"Environmentalists don't want safer shale gas. They want no shale gas."
This statement comes out of the UK, where policies are green, energy costs high and rising, and shale potential rich but mostly untested as the government stews about hydraulic fracturing.
Environmentalists, writes Member of Parliament Peter Lilley in the May 11 edition of The Spectator, "argue that we should not drill [for shale gas] because we might find so much that we would be tempted away from the path of righteousness, which is to abandon fossil fuels."
Lilley quotes Kevin Anderson, a leader of the green movement, as saying, "from a climate-change perspective, this stuff simply has to stay in the ground."
A Conservative trained in physics and law, Lilley takes a different view of climate change and voted against the UK's aggressive Climate Change Act.
In a speech a year ago, he said he doesn't deny the existence of human-induced warming of the atmosphere but questions the extent and timing of the influence.
He voted against the legislation, he said, because of the government's cost-benefit estimates: more than £200 billion in costs, excluding transitional costs and losses from movement of businesses away from the UK, vs. maximum benefits worldwide of £105 billion.
Voting against the bill, he said, "seemed like the sensible thing to do."
Feed-in tariffs later enacted to support nonfossil energy looked even worse by the same analysis: costs to UK consumers and taxpayers of £8.6 billion vs. worldwide benefits of £400 million.
Yet before the vote on the climate-change legislation, Lilley said, the cost-benefit issue received no attention.
"That taught me a little about the nature of the debate," he said in the speech. "It's not one of reasoned assessment, balancing costs against benefits. It's one of belief and conviction, against reasoned argument."
The nature of the debate helps explain why an 18-month moratorium on shale-gas drilling remains in place in the UK. As Lilley writes, environmentalists want no shale gas.
