Shaky Commitment

Since we have such meagre resources of wind and water, as one would expect of a group of islands in the north Atlantic, Britain's greenest government ever is expected to greenlight the resumption of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas. The process involves drilling some hundreds of metres into the ground and then pumping things into the hole in order to release methane; it can cause minor earthquakes, with which the British nuclear industry will almost certainly be able to cope nearly as well as it copes in the absence of earthquakes. A study last year said that the impact on the climate would be worse than that of coal, but the study was done at Cornell University, and almost certainly by mere scientists rather than management consultants or other members of the priestly caste. The chief executive of a fracking company operating in Northern Ireland said that it was all perfectly safe if properly regulated, rather like banks or media monopolies or Francis Maude; so a research wallah at Policy Exchange was duly cranked out to blather up the benefits of a flexible energy market (fossil fuels and profiteering, in Standard English) and an emissions cap which is feeble enough to be credible, long-term enough to cause no more than minor irritation during the present parliament, and EU-wide so that we can all blame Brussels when it fails.