All Hail Shale!

The discovery of enormous amounts of 'shale gas' in the North West is brilliant news, for reality based people. This naturally excludes Chris Huhne the Energy Secretary. Chris, who is probably just a pretty straight kinda guy, doesn't have much interest in energy, or in fact climate change which is the other part of his important title. No, he is interested in ideology, more specifically Man Made Global Warming ideology.

In this he seeks to put everything behind his certain knowledge that CO2 in the atmosphere is deadly and will cook us all, or freeze us. But it will definitely be our fault. You see the climate probably is changing, it always has so it seems a pretty safe premise and until fairly recently it was in an upward, hotter direction. Then, rather inconveniently it stopped warming. So those tied to the ideology decided to ignore this new data (or 'hide' it, see 'Climategate') much as they had also had to ignore the Mediaeval Warm Period.

It is truly brilliant now that science has been released from the bonds of being, well, an exact science. And this is Chris Huhne's world, that is Chris Huhne the politician who is in a position to do an awful lot of harm. He isn't insisting on building and subsidising wind farms to cure a problem, he is doing so because his ideology says he must. So fuel bills sky rocket whilst absolutely pointless turbines go up, that are making some people rich, like the Prime Minister's father-in-law, but don't actually have a purpose.

Even when the blasted thing is met with the most favourable conditions and it is outputting at its maximum, a conventional power station has to be 'turning and burning' just in case the wind drops (or increases), thus negating the whole reason for the existence of the Quixotic devices. To believe otherwise you have to lack reason and logic.

Which brings us back to shale gas. If it turns out that there is anything like the amount we think there is, it will be ground breaking for the UK (no pun intended). It will mean cheap fuel for the rest of our and our children's lives, at least. It will remove at a stroke the need to rely on Russia for gas and it will help stabilise our economy. But with ideology led Chris Huhne anywhere near the controls, we run the risk of this bounty being ignored.

Though wind turbines are entirely pointless, they are the prescribed saviour mechanism and therefore, as with all religious scripture cannot be denied. Shale gas ticks all the boxes if you live in the real world, but we have a madman in charge of policy (apparently), so we must be prepared for trouble. Soon, the articles will doubtless start appearing on the BBC and in the Guardian saying that to use shale gas we would have to first sell our souls to the Devil and that anyone who supports it eats babies. These are the people, don't forget, who really do have the funds to pay for propaganda.