This is one of those rare occasions when I have to disagree with Dr Alf, the Green Party, the makers of the film “Gasland”, and the barriers to UK fracking in the Northwest posed by Luddites within Lancashire County Council.
We live in a dangerous world, where Muslim jihadis and lunatics seize oilfields and try to hold the rest of us to ransom.
We recently had Russia doing it via Vladimir Putin, until the Saudis, under their now dead king, decided to try and put the frackers out of business and damage Russia’s economy.
The UK has less than 3% margin of generating capacity over what is actually required and any increase of cold weather in February or March will push us into blackouts, which will cost us billions and may even trigger a balance of payments crisis.
Old, coal-fired and nuclear power stations are being mothballed and are not being replaced, and worse than that, we have no coastal protection vessel, only 17 escort vessels and still more plans to cut the army down to 60,000 men and have a total Tri-Forces of 90,000, which is nowhere large enough to defend us nor protect the nuclear power station feed from France, food supplies or oil coming into Milford Haven and our other key ports.
Already we hear from Davos in Switzerland last Wednesday that Claudio Descalzi, the Chief Executive of the Italian oil group ENI is expecting oil prices to start rising again next year as supplies become tighter.
Alexei Kudrin, an ally of President Putin. tipped to succeed Medvedev is preparing Russia for prices in oil higher than the present artificially low one but below the previous peak.
As an island with a rising population, we need to frack and frack now, albeit with safeguards to protect us from leakage into the water table.
Jobs would be created, just as they have been in Texas, and the Exchequer which is experiencing alarming falls in tax receipts would start to fill up again.
The alternative of renewables just does not work, and represents a series of costly and futile white elephants.
Wind farms are 14%-efficient and each turbine has to be subsidized to the tune of £2,500 gbp, solar power has to be subsidized because we have too little sun, insulating houses stops energy loss but again there are massive subsidies because benefit recipients and other economically-useless-people have the least energy efficient housing and are often in “fuel poverty” which has to be alleviated by the rest of us.
The solution is nuclear power but since it takes 15 years to build one, matters have been left too late by successive politicians.
The UK Government proposes now to pay firms not to use energy in order to maintain generating capacity in the event that the weather turns bad and through the Department of Energy and Climate Change smart meters are proposed that will switch off someone’s fridge at 3.00 am and back on again by say 6.00 am.
I met and questioned a senior civil servant, on secondment at the University of East Anglia, about this lunacy and asked the woman concerned about what would the Government do if someone got food poisoning or died because of food spoilage of say fish and the personal representatives sued.
Answer, there came none.
The IPCC,s second latest report shows that there was no global warming from 1996 to the present day ,indeed the panel members had a discussion before the report was released to decide how to present this unhelpful piece of information.
They came up with the idea that the warmth was being absorbed by the oceans and that it would re-emerge with a vengeance in 25 years time.
Unfortunately for them NASA satellite imagery shows that both the polar icecaps are 25% larger and 25% thicker than they were when Al Gore made his film an “Inconvenient Truth”.
In addition Polar Bear numbers are thriving suggesting that far from warming the earth is cooling as per the view of the Chinese and Indian Governments,the Russian Academy of Science and Professor Richard Lindzen the world’s top oceanographer.
All this says to me that we have no alternative to frack and frack now.
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