide. There is no sign of serious global warming going on, and if there were, it would be hard to explain it by increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Labour is just pandering to Green Luddites.

Tax credits should be abolished

The central member of a gang who stole more than £3m of tax credits has been jailed for five years, following an international investigation by HMRC.

Tax credits are wide open to fraud.

Lithuanian Ricardas Virokaitis was the linchpin of a gang who paid Eastern European women to come to the UK solely to register for benefits and tax credits. Virokaitis and his criminal colleagues escorted the women while they gained the necessary documentation to claim the fraudulent benefits. The women then returned to their home country and the gang accessed their payments via bogus bank accounts. Virokaitis deliberately recruited women with children in order to maximise the amounts paid to each account.

More than 100 women were fraudulently registered for benefits and tax credits. This enabled Virokaitis’s gang to steal over £3 million in bogus tax credit and benefit payments. Before he was arrested Virokaitis was withdrawing up to £90,000 every month from these bogus accounts.

Virokaitis was arrested in September 2010 at Stansted airport, whilst attempting to flee the country on a flight to Lithuania. HMRC officers uncovered a safe house used by the gang in South East London, where they found 93 bank cards and false identity documents hidden under the floorboards.

Back in March 2006 (says Chris Mullin in his diaries) Alan Milburn was suggesting that Labour needed to scrap tax credits and instead reduce taxes for the poorest: "Tax credits are based on the belief that the state can micro-manage people's lives - and it can't."

"A fundamental philosophical difference between yourself and Gordon", said I.

The great meddler, with his famous lack of empathy, set up this cumbersome, centralised system, wide open to fraud, knowing best, rejecting the offer of help from the DWP.

This part of his legacy will probably survive, only because the coalition is too timid to do what it should. Their philosophy should be that set out by Alan Milburn back then. Cheaper to set the people free.

But how much more agreeable to take their money away and then give it back to them after they have filled out your forms and jumped through your hoops.

The timidity of the coalition will entrench this controlling, fraud prone mammoth in our system of government.

Spendthrift with other people's money

A BBC boss spent £600 of licence payers' cash on a 132-mile cab ride home.

Menna Richards, 57, who earns £160,000 a year, took the taxi from London to Cardiff - then put the fare on her expenses because she had been in the capital on business.

Thank you, Sun, for calling it licence payers' money.

It's not the government's money, it's certainly not the BBC's money. It's ours.

But big cheeses don't care when it's not their own money they're spending.

More on the next big energy source

No apologies for returning to the coming bonanza of shale gas, with a piece on GWPF suggesting that amazingly Mr Huhne is not enthusiastically embracing it, even though

In July 2010 Cuadrilla ... announced the discovery of significant British shale gas deposits in Bowland Shale, which stretches from Preston, Lancashire to the Irish Sea. Early assessments suggest sufficient gas to provide up to 5 to 10% of national gas needs. Later in the year, IGas Energy reported that the rocks beneath the Wirral area alone could yield up to two trillion cubic feet of shale gas – enough to supply all 26 million homes in Britain for three years.

The irrelevantly named No Hot Air consultancy recently presented at a conference (presentation here); as one attender said:

The presenter is a major bull of shale gas - not just in the US, but also Poland, Argentina, India, China & Austalia. He believes that current US gas prices have further to fall & that given global shale gas potential he was of the opinion that a future problem will be finding sufficient demand for likely future gas production. The presenter thought it nuts (my conclusion) to be spending upward of £100 billion sticking windmills in the North Sea & was similarly unimpressed with the renewed interest in nuclear. His logic was that simply replacing coal powered power plants with gas fired plant would slash CO2 emissions globally, at little cost. He was also of the opinion that electric cars were a foolish fad & that GTL was the way forward for transport.

A rational government would be trumpeting this. But then we have Huhne and greenboy.

Behave yourselves

A 32-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of landscape architect Jo Yeates.

Let's hope this time the media don't prise open his personal life.  If her landlord proves to be innocent, the media deserve to be hauled over the coals for publishing detail of his personal life and his past.

