This post is by Tony Bosworth, Friends of the Earth’s energy campaigner.
It’s no surprise that a task force funded by the shale gas industry has produced a report saying fracking can help tackle climate change. But its arguments – repeated in the blog here this week by Stephen Tindale, an advisor to the task force – doesn’t present the whole picture and glosses over some vital issues. Read more
This post is by climate and energy consultant Stephen Tindale. He blogs at www.climateanswers.info.
UK climate campaigners should support fracking for shale gas. Shale gas would enable the UK to reduce the burning of coal, and also the import of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Read more
This post is by Dr Bruce Tofield, associate consultant at the Adapt Low Carbon Group, University of East Anglia.
In launching Next steps for shale production, energy minister Michael Fallon said that fracking “is an exciting prospect, which could bring growth, jobs and security”. There is, however, great concern about the damaging local environmental impact of fracking in Britain. Less remarked upon is fossil fuel lock-in, highlighted recently by Rachel Cary. As Michael Liebreich, CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, has pointed out “If the UK ever becomes dependent on shale gas, it will never be able to kick the fracking habit.” Read more
I wrote recently about how resource extraction is like the Red Queen race in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where rising environmental pressures mean we have to work much harder and pay more just to maintain production. What I didn’t touch on was what this is doing to our politics: persistently high prices appear to have come out of nowhere, leaving politicians reeling. Read more
This post originally appeared on The Guardian.
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass contains a famous passage describing Alice’s attempts to run alongside the Red Queen in a topsy-turvy nonsense world, where cause and effect are reversed: Read more
This post first appeared on The Guardian.
Any new technology has a short honeymoon period where its attractions loom large before practicalities intervene to burst the bubble and a more realistic picture of its costs and benefits emerges. I should know, I helped to raise expectations about the future of UK wave power in the early 2000s. Our hope that large wave farms would be up and running within the decade proved distinctly optimistic. Read more
This post first appeared on the New Statesman blog.
Among the many extravagant claims made by supporters of fracking, perhaps the most absurd is that it will lead to a renaissance in British manufacturing. George Osborne picked up this theme last week when he argued that cheap energy was leading manufacturers to return to the US and he wanted to see this happen in Britain. Read more
