Cheap energy, lots of jobs - the LibDems are going to hate this

Poyry Consulting have issued a report on the impact of shale gas exploitation across Europe, considering what happens if we do a bit of it or a lot of it. They say things like this:

In the Some Shale Scenario, net employment increases by 0.4 million by 2035 and 0.6 million by 2050. In the Shale Boom Scenario, net employment increases by 0.8 million jobs by 2035 and 1.1 million jobs by 2050.

A million jobs by 2050 sounds pretty good to me

As does this:

Household spending on energy costs by 2050 could be lower by up to 8% in the Some Shale Scenario and by up to 11% in the Shale Boom Scenario, when compared to the No Shale Scenario. Over the period 2020 - 2050 total cumulative savings could be €245bn in the Some Shale Scenario and €540bn in the Shale Boom Scenario.

Pat's progress

Pat Swords writes with news of his attempt to have the Irish government's renewables plans deemed illegal under the terms of the Aarhus Convention.

Readers will probably remember that the Compliance Committee overseeing the convention has ruled that Irish government is out of line. This decision will now go to a Meeting of the Parties to the convention:

Click to read more ...

The sound of the wind

Woodcut by Paul Bloomer (click for link)Yesterday was spent at the first annual conference of Scotland Against Spin, the umbrella group for Scottish anti-windfarm groups. This was top quality stuff, with an excellent array of speakers with some amazing stories to tell. I'm going to pass some of these on over the next few days.

The theme of the conference was the cost of wind power, so much of the focus was on economics, but the final speaker focused on noise, and had presumably been added to give a bit of relief from the numbers.

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A very slow motion car crash

Last week Dieter Helm gave evidence to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee as part of their inquiry into shale gas. This was powerful stuff from a very clear-thinking witness and some of his comments were devastating. Here are his thoughts on the impact of US shale on European coal prices:

The immediate price impact [of US shale] to drive down the price of coal in Europe. The coal burn has expanded very substantially in Europe, and since the coal burn has gone up a lot in Britain and the coal price has gone down, you might have expected that electricity prices would be falling in the UK rather than going up.

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The Canonbie mystery

Updated on Nov 23, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Nov 23, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Here's another of those stories I got from my visit to Dart Energy.

Back in April a story appeared in the Glasgow Herald reporting claims that some of Dart's coalbed methane wells at Canonbie in Dumfriesshire were leaking. Written by veteran very green reporter Rob Edwards, the story was rather exciteable, but a bit reticent about explaining who the main protagonists were:

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) is launching an investigation into claims that methane is "bubbling up" in wells drilled to test for the gas in coal seams near Canonbie in Dumfries and Galloway. The claim is denied by the company that owns the wells.

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Yeo, as happy as a Pig in - Josh 245

Cartoons by Josh

Greenery still killing the environment

It's behind a paywall, but we gather from the Herald that the Beauly-Denny power line, designed to bring all that wind power from the highlands down to the central belt of Scotland where it is needed, is scarring the landscape to an extent not envisaged and on a permanent basis.

Conservationists have raised concerns that tracks cut into hills to build a controversial power line, which were supposed to be temporary, are becoming permanent scars on the landscape. They say that, although the Scottish Government's planning permission for the 137-mile Beauly/Denny line was on the basis these "temporary tracks be removed", all landowners need to do to make them permanent is to apply to the local council.

Yet again, we see that environmentalism ends up damaging the environment. I hope Friends of the Earth are very proud of themselves.

The Yeo report

Readers may be interested in the report of Kathryn Hudson, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, into the allegations against Tim Yeo.

I'm particularly interested in the Commissioner's acceptance that Yeo saying he had coached a witness who appeared in front of his committee was a joke. Having reviewed the video, I have to say that this meek acceptance does Ms Hudson no credit.

I gather that that she has

raised concerns about whether the public viewed lawmakers who chair...committees as acting impartially when examining policy in a subject area in which they were also involved commercially.

Well, yes.

Buy your Josh 2014 calendar now!

I hope you have all noticed the advert for the Josh 2014 calendar in the sidebar. Buy now! Buy twice! Or more often than that!

Murry Salby in London - Cartoon notes by Josh

Click image for a larger version

Murry Salby was in the UK a couple of weeks ago. He gave an interesting and technical lecture which was fun to draw notes for. I will update with lecture notes if I can get hold of any - they might help with some of the more obscure scribings.

Cartoons by Josh

Update on Nov 23, 2013 by Josh

There are some useful slides from Murry's lecture posted up at WUWT here.

Energy prices - the truth

BBC Radio 4 has a programme tonight called Energy Prices - The Truth. It's due to go out at 8pm.

Hannah Barnes asks where the money from your energy bills goes. Do the energy companies have anything to hide, and are customers are being ripped off?

I wonder if we will hear anything about levelised costs, about the trick of reporting costs to consumers only to the extent that they appear on bills, or about not including the cost of grid connections for all those wind farms?

The show seems to feature a lot of greens so my guess would be not.

Yeoverjoyed

The hot news is that Tim Yeo has been cleared of the allegations of influence peddling that emerged last year in the wake of a sting operation by the Sunday Times.

Mr Yeo is apparently "very pleased".

The original video from the Sunday Times is here; the report into Mr Yeo's conduct is here.

The nature of scientific advice

Writing in Nature yesterday, David Spiegelhalter and two other eminent scientists tried to explain to ministers how to understand the advice they get from scientists. It ranges from the worthy (No measurement is exact; Bigger is usually better for sample size) to the much racier (Bias is rife; Scientists are human). It's hard to disagree with any of this although I'm not sure that it really portrays the problems with academia as a reliable source of advice for policymakers.

For example, when the authors tell the reader that scientists are human and that peer review is fallible, you get no sense of the failings uncovered by controlled studies of peer review (as described in The Hockey Stick Illusion), which suggest that it is nearly useless for ensuring that the conclusions of a paper are correct (although that obviously doesn't prevent peer review being useful as a way of improving a paper).

Click to read more ...

Cameron's crap

The papers this morning are full of the story that David Cameron has called on aides to "cut the green crap", in other words to strip away all the environmental costs from energy bills.

Which is a bit odd when you think about it. His aides have no power to cut the green crap and in fact Cameron himself has no power to do so because he has an agreement with the Liberal Democrats about what energy policy will be. And nobody is in any doubt that the Liberal Democrats are so enamoured of green crap that they see keeping the lights on as of secondary importance.

Perhaps he is referring to the next Conservative manifesto. That's possible, but having gone into the last election with the intention of being the greenest government ever, what should we make of a party that now declares that greenery is 'crap'?

About those Poles...

Marcin KorolecReaders who watched yesterday's questions in the Lords will have noted the noble and learned Baroness Worthington asking a question about what the government are doing about learning from the Poles on the shale gas front.

Interestingly, today we learn that the Polish prime minister has sacked his environment minister Marcin Korolec and is to bring in someone who is going to work a bit harder to accelerate the pace of shale gas development:

"It is about radical acceleration of shale gas operations. Mr Korolec will remain the government's plenipotentiary for the climate negotiations," Tusk told a news conference.