Fraser Nelson says "let there be shale"

Owen Paterson is far from a household name, but the significance of his appointment as Environment Secretary has not been lost on the green lobby groups. As far as they’re concerned, this is war. They are already denouncing him as a “prominent hater of wind turbines” and overall climate change sceptic.

It is just as well, then, that Paterson has spent two years at Northern Ireland, learning the art of political combat. For his critics are quite right to detect a shift in policy. According to Downing Street, his mission is to revive the rural economy – and the main species he has been asked to protect is the humans trying to make ends meet. As for his leader, the man once photographed being pulled by dogs over a Norwegian glacier is tiptoeing away from his old policies as he might do from embarrassing photographs of his student exuberance.

Read the whole thing.

Comments

[Alan Reed]

"...beneficiaries are often the rich – to an extent that even appals the gentry. “When we toffs meet up, all we talk about is government grants,” one landowner tells me. “I was even offered a grant for my folly.”

I am writing this from my estate in Hampshire (actually it is just a hatchback).

[Lord Beaverbrook]

Spot on, more and more media attention, please. Lets have CAGW condemned to the annuls of history by 2015 so that we can all get on with improving life for our future generations.

[peterwalsh]

Lord Beaverbrook...was "annuls of history" a freudian type slip of the keyboard?

[Roy]

To save the countryside it is important to highlight the fact that the Greens want to ruin it (as well as ruin the population in general). Greens have become some of the biggest, possibly the biggest, enemies of the environment in Britain.

[Mike Jackson]

Lord Beaverbrook
Did you really mean 'annuls'? Wouldn't 'anals' be more appropriate?

[jones]

For gods sake repeal the CCA.

[Robin Guenier]

See Mike Jackson's excellent reply at 10:24 this morning to my post about the Nelson article on the Harrabin "Mixing Science and Economics" thread below.

[Mike Jackson]

Robin
Flattery will get you everywhere. Do you want a cheque or will a brown envelope suffice?

[Lord Beaverbrook]

Oops, perhaps the inner psyche is being unleashed, calling Lewandowsky, please book me in for social profiling.
Wouldn't it be ironic if all the hard work put in by sceptics was erased from scientific history by a footnote stating that CAGW was a 20th century minor mistake within a growing field of science.

[Trefjon]

Call me an old sceptic - but is it a total convenience that the appointment of several sensible ministers has been greeted by the BBC with a load of alarmist stories on Radio 4 and Newsnight. A lifetime supporter of the BBCs objective reporting, I visited Moscow last week and discovered that the covering of the "Pussy Riot" story would have outdone TASS at its very best. The new controller has a battle on his hands to rein in the gang of illinformed Guardianistas who are strangling it at its very core.

[cedarhill]

Better that he'd be the Shiva of Windmills and Windfarms.

Is there any use for windmill parts after they're removed?

[Jamspid]

Where does Vince Cable stand on Shale.
Got David Laws back in the Cabinet
Looking at the Paddy Power Vince is now 7 to 2 to take over from Clegg
Personally i would say Simon Hughes whatever.

Labour spin this morning hes been Texting Milliband.
Possible next Lib Dem Labour coalition.Actually good sidelines the Greens.

Go Nuclear (French and Existing British) and Gas US and Russian..Phase out Coal and token Renewables keep Brussells happy.Gradually phase in British Shale.

Ironic more Wind means more Shale to back up the unreliable renewable supply.

[Nial]

"Call me an old sceptic - but is it a total convenience that the appointment of several sensible ministers has been greeted by the BBC with a load of alarmist stories on Radio 4 and Newsnight."

Ahh, I wonder what prompted the "ALL THE GLACIERS ARE GOING TO MELT" story on R4 this morning.

Luckily I'd already dropped my daughters off so they didn't hear the swearing.

[Gareth]

If a change of face is required to usher in a change of policy we are ruled and represented by cowards.

Fraser Nelson is bang on the money when he wrote "For more than a decade, environmental policy has been cursed with cross-party consensus because no one wanted to be seen to oppose so noble a cause."

[Lord Beaverbrook]

Heh ...heh...heh... this will make their heads spin:
http://news.sky.com/story/982138/tax-breaks-for-oil-and-gas-industry-announced

[Richard Drake]

It's good to mark the end of such an exciting episode as this week's reshuffle (as I for one need to turn to other work) with such a superb summary from Fraser Nelson. If Matt Ridley is our most intelligent science journalist, and has been arguing powerfully for shale for a number of years, then Nelson can surely lay claim to being one of the canniest generalists. He does a great job here with the highly interlocking politics, science and economics of shale in the light of Owen Paterson's promotion.

Not that the tenses chosen are completely perfect. This for me is the most important paragraph of the piece by far:

In economic terms, too, shale is a godsend for Cameron, just as North Sea oil was for Thatcher: it could well make Blackpool into the Dallas of the north, creating 5,000 jobs in an area that desperately needs them. But this gift horse is being sent packing, as if the Prime Minister wants to be left alone with his economic misery. Even as Northern Ireland Secretary, Paterson was saying in Cabinet that this was lunacy. Then, he was a lone voice. Now, he is in charge of the policy.

