Theresa May’s Shale Plan Is A Fracking Brainwave
In this newsletter:
1) Families Offered Up To £13.000 To Kick-Start UK Shale Revolution
2) GWPF Calls On Government To Deliver On UK Shale Development
3) Trevor Kavanagh: Theresa May’s Shale Plan Is A Fracking Brainwave
4) Putin’s TV Station ‘Stokes Fracking Fears’ To Prevent UK Shale Revolution
5) Matt Ridley: Innovation And Its Enemies
6) U.S. Shale Revolution Has Created One Million Jobs & Slashed Energy Bills (& CO2 Emissions)
Full details:
1) Families Offered Up To £13.000 To Kick-Start UK Shale Revolution
Simon Walters
Families will be offered five-figure cash payouts under a radical plan to boost the drive for controversial shale gas fracking. The move marks a further dramatic departure by the new Prime Minister from David Cameron’s blueprint for Britain’s energy needs.
The Lottery-style ‘Frackpot’ windfall scheme, to be unveiled by Theresa May tomorrow, involves paying individual householders cash sums – which could be as high as £13,000 – if they are living in areas where the gas can be extracted.
Will your village or town hit paydirt in the great shale bonanza?
The move marks a further dramatic departure by the new Prime Minister from David Cameron’s blueprint for Britain’s energy needs.
Prime Minister Theresa May hopes her bold post-Brexit plan would allow access to Britain’s untapped energy reserve and give a boost to the economy
In just three weeks in Number Ten, Mrs May has scrapped the climate change department, threatened to scupper the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant deal with China and France, and now plans to transform Mr Cameron’s cautious fracking rewards scheme.
Mrs May hopes her bold post-Brexit plan would allow access to Britain’s untapped energy reserve and give a boost to the economy….
The proposal is the latest evidence of a new boldness by Mrs May as PM in contrast to her steady-as-she-goes tenure as Home Secretary.
It could be a game-changer in the politically explosive energy sector, which could override the green lobby’s fierce opposition to fracking….
In remarks released last night, Mrs May said the initiative was in line with her pledge on entering Downing Street to switch the Government’s focus from the wealthy to the less well-off.
The PM said: ‘As I said on my first night as Prime Minister: when we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful but of you.
This announcement is an example of putting those principles into action – making sure people personally benefit from economic decisions that are taken, not just councils – putting them back in control over their lives.’
The scheme could be widened to provide similar windfalls for families from other local building projects.
‘We’ll be looking at applying this approach to other Government programmes in the future as we build a country that works for everyone,’ said Mrs May…
The new move could spark a shale gas rush in the UK as the cash incentives neutralise opposition to fracking from local residents at a stroke.
A massive shale oil programme in the US has seen domestic fuel bills plummet and fears of environmental damage fade.
A drop in energy bills would give a boost to British industry.
2) GWPF Calls On Government To Deliver On UK Shale Development
Global Warming Policy Forum, 8 August 2016
London, 8 August 2016 — The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) has welcomed the Prime Ministers plan to spread the benefits of shale gas to local residents as a sensible step to break the decade-long logjam in UK shale development.
London, 8 August 2016 — The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) has welcomed the Prime Ministers plan to spread the benefits of shale gas to local residents as a sensible step to break the decade-long logjam in UK shale development.
The GWPF, which has been advocating UK shale development for many years, is calling on the Government to speed up shale gas exploration in order to establish the full extent and economic viability of the UK’s substantial shale resources.
“Despite repeated claims to ‘go all out for shale’, the last two governments under David Cameron (2010-2016) failed to get any shale gas out of the ground. Theresa May now has a golden opportunity to reset UK energy policy and demonstrate that she can deliver where her predecessor failed,” said Dr Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director.
The GWPF also called on trade unions to support the development of a UK shale gas industry that will benefit both households and UK manufacturing.
“The trade unions have a choice between a policy based on the eco-dogmatism of green campaigners and the GMB Union’s energy policy that focuses first and foremost on safeguarding UK manufacturing and tackling fuel poverty,” said Benny Peiser.
