Britain: Land of lousy weather, worse food and terrible dental hygiene. But what’s simmering under the surface is that the United Kingdom will soon be famous as the nation that’s so liberal, even though their so-called “conservatives” are screaming Lefties.
Case in point would be the Boris Johnson government ordering the last remaining fracking wells be sealed forever with concrete.
As it turns out, Great Britain is sitting on top of a veritable ocean of natural gas. Some say that Britain is atop one of the largest reserves on the planet.
Interestingly enough, it’s also reported that if Britain actually just a measly 10 percent of their gas reserves, that could power Britain until the year 2072.
Unfortunately for the hardworking British taxpayers, politicians of every stripe are scared to death of the Green Energy Mafia.
With that in mind, the only two natural gas fracking wells in the entire nation are about to be permanently sealed, supposedly due to the fracking causing earthquakes onsite in the Northern England city of Lancashire.
Please keep in mind that there has been some seismic activity in and around Lancashire, none greater than 1.5 in the Richter Scale. Also keep in mind that this activity doesn’t even qualify as a mild earthquake. They’re known as “micro-quakes” that people don’t even feel. They also occur hundreds of thousands of times per year.
One other thing, the average FedEx truck driving down your street registers at 3.0 on the Richter Scale. But due to half the force of a mail truck heading about 20 MPH down the road will almost certainly guarantee that England, Wales and Scotland will be mere vassal states sometime by the middle of this century.
As reported by Andrew Neil of London’s The Daily Mail (emphasis mine>;
‘It’s a global energy crunch,’ say our politicians. ‘There’s not much we can do about it.’
In fact, we are reaping the bitter consequences of 25 years of increasingly costly, stupid and self-defeating energy policies promoted in unison by these very same politicians — Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat alike — who now bleat there’s nothing they can do about it.
Take gas. As the world economy has sprung back from the depths of the pandemic, there is, indeed, a global shortage of gas. Prices have spiked and the extra cost is now showing up painfully in our domestic fuel bills.
The solution has been under our feet for more than a decade. Britain sits on some of the world’s richest reserves of shale gas. The Bowland Field in Lancashire harbours 37.6 trillion cubic metres of the stuff. Even if we were to extract only 10 per cent of it — through a process called fracking — we’d have enough gas to be self-sufficient for 50 years.
There are plenty other places in our land brimming with shale — all of which could be mined to supply our own needs, with the surplus exported to a gas-hungry world.
In reality, we haven’t extracted a single cubic metre. Our politicians — left, right and centre — simply didn’t have the gumption to go for it.
They were cowed into submission by the propaganda of the green lobby, which hugely exaggerated the environmental dangers and spread scare stories when exploratory drilling produced the mildest of earth tremors in the Blackpool area.
They barely registered on the Richter scale and Northern coal-mining areas have experienced worse for more than a century. But they were enough to kill off Britain’s nascent shale industry.
Even that’s not enough for the Green Blob.
Far from exploiting our shale reserves, the Oil and Gas Authority, a state quango which increasingly dances to the green net-zero carbon emissions tune, has ordered Cuadrilla, the drilling company, to seal forever its two shale gas wells by pouring concrete down them.
Not now to frack — and not ever. It is a policy which beggars belief. The Government should be ashamed of itself — as should all those Opposition politicians who support it. Far from developing shale gas when we most need it, the unthinking and often uninformed Westminster consensus is to make sure none of it ever sees the light of day.
As a result, massive investment in the North will not take place and 75,000 well-paid, skilled jobs in places where they are most needed — such as Lancashire — will now never be created. Remember that next time you hear a Cabinet minister wittering on about levelling up the North with the South.
Of course, we’re still going to need gas. Even as billions have been poured into renewables, gas is still the biggest generator of electricity — accounting for on average 40 per cent, and more than 50 per cent when the wind isn’t blowing. But instead of extracting it from our own lands, we’ll have to import it.
Already 50 per cent of the gas we need comes from abroad — mainly Norway and Qatar, with some from Russia. By the end of the decade, we’ll be importing 70 per cent and by 2050 — when we’re meant to hit that magical net-zero for carbon emissions — 85 per cent of the gas we need will be imported.
I think to myself that if the body politic in the UK is really this screwed-up, then they deserve to lose their sovereignty, just to have the Qataris and the Russians to lord over them.