Shale

Either the people who question policies on renewabale energy are wrong. Or they are right. If they are right we are all being led for no good reason up the most expensive garden path in the history of the universe. Christopher Booker provides extensive proof for his view that global warming is a 'scare' that is costing 'the most expensive set of proposals ever put forward.... requiring  such a dramatic change in the way of life for billions of people that it is hard to imagine how modern industrial civilisation could survive.'  (Global Warming Disaster, Continuum, '09) Matt Ridley says: 'To persist with a policy of subsidising renewable energy ... at a time when vast reserves of cheap low-carbon gas have suddenly become available is so perverse it borders on the insane'.  (Spectator October 15 '011). He referred to vast fields of 'shale gas' being tapped in America, and now being explored in Lancashire, which could provide immense reserves of  'green'energy. Drilling near Blackpool has located 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, 'enough to keep the entire British economy going for many decades. Objections by the big coal, gas and nuclear industries are, says Ridley 'almost comically fabricated or exaggerated.' We could access this stuff, long trapped in the earth's rocks, and resolve all our energy problems.  I took up this theme at a harvest sermon to 20 village chapel-goers  in October. (Little wonder it did not make international news!) I maintain that nature continues to provide the means by which life can be sustained. Shale gas and GM crops, are among the 'new things' Isaiah spoke about which are provided to take over from oil, coal and traditional farm technology. Hail, shale! Vested interest, anxious reactionaries and bureaucratic intertia must not stop you..