Why I am very concerned about fracking ...

Of course we can see the argument for getting away from being supplied by potentially hostile and/or unstable countries. However there are major -and I mean major- problems with the whole enterprise.
Most importantly it doesn't help address our need (indeed duty) to decarbonise our economy. So unless it were accompanied by a very rigorous set of mechanisms to make sure that our exploitation of these fossil carbons did not contribute to increasing the net amount of carbon and other greenhouse gasses, we should not even be considering this. This is one of the things driving a fairly furious response from members of the public and unless this is taken seriously we could have Twyford