3) Trevor Kavanagh: Theresa May’s Shale Plan Is A Fracking Brainwave
THERESA MAY’S plan to dish out £10,000 to every household near a shale gas well is a fracking brainwave.
It offers to solve Britain’s alarming energy crisis, cut the ground under eco-anarchist protesters and sort out our stand-off with China over nuclear power.
STEVE BRIGHT -- The payout to locals is already being denounced by opponents as a “bribe” . . . but it is a bribe that works
Most important, it gives a direct stake to those who live above those valuable gas fields — a bonanza to the impoverished North West and the whole British economy.
It is also a nod to America where landowners control the rights to minerals found below their feet.
The payout to locals is already being denounced by opponents as a “bribe”.
But it is a bribe that works — as the French proved when they built nuclear power plants in cities and drove TGV rail routes straight through the countryside.
Homes near power plants won cheap hot water and central heating.
Those in the path of a high speed train line were offered above-market prices for their houses.
This gave them a real personal interest in the process of change.
Protests, if any, came from those who lived outside the compensation zone.
Hand-wringing Lib Dems thwarted David Cameron’s dream of tapping Britain’s potential treasure trove and gave protesters time to dig in.
Few householders were swayed by promises to hand some of the shale profits to extravagant local councils.
‘Fracking offers to solve Britain’s alarming energy crisis’
Driller Cuadrilla almost abandoned hope as environmentalists put more and more hurdles in its path.
The prospect of a cash-in-hand deal worth more than half a year’s pay in the Blackpool area is likely to see such entrenched opposition evaporate overnight.
If America’s experience is anything to go by, huge benefits in jobs and prosperity would certainly follow…
Thanks to shale, global oil prices have slumped from $110 a barrel before the Scottish referendum in 2014 to $41 today and are unlikely to climb again any time soon.
Cheap oil has given a shot in the arm to the sickly world economy….
There is no time to be lost. Our creaking nuclear plants are near the end of their lives.
North Sea oil is a thing of the past. We are at the mercy of Russia’s gas pipelines and rely dangerously on imported fuel.
Lancashire and Yorkshire are among Britain’s poorest regions but they stand on some of the richest shale gas fields in Europe.
If we want to close the economy’s yawning North-South divide we need to take the inevitable next step.
Full post
4) Putin’s TV Station ‘Stokes Fracking Fears’ To Prevent UK Shale Revolution
The Times, 6 August 2016
Ben Webster and Dominic Kennedy
The Kremlin-backed television station RT has been accused of scaremongering about fracking in Britain to prevent the industry from developing.
A viable shale gas industry in Europe would reduce the continent’s reliance on gas imported from Russia.
Cuadrilla, which wants to extract shale gas in Lancashire, has complained to Ofcom that RT breached the broadcasting code by making false statements.
RT regularly interviews anti-fracking campaigners and some of its presenters make frequent comments attacking the technology.
Max Keiser, an American broadcaster who presents the Keiser Report with his wife Stacy Herbert, has said in broadcasts that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles” and fracking is giving British children cancer.
Francis Egan, chief executive of Cuadrilla, said: “RT’s broadcasts on UK shale gas frequently have no factual basis and seem designed to instil fear in the public. One assumes RT would prefer the UK and Europe to rely on poorly regulated imports of gas, primarily from Russia, rather than taking control of our own energy future.”
Full story
5) Matt Ridley: Innovation And Its Enemies
The Times, 8 August 2016
The prime minister is to announce today that she would like to redirect some of the future profits of shale gas production to households, rather than councils. This is eminently sensible. It gives local people a stake in the new technology; it recognises that innovation will only be accepted in society when its social effects are beneficial; and it reflects Theresa May’s philosophy that all of society should share in growth.
