Monday
Feb012016
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Cue violence
Feb 1, 2016 Energy: gas Greens 
The Telegraph is reporting that the cabinet are going to take planning decisions over shale gas developments out of the hands of councils. If correct, it means that planning officers will now be left to their own devices.
I think this probably means that the greens will resort to violence of one kind or another.
In some ways it could be David Cameron's miners strike moment: the time when he is handed the opportunity to face down an anti-democratic and thuggish minority. I'm not sure DC is any kind of an iron lady though. A jelly gentleman or something like that.
Reader Comments (249)
Today's politicians no longer have spines. What they do have is soft white squishy stuff for backbones that stops them from making the tough decisions this country needs to progress forward!!!
Mailman
it could be David Cameron's miners strike moment
Not really as I doubt they can get 10,000 on a march let alone the kind of numbers on strike in 83/84.
Billed as the largest anti fracking march in the UK and only a thousand turned up:
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/fracking-protest-manchester-1000-take-6791027
I'd be on the look out for the druids in the crowd. Just saying.
The usual suspects.........................as usual! Dial/rent-a-mob! Not one has actually stated their fears or concerns, just repeating the usual mantra off-pat.
... this probably means that the greens will resort to violence of one kind or another...
As Swiss Bob says, they are few in number - so we will not have a 'miners confrontation'. Instead, we will have regular acts of sabotage and individual families being attacked - a bit like the Animal Liberation Front...
I have relatives (in laws) who are involved in the Barton Moss protest camp, so I follow their activities closely. From the face book site and their comments, it's clear these protests are anti-police and anti-Capitalism. Frakking gets mentioned never
One thing you will hear from the anti-fracking Greenblob is that having the decisions taken away from LPAs and having the decisions being made by Government is undemocratic and anti-localism. You never heard anything from them when LPA decisions to refuse planning permission for wind farms and wind turbines and solar farms and AD plants were over-ruled by Government appointed Planning Inspectors. They are hypocrites (as well as useful idiots).
Ah, no EO, what you are reading there is from the undercover police officers who have infiltrated the protest and are running interference, when they are not fathering children, that is
So do we complain about local people not having a say in where wind turbines and solar panels are put up, but think it's fine to go over the heads of local people when it comes to fracking?
umm... here's hope' n that some usual suspect activist legal types turn up, indulge themselves in some familiar justifiable / noble cause nonsense and find themselves looking at decent (
<6 month custodial ) charges and a determined prosecutor - it's long overdue - I hope Ms. Lucas tries her luck again too.
@PC err... no... I've seen my local anti frackers in action at (their...) meetings and concur with EO with added addled JW-ness.
Is anyone surprised? We have governments that are very coy about our reliance on energy in general but gas in particular. They've taken fossil fuel incomes for granted. They've heavily flirted with being green but don't understand the costs or what it would take. And finally they've become pushovers for every bleeding heart cause under the sun. Councils have wisely passed the buck upwards. They know that they're the piggy in the middle and don't want to be left holding the smelly object if government changes its mind down the line. Governments have security guards and distance from the issue. Let them take the responsibility for tough decisions.
Even if governments pass planning permission, they will then wash their hands of the issue, leaving the businesses and local police dealing with protestors who are pretty much allowed to do what they like. It will be interesting to see what sentence the Plane Stupid lot get. Either drilling or building runways is legal or it's not. If it's legal, it's time government did something to protect businesses from tiny minorities who can cause massive, expensive disruption. Public officials have got to stop expressing their own activist sympathies by being indulgent with anything but peaceful, lawful protest.
@Phillip Bratby: A very well put point, Sir!
I call Cameron "ol' jellyback" (which is what Paul Keating used to call Bob Hawke).
I am sure that CMD will rise to the occasion, just not this one.
Phil Clarke, so you don't think that most of the anti frack lot aren't also anti capitalist and anti police (rogue undercover officers or not)? If not, then they should think more carfully about who they associate with, let alone get pregnant by.
I actually went down to see if I could find one of these sites but no luck. I stopped and asked a local, she said 'head off towards those windmills, you can't miss it'
Quick Monday Quiz….
Q1 According to a report from energy consultants Poyry, a fracking in the UK has the potential to reduce energy prices by between
(a) 20-40%
(b) 10-20%
(c) 5-10%
(d) 2-4%
Q2 Cuadrilla's PR officer described this impact as
(a) 'a major boon to customers'
(b) 'basically insignificant'
I find it difficult to believe that the UK having its own gas supply will not benefit the nation, & potentially bring down costs, as opposed to buying it from that well known philanthropist & all-round good-egg, Vladimir Putin!
Phil Clarke, it's not about reducing energy prices, it's about keeping them low, about government tax take and energy security. Before tax take our energy prices are fairly reasonable.
@Phil Clarke - if fracking reduces prices, that's nice. It if doesn't, it will probably be hugely profitable and generate stacks of lovely tax revenues, and make us less dependent on various unsavoury foreigners. It's a win win.
