“Restoring the fracking moratorium would be an error. To rely on imported gas when we have 50-100 years’ supply under our feet is not a stance rooted in science or economics, but political weakness in the face of militant protest groups and anti-development campaigns. This decision will not help the planet; the UK will become more dependent on gas imports, with higher emissions than local production. It will not help the growth plan; we will be borrowing to pay Qatari and US taxes rather than building an industry.
It will not help the low carbon transition; there will be fewer fossil fuel taxes to fund it and the cost of all energy sources will rise. It will not help our allies in the EU or Ukraine; surrendering further dominance of regional gas markets to Russian tyranny. It seems the Government and Opposition are determined to risk blackouts and freezeouts before taking hard decisions rooted in reality.”
– Andy Mayer, of the Institute of Economic Affairs (one of those evil organisations now safely removed from influencing our “sensibles” in government), talking about the decision of the new Rishi Sunak government to ban fracking. The quotation explains the imbecility of that decision. (I received the comments in an email; there is no weblink that I could see.)
Who needs vulgar industry anyway, when we can import all this stuff from grubby foreigners, daaaahhling.
Update: Ambrose Evans Pritchard in the Daily Telegraphs compliments the frackers of the US for helping to save the West (he’s not exaggerating) but argues that UK fracking is far less sensible as an investment proposition, and he may be correct. However, he goes onto laud the benefits of the UK going all in on Green, renewable energy, and talks about hydrogen, etc. But throughout the entire article, written with AEP’s typical brio, is not one single reference to battery storage capacity. Weather-dependent energy requires storage to deal with the baseload power issue. There may well be solutions in the skunkworks, but an awful lot is riding on this. There might well be a sort of “Moore’s Law” effect on renewables and affordability, but batteries are the key. And making batteries needs lithium, cobalt, and other minerals that come from places that are often not exactly very agreeable to the West. And there are environmental side-effects, including damage to water supplies (often far more serious than anything that fracking might cause.)
Now we see the real reason Truss was quickly deposed.
Features, not bugs. It seems very much as though the wonks in both parties want blackouts.
I don’t think that it can be emphasized enough that CO2 emissions are an imaginary problem. A planet sized ball of insanity has grown up around the insane idea that CO2 has a significant effect on the weather. The climate alarmists point to every extreme weather event as “proof” that climate change is a real existential threat. They get away with it due to the ignorance of the mass of people who are seemingly unaware that extreme weather events aren’t anything new.
It seems very much as though the wonks in both parties want blackouts.
Even now I think it is hard to see that the likes of Sunak, or the rest of them, including Labour, are so retarded that they want the UK to be starved, as deliberate policy, of power during several months of the year. Maybe the lockdowns got them to think, in the words of Neil Ferguson, the Imperial college guy, that they can “get away with” closing society down in some way or other.
The problem is that the authorities could “get away” with lockdowns because we had the internet and could still use communications tech while stuck at home. Imagine a population, already psychologically bludgeoned by lockdowns, forced to now spend dark, candle-lit evenings, or see their businesses fucked because they cannot get power. Imagine being told that nights out at a restaurant, or club, or suchlike, are off-limits because a country that is rich in oil and gas bans itself from exploiting those resources.
The problem is that the major political parties seem complicit in this nonsense, and are determined that anyone who challenges this situation is deemed to be a “libertarian jihadi”, or somesuch.
Maybe Sunak is trying to close down what he thinks of as needless debate and distractions, shore up support in the Tory shires, and hopes that something on the energy front turns up. He may be lucky, but I have nothing for contempt for the wider Tory Party and those who think that the Precautionary Principle is going to be much good at times like this.
Sunak has carefully considered the arguments for and against fracking, calculated the cost benefit, predicted the unintended consequences and decided, on balance, to ban it.
Also, I have a bridge to sell you.
It is the first avowed intent of His Britannic Majesty’s government that the UK’s citizens and residents should be poorer and colder than they need to be.
And the Conservative Parliamentary Party is delighted.