After leaving the European Union, Britain will have to be quicker to adopt new technologies, the better to create wealth in the knowledge economy. For me that’s the biggest opportunity of Brexit. But to grasp it we must find a way to persuade people to be more ready to embrace innovation and less suspicious. A country that can work out how to do that is going to steal a march on its rivals.
Innovation is the source of virtually all prosperity. It is the reason the average person now lives longer, feeds better, travels farther, is better entertained and sees more children survive than even a monarch did four centuries ago. A glance back through history shows that innovation nearly always does more good than harm.
So why is innovation so fiercely resisted? Opposition to “fracking” (the novelty is not hydraulic fracturing, which has been happening for decades in Dorset, but shale gas extraction; the opponents like using a word with f and k in it) is largely irrational. Like the claim that the Liverpool to Manchester railway would cause horses to abort their foals, it is based on myth, flying in the face of the evidence that shale gas can provide energy more cleanly than coal, more cheaply than nuclear and more reliably than wind. Yet the opponents, backed by the giant budgets and PR machines of the big environmental pressure groups, have poisoned shale gas’s reputation here already.
This is nothing new. “When a new invention is first propounded,” said William Petty in 1679, “in the beginning every man objects and the poor inventor runs the gauntloop of all petulant wits.” As Calestous Juma, of Harvard Kennedy School, recounts in a fascinating new book called Innovation and Its Enemies, even coffee and margarine were fiercely rejected at first.
In the 16th and 17th century, coffee was repeatedly outlawed by religious and political leaders in Cairo, Istanbul and parts of Europe as it spread north from Ethiopia and Yemen. Their objection was ostensibly to its “intoxicating” qualities or on some spurious religious ground, but the real motivation was usually to ban coffee-houses’ alarming tendency to encourage the free exchange of ideas. King Charles II sought to close down all coffee houses explicitly because he did not like people sitting “half the day” in them “insinuating into the ears of people a prejudice against” rulers. He’d have hated Starbucks.
Margarine, invented in France in 1869, was subjected to a decades-long smear campaign (blame Professor Juma for the pun, not me) from the American dairy industry. “There never was . . . a more deliberate and outrageous swindle than this bogus butter business,” thundered the New York dairy commission. Even Mark Twain denounced margarine, showing that celebs have been anti-progress before.
Laws were passed in many states to cripple the margarine industry with bans, taxes, labelling laws and licensing provisions. By the early 1940s, two thirds of states had banned yellow margarine altogether on spurious health grounds. This is reminiscent of today’s reaction to the invention of vaping: banned in some countries, such as Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, discouraged in most others.
The Horse Association of America once fought a furious rearguard action against tractors. The American musicians’ union managed to ban all recorded music on the radio for a while. Like the initially successful opposition to railways from the canal owners in Britain a century before, incumbent industries will do their utmost to stop new challengers.
Another lesson is taught by the Islamic world’s rejection of printing for four centuries, in contrast to China and Europe. Professor Juma thinks part of the reason printing quickly caught on in Europe — and sparked the Reformation — is that European scribes, being monks, did not lose their livelihoods as the freelance calligraphers of Istanbul risked doing. Religious objections also contributed.
Bizarrely, the Ottoman empire allowed foreigners to set up printing presses using foreign languages and scripts but when a Hungarian convert, Ibrahim Muteferrika, was permitted by the sultan to set up a press in Istanbul in 1726 to print only non-religious books there were riots.
This shows that it is not the technology but the social environment around it that determines whether it will be accepted. Europe’s implacable and irrational resistance to genetically modified crops, in contrast to the relatively speedy adoption of that technology in the United States, supplies much the same lesson.
Bombarded by green propaganda, European consumers largely saw genetic technologies as a threat, rather than an opportunity. Genetically modified bacteria, making insulin for diabetics, encountered no such opposition.
Full post
6) U.S. Shale Revolution Has Created One Million Jobs & Slashed Energy Bills (& CO2 Emissions)
Mail on Sunday, 7 August 2016
Caroline Graham
Exploitation of new oil and gas reserves by fracking shale rock has transformed the US economy since it started just 11 years ago – creating at least a million jobs and slashing electricity bills and greenhouse gas emissions. The scale of this energy revolution is almost unimaginable.