The government should grant many licences at the same time. If drilling is going on simultaneously that will cause a big headache for the anti-fracking mob. Divide and rule is the strategy.
If we don’t back this technology, we will miss a massive opportunity to help families with their bills […] fracking has real potential to drive energy bills down […] Even if we only see a fraction of the impact shale gas has had in America, we can expect to see lower energy prices in this country.
David Cameron. Liar, apparently.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10236664/We-cannot-afford-to-miss-out-on-shale-gas.html
We all know David Cameron is a liar (no ifs, no buts). Anyone who believes words from Cameron is extremely gullible.
Fracking is yet another corporate conduit operation.
In that sense it is no different to the windmills.
The fact is the UK is having difficulty absorbing the present surplus from the colonies.
Why scour the Shire for no other purpose then pointless work to access the still massive industrial surplus flowing into the center of world usury?
If you want to do useful work empower people (via the monetary system) to produce and consume for the local market.
This business of producing massive industrial surpluses
Subsequently unable to afford the costs and thus seeking to export waste production so as to offload costs of these operations is clearly a failure.
Phil Clarke, North Sea Oil didn't reduce prices at the pump but was a huge benefit to the country. It payed a lot of people's bills indirectly when they were unemployed and the government needed the oil revenues to pay unemployment revenues.
"So do we complain about local people not having a say in where wind turbines and solar panels are put up, but think it's fine to go over the heads of local people when it comes to fracking?"
Actually I think that is a reasonable point to make. I would say that most objections to wind turbines are genuine, their visual impact and the fact that half of the time they don't work for example. The objections to fracking are mostly made up and based around fracking being a scary sounding word. Also local objections to wind turbines are actually local and not coming from a mob of imported hippies.
Regarding numbers, Hull's East Park gets more than 500 on the Saturday morning parkruns, so yes, 1,000 is a pretty poor turnout.
Dork - " the UK is having difficulty absorbing the present surplus from the colonies." Please explain?
We have gone from peak oil to knee deep in oil in just a few years, now we have tons of gas everywhere we look.
These are tough times to be a Malthusian, eh pj ?
Cameron is improving. He is only six years late backing shale.
Phil Clarke you have no idea how much shale gas we have got so do put a sock in it (actually it might take something bigger than a sock).
Shale can have a far bigger impact in the UK than in the USA because we will start with the latest technology and much higher recovery rates.
In fact shale will be so successful that Cameron needs to keep down the number of wells we drill to avoid over supply until the CCA is scrapped and somebody thinks to build an LNG export terminal.
Phil Clarke, Energy Consultants Poyry, have failed to notice that so called 'renewables' are Unreliable. Why are their opinions on fracking relevant?
If you just sit down and observe Uk, Euro and world trade you cannot help but notice the massive flows of imports and exports.
It's never about local production / consumption.
Instead we witness this pointless movement.
The more wasteful the enterprise the more you must export to pay for its costs.
In Cork we have a long history of this.
Agriculture became part of the Industrial and subsequently the war economy 200 + years ago. ( Food was a major energy product back in the day)
To compensate for the costs of mass production for export successive butter booms and busts just seemed to happen for some funny reason.
The system was wildly out of equilibrium.
To my knowledge one of the largest British convoys ( by number of ships) left Cork, bound for the States.
That was back in 1812.!!!!!
Nothing much has changed.
The nature of the Venetian system of Government at the heart of the dark British usury experiment will continue to swim forward as it has no choice.
It's a Shark.
The authors hostility to peasantry or more precisely
the mining serfs who considered themselves the aristocrats of your their vanished and broken class is very obvious.
of their class is obvious.
@Derek
Observe the real goods trade balances, in particular within the EU28.
For example the UK trade deficit with France jumped from 1billion ~ Sterling to 6billion + within a few years.
This 6 billion figure was witnessed in 2014.
More then likely this was helped by Russian trade sanctions.
Think of this from a French farmers perspective, he had no other choice but to sell to the UK deficit area (In terms of internal Eu trade it's the only game in Town)
Who benefitted?
The UK.
They could buy the French agricultural surplus on the cheap.
Fossil fuels were, and are, artificially cheap. The surface temperature has risen nearly 0.8C since the North sea Oil industry started ….
In common with many other environmental problems, human-induced climate change is at its most basic level an externality. Those who produce greenhouse-gas emissions are bringing about climate change, thereby imposing costs on the world and on future generations, but they do not face directly, neither via markets nor in other ways, the full consequences of the costs of their actions. Much economic activity involves the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs). As GHGs accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures increase, and the climatic changes that result impose costs (and some benefits) on society. However, the full costs of GHG emissions, in terms of climate change, are not immediately – indeed they are unlikely ever to be – borne by the emitter, so they face little or no economic incentive to reduce emissions. Similarly, emitters do not have to compensate those who lose out because of climate change. In this sense, human-induced climate change is an externality, one that is not ‘corrected’ through any institution or market, unless policy intervenes. Symmetrically, those who benefit from climate change do not have to reward emitters. Thus, climate change is an example of market failure involving externalities and public goods. Given the magnitude and nature of the effects initially described in the previous chapter and taken forward in Parts II and III, it has profound implications for economic growth and development. All in all, it must be regarded as market failure on the greatest scale the world has seen.