I take a more nuanced view, Stonyground. I think it’s quite a credible theory that CO₂ can contribute towards a general warming but I don’t accept the proffered evidence uncritically, and most such “evidence” doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Climate science is largely pseudoscience. After 30 years of studies the window for the climate-altering emissions has been pushed back thousands of years with climate scientists now claiming neolithic activities were significant. This is mostly based on models of models, pretty well worthless in real terms but useful for getting payments for this dubious research.
Even if we were to accept that CO₂ emissions affect climate significantly, the prognostications of doom are unfounded. The claims of climate scientists are always accepted and promulgated by an uncritical media without questioning the vagueness or the sheer ludicrousness of the claims. The world changes so much in short periods of time that making any kind of prediction is always a fool’s errand. In 1998 someone predicting 9/11, the rise of the Islamic State, the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia in 2014 and 2022, the COVID pandemic and the responses by governments would have been seen as a madman, as these things were unlikely at best (maybe not quite so much the invasion of the Ukraine). We’ve all seen how poorly predictions from 50 years ago about warble gloaming have aged.
Isolated weather events like hurricanes, whether exacerbated by climate change or not, can have a much more significant effect than climate change in terms of direct human suffering, devastation to property and investments. The threat of climate change is a much more easily understood, easily tackled problem. Reversing or halting it is a folly, short of nuking China and India back to the dark ages it simply won’t be possible for Europe and America to reverse or halt climate change even if we accept the hypothetical cause. No amount of hair shirt-donning in Europe will affect global CO₂ emissions in the slightest, particularly as though young American or English women or Germans might be willing to eat variations of tofu day and night they certainly aren’t willing to give up driving to work (the Germans might be willing to switch to an electric car, the manufacture of which produced emissions exceeding ten years worth or more of normal driving of a conventionally fuelled car but they won’t forego their skiing trips). Alternatively sensible steady investment in realistic technological improvements will deliver more than just a warm feeling of being “part of the solution”, by actually helping other people improve their lives and their homes. Insulation, for instance, is not a bad idea in general. Specifics vary, with excessive insulation doing more harm than good in many buildings. But it’s easily proven that small sensible steps to insulate many houses in the UK, for instance, would have a positive impact on the health and wealth of the residents while reducing overall energy usage. Such programmes don’t make headlines and don’t make money for the likes of Tesla, however.
I actually never have been responsible for any “significant” carbon emissions being a simple soul who likes using second hand technology and public transport, and never having flown or owned a car. Not bragging or suggesting anyone else should live like this, it’s just the way I have happened to live more or less unintentionally. I did a “carbon budget” out of interest one day, and even with my incredibly modest lifestyle my emissions would still be too high to prevent a 2℃ rise (still accepting the greenhouse gas theory, for the purposes of discussion). “Carbon” budgeting tools are completely useless, by the way. My point is that even everyone living as modestly as is reasonably possible in modern Britain (in which a computer of some kind, including smartphones is essential*) would not prevent the 2℃ rise on which so much emphasis is placed.
* my neighbour missed out on his cost-of-living payment because he claims benefits so it couldn’t be applied to his council tax account, and he was sent a letter with instructions on how to claim the money but it had to be completed online. I helped another neighbour complete her form, but the neighbour who missed out didn’t ask for help and so just didn’t get the payment at all.
Generally speaking I prefer cock-up* over conspiracy as an explanation, but there comes a point at which the behaviour of our politicians becomes so bizarre that it does pay to give a second thought to conspiracy. As you say here I think lockdowns gave them all a taste of absolute power. People obeyed their dictates regardless of the propriety of the dictate. That’s gotta be an intoxicating sensation. The energy “crisis” of the UK is entirely man made and preventable. The long-term energy security of the country is obviously something most people would want, but giving conspiracy some consideration then you might conclude that politicians perhaps don’t want stability particularly if they get to be the ones to “rescue” us from the dark. Not to mention the powerful feeling of being in control of the disgusting plebs, by being able to switch off their light and heat from time to time. A powerful corrective to teach the ungrateful yobs to respect their betters. Pity it’ll likely end up with ropes and lamp-posts if things continue this way.
