Shale gas

I'd pretty much given up blogging about the mass hysteria previously known as anthropogenic global warming (AGW) on the grounds that those who able to think for themselves already know it's bull-shit and the rest are simply frightened lowmids being herded by cynical political and commercial opportunists.

It's a religion, stupid - or a stupid religion, take your pick - that has rushed into the vacuum created when the Moscow Caliphate collapsed and therefore as impervious to reason or factual refutation as any other superstition. It is also the enshrinement of nimbyism and fear of the yellow/brown/black peril as the world's poor claim their piece of the pie and become emancipated from shackling Western aid.

However - Soothscribe Matt Ridley, echoed by Soothscribe Christopher Booker, have lately published articles so persuasive about the abundance and ubiquity of shale gas that I think I will re-engage with the topic, not to comment further on the soaring number of practical and properly scientific refutations of the whole AGW scam, but to clock the slimy wriggling of the EU and British AGW advocates like the snerge Huhne who have gone so far out on a limb that it seems impossible for them to crawl back.

On the other hand, given the functional illiteracy deliberately created by "progressive" education, I don't suppose it will affect what passes for politics in the West in general and Britain in particular. People will continue to vote for what they perceive to be their own interest, and AGW is simply the one of the poison suppositories vaselined with subsidies that a people without virtue will continue to shove up their own arses.  

Past the point of no return

Today's Taxpayers' Alliance research paper "The Real National Debt: A Decade of Reckless Growth" will be ignored by the Coalition government because, were they to admit the truth, it would do them more damage than it would the Labour pukes, who will just say it's all Gordon Brown's fault and, anyway, it can all be cleared up by punishing the bankers.

This is what the Labour regime did, quite deliberately, to poison the well, so that the successor administration would be destroyed by the political costs of clearing up the mess, counting on the stupidity of the electorate to return them to power for ever and ever after the hard work was done. 

• The real national debt stands at £7.9 trillion, over £300,000 for every single household in Britain.
• During the last decade debt has more than tripled from £2.3 trillion (230% of GDP) to £7.9 trillion (560%).
• Official national debt (quoted by the Chancellor in his budget) hugely underestimates taxpayer liabilities.
• Relative to GDP, this is a far bigger national debt than after World War II.

TPA has released this video by Mike Denham, author of the report, to illustrate the figures.

Not mentioned are the opportunity costs of the wasted North Sea oil revenues, of the power stations and other vital infrastructure projects not built, and of growth sacrificed on the altar of "equality" and of the EU.  

There is no way back from this. The only hope would be that the economy might grow to reduce the debt as a percentage of GDP, but burdened with EU regulations spitefully designed to harm Britain and the costs of  creating an allegedly "sustainable" energy infrastructure, it will not.

Deborah Orr - soothscribe again

Under the drum-fire of lefty crap that usually fills it, I'm often tempted to delete the Guardian's CiF column from my RSS. Then something like Deborah Orr's article today comes along to remind me that there are still a few clear-eyed sceptics on the left. I believe she's the first person to win a bar to the Soothscribe award.

It seems to me that all we voters have to choose between is two brands of fantasy. Ed Miliband's fantasy is that Labour can now do all the stuff it was voted in to do in 1997, when it achieved an awesome mandate at the start of a long boom. David Cameron's fantasy, shared by his deputy, is that he can wipe out the deficit within five years, to the applause of a busy, purposeful and grateful nation. 

And, with reference to the Coalition government's decision to cancel - probably on the grounds that anything he did was assumed to be corrupt - Peter Mandelson's £80 million loan to Sheffield Forgemasters (which relates directly to yesterday's post on the prospects for nuclear energy in Britain): 

Britain's nuclear energy programme may not be exactly healthy (no government subsidy for nuclear development was the Old Generation's policy, under Old Generation energy secretary Ed Miliband). But Forgemasters has an eye to the foreign markets it believes will be buying the large castings that only one other company in the world presently supplies for nuclear power stations.

Deborah Orr is married to the novelist and acerb commentator Will Self. I imagine they breakfast apart, as their combined reactions to the day's news would probably achieve critical mass.

Britain does not have a nuclear power option

It's amazing Christopher Booker still has a fine head of hair, as he's been pulling it out by handfuls for many years. Last Saturday, not for the first time, he raged against Chris Huhne, the imbecile LiDem Climate Change Secretary, for the Thanet wind farm boondoggle. As he points out:

In all the publicity given to the opening of "the world's largest wind farm" off the Kent coast last week, by far the most important and shocking aspect of this vast project was completely overlooked. Over the coming years we will be giving the wind farm's Swedish owners a total of £1.2 billion in subsidies. That same sum, invested now in a single nuclear power station, could yield a staggering 13 times more electricity, with much greater reliability.

There's just two teensy problems: the first is that the Coalition government has no way back from its commitment to "green energy". Cameron and his millionaire chum Zac Goldsmith burned the Conservative party's bridges with the 2007 publication of the Quality of Life Policy Groups' Blueprint for a Green Economy.

Furthermore, to back off from it would be a deal-breaker with the LibDem sandalistas, the core constituency that has been putting fingers in its ears for years and going "la, la la - I can't hear you" to any information about the looming catastrophe of energy rationing preceded by vastly increased energy prices as the old coal plants are closed down WITH NO REPLACEMENT.

But the second is that even if they all collectively woke up one day soon and realized what cunts they are, it is far too late to sign up for nuclear power on the massive scale that would be necessary. There is a bottleneck in the production of the massive nuclear core container vessels, and countries run by serious people have booked capacity for many years in advance.

Worth considering that if Britain left the EU and abandoned the "green energy" chimera, there would be a greatly reduced need to cut government spending. But that would require politicians equipped with brains and balls, neither of which are much in evidence in any party - or indeed in British society as a whole.