I spent yesterday evening at the Edinburgh Book Festival at a debate about the need for fracking featuring Richard Dixon, the head of Friends of the Earth Scotland and Zoe Shipton, a geologist from the University of Strathclyde. As always with these things one came away frustrated with the sheer brassneck of the environmentalist contingent.
We learned, for example, that Lord Stern had said that the shale gas industry was founded on "baseless economics". Now while lesser mortals might have thought that this would mean that the industry was doomed to failure, we also learned that it was going to poison us all, with reports of cancer causing chemicals and endocrine disrupters from fracking. This seemed to me to be a case of having one's cake and eating it. It actually got quite interesting a bit later, when Dixon was asked about the terrifying studies he had mentioned earlier, and he seemed to step back rather, saying that the only peer reviewed study he had mentioned was to do with an association between low birthweight and fracking. Unfortunately, my research today suggests that he was thinking of an entirely non-peer reviewed paper presented at an economics conference. So that's the book festival audience misled by an environmentalist. Again. (By strange coincidence, he also raised the "300,000 deaths from climate change" canard - the one the Met Office has repeatedly said is nonsense).
Prof Shipton was pretty good, a tendency to emote about climate change apart. She was engaging, amusing, and once she got into her stride very clear with the facts. She deflated the normal "OMG, fracking involves chemicals" question from the audience without batting an eyelid, for example. Likewise, she gave everybody a giggle when asked why we didn't avoid this awful fracking by doing geothermal energy on a grand scale, pointing out that geothermal power as available in Scotland also involves fracking. (As an aside, this presumably means that Friends of the Earth oppose its use too).
However, Prof Shipton's efforts fell down rather once the conversation moved onto the future energy supply, which is perhaps forgiveable since it's not really her field. This did, however, leave the field clear for Richard Dixon.
Which was a pity really, because his efforts on energy supply were risible. According to FoE's top man, in the next few decades Scotland will have:
Howeve, once he is running the country, Dixon intends to get rid of the nuclear and the fossil fuel plants, leaving us just with renewables and connections to the English grid.
Perceptive readers will notice a bit of a flaw here, namely an almost complete lack of any dispatchable power. Scotland has 1.5GW of hydro power, about 12% of the total demand. I don't know the figures, but I fancy this will be woefully inadequate to cope with a grid dominated by wind turbines. That leaves us with the connections to the English (and possibly other grids too). The problem here is that Friends of the Earth don't want England or anyone else to have any power stations powered by fossil fuels either. So the question remains, where is the dispatchable power coming from?
But as always, the difficult questions remain unasked, let alone answered.