The Marcellus shale bed in Pennsylvania is thought by geologists to contain enough gas to power and heat every home in America for 50 to 100 years. Yet a few hundred feet beneath it lies another giant formation, the Utica, that contains enough gas for a further century.
A natural gas drilling rig in Fairfield Township, Pennsylvania. The area sits above the Marcellus Shale where the search for natural gas uses a controversial method known as hydrofracking
In 2013, the ‘black gold rush’ caused by shale oil from states such as North Dakota meant America produced more oil than it imported for the first time since 1995. There are also huge reserves in Texas, Colorado, Louisiana and other states.
Last year a study found fracking had added 725,000 jobs to the US economy between 2005 and 2012. The US National Bureau of Economic Research calculates there are $243,000 (£186,000) in wages generated for every $1million of oil and gas extracted.
In America, unlike in Britain, landowners own the rights to minerals and hydrocarbons from the surface to the centre of the Earth. This means that when firms want to drill, they have to pay large bounties and royalties, if they start to produce – thus transforming fracking areas’ economies.
Speaking at his home in Dimock, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Marcellus region, former Democrat Congressman Chris Carney, a current member of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said fracking had brought his community ‘immense benefits’.
It meant farmers who could ‘barely scratch a living’ had transformed their lives, while the town had built superb new facilities such as a handsomely equipped high school.
Mr Carney added: ‘Fracking means this country is awash with energy – which is a place we’ve never been before.’
He said recent falls in oil and gas prices, caused by competitors flooding the energy market and declining Chinese demand, had reduced landowners’ royalties, which average 12.5 per cent of the proceeds from a well.
‘But cheap energy is also a benefit. Overall, fracking isn’t a double-edged sword. It’s just a good thing.’
Elsewhere, fracking created overnight millionaires, and whole new towns to support the armies of oil workers who arrived to cash in.
With the fall in prices, the early boom days are over: of the 80,000 workers who went to North Dakota in 2014, most have now left.
In Williston, once dubbed the boom’s ‘ground zero’, oil tax revenue is down 70 per cent on last year. Blocks of flats which sprang up to accommodate the workers now sit empty.
But industry sources say the downturn will not be permanent.
At the same time, the shift from coal to gas means America has cut carbon dioxide emissions by almost a billion tons a year – more than any other advanced nation.
Full post
This gave them a real personal interest in the process of change.
Protests, if any, came from those who lived outside the compensation zone.
Hand-wringing Lib Dems thwarted David Cameron’s dream of tapping Britain’s potential treasure trove and gave protesters time to dig in.
Few householders were swayed by promises to hand some of the shale profits to extravagant local councils.
‘Fracking offers to solve Britain’s alarming energy crisis’
Driller Cuadrilla almost abandoned hope as environmentalists put more and more hurdles in its path.
The prospect of a cash-in-hand deal worth more than half a year’s pay in the Blackpool area is likely to see such entrenched opposition evaporate overnight.
If America’s experience is anything to go by, huge benefits in jobs and prosperity would certainly follow…
Thanks to shale, global oil prices have slumped from $110 a barrel before the Scottish referendum in 2014 to $41 today and are unlikely to climb again any time soon.
Cheap oil has given a shot in the arm to the sickly world economy….
There is no time to be lost. Our creaking nuclear plants are near the end of their lives.
North Sea oil is a thing of the past. We are at the mercy of Russia’s gas pipelines and rely dangerously on imported fuel.
Lancashire and Yorkshire are among Britain’s poorest regions but they stand on some of the richest shale gas fields in Europe.
If we want to close the economy’s yawning North-South divide we need to take the inevitable next step.
Full post
4) Putin’s TV Station ‘Stokes Fracking Fears’ To Prevent UK Shale Revolution
The Times, 6 August 2016
Ben Webster and Dominic Kennedy
The Kremlin-backed television station RT has been accused of scaremongering about fracking in Britain to prevent the industry from developing.
