Monday
Apr072014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Lucas: unconventional gas "no worse"
Apr 7, 2014 Energy: gas Greens "It's not that fracking itself is necessarily worse than ordinary gas extraction. It's the fact that we're just about to put into place a whole new infrastructure for a whole new fossil-fuel industry, at exactly the time when we need to be reducing our emissions." The problem, in other words, is climate change.
...Lucas accepts that we do need gas to tide us over, "but I would prefer to keep importing it from Norway, for example, because it will be easier to turn that tap off than it would be to dismantle an entire new industry that we had deliberately incentivised. That's why Balcombe felt so important, because it is literally on the frontline."
Caroline Lucas breaks with the rest of the green movement over fracking safety
Reader Comments (34)
When the energy shortage becomes so acute that blackouts begin, I rather hope that Norway turns off the tap for him.
Apologies to all decent people in the UK who want to be warm. I just think the point needs to be pointedly made.
Like the good little English graduate and green obsessive that she is she totally fails to realise/understand/acknowledge that shale gas is the main reason why, without any need for international agreements or other totalitarian interference with the people, the USA has succeeded in cutting its CO2 emissions quite drastically.
(We can debate whether there was in fact any urgent need to do that some other time.)
I love the idea that it's OK for the Norwegians to carry on "polluting" the planet with CO2 as long as the UK doesn't.
[And Mrs J has just added, "... and then pull the plug on their economy when we feel like it!"]
The words "selfish bitch" come to mind but I'd better not say anything!
... it will be easier to turn that tap off than it would be to dismantle an entire new industry that we had deliberately incentivised.
Why is the government "incentivizing" anything? If they simply get out of the way, private industry can make a decision to frack or not to frack and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of the market. This is just another example of the government's mindset that they are and need to be and can be in control of everything.
Did she say whether she intends to stop lying about the dangers of fracking or to discourage her supporters from doing so?
fracking safety has never had anything to do with it , the problem is that fracking like nuclear is a real threat to hopped for energy crisis the Greens wish to see . Remember for years they complained that energy was ‘too cheap ‘ and ‘too easy to get ‘ although in public they dropped these ideas in private they still feel that modern life is ‘to easy ‘
They idolised some mythic rural past full of happy folk that made everything by hand and never travelled. Of course, it’s a BS claim that has no basis in reality, but they see an energy crisis as an ‘opportunity’ to get their ideology enforced onto a population how otherwise would never accept it. As for the ‘price ‘either in cash of bodies, well how much is too much when ‘you’re saving the planet’
Why do I get the feeling that even that Guardian journalist has become dubious that green propaganda is all it’s cracked up to be? Signed up for the Green Deal and then found it too expensive? Don’t think windmills work that well? Who’d a thunk it? Finding Caroline Lucas to be like a fictional character is telling too, though Walter Mitty might be a better model for the Lucas’s propensity for fantasy.
I’d feel sorry for the greens if they weren’t the Greens. They were misled by all those people like Cameron saying they were about to embrace green issues. Of course, people like Cameron misled themselves too. Why didn’t he and his buddies ever realise how expensive and impossible reducing CO2 would be or that following the green brick road is the fastest route to economic misery? It’s pathetic listening to greens pretend there is an army of keen members of the public behind them when elections and CO2 levels make liars out of them. Cameron probably lost as many Conservative voters with his ‘vote blue, go green’ campaign as he gained. Certainly even Caroline Lucas seems to realise she probably won’t be an MP after the next elections.
Marginally off-topic but relevant to the whole 'message' thing:
I was astonished to hear on BBC's 'Newswatch' that a viewer, clearly watching a different set of tv channels to the rest of us, had written in to complain that climate 'deniers' were getting TOO MUCH airtime (I know, I know) - on the basis that 'facts should take precedence over opinions..'
Oh, my goodness - isn't that precisely what we are demanding the whole time..?
[And Mrs J has just added, "... and then pull the plug on their economy when we feel like it!"] The words "selfish bitch" come to mind but I'd better not say anything! - Mike Jackson
The reverse is also true. If Norway gets a better offer for their gas or decides to raise gas prices till we squeek, it might be our economy that crashes. The words "silly bitch" come to mind but I'd better not say anything either! For some reason, 'good' actions never have bad consequences in the minds of people like Lucas. Her favourite joke is a good example.
The problem with the Greens, as I see it, is that they visualise energy/electricity generation as a sort of 'cottage industry' - which could be relaced by a few little windmills, a couple of carefully located waste digesters and some rooftop solar panels.
