Roger Harrabin
BBC News
13 December 2012
The government has given the go-ahead for a firm to resume the controversial technique known as fracking to exploit gas in Lancashire.
The company, Cuadrilla, was stopped from fracking after two tremors near Blackpool.
Conditions have been imposed to minimise the risk of seismic activity.
In fracking, a mixture of water, sand and some chemicals is pumped into a well under high pressure to force the gas from the rock.
Energy Secretary Ed Davey said shale gas was a promising new potential energy resource for the UK. It might contribute significantly to energy security and substitute for imports which are increasing as North Sea gas is decreasing.
But he warned against over-excitement: “We are still in the very early stages of shale gas exploration in the UK and it is likely to develop slowly.
“It is essential that its development should not come at the expense of local communities or the environment. Fracking must be safe and the public must be confident that it is safe.”…
…Mr Davey said the advent of shale gas would not weaken the UK’s legally binding targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He announced a study from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) chief scientist David McKay on the impact of shale gas on climate change.
But he asked: “Is it not better that we produce gas in this country than gas shipped half way across the world?” He said his view was that, overall, greenhouse gases from shale gas in the UK might only be slightly greater than importing gas exploited in the conventional way…
The complete article, with video, is at BBC News.
Update: Man-made global warming: even the IPCC admits the jig is up
Breaking news from the US – h/t Watts Up With That? – where a leaked draft of the IPCC’s latest report AR5 admits what some of us have suspected for a very long time: that the case for man-made global warming is looking weaker by the day and that the sun plays a much more significant role in “climate change” than the scientific “consensus” has previously been prepared to concede.
Here’s the killer admission:
Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.
As the leaker explains, this is a game-changer…