A viable shale gas industry in Europe would reduce the continent’s reliance on gas imported from Russia.
Cuadrilla, which wants to extract shale gas in Lancashire, has complained to Ofcom that RT breached the broadcasting code by making false statements.
RT regularly interviews anti-fracking campaigners and some of its presenters make frequent comments attacking the technology.
Max Keiser, an American broadcaster who presents the Keiser Report with his wife Stacy Herbert, has said in broadcasts that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles” and fracking is giving British children cancer.
Francis Egan, chief executive of Cuadrilla, said: “RT’s broadcasts on UK shale gas frequently have no factual basis and seem designed to instil fear in the public. One assumes RT would prefer the UK and Europe to rely on poorly regulated imports of gas, primarily from Russia, rather than taking control of our own energy future.”
Full story
5) Matt Ridley: Innovation And Its Enemies
The Times, 8 August 2016
The prime minister is to announce today that she would like to redirect some of the future profits of shale gas production to households, rather than councils. This is eminently sensible. It gives local people a stake in the new technology; it recognises that innovation will only be accepted in society when its social effects are beneficial; and it reflects Theresa May’s philosophy that all of society should share in growth.
After leaving the European Union, Britain will have to be quicker to adopt new technologies, the better to create wealth in the knowledge economy. For me that’s the biggest opportunity of Brexit. But to grasp it we must find a way to persuade people to be more ready to embrace innovation and less suspicious. A country that can work out how to do that is going to steal a march on its rivals.
Innovation is the source of virtually all prosperity. It is the reason the average person now lives longer, feeds better, travels farther, is better entertained and sees more children survive than even a monarch did four centuries ago. A glance back through history shows that innovation nearly always does more good than harm.
So why is innovation so fiercely resisted? Opposition to “fracking” (the novelty is not hydraulic fracturing, which has been happening for decades in Dorset, but shale gas extraction; the opponents like using a word with f and k in it) is largely irrational. Like the claim that the Liverpool to Manchester railway would cause horses to abort their foals, it is based on myth, flying in the face of the evidence that shale gas can provide energy more cleanly than coal, more cheaply than nuclear and more reliably than wind. Yet the opponents, backed by the giant budgets and PR machines of the big environmental pressure groups, have poisoned shale gas’s reputation here already.
This is nothing new. “When a new invention is first propounded,” said William Petty in 1679, “in the beginning every man objects and the poor inventor runs the gauntloop of all petulant wits.” As Calestous Juma, of Harvard Kennedy School, recounts in a fascinating new book called Innovation and Its Enemies, even coffee and margarine were fiercely rejected at first.
In the 16th and 17th century, coffee was repeatedly outlawed by religious and political leaders in Cairo, Istanbul and parts of Europe as it spread north from Ethiopia and Yemen. Their objection was ostensibly to its “intoxicating” qualities or on some spurious religious ground, but the real motivation was usually to ban coffee-houses’ alarming tendency to encourage the free exchange of ideas. King Charles II sought to close down all coffee houses explicitly because he did not like people sitting “half the day” in them “insinuating into the ears of people a prejudice against” rulers. He’d have hated Starbucks.
Margarine, invented in France in 1869, was subjected to a decades-long smear campaign (blame Professor Juma for the pun, not me) from the American dairy industry. “There never was . . . a more deliberate and outrageous swindle than this bogus butter business,” thundered the New York dairy commission. Even Mark Twain denounced margarine, showing that celebs have been anti-progress before.
Laws were passed in many states to cripple the margarine industry with bans, taxes, labelling laws and licensing provisions. By the early 1940s, two thirds of states had banned yellow margarine altogether on spurious health grounds. This is reminiscent of today’s reaction to the invention of vaping: banned in some countries, such as Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, discouraged in most others.