Oh, well - I suppose its got to be 'lights out' before they and the government wake up...
I applaud Caroline Lucas for her honesty about the reasons she is against fracking. More please, across the whole climate and energy debate.
"I’d feel sorry for the greens if they weren’t the Greens"
One for Evernote ...
Perhaps somebody should send Caroline Lucas a copy of this book - The Age of Global Warming by Rupert Darwall - "reviewed" in the Telegraph by Charles Moore
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/10748667/The-game-is-up-for-climate-change-believers.html
"The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days."
But then, as she is a "believer" proper science has no place in her views.
I call it the Cider-with-Rosie syndrome.
"It is a total myth, she insists, that fracking shale gas would bring down our energy prices. It has in the US, but she says any shale gas fracked in the UK would have no impact on our heating bills, and wouldn't even be used in this country, because we are locked into European energy prices. "What will reduce prices is a significant investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency."
So it's a myth that shale gas won't bring cheaper bills while it is a truism that renewables will - at some unspecified date. So she is an optimist after all! Or...even though they sometimes try to be honest it seems very difficult for greens to sustain that honesty for more than a few minutes. What she really wanted to say was that she didn't care if bills were higher because us plebs use too much already which is sustaining a vulgar consumerist society that is affecting our noble fellow creatures on Earth. For greens CO2 reduction is the vehicle taking us towards the nirvana of de-industrialisation. Alas CO2 is also a good excuse for statists and capitalists alike - what better thing to sell or tax than air?
Tinyco2: I think you'll find that Lucas is jumping ship at the next election. That will net her a nice little windfall as a retiring MP. Good riddance.
sherlock1
The Greens see everything as "a sort of cottage industry" or at the very least would like it to be and want to make it so. See innumerable comments of mine passim over a long period!
The "Cider with Rosie" syndrome is a nice description, michael hart, and just about captures the sort of pre-war (won't say which!) world which no more existed than their idyllic pre-IR time.
Try reading The Darling Buds of May or just about anything by Wodehouse or Dornford Yates 'Berry' books (which I find fun but are a classic example of an author who thought that civilised behaviour came to an end in 1914 — which I suppose in some respects it did).
We're emphatically not talking 'environmentalism' here; this is unashamed harking back to an age when the peasants knew their place and the landed gentry lived a life of luxury. That was only ever a veneer and the Greens can't see that.
If you are going to "incentivise" an industry then you provide it with subsidies, grants, guaranteed prices, compel other businesses and consumers to purchase the products at inflated prices etc.
What they are doing with fracking is letting them pay tax at a higher rate than other businesses but less than the 85% oil and gas usually pay. They are also going to let them offset losaes with one gas field against profits in another gas field.
This isn't "incentivising", it is reducing the deterrents against operating in the oil and gas industries.
Lucas in Parliament, 2012
Perhaps she has changed her mind.
Caroline Lucas persists in mis-describing the Balcombe well. It's not aimed at shale gas: it's a conventional oil exploration well with a horizontal section. Cuadrilla have explicitly said they do not intend to frack the well.
http://www.cuadrillaresources.com/news/cuadrilla-news/article/further-information-on-our-west-sussex-planning-application/
Bishop Hill:
Evidently she has. Her statement on Friday had the virtue of honesty (at least I can find no other explanation). "I was wrong in 2012" would have been even more honest - but what politician goes around saying things like that?
"Caroline Lucas persists in mis-describing the Balcombe well. "
Caroline Lucas is an graduate in English who does not understand the issues nor in fact, want to understand them (since she is a zealot of the Green religion). The only thing that matters to her is the return to a pre-industrial medieval world where people can die of "natural" disease and famine rather than evil "man-made" ones.
Thanks, Mike Jackson.
I suspect that many outside the UK don't realise just how deeply the English rural-idyll is engraved on the heart of so many people in this country, rich and poor. I'll plead guilty. It is emotive enough that politicians of all colours wish to enlist it in their cause, and anything that might threaten it must go the extra mile to gain acceptance.
If you haven't alread read it, Jenny Uglow's book "The Lunar Men" is a wonderful description of the birth of the industrial revolution, and what we may have lost as a nation. I recall a comment made by some German customers/partners (in the chemical industry) at a company I worked for in the 1980's
All the jobs in the chemical/plastics industries will leave for the USA (and hopefully a little to Canada). Manufacturing will follow.
Turning off the tap from Norway won't be necessary.