The alternative is that our political class is entirely detached from reality and really does believe they are acting for the best. It’s a bit difficult to believe that all the Tory policy people are so completely sold on the concept of clean energy, and simultaneously so detached from reality that they don’t understand the renewables are backed up by gas. Even if they don’t want dirty fracking, they surely understand that you can’t have your green energy wins if you can’t deliver a steady supply of gas to the turbines on a cold but still December night.
* Or generally just ignorance, stupidity and naïvety.
They just want power because it’s what is needeed for the others to live in poverty and misery. They will be the kings among peasants. And the peasants will accept it because they don’t want happiness, prosperity and freedom. They think they don’t deserve it.
So much that we do affects the climate. For example, erect a fence and you will change the wind speed and direction climate downwind. Or spread concrete and the like (as in buildings and roads) and change the temperature climate in the vicinity. Adding CO2 ought to have a modest affect on global mean temperatures, but there is no evidence that it is a major driver of climate, and no evidence that we are facing a climate crisis. Nothing extraordinary has been happening to weather, nor to climate in recent decades and centuries. We are suffering from some kind of mass hysteria. A very very harmful one. As for fracking, it is a remarkably benign and beneficial technology.
I joined Reform UK today
If the fracking industry was subject to the same vibration limits as any mine or quarry in the UK there wouldn’t be a problem.
The limits imposed on fracking are deliberately unachievable.
Good luck with that. We in the US will be shutting down exports of our increasingly expensive energy soon. OPEC will once again be ascendant. I suppose there’s always Russia . . .
This isn’t about micro-tremors. This is about CAGW. You’ll be cold and stranded and you’ll like it . . .
This actually seems highly likely to me. Consider that once you get above a certain level in the immensely bureaucratized political apparatus of any modern state, literally almost every minute of your waking day is pre-decided for you, and what free time you get is likely to be spent at the farthest distance possible (figuratively if not literally) from anything reminiscent of your responsibilities. That may very well form an echo chamber worse than any radical’s subreddit of choice, and more deceptive for thinking the people in it are keeping you more informed than average rather than less.
@Bobby b
I think that was sarcasm from Jonathan Pearce!
I think Perry’s news is symptomatic.
It is not a matter of being retarded, nor of dementia, but of delusional insanity.
My default assumption is that the establishment believes its own propaganda — because, if they didn’t, they would not risk trusting the people to believe it.
But i am open to evidence to the contrary, in specific cases.
Not very difficult to believe, if you already believe, as i do, that eating regularly in restaurants predisposes people to delusional insanity (due to the seed oils and sugars).
And politicians, like journalists, tend to have lunch in restaurants.
Johnathan Pearce – I suspect you have never held elective office.
When a politician is low down, they think “well policy is presented to me now – but if I get higher, I will be part of deciding policy” – but when they get higher, they still find policy is presented to them.
Take the example of Kemi Badenock – highly intelligent and well read. The lady today was praising the Equality Act of 2010 – “it is a shield, not a sword”.
That is not true, and the lady knows it is not true. The Equality Act is working exactly as it was designed to – i.e. it is causing terrible harm. But to oppose it, rather than say it has been misinterpreted, would be political suicide – the lady would have to resign.
The Equality Act is POLICY you see – eventually Policy gets turned into law (even if it starts as “legally nonbinding agreements”).
So is the end of “fracking” and the general “Net Zero” policy.
Mr Sunak is not an evil man, certainly not – everyone tells me he loves his children and is very pleasant to everyone – but he cannot go against POLICY – so the public will suffer, although he most certainly does NOT want people to suffer.
Liz Truss was Prime Minister – but the lady went against POLICY (in several things) so she is no longer Prime Minister.
This is NOT to say that a politician can make no difference – a politician, say the Prime Minister, can change a few details here and there. Do some good – at least I hope so.
But basic matters of policy are beyond us – we can change some things, but not the really big things.
For example, Mr Johnson did NOT want a lockdown – but we had a lockdown.