Distasteful, intrusive and wrong.

Back in the real world

As the main section of the Daily Telegraph keeps trying to become a bad version of the Daily Mail, the billion sized scandal of the EU carbon market, picked up by Richard North, is relegated to its business pages, where Rowena Mason tells us that it

has been plagued by fraud, with Europol estimating that carbon trading criminals trying to play the system may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries during 2009. Fraudulent traders mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland pocketed an estimated €5bn.

This isn't business news, it should be high politics, and is far more worthy of a review article than a waffly piece about William Hague's enthusiasm for his job.

The carbon market isn't even flawed execution of a good policy. There's no evidence that global warming is shooting up, and evidence for the theory that this global (sic) warming (sic) is caused by carbon dioxide is as hard to spot as a legitimate carbon trade.

Staying in the business news, Jeremy Warner retails what may have been a joke at the time, that

Writing in The Times in 1894, one columnist estimated that such was the growth in horse-drawn carriages that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.

The theme of his piece, hung on BP's latest energy review, is that "new energy sources are being discovered all the time. The world looks more than able to cope for now", with huge amounts of shale gas, and thorium in the wings.

(Shale gas is even present in Britain. A company drilling near Kirkham wants to make "a leak-free well that is going to last 50 to 100 years".

Cuadrilla Resources said it believed there could be enough gas in Lancashire to supply about 10% of Britain's future needs.

Naturally the BBC's subsequent coverage is focused on greenie wimping rather than the potential benefits. We see a piece from their notoriously impartial environment analyst, but where is the piece about the economic benefits?)

Back to Warner. As he argues, energy intensity lessens as an economy matures - especially if the energy is getting dearer: cost is a great driver to innovation.

An even more important issue than the motivation of William Hague (who?).

When the history comes to be written, this generation of politicians will deserve infamy for their colossal skewing of resources in support of a discredited theory of the causes of "global warming".

It seems "global warming" in Australia causes drought - oops, flooding - oops, maybe that's cyclical. Anything can be put down to "global warming". This is just how religious beliefs are bolstered. Absolutely anything can be explained away, nothing falsifies the core doctrine.

There is no more reality to carbon dioxide induced global warming than there is to the god of the Roman Catholic or any other other church.

But the Roman Catholic church has lasted for a worryingly long time.

It's not specially warm out there

From the invaluable WUWT:

Professor Emeritus of Geology Don Easterbrook has given the annual temperature reports in a different frame of reference. Based on his calculations from the GRIP-2 ice cores from Greenland, for 9,100 of the past 10,500 years it was warmer than today. That is, 86.7% of the time during this 10,500 year period it was warmer than today, and 13.3% of the time it was colder (at least in Greenland).

I must have missed that in the MSM.

Martha Kearney patronises

Introducing a WATO item on the inflation figures, Martha Kearney says:

If you thought your bills were going up, you're right.

I'm sure she didn't set out to patronise Radio 4 listeners. It just comes naturally to her.

We're the BBC. We know we're cleverer than you.

Charity Commission has more questions to answer?

Yes on the face of it.

This woman took her concerns about possible fraud at the charity Forensic Therapies to the Charity Commission among others, and then surprisingly was made redundant.

Questions also for the Cabinet Office, who had poured £535,000 of our money into what looks like another sham charity, in that it was a front for government spending.

So who was checking the accounts at the Cabinet Office, or didn't they care about taxpayers' money?

Probably not.

Sunday Telegraph 16 January

What did you think was the main story of the week? Yes, to read about older TV presenters (remember them?) turn to page 13 ... and page 23 ... oh, and page 35.

On page 13 Miriam O'Reilly is allowed to bang on about the fact that it was women who were let go from Countryfile, despite the fact that the tribunal did not find for her on the grounds of sexual discrimination. No mention of this by the paper's media correspondent in his report. Indeed

she encouraged other women to take action if they thought they had faced discrimination.