Many extreme Greens think that the Industrial revolution was a Bad Thing, based on a concept of society prior to it largely based on reading fantasy novels where they fail to realise that the protagonists are at the top of such society or don't care because they assume they would be in the same position for some reason.
Certainly in their vision of a future based on the Past That Never Was they are at the top rather than the bottom.
Mad Woman become slightly less mad, but it's only temporary.
She's now denying that she's changed her mind.
Twitter thread, I hope
I am waiting for her reply.
It is worth reading the interview in the Guardian as it contains genuine rib ticklers from Caroline Lucas such as:
"What will reduce prices is a significant investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency."
Rather than the UK have its own shale gas Caroline Lucus " ... would prefer to keep importing it from Norway, for example, because it will be easier to turn that tap off than it would be to dismantle an entire new industry"
michael hart
I haven't read that book but as a dedicated (though frankly amateur) historian I almost certainly should — and will.
I'm not quite sure why the English (it is a specifically English characteristic I think) are so nostalgic for an age that never really existed, at least for the vast majority. But like you I occasionally find myself longing for a past that I certainly never experienced until I realise that there were always "good old days" — except that they weren't!
Comfort blankets at the ready, folks!
The anti-frackers have painted themselves into a corner and all that has been saving them is the media's reluctance to expose their contradictions. However, the MEN has just done that big time by just putting up photos and quotes. The unfortunate Gong then enters the comments section to dig himself a bigger hole.
At different times they can be heard saying:
a) they're simply against all "fossil fuel" development
b) they're only against it when it might involve "fracking"
c) they're against it because it's not economical
the inconsistencies between these various positions and their subsets ("not in a populated area" etc) are too many to enumerate but the public have well and truly sussed them.
My post below the Guardian articles:
I agree with Caroline Lucas when she says:
"the big problem with fracking has nothing to do with the risk that it will cause earthquakes, contaminate the water table or pollute the soil. In fact, she thinks it possible that stringent regulations could minimise those risks."
If you are anti-fracking because its a fossil fuel, its best to be honest about it. If you distort the argument by focusing on earthquakes and contamination, you will lose the argument, because these risks are being addressed, just like for other major sub-surface industrial activities (such as water wells, oil wells, road and railway tunnels, sewer systems, etc), which rarely, if ever, generate the same level of protest.
http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/34042695
I am old enough to remember being reliant solely on wood as a fuel for cooking and, as a small boy, being responsible for chopping the kindling every day. Only a single power outlet the house, keeping hens as a source of cheap eggs and meat, all of our neighbours keeping a house cow, sweating to help an elderly aunt make butter from her own separated milk, having to assist with the family vege garden, killing and butchering sheep and the occasional pig. An idyl it certainly was not and I have no happy memories of the business of helping run our household as a pre-teen, just bloody hard work and lots of it, plus quite nasty consequences for 'mistakes' such as mis-hitting kindling with the axe - nothing quite like copping a flying piece of wood in the face to keep one focussed on correct and safe techniques.
Any person mad enough to want to return to all that has never lived it!
Alexander K: fascinating story. May I ask how old you are?
Last quarterly [3rd Qtr 2013] figures for UK Balance of payments was revised up from £20 billion to £22.4 billion with overseas investments going down the pan - the UK is in some serious 'doings'. Add to that, the borrowing requirement for this financial year will hit £80-90 billion and with the public debt north of £1.4 TRILLION and rising though the actual estimates vary but throw in the public pensions sector liability and the PFI schemes and the public debt is near to £4 trillion.
The UK is bust in a big way, the infantliized media, the bird brained green lobby - Lucas et al can talk all they like about 'green energy' this and renewables lowering in price in 10 or 20 years but all of it is green wet dream fantasy.
Energy from fossil fuel generation plant is arriving at a crisis, just as we are heading into economic oblivion. The only way out financially speaking - is for Britain to re-commence making things and selling them to the world, the British manufacturing sector is less than 12% of GDP and that compares very unfavourably with most if not all of our major competitors.
Barring growing money on trees, Britain has had it - investments, insurance and banking can only do so much, the Germans understand this very well, for goodness sakes unlike Britain - the Germans still build ships.
Green energy is the final nail in the coffin, the green agenda will bury us all.
UNLESS.............................. the only way is dig/mine, drill/frack - burn it for CHEAP energy and make stuff again - need I reiterate.....all of it is just another reason to leave the stifling embrace of the EU and Germany.
Quarterly figures, are negative numbers -£22.4 billion - apols.