And Mr Johnson certainly did not want to hurt anyone with the Covid injections – no politician wanted to do that, but it was done anyway. And Mr Johnson had to speak, many times, in support of the policy. I did not have to speak in support of it – because I am very low down, but I still had to have two injections (not formally – but de facto).
As an experienced Member of Parliament (not my own) recently explained to me….
“It is better not to know some things – because you cannot stop them happening, and you will just torture yourself”.
The happiest Members of Parliament are normally the most ignorant – they think they make policy, and they think that policy has beneficial results.
“The State Works!” I recently heard a former adviser to David Cameron say – I looked into his eyes, the lights were on, but no one was home. And I am sure he is a much happier person than I am.
People sneer at politicians – “if you are low down you can avoid speaking in support of all these terrible things – but that jut means you are might as well be a stuffed dummy”, true enough – but it is not different in the corporate world.
Imagine someone on the Board of Black Rock, State Street or Vanguard, or one of the big banks, opposing “Net Zero”, or “Diversity and Inclusion”, or “Social and Environmental Governance”, and-so-on.
They would not stay on that Board of Directors very long – “masters of the universe” they most certainly are NOT.
The few big corporations backed by the Credit Money of the banks (Cantillon Effect) are just following Policy as well – they had to get rid of Liz Truss, the lady violated Policy. Vast government deficit spending is fine (notice that no one objected to the wild spending in the budget – the energy price cap) – but rolling back tax increases is against Policy. Handing out many billions of Pounds for absurd things such as “Track and Trace” is fine – reducing tax rates is not. And the money continues to be spent right now – on just about everything.
The “Big Business” types are often just as helpless as politicians. Sometimes an individual rich person will rebel – for example Donald Trump when he got sick of seeing American industrial towns and cities turned into waste lands (he may not have understood why it was happening – but he knew he was against it), or Elon Musk when “the tides of history” decided that his child should “sexually transition” – when the “history” comes for your own child it is not so easy to be an Hegelian and just accept sexual mutilation. But what can they achieve?
Again, the most stupid and ignorant are the happiest – because they really do not know how much harm Policy is doing.
“But where do all these international policies come from?”.
Bleep – I do not know, perhaps the cat in the back garden creates them. From sexual mutilation to endless Credit Money and Credit finance, to C02 is Satan.
“The United Kingdom only produces 1% of C02 – destroying this country will not make any difference to world C02 emissions”.
Of course not, but it is POLICY.
Oh, I know it was! Well played sarcasm, too. 😉
The time when a nation could decide to play virtuous and expect other nations to take up the slack is coming to an end. Energy is fungible, until it’s not.
My first reaction to this was my traditional one – so the Tory conservative side loses another effective voice and the progs win.
My second reaction, though, was that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I’ve lost that entire “but we need to stay united to keep the Visigoths from the gates” sentiment myself. It’s hard to decide that you need to stop looking at tomorrow and play the longer game. But when tomorrow is truly lost, it’s time to re-think your game.
Bobby:
What’s wrong with the Visigoths??
They saved Spain from Islamization, at Covadonga and subsequently.
Another way of looking at this: you should choose the lesser evil — but the lesser evil in the long term, not the short term.
(Although, admittedly, there is more uncertainty in the long term than in the short term. You should always keep that in mind.)
In this perspective, let me take this opportunity to congratulate Perry for joining Reform UK.
@ Alex:
“It seems very much as though the wonks in both parties want blackouts.”
Lenin? quote: “The worse, the better”.
See also Rahm Emmanuel: “Never let a crisis go to Waste”.
Typical “loony” behaviour:
Smash everything and everyone in sight, Then, conspicuously turn up to “put things right”, (In your own image, of course).
Two basic categories of human:
Lifters and Leaners.
See also the three options variation:
Makers, takers and breakers.
Got the drift, yet?
In my culture (i.e., the historically-illiterate Americans who skipped European history almost completely) “Visigoths” has always been the shorter term for “the barbarian horde at the gates.”
