Fracking

There has been predictable frothing at the suggestion by Professor Averil Macdonald, Chairwoman of UK Onshore Oil and Gas, that more women than men oppose fracking because women are more prone to follow their gut instinct than the science behind fracking. I am going to keep out of that debate, not because I fear for my chances of landing an honorary fellowship – if Tim Hunt’s experience is anything to go by, the world of academia will fall in on Professor Macdonald -- but because I am more interested in what fracking tells us of the attitude of the left towards science. Over the past few years the left has tried to establish itself as the defender of scientific reason.

That democracy is a superior form of government to any other goes without saying. But in order to function, it has to be conducted in such a way and on such a scale as to ensure that the people or their elected representatives are making decisions based on genuine alternatives. With this week’s decision by Lancashire County Council to reject a second application for fracking on a site near Blackpool, something has gone seriously wrong. An important national issue has been allowed to be settled according to purely local concerns.

The city of Denton, Texas, doesn’t often make the news, but last month it did: it became the first city in the US – by a margin of 59 per cent to 41 per cent – to vote to ban fracking. Is the US love affair with shale ending? The industry has not been its own best friend, James Ball, special advisor to Tachebois Ltd, told the Spectator Energy Forum this morning. He asked the audience – made up of a large number of professionals from the oil and gas industry – how many had watched Gasland, the US documentary by Josh Fox which helped to form negative public view of the industry. None had. ‘See, that’s problem,’ he said.

Iain Conn, who will succeed Sam Laidlaw as chief executive of Centrica, would have been a dead cert for the top job at his current employer, BP, were it not for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The subsequent PR fiasco terminated the BP career of the then chief executive Tony Hayward — who seemed crushed by the episode, but recovered to make a double fortune at Genel Energy and Glencore. Had Hayward served a full term, Conn (BP’s head of refining and marketing) would almost certainly have followed him. As it was, BP found it more politic to appoint an American, Bob Dudley, to repair relations in Washington while simultaneously arm-wrestling with the Kremlin-connected oligarchs who were BP’s co-investors in Russia.

The government's announcement today that fracking will not take place in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty save ‘in exceptional circumstances and where it can be demonstrated they are in the public interest’ is a welcome and sensible move. It may indeed be in the national interest to exploit a new source of energy, but these landscapes are specially protected in the national interest, too. The government states that countryside ‘adjacent’ to these protected areas will also be covered by the policy. That will be a relief to the residents of Wisborough Green and Kirdford in my constituency, two villages in beautiful countryside close to the South Downs National Park which have faced the prospect of drilling.

‘Iraq turmoil sends crude oil prices to nine-month high’ is the sort of headline that used to send shivers down economists’ spines, especially if it appeared on the same page as ‘Europe faces gas shortage as Russia cuts Ukraine supply’. How worried should we be at the current turn of events in the energy world? Since Iraq’s new insurgency kicked off, the price of a barrel of Brent Crude has blipped from $105 to $115 — nothing to panic about — but the more pessimistic analysts are talking of a further $30 rise if Iraqi oil flows of 3.6 million barrels a day (representing about 4 per cent of global demand) are seriously disrupted.

If you happen to be reading this column at breakfast, I’d recommend you skip to something more agreeable like Dear Mary and save mine till a bit later. It concerns the ugly details of one of the most revolting mass murderers in US history. His name is Kermit Gosnell — a doctor who ran a particularly dodgy clinic in Philadelphia specialising in late-term abortions for mostly poor black women. When police raided it in 2010, they encountered a scene of quite appalling horror. In a flea-ridden, blood- and faeces-stained basement, Gosnell had been operating on women using unsterilised equipment, killing babies well over the legal term limit, sometimes by sucking out their brains with a machine.

It might not be something you want to mention in the Half Moon Inn in Balcombe, or around any of the other communities where people are getting anxious about shale gas explorers ripping up the countryside with their drills and pipelines. But if shale is the tremendous source of wealth that David Cameron insists it can be for this country, how do you go about investing it? After all, if there are fortunes to be made, there is no reason not to claim your share. There is no longer any question that shale gas is a major industry. In the US, where it is most advanced, it is already worth $76 billion annually, according to its trade association, and by the end of next year that will have grown to $118 billion.