30/06/2013
The lead story in the Booker column
today is about the child care system, with reference to the grooming episodes which have horrified and sickened us all.
Then Booker turns to the
energy issue, remarking that the Almighty must have a sense of humour when, on the very day headlines were filled with warnings that our electricity system is now in such a parlous state that we can soon expect power cuts and electricity "rationing", we were also told that Britain is now sitting on what has been called "by far the biggest shale gas basin in the world".
Booker acknowledges that there may have been some journalistic licence in how the two reports from which these claims derived were written, and indeed there was. The media accounts of neither report
really stack up, with the risk of power cuts exaggerated and while the potential bonanza from shale gas may have been overstated.
Certainly, the chances of major blackouts
look remote, and the
BGS report writes of further exploration drilling and testing over an extended period being needed. Only then, and with the optimisation of the extraction process, will it be possible to determine
whether the gas can be exploited commercially.
The best case scenario is that the resource will be enough to meet all the UK's energy needs for many decades to come, but this does not change the barely credible shambles successive governments have made of our national energy policy, nor how ludicrously skewed it has become by their obsession with global warming and the delusion that, by cutting down our "carbon emissions", we can somehow change the Earth's climate.
The Government's current policy, which Booker has repeatedly explored, is twofold. On one hand, it is based on building tens of thousands of useless and ludicrously expensive wind turbines, made possible only by forcing us to pay double or treble the normal cost of the pitiful amount of electricity they so unreliably produce.
On the other, by taxes and regulations designed to make "renewables" seem competitive, they plan to double the cost of any power from other sources, whether fossil fuels or nuclear. In short, they want to make our electricity more expensive than anywhere else in the world.
Then, says Booker, just as they have cobbled this crazy joke of a policy together, we discover that we are sitting on what is potentially the world's largest resource of a fuel so cheap that it has halved the price of gas across the Atlantic in just five years.
The last time he observed that the Almighty must have a sense of humour was in October 2008 when, just as our MPs were voting almost unanimously for Ed Miliband's Climate Change Act, committing us to economic suicide by cutting CO2 emissions by 80 percent in 40 years, the first October snow was falling in London for 74 years.
We will not see an end to this insanity, Booker concludes, until our politicians recover their senses, struggle back into the real world and strike that Act from the statute book.
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