Tuesday 9 July 2013

Nigel Lawson on top form

From today's Soaraway Sun:

Recognising that Brits have too much common sense to fall for this, [the taxpayer-funded lobby groups] parade spurious environmental concerns, claiming that fracking will contaminate groundwater and lead to damaging earthquakes.

Both these objections are entirely unfounded. Despite the hundreds of thousands of shale wells drilled in the US, there is not a single, authenticated case of groundwater contamination. This is hardly surprising. Groundwater, as its name implies, is near the earth’s surface. Shale gas is drilled deep, deep, down.

As for earthquakes, while there have been a few instances of minor tremors deep down where the fracking takes place, these have no effect whatsoever on the surface, where we all live.

17 comments:

Unknown said...

You missed out this excellent bit: "They (the Greenies) are all motivated by a quasi-religious obsession that carbon dioxide, essential for life on this planet and produced when gas or oil is burned, is somehow evil."

"Quasi-religious obsession" hits the nail on the head. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out "When people stop believing in God, they won't believe in nothing, they will believe in anything".

Mark Wadsworth said...

MC, if you say things like that you get labelled a Climate Denier. I just liked his punchline about groundwater not being miles underground.

By the way, I neither believe in "god" nor in "catastrophic climate change", they both seem equally laughable, and attempts by the Greenies to paint "climate deniers" and "creationists" into one corner strike me as totally bizarre.

View from the Solent said...

"Climate Denier". My response at the personal level is -

Of course there's climate. Every place on earth has a fucking climate, and it's been changing for three and a half billion years. So what?

It makes them go quiet.

Unknown said...

"Climate Denier" - isn't that something to do with women wearing thicker stockings up north?

Anonymous said...

Climate deniers versus Deficit deniers:

Climate denier doesn't really mean that people critical of 'global warming science' deny there is a climate...does it? It really just means they deny there is man made global warming which implies that those who use the term should refer to 'climate deniers' as 'anthropomorphic global warming deniers'. It's never going to fly...is it? :)

'Deficit deniers' is even more ridiculous in my view. Er...like does this imply that Miliband and Co or Krugman/Stiglitz deny there is a deficit? Same difference only more crass, imo.

Pablo said...

"there is not a single, authenticated case of groundwater contamination" I dunno. I saw a Horizon doc. with Ian Stewart on this recently and, as I recall, there were cases of flammable water due to copious quantities of methane getting in.

Anonymous said...

Pablo, Methane is not considered a contaminant by US environmental agencies. It's merely flammable above certain levels so only poses a danger to smokers. Now I'm not sure but isn't MW a smoker?... ;)

Mark Wadsworth said...

P and PC, it would be foolish to deny that if you have hundreds of bore holes, sooner or later a few people somewhere or other will suffer some adverse consequences, but let's not overplay this.

Everything has a cost, nothing is free or risk free, but these costs are but a small fraction of the benefits, end of discussion.

DBC Reed said...

@Pablo
There is at least one youtube video showing methane coming from taps and being set alight. So it does get into the water supply presumably through the aquifers because it couldn't penetrate the pipework. Not sure I'd want that and earthquakes (two already in well-heeled UK places and they were only trial runs).
People are not going to trust the suppliers after the argument that nuclear power stations were perfectly safe next to the sea
literarily exploded in Japan.

Sarton Bander said...

Greenies seem to be mainly of the economic creationism (marxism) bent.

Sarton Bander said...

With fracking those films are misleading in the extreme. There was methane seepage there before it was extracted! Fracking was not the cause.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, it also happens half a dozen times a year that a house is blown up, burned down because of gas leaking from the normal domestic supply.

As tragic as this is in individual cases, we have collectively decided that the benefit to the twenty million households who use gas for heating and cooking outweighs those half a dozen individual tragedies.

SB, yes and yes, see my reply to DBC. The water companies manage to remove all sorts of shit from the water supply, I'm sure that they could install some clever valves to get rid of the methane if it's really a problem.

DBC Reed said...

@MW
The greater good argument is all very well but we know that that the greater good would involve some form of LVT but there are a lot of people who get in the way .It would be for the greatest good of the greatest number to have fracking ,no doubt, but there is an issue with the preservation of minorities from the claims of the majority. (As a smoker you should no how easily a minority gets put upon.)
If you are saying people OOP NORTH have to put up with methane in their water and earthquakes to provide everybody with cheap whatever i)you are in deep water ethically; ii) the voters will almost certainly say fracking affects house prices and you're sunk.

DBC Reed said...

PS NO/ KNOW confusion ! Wow! Mind you I have a complete scheme of spelling reform once LVT is set up.

Anonymous said...

It's not necessarily the case that gas got into the aquifers supplying a guy with burning taps. One of the people with burning taps found their water well had been drilled through a few coal seams.

There are risks associated with any means of energy production. Coal mining kills thousands a year, burning coal releases more radiation into the environment per KWh generated than nuclear power. But people don't get into a panic about coal mining.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, it appears that the best sites for fracking are up north, so what?

I'd be just as in favour if the best sites were in "posh" counties like Oxfordshire or Surrey or whatever. Don't forget, fracking = jobs, and as UKL suggests, fracking is more or less a straight swap for coal mining (which was also mainly up north or in Wales).

As to house prices, that ain't necessarily so. Look at house prices in Aberdeen compared to the rest of Scotland. Or look at house prices in mining villages when the pits were shut. And cheaper gas = higher house prices as they are cheaper to heat.

UKL, excellent points, thanks for back up.

Unknown said...

"People are not going to trust the suppliers after the argument that nuclear power stations were perfectly safe next to the sea literarily exploded in Japan."

FFS here we have a nuclear power plant being hit by a tsunami and precisely how many people have died as a result? The amount of radioactive material released into the atmosphere by the nuclear power industry is a drop in the ocean compared to that produced by above-ground nuclear weapon testing in the '50s and '60s, which material will be around, pushing up the background radiation levels, effectively for ever.