We prefer a black-and-white world, thank you. Less accurate, but simpler. 😉
I’m in the “On a sunny day, if there are no clouds in the afternoon the temperature will drop several degrees overnight. If there are clouds it will drop much less” school. Water vapour (i.e. clouds) is as potent a GHG as Co2, but is over a 1,000x the quantity in the atmosphere compared to Co2. Yet people blame Co2…
I’m glad fracking has been blocked. The issue is not energy but water. The pollution of groundwater by fracking is well-attested and has been known for years.
Quentin (October 27, 2022 at 8:13 am), the dreadful effects of global warming are “well-attested”, yet what has to-date actually happened, or looks like it’s happening, can be described either as not well attested or else as very well attested – to differ.
This does not of course say anything in itself about whether any particular fracking might pollute any particular patch of ground water, but it does warn you to use some more reliable metric than “well-attested”.
Science is about verifiable predictions, not testimony from authority figures – though authority itself tends to forget that.
Not the usual quote:
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
H. L. Mencken
Paul Marks: Johnathan Pearce – I suspect you have never held elective office.
Give me a bit of credit. 35 years of being a working journalist, covering politics, business and finance, have given me some angles on the motivations of politicians, including the pressures they operate under, the way that they can be swayed and influenced, the institutional issues, and so on.
As I said, I think Sunak and others like him are so keen to play the “sensible” card that they are determined to close down certain areas of controversy and debate. Sunak does not want lots of Greens and Extinction Rebellion half-wits blocking the streets, so he chooses to throw a bone to them by banning fracking. And he will do the same to the NIMBYs, many of them Conservatives, by making nice about the Green Belt (which in some cases is not even very green), and so on. Hence my points.
Quentin, if we are worried about the effects on ground-water (not a trivial point, I will concede) what are the water effects of lithium and cobalt mining, for example, to obtain material for electric batteries? There’s a danger we merely exchange one set of environmental effects for another.
Here is a link for those who might be interested on cobalt mining and its impact.
@Jonathan 0959: Indeed.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
But I do believe the groundwater thing is massively overdone for political reasons; as Neil nearly said, “Citation required”.
Fracking does have impact on groundwater, but the discussion really ought to go on to “how MUCH impact does fracking have on groundwater, and do the benefits of society being energy-rich outweigh what impact actually occurs?” I think the answer to the second part is, clearly, yes.
Johnathan Pearce – I had no intention to offend you, and I apologise if I did.
Local journalists, no matter how many years they have been working, assume that local politicians decide policy (such as the level of council tax increase) – and that is not true. If a local council increases Council Tax by less than X they lose grant, and there is also a financial penalty for increasing the Council Tax by more than X – so the Council Tax increase is X. And what would happen to someone in local government who opposed Net Zero, or Diversity and Inclusion? After all many of these things (although they have started as “legally non-binding”) are now the law-of-the-land.
However, your comment still assumes that Mr Sunak is making policy decisions.
Is he? Or is he carrying out international Policy?
Yes (YES) Mr Sunak could reject the advice of Civil Servants and “the markets” (the big Corporations backed by the Credit Money of the Central Banks) – but there would be a heavy price for rejecting this “advice”.
Ask former Prime Minister Truss (although I doubt the lady really grasps what happened to her – I would not be surprised if she is baffled by it all), and her departures from international Policy were actually quite small.
By the way – I want to believe that you are CORRECT, that policy decisions are really made by elected politicians.
I would be delighted if this is really the case.
I remember how helpless President Trump sometimes (sometimes) was – he would order X, but the government machine would do the opposite.
What is a politician supposed to do then?
What Bruce said. Creating a societal catastrophe is no longer on a Western politician’s ‘Avoid at all costs’ list. A crisis allows the State to do things it could not do in less turbulent times, ergo crises are good, as long as you can reasonably blame someone else for them, and surf the wave of public fear towards increased State power and control. And the Deep State know that as long as they control all the major political players and lock them into the ‘Policy’ (as PM rightly points out) then it doesn’t really matter if the voters vote out Team A, Team B will implement exactly the same policy anyway.
