In the news

Art apparently.

I amazed that doesn't happen more often. One of the most arse clenchingly terrifying moments of my life was to be descending a col off the beaten track in the eastern Pyrenees when a wild boar came running out on the road ahead of me, only to be shot as I was within 10 metres of it.

For some reason the wild boars like to hang out near the road, you pretty much described the Pyrénées-Orientales in a nutshell!

Sorry if this has been covered, but if this leads to wide spread environmental damage and loss of local livelihoods, etc. Can the judge that passes this ruling be held to account. I bet he would think twice, if this was wrong and he paid the price with losing his job like forever.. or do the campaigners just need a better legal bid.. also why are we as a country allowing this to happen instead of investing in renewable energy.. grrrrr

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/12/anti-fracking-campaigner-loses-legal-bid-to-block-cuadrilla

A Greater Manchester Police spokesperson said officers are 'looking into' the incident.

The jam was strawberry and the reason was for artistic expression.

"I just hope this isn't the start of a new craze that starts to spread.” Inspector Middleton

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/naked-women-jam-manchester-centre-15263816

For some reason the wild bores like to hang out near the road

Welcome to lfgss

It was coming right for us etc

weren’t tempted to stuff it down your jersey and make off with it?

Zing!

I imagine the judge has been told that this is “national interest” stuff- we’re about to fuck our economy with Brexit, so a fresh natural resource find would be extremely useful.

also why are we as a country allowing this to happen instead of investing in renewable energy.. grrrrr

As a counter argument search for some of Lovelock's comments on this. The tl;Dr argument is that fracking is an efficient technology that cam almost immediately be deployed as a filler until renewables can serve as a full replacement.

The real answer is that it shouldn't be an either, or.

We'll it's less efficient then conventional oil and gas production as you have to not only drill more well bores per field, more intervention to keep producing efficiently and the drilling is more complex. Cuadrilla themselves have only just started fracking at the exploration wells to start testing, they won't know what kind of production they will see sometime next year, at that point. They will then have to plan the well, drill the horizontal wells and place the completions to start producing. The biggest driver for fracking, as with any oil and gas well is revenue, not filling the gap whilst renewables catch up.

yes, I'd question if we really need to fill this gap in this way or if this is just an argument being made as fracking has become economically viable. If there was a hard no to fracking globally, couldn't this divert r&d funds going to fracking to renewable.

Totally a lever the government can pull, look at Orkney and the research that happens there, we are world leaders, we should be pursuing renewables as part of the energy mix. Pretty sure the Paris agreement is to cut down on fossil fuels.

Imo the big difference between us and the US (which iirc was the basis of most of the evidence for Lovelock's argument) is that they went straight into fracking, which enabled them to drop energy costs and shift from coal (to the point coal is now uneconomical). In that eg I think there is a good case for fracking.

In the time we've spent (6yrs?) dithering we could have put even more investment into renewables and batteries.

If you look at the amazing ramp up in renewables in the last 5yrs, you can't help that feel sad that we haven't put more behind it.

I've only seen figures on US subsidies, but I think direct subsidies are x7-8 more for fossil fuels than renewables. Love to see the equivalent including indirect for the UK.

https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/jun/15/james-lovelock-fracking-greens-climate

Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it: the amount of CO2 produced by burning gas in a good turbine gives you 60% efficiency. In a coal-fired power station, it is 30% per unit of fuel. So you get a two-to-one gain there straight away. The next two-to-one gain you get is that methane has only got half its energy in the carbon, the other half is in the hydrogen, so there's a four-to-one gain in CO2 output from the same amount of electricity by burning methane. Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.

That's an interesting argument (from 2012) but it is not being put into perspective by mentioning what multiple to one we stand to gain form renewable, what is the conceivable impact of renewable, is there any impact on the development of renewables by fracking. You can't put together a strong argument just by comparing to coal.

Totally agree.

Just thought it would be interesting for people to have a counter view on fracking.

I personally can't stand windmills at any price.

From the same article. Lovelock has some strange views on renewables (amongst other things).

I don’t believe Cuadrilla would have persevered at £89,000 A DAY if they weren’t pretty confident it was nice and gassy.

Either way it’s the thin end of the wedge and the sentences of the three guys for protesting were disgraceful.

There's a load up near me and they do definitely dominate the natural skyline. (Obviously whether that is a worse thing than fossil fuels is another matter.)

It is bloody gassy, they know what they are doing. Whilst at the same time, when protests successfully shut down a site or even slow it down, you really are having a monetary effect on the company and the speed to which they get to production. Sentencing the protesters makes sense if you want to scare off any other protests, we'll see how that goes!

Yes, I can understand, though I don't mind looking at them personally. But for a scientist giving his position on renewables/climate change it's nuts to say something so silly - we can't afford to discount things just because they don't look very nice.

Got to remember on the gas side that most of our houses are heated by gas. It's not easy to just "go renewable" in the same way. You can install as many wind turbines as you like, but thats not going to put gas in your boiler.

Greening our heating is a much bigger challenge than electricity. You don't need to retro fit an old house to make it run on wind electrcity, but you do if you want it to be heated by something other than gas.

You can create "green gas" using bioproducts, but there are finite amounts of land/waste available to grow the crops source the waste from.

I think the sentence for the protesters is grossly over the top considering the laughable sentences for other more serious crimes. However, I can't help but think the protesters would be better off in general trying to get our government to think bigger and quicker on how to green our heating, if climate chnage is what they are bothered about, rather than just preventing a source of gas coming on stream that will be easily replaced/continued to be sourced from overseas.

We are gas dependent, that wasn’t my concern.. the demand remains high even if it’s falling.. but fracking at what cost to our environment and livelihoods, what if regional industries such as farming don’t recover long term.. what if I can’t get proper Wensleydale cheese, grommit.

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Ahem

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/robert-altham-judge-with-oil-links-sent-fracking-protesters-to-jail-3b7znmts8

Pretty clear to me he should have recused himself. The appeals of the three who were sentenced are being heard this week I believe.