Surely that should have been:

But this gift horse has until now been sent packing, as if the Prime Minister wanted to be left alone with his economic misery.

Because if it's true that Paterson has been vocal not just privately but in Cabinet, in front of all those Lib Dems and other grandees, saying that the then approach to shale gas was lunacy then his promotion now to DEFRA is a crystal clear statement of intent from the PM and Chancellor. Whether they can carry it through is another matter. But we have much to be hopeful for.

[Robin Guenier]

Mike Jackson:

Just send a large cheque to a leading anti-wind farm organisation. Thanks.

For anyone who might be interested, this arose because, noting Fraser Nelson's suggestion that the new policy "unlike the old one ... might yet leave Britain, and the world, a better and greener place", I observed: "Not sure about "greener" or how the world would benefit. But the UK certainly would". Mike disagreed re greener and world benefit:

Nelson is correct in surmising that there is the potential (he mentions shale but other sensible environmental policies would contribute) to make Britain a greener place. Care for the environment is only possible when you don't need to wreck it in order to survive ... [And] a sensible policy which understood both the need for cheap and reliable energy ... combined with the need for research into other forms of energy and energy use for the future ... would resonate outside the boundaries of the UK

These seem to me to be valid points. However, I now see (same thread) that Ben Pile disagrees about the first. His is a good point. But, if the government really were to move to a sensible energy policy (sadly unlikely in coalition with ultra-green libdems), I think Mike would be proved right.

[Dung]

Remember that Fraser is not a climate sceptic, he is one of those rare animals that can believe in CAGW but at the same time see the economic imperative for developing Shale, all credit to him.

[Mike Jackson]

Dung
I'm not sure that Nelson is a catastrophist. There are many who accept the underlying thinking behind AGW because they haven't the time to dig and see it as making sense from where they sit but have little time for the rabid excesses of the enviro-nuts.

[Agouts]

Actually Dung I'd say that Nelson, not unlike Guido, is one of those narrowly political animals who, absorbed by the minutiae of Westminster, had taken as a matter of fact that Global Warming was a certainty because this what the science said it was. As such, it was not just effectively beyond party politics but the cost of rejecting it seemed to be electoral oblivion.

Put it another way, if we all know increased carbon emissions will lead to our certain and miserable end, how could any bien pensant political type argue against it?

Needless to say, this is the kind of nonsense Group Think leads you to.

Yet for at least a couple of years, the scales seem, a little slowly it's true, to have fallen from Fraser's eyes as the gradual realisation has sunk in that the science, very far from being settled, is not just largely bogus but driven by combination of grant seeking, ego building and vested interests (in government as well as in business). In addition, he has woken up, again rather slowly, to the economic lunacy that the 'renewables' business represents.

So on the whole, he may be a hesitant convert but he looks more and more like a convert nonetheless. And as such, hugely to be welcomed.

[Rob Burton]

Sep 7, 2012 at 12:41 PM | Lord Beaverbrook

In the BBC article describing the tax break it has this quote (actually pasted from the Portsmouth 'The News')

'Friends of the Earth head of campaigns Andrew Pendleton said: "The Chancellor should be urgently trying to wean the economy off fossil fuels, not subsidising its addiction."
'

What a strange sentence to say, it doesn't even make sense...

[Mike Jackson]

Rob, you've missed the best bit of Pendleton's quote:

It's time to stop scraping the bottom of the barrel on energy policy - we should invest in clean British energy from the wind, waves and sun as well as cutting waste to create jobs and give us power we can all afford."

What I'm still desperately trying to work out is whether he really, truly believes what he is saying.

[Rob Burton]

Sep 7, 2012 at 8:25 PM | Mike Jackson

" we should invest in clean British energy from the wind, waves and sun"

What is the 'official' comment by wind and solar advocates in the UK when it is trivial to point out that maximum energy demands are on calm winter days (after dark I assume). Solar definitely has it's place in providing energy but I just don't see it helping much on British winter nights much...

[Steve C]

"Is there any use for windmill parts after they're removed?" - cedarhill, Sep 7, 11:51 AM

You bet. Stick 'em on the surplus market at sensible prices, and there'll be plenty of people who enjoy mucking about with interesting machinery to snap them up. Not only that, the quantities of ferrous metal we'd need to screen those neodymium magnets so they didn't eat most of the metal in the house would be enough to turbocharge the UK's iron and steel industry. Did I say "we"? ... oops ... :-)

[clipe]

Booker

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9528905/Owen-Paterson-The-unknown-Cabinet-minister-has-a-fight-on-his-hands.html

[Dung]

First comment on Booker and Henderson at 10.53 pm. When I read it at around lunch time I thought "The Bishop Hill blog will be full of Owen Henderson by now and I will have missed it.
If Booker is right then we have a real life SAS warrior fighting for our side. I just hope his weaponry is of sufficient caliber to slay the many big beasts who will stand in his way ^.^
ups! I just realised it was 10.53 last night hehe so where is everybody else then??