The Horse Association of America once fought a furious rearguard action against tractors. The American musicians’ union managed to ban all recorded music on the radio for a while. Like the initially successful opposition to railways from the canal owners in Britain a century before, incumbent industries will do their utmost to stop new challengers.
Another lesson is taught by the Islamic world’s rejection of printing for four centuries, in contrast to China and Europe. Professor Juma thinks part of the reason printing quickly caught on in Europe — and sparked the Reformation — is that European scribes, being monks, did not lose their livelihoods as the freelance calligraphers of Istanbul risked doing. Religious objections also contributed.
Bizarrely, the Ottoman empire allowed foreigners to set up printing presses using foreign languages and scripts but when a Hungarian convert, Ibrahim Muteferrika, was permitted by the sultan to set up a press in Istanbul in 1726 to print only non-religious books there were riots.
This shows that it is not the technology but the social environment around it that determines whether it will be accepted. Europe’s implacable and irrational resistance to genetically modified crops, in contrast to the relatively speedy adoption of that technology in the United States, supplies much the same lesson.
Bombarded by green propaganda, European consumers largely saw genetic technologies as a threat, rather than an opportunity. Genetically modified bacteria, making insulin for diabetics, encountered no such opposition.
Full post
6) U.S. Shale Revolution Has Created One Million Jobs & Slashed Energy Bills (& CO2 Emissions)
Mail on Sunday, 7 August 2016
Caroline Graham
Exploitation of new oil and gas reserves by fracking shale rock has transformed the US economy since it started just 11 years ago – creating at least a million jobs and slashing electricity bills and greenhouse gas emissions. The scale of this energy revolution is almost unimaginable.
The Marcellus shale bed in Pennsylvania is thought by geologists to contain enough gas to power and heat every home in America for 50 to 100 years. Yet a few hundred feet beneath it lies another giant formation, the Utica, that contains enough gas for a further century.
A natural gas drilling rig in Fairfield Township, Pennsylvania. The area sits above the Marcellus Shale where the search for natural gas uses a controversial method known as hydrofracking
In 2013, the ‘black gold rush’ caused by shale oil from states such as North Dakota meant America produced more oil than it imported for the first time since 1995. There are also huge reserves in Texas, Colorado, Louisiana and other states.
Last year a study found fracking had added 725,000 jobs to the US economy between 2005 and 2012. The US National Bureau of Economic Research calculates there are $243,000 (£186,000) in wages generated for every $1million of oil and gas extracted.
In America, unlike in Britain, landowners own the rights to minerals and hydrocarbons from the surface to the centre of the Earth. This means that when firms want to drill, they have to pay large bounties and royalties, if they start to produce – thus transforming fracking areas’ economies.
Speaking at his home in Dimock, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Marcellus region, former Democrat Congressman Chris Carney, a current member of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said fracking had brought his community ‘immense benefits’.
It meant farmers who could ‘barely scratch a living’ had transformed their lives, while the town had built superb new facilities such as a handsomely equipped high school.
Mr Carney added: ‘Fracking means this country is awash with energy – which is a place we’ve never been before.’
He said recent falls in oil and gas prices, caused by competitors flooding the energy market and declining Chinese demand, had reduced landowners’ royalties, which average 12.5 per cent of the proceeds from a well.
‘But cheap energy is also a benefit. Overall, fracking isn’t a double-edged sword. It’s just a good thing.’
Elsewhere, fracking created overnight millionaires, and whole new towns to support the armies of oil workers who arrived to cash in.
With the fall in prices, the early boom days are over: of the 80,000 workers who went to North Dakota in 2014, most have now left.
In Williston, once dubbed the boom’s ‘ground zero’, oil tax revenue is down 70 per cent on last year. Blocks of flats which sprang up to accommodate the workers now sit empty.
But industry sources say the downturn will not be permanent.
At the same time, the shift from coal to gas means America has cut carbon dioxide emissions by almost a billion tons a year – more than any other advanced nation.
Full post
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
1 comment:
At least one leader has finally acknowledged climate change is a scam and the data does not support the alarmists.Common sense at last.
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