Shale shock cures peak oil, climate change

If anyone came across a new energy source described “ubiquitous, cheap and environmentally benign” you would expect it to be eagerly welcomed by everyone from oil companies to Greenpeace.

Wrong, as Rational Optimist author Matt Ridley  found when he prepared a report (pdf) for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

It describes shale gas as potentially replacing coal, nuclear and renewables in the electricity generating market, and oil in the transport market.

It sounds like everyone’s answer to peak oil (declining reserves) and carbon emissions (global warming from burning fossil fuel), as well as the need to heavily subsidise wind and solar power.

It is also good news on the geo-political scene, as large countries, both rich and poor, from China and Pakistan to the US and Poland, will no longer have to be dependent on imports, while other gas providers such as Iran and Russia will lose market power.

It is also, Ridley writes, bad news for coal producers, and for the nuclear and wind industries, which were expecting to be rescued from dependence on subsidies by rising fossil fuel prices. They may now not be.

But opposition is building from Russia’s powerful Gazprom (which holds much of Europe to ransom every winter) through to Greenpeace…,

“to strangle the shale-gas industry at birth, by claiming that drilling for it contaminates water with carcinogenic and even radioactive chemicals. This turns out to be true only in the sense that coffee is carcinogenic, bananas radioactive and dihydrogen monoxide (water) a chemical."

Who needs optimists?
Ridley’s belief that free markets, particularly in ideas, will overcome most problems has made him unpopular with the Left, as anyone who heard him interviewed at the weekend by Kim Hill will attest.

His findings on shale gas have been well summarised by Peter Glover on website Energy Tribune. His article also points out that shale gas will keep the price of nitrogen fertiliser low and hence keep food prices down.

Glover goes to some lengths to debunk contrary reports that recovery of shale gas is wasteful and damaging. These include a film, Gasland, which is devoted to attacking the method of extraction called hydraulic fracturing stimulation, or fracking.

Activists in Europe have pushed for the banning of fracking before it has even been tried and France has passed a law against it. Fortunately Poland, which is an energy hostage to Russia, is keen on fracking and is drafting a Norway-style sovereign fund to cash in on its prospective gas sales.

Bloomberg reports: Poland has awarded 87 licences to companies including Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Talisman Energy to explore for gas trapped in shale rocks. The country’s recoverable reserves of shale gas may amount to 5.2 trillion cubic metres, enough to supply more than 300 years of domestic consumption, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Bloomberg also reports France is facing a legal challenge to its ban from exploration companies while major discoveries of shale resources have been found in energy-deficit countries such as Argentina.

Fall of the House of Assad
Economics rather than Libyan-style bombing may bring the eventual downfall of the Arab world’s other most-detested dictatorship.

Bashar al-Assad’s Syria is not open to western journalists so the full extent of his repression is not known. But one thing is sure: western tourists and investment are also absent.

Max Fisher, writing in The Atlantic, predicts this could bring rapid regime change:

Syria's economy has come under such incredible duress in recent weeks that financial analysts say the government could run out of money entirely. Syria is struggling due to a combination of international sanctions, drying-up foreign investment, a devastated tourism industry … and Assad's costly civil service pay raises made in a last ditch effort to assuage protesters.

Fisher says Syria’s 22 million people are highly urbanised and that his stretched military and security forces cannot lay siege (and by all accounts) destroy every city where protests might break out.

Meanwhile, Syria is losing the diplomatic war as well, with popular re-elected Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan being reported in Ha’aretz as now able to restore relations with Israel and defuse the flotilla issue ahead of Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s UN report, due to be released in the first week of July.

Israel and Turkey's representatives on the committee want to use the report's release as an opportunity for both countries to put the affair behind them and rehabilitate ties.

Both countries are also united against Assad, Ha’aretz continues.

[His] violent crackdown and the stream of refugees to Turkey have shaken Ankara. The Turks were especially surprised Assad refused their demands, lied to them and prefers the Iranian patronage, Israeli officials say.

Man drought turns to surplus
A new book causing a sensation among the chattering classes in the US is Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection: Choosing boys over girls and the consequences of a world full of men.

Ignoring the usual restraints of political correctness, cultural relativity and gender balance, she pins some major targets: the Islamic world, India and China, to name a few.

"Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," she writes. "Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent."

She notes that sexual imbalances can be traced as far back as the fourth century BC in Athens and during China's Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. (Both eras featured widespread female infanticide while today the cause is abortion based on ultrasound scans.)

Among societies where the sex ratio has spiked, such as provincial China, a crime wave has followed. She says the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area in India is not income but sex ratio.

Though Hvistendahl is a traditional feminist with pro-abortion views, her book paradoxically is a powerful argument against it. Her solution to “gendercide” is a strictly enforced ban on sexual identification during pregnancy: a move that would be impractical unless abortion was banned as well.