Huge swathes of Britain are up for grabs in a new round of gas exploration licences which the government is due to issue soon. Could this be the answer to cheaper energy bills? Looking over the maps he drew up for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), Nigel Smith, a geologist working for the British Geographical Survey, highlights which areas of the UK contain the most potential for gas exploration. "Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, the Wessex Basin - and that could include the Isle of Wight and Dorset," he says. "Scotland...the Midland valley, too." --Simon Cox, BBC News, 13 October 2011
Shale-gas production in Europe could reach 35 billion cubic metres a year (cm/y) by 2020, or about 20% of EU member states’ output now, with Poland and the UK the leading producers, says a new report. --Helen Robertson, Petroleum-Economist, 12 October 2011
When we learn that one in four families are going to struggle to pay their bills in four years’ time, as Deutsche Bank predicted this week, that is going to concentrate a lot of minds. As are the latest dire unemployment figures. It could be that the wind is now blowing against green taxation and carbon tomfoolery. Perhaps Mr Osborne’s apparent conversion in Manchester last week, when the Chancellor appeared to reverse climate change policy by suggesting we let the EU take the lead, is a sign of things to come. --Stephen Doughty, Daily Mail, 12 October 2011
The pattern of failure tells us several things: that the Obama administration’s understanding of green jobs was poorly conceived, and also that the execution was incompetent. These failures are likely to play a significant role in the 2012 campaign because they support an argument that works well with independents. It is clear that the Obama administration doesn’t know how to create jobs. In the midst of the worst recession in three quarters of a century, it chose to subordinate real job creation to vague and illusory green fantasies. --Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, 12 October 2011
AFTER more than a decade of political argument, the House of Representatives has this morning passed legislation to put a price on carbon, paving the way for Australia's most dramatic economic reform in more than a decade. But opposition leader Tony Abbott said he was more determined than ever to axe the carbon price if he became prime minister. “We will repeal this tax, we will dismantle the bureaucracy associated with it,” Mr Abbott said. “I am giving you the most definite commitment any politician can give that this tax will go. This is a pledge in blood this tax will go. --The Australian, 12 October 2011
Lord Rees of Ludlow and Lord Giddens are addressing the wrong problem about climate change (“Whoever said global warming was dead?”, Oct 13). One possible scenario for 2050, no less possible than any projected on the basis of climate models, is that we are in the middle of a deep solar minimum, and it is only the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere over the previous 100 years that is staving off cold climates that would lead to crop failure and mass starvation. The uncertainty is not only in the science and in the scenarios, but in what is a reasonable response today. As an engineer I see energy security as the urgent, largescale and real problem in the UK over the next decade. That should be the focus of action now, with reduced CO2 emissions being a collateral benefit. --Professor Michael J Kelly FRS, Prince Philip Professor of Technology, University of Cambridge. The Times, 14 October 2010