No mention either that the tribunal's verdict meant they hadn't believed the evidence of Jay Hunt. Wynne-Jones's article is just an uncritical report of what Miriam O'Reilly says. That's not news.

Page 23 is given to John Simpson to peddle his line, which comes down to

Keeping the same faces on television decade after decade can give continuity, and can even be comforting to viewers, who, like the nation as a whole, are getting older; but the broadcasting executives must be allowed to get rid of frontmen and women who can no longer cut the mustard.

Almost right. Presenting isn't hard, and a presenter has to go if someone better comes along.

Two articles aren't enough on this key issue, so let's hear from another luminary, Wogan on page 35. His theme by contrast is that presenters don't have jobs for life, so live with it.

Almost inevitably, the Telegraph can't let this major debate go by without a picture of Selina Scott. But there's a big fact about Selina which it doesn't seem polite to mention. As her performance on Andrew Neil's This Week has shown, she's no good. She did not show she had anything of interest to say. So goodbye.

There's an over-supply of competent presenters and newsreaders. That means the BBC is over-paying them, with taxpayers' money. Draw up a shortlist and then let the candidates bid for the role. Lowest bidder gets the job.

Yes, it's not about their wrinkles, it's about our money. But you won't find that delicate subject mentioned in the Telegraph's soft soap, plentiful coverage.

BBC man on one of windpower's flaws

We know windpower is expensive, inefficient and intermittent. Paul Hudson - a weather presenter for the BBC - spells out one of its disadvantages.

For the third winter running, he says, the intense cold has gone hand in hand with periods of little or no wind.

This should come as no surprise since prolonged cold is invariably associated with areas of high pressure.

Peak demand also comes during summer heat waves - as we all turn on our air conditioning units - again usually associated with areas of high pressure, with little or no wind.

For now, he says, this is not a problem (ignoring the cost of these unsightly beasts standing idle). Only 5% of electricity is currently generated by wind farms, and so other power stations can step in and ramp up output.

But in only 9 years time, the UK will legally have to generate some 30% of its electricity from renewable sources, of which 25% is expected to come from wind farms.

So if a similar meteorological situation occurred in 2020, almost 25% of power would suddenly have to come from sources other than wind.

This means that there would have to be some power stations - using coal or gas, since nuclear power output can't be increased at short notice - that simply exist as a stand-by facility, in case the wind doesn't blow.

Now he makes the point that that's expensive.

But then he takes another step outside the BBC orthodoxy and asks what happens if the next 10-15 years "see an increase in the type of disrupted weather patterns that we have experienced recently, because of solar considerations"?

He reports that Professor Mike Lockwood at Reading University thinks the UK could indeed experience colder winters on average, compared with the last few decades because of the sun's low activity.

This would lead to a higher frequency of 'blocking' weather patterns leading to less frequent windy conditions than would normally be expected if one looks at climatological averages - suggesting we would have to continue to rely on coal and gas fired power generation well into the future - and possibly more than is currently envisaged.

Will those power stations still be available? Will the insistence on carbon capture for coal fired stations make it possible to build any new coal fired power stations at all?

Which domino will break the camel's back?

Which country will crack the euro? Greece and Ireland have already had to borrow from the EU & IMF. Ambrose explains that the packages "have driven the bond yields even higher for Ireland and Greece, precisely because the punitive rates trap countries in debt-deflation and do nothing to reduce the likelihood of default in the end".

Now, says Paul Hannon in an interesting piece, backroom officials have started a whispering campaign against Portugal, just as they did against Ireland.

Officially, they insist that it is up to the individual government to request help, and that nobody is being put under pressure to choose that option.

Unofficially, euro-zone policy makers brief reporters, expressing concerns about the ability of the government in focus to maintain access to the international bond markets at an affordable rate, fully knowing that by doing so they will push the cost of borrowing to levels that aren't affordable.

By this means, he says, Greece, Ireland and now Portugal are forced to accept a bailout, without an individual euro-zone government leader having to go public and on the record.

But - as we know - the packages this oh so clever manoeuvring leads to are only making things worse. In other words, nothing that is being done is improving the eurozone's economic prospects. At a country level Greece seems still to be simmering, while in Ireland all bets are off, with a general election imminent.

