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!