The Stern Review
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130129110402/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/Part_I_Introduction_group.pdf
Chris Smith, of the industry-funded Task Force on Shale, believes there must be immediate progress in developing carbon capture and storage for gas-fired power stations and industrial plant. And second, we recommend that the Government should deploy revenue derived from a developed shale gas industry to investment in R&D and innovation in CCS and low carbon energy generation, storage and distribution
http://www.infrastructure-intelligence.com/article/sep-2015/re-invest-shale-gas-revenues-carbon-capture-and-renewables-says-task-force>
Which would be good if happens.
Anyhow, the point appears increasingly moot, despite Government enthusiasm, those in support of extracting shale gas are in a dwindling minority :-)
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/05/19/opposition-fracking-britain-grows/
@ Eternal optimist
You need to ask yourself the simple questions
To engage in Elegant definitions.
First, let's start with what economics as a study should be and is sadly not.
That is the study of the production, distribution and consumption system.
We have clearly witnessed a breakdown of this system over the years, now increasing in intensity with every year.
The causes have indeed little to do with Maltusian resource scarcity.
Of course the problems reside within the monopolist capitalistic system which was never a free enterprise system.
Phil Clarke
Bravo for managing to cram so many errors into just a few paragraphs. You suffer like most of the world from the mistake of judging time with reference to our own short life span. The planet is already adjusting to the increased level of CO2 and will continue until the level stabilises and then falls. The idea that we need CCS is a truly Neanderthal attempt to deal with our non problem because the Earth is much better at it than we are ^.^, that is why we have fossil fuels.
Phil Clarke, if Stern had been ignored we would not be in the mess we are in now.
Why should Stern's advice be referenced now?
and how many battalions Dork, do you think it would take, to make things right ?
Austerity has been turned into a dirty word, by those who like spending other people's money.
Advocating Energy Austerity, by restricting supply, will render the Green Blob Powerless. If that is what it takes......
Shale can have a far bigger impact in the UK than in the USA because we will start with the latest technology and much higher recovery rates.
As they did in Poland? ;-)
Austerity has been turned into a dirty word, by those who like spending other people's money.
There are now two people posting under my name, the words above are from t'other.
I shall restyle myself 'Old Phil' to avoid confusion.
I'm afraid I take the view that anyone who uses Stern to back up his argument can be discounted immediately.
Only an economic illiterate assumes that reducing retail prices is the be-all and end-all of economic development. Cameron may believe that (Economics not being a serious component of a PPE course) but it is much more likely that he is speaking as a politician-cum PR man and putting some positive spin on what is still an unpopular form of energy extraction, thanks to the mendacity of the Greens.
Given the current state of Middle-East politics and the present need to rely on the whims of a sociopath for essential supplies of feedstock for electricity generation only a fool or a knave would oppose attempts to improve the UK's energy security.
We already know that Greenpeace, WWF, et al are knaves supported by fools. Perhaps Phil Clarke would like to tell us where he fits in on that spectrum.
Poland do not have the quality of shale deposit that we have and neither do the US ;-)
Mike, and GC...
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130129110402/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/20061028_Quotes-7.pdf
Phil Clarke @ 1:16, apologies, was me not Phil Clarke. No deceit, dirty tricks etc intended. My clumsiness.
First of all people will need to understand how the real social and economic system works.
Not to become propagandised by the political ballot box system of control.
Functional democracy, that is real bottom up purchasing power is needed.
Not fights for concentrated wealth or its scaps with every political punch and Judy cycle.
Damon Vrabel ( a young traditional American republican of the officer Class) tried to educate people about the money vortice at the start of the current crisis.
He talked about Horizontal jeffersonian and vertical Hamilitonian forces and tensions etc etc etc.
He was more or less on the button.
Poland do not have the quality of shale deposit that we have and neither do the US ;-)
Even the BGS don't go that far.
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/energy/shaleGas/bowlandShaleGas.html
As with Stern and his carbon-capture cronies, they are trying to out-fail the peak-oil brigade.
Poland appears to hold some of the geologically most favorable shale gas resources in Europe
http://www.eia.gov/pressroom/presentations/newell_06212011.pdf
The BGS have not drilled through a 6000 ft thick shale deposit, Cuadrilla are the only people in the world who have done that and so I respect their info a lot more than the BGS.
The big US shale plays have deposits about 600 ft thick ^.^
need to rely on the whims of a sociopath for essential supplies of feedstock for electricity generation only a fool or a knave would oppose attempts to improve the UK's energy security.
No dictator in history has been able to stop the tides, wind or the sun ;-)