shale

Either the people who question policies on renewable energy are wrong. Or they are right. If they are right we are all being led, for no good reason, up the most expensive path since the Garden of Eden. Christopher Booker (Global Warming Disaster, Continuum 2009) provides impressive proof for global warming being a 'scare'. requiring immense public expenditure - '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'. Matt Ridley (Spectator October 2011) 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 that it borders on insanity.' He refers to fields of 'shale gas' being tapped in America and now discerned in Lancashire, which could provide reliable, green energy  for most of the next century. Apparently it is already transforming life in parts of America. 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 and exaggerated.'  We could access this stuff, long trapped among earth's rocks, and at a stroke resolve all our foreseeable energy problems. Wow! If this is true why do we not know about it ? I took it up in a harvest sermon to 20 village chapel goers in October (small 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' that Isaiah spoke about which are there to take over from oil, coal, and traditional farming.  Hail, shale! Vested interest, nervous reactionaries and bureaucratic inertia must not stop you!

Listen

More than anything, we need somebody to listen. Really  listen, that is, not just cock half an ear while they think of the next thing to say. Today's paper says than doctors are being treated like priests; and for sure the most popular medicos are those who make time to listen to their patients. A man I know found his surgery closed and only a cleaner on the premises. He sat on a wall outside and told her his problem, and afterwards he had no need of the doctor. A pub landlord tells me that lonely and troubled individuals are more and more turning up in the hope that he will have time for a chat, or that there will be other customers willing to listen to them. 'They want sympathy more than drinkl,' he says. 'Running a pub is hard enough without being a mixture of priest, doctor, social worker and psychiatrist.' Is this a role for the under-occupied clergy? Lots of them pretend to be 'busy' but when you analyse their day much of what they do is self-indulgent. Ministry can be a sinecure. Clergy set their own agendsas so that they appear to be immensely busy, or more or less idle. Most have not been trained in time mangement so never achieve much. A church could 'adopt' a pub or a surgery to provide willing listeners (not preachers!) to over-burdened landlords and doctors. Chaplaincy is a more useful activity than parish ministry... perhaps also for motorways and pub chains aetc,etc. Too many clergy are wasting their time and training. Discuss...