Ergo our current support for Ukraine – despite what our host thinks about the morality of the policy, it has nothing to do with whether Western governments want a free Ukraine or not (which in itself is a joke, as the only freedom being offered to Ukraine is to become serfs to a Global Hegemony like we are in the West), and has everything to do with causing a plausibly deniable crisis in energy supply, which just coincidentally allows those who demand Net Zero to control the masses access to energy, and to further their own ‘Policy’. Its the perfect scam – ‘supporting Ukraine’ is ‘the moral thing to do’, the political class can dump the consequences onto Uncle Vlad, and off themselves. And ride the consequent wave of public fear and terror at being impoverished to exactly the location they wanted to be in the first place. If support for Ukraine was based on morality then we would be sanctioning China and Saudi Arabia, but we aren’t because they are TOO important to get rid of. Putin is just in the sweet spot – Russian energy exports are important enough to create a crisis by their absence, but not important enough to destroy Western society overnight if removed from global trade.
Support for Ukraine might initially have been genuinely meant, but the continued insistence in the ‘Policy’ once the consequences for the West have become apparent (and the refusal to take any alternative measures to secure energy supplies) show that it is now a political choice – the West must freeze and suffer, because our Global Overlords want us to, so that we will eventually actively demand the ‘solutions’ they have lined up for us, just as we demanded Covid Lockdowns. Covid taught us (or should have if we were taking notice) that tyranny does not necessarily get imposed by the boot from the start, it gets invited in through open doors and welcomed with open arms. We are being set up for the same, just on the Net Zero/WEF/You will own nothing and eat bugs ‘Policy’ instead.
Re bobby b’s comments on impacts on groundwater…I’m no expert (I’m a wannabe geochemist, actual training is physical chemistry and analytical chemistry), but I suspect this will be hard to know with enough certainty. Doing things deep underground (oil/gas extraction by all sorts of means from near surface to depths of 5 miles) and figuring out the impacts on shallower and deeper water resources strikes me as hard geoscience. Probably requiring decades to see/discern the impacts. Maybe centuries? Some groundwater is really old (these things can be age dated to 100K years and more).
I could be wrong; I hope I am and impacts are more readily determined. Or like much of resource extraction, we can constantly update the fracking impact from now to 30 yrs out. And then react accordingly with 30 yrs to sort things out. And if we totally eff up the ground water in places, maybe we’ll need nuclear powered desalination plants along the coasts (I’m American so don’t know geography, especially the UK/EU, but IIRC, the UK has a fair bit of coastline per square mile of land).
A bit of an aside: if you’re interested in why we are always “going to run out in 30 yrs”, read this:
https://www.geochemicalperspectives.org/online/v6n1/
The bottom line is: we are always in the situation of having “only” 30 yrs of known resources because it never makes economic sense to find/develop resources (v expensive activities) needed for longer than that!
Absurd. The policy of resisting Russia was and is entirely geopolitical: it is not in the interest of “the west” to have an aggressive expansionist Russian reconquer its former colonies and move dramatically west, with forces & interior supply lines once again bordering Slovakia & Romania (Russian intentions to roll over the bits of Moldova they don’t already control (not just Transnistria) have been openly stated).
Nothing has changed after several months of war. And the fact this would lead to an energy crisis was absolutely understood not just from day one of this stage of the war, but also well before…
So no, resisting Russia has absolutely nothing to do with “Net Zero/WEF/You will own nothing and eat bugs policy”. Zero, zilch, nada, that is daft RT moonbattery of the highest order as offered by Russia Today.
Now the unwillingness to *immediately* start fracking on the other hands, that really is insane.
Perry finds me in complete agreement, except that he does not go far enough:
What has changed is that backpedaling now would mean that Putin or his successor (not to mention Xi, Kim, and the Ayatollahs) would not take seriously similar measures by the West at the next crisis.
As for the energy crisis: we cannot go on being dependent on the whims of an arbitrary ruler. It strikes me as insane that people who claim to be opposed to rule by “Global Overlords”, are eager to submit to Putin and Xi.
I wonder whether Perry, in using the word ‘insane’, means it as literally as i do.
It is a fact, though, that the word is popping up all over the place on conservative sites, beginning with the weekly Insanity Wrap at PJMedia.