So will it be one of these countries - condemned by their bailouts - which will default and undermine the euro? Will the Chinese money now supporting the much larger Spanish economy be enough to ensure demand for Spain's bonds at reasonable rates despite its rickety underpinnings?

Media attention is sifting to Belgium. Tempting. It hasn't had a government for seven months. No one in place to make budget cuts or even issue the ritual denials.

How ironical it would be if it was Belgium - home to the unaccountable European Commission and the pointless European Parliament - which precipitated the fracture of the eurozone. And because of a lack of a government at country level.

To mangle the metaphors, which domino will break the camel's back?

Does she know what she's getting into?

Via the GWPF, the Liverpool Echo reports that Labour MP Louise Ellman, as chair of the Transport Select committee, is taking soundings on whether to launch a "wide-ranging" inquiry into why snowfalls up to the Christmas/New Year break crippled the rail and road system.

It is billed that this would focus on the coalition government’s alleged failure to respond to Met Office warnings of severe weather.

The GWPF didn't ask for this because they were concerned about traffic jams. The first question will be, what did the Met Office tell the government and when did they tell it? And if they told the government something different to what they told the rest of us, why? Booker covered this particularly well yesterday.

The Met Office says an amber warning was sent out as part of forward planning (whatever that means). The GWPF asks:

Not only is the lack of Government preparedness a cause for concern, but we wonder whether there may have been a reason – that ministers did not want to undermine preparations for the UN climate change conference in Cancun.

Of course a Select Committee should probe this. But you do wonder if Ms Ellman realises what she may be getting into.

A thoroughly nasty régime

Let's not forget what a thoroughly nasty régime has Belarus in its grip.

Another ridiculously light sentence

Highlighted by Inspector Gadget.

This is senseless. It is giving free rein to the criminal underclass.

The pain of Spain

Spain may be in more economic trouble.

Courtesy of the GWPF, we can read an FT report that Spain plans retrospective cuts to “trade-in tariffs” for the country’s solar-photovoltaic energy producers of 30%. This is serious money, as it's worth €3bn over the next three years.

A survey of institutions with investments in Spain has revealed a majority saying that "any retroactive tariff cut would increase the perceived regulatory risk for Spanish utilities, regulated industries and banks, as well as for Spanish sovereign risk".

Almost three-quarters described a retroactive change as a breach of investor confidence, and nearly half said they would reduce exposure to Spanish assets.

Of course the green aspect of these subsidies was always trendy, politically correct nonsense.

But this unilateral rewriting of existing contracts is another sign of the rickety structure of the Spanish economy.

If investors can't trust the Spanish government to stick to their contracts, however bonkers, what can they trust them on?

It must increase the risk of investing in Spain.

Charities don't get it - and shouldn't

They'll still get money, but they're worried that they'll get less, so they're calling for a new tax on bankers' bonuses to help protect them from funding cuts.

This is a bad idea on several levels. First, new taxes are intended to reduce the deficit, not allow some sectors to keep spending unaffordably.

Second, a charity funded by tax is just another quango. Quangos are bad because they're unaccountable. Just like quangos, charities as they grow indulge themselves. Oxfam expands into greenery, Amnesty moves from Prisoners of Conscience into all leftist right-thinking.

And who would decide how much each charity got?

Council social services aren't charities. They're there to help people, but they're tax-funded organisations.

Charities should be funded by voluntary donations.

Now it may be we will give less to charities in 2011 as higher taxes bite. (David Cameron wants us to give a little when we use a cash machine. I'll consider that once he's personally given away enough to bring his household down to the national average level.) But calling an organisation a charity doesn't mean it should automatically be exempt from cuts. The label is not a Get out of cuts free card.

Go out and get voluntary donations. Be accountable to your donors. If people don't want to give, why should you get your hands on their taxes? It makes things easier for you, I know. But it makes you a fake charity.

Not that you'll mind, it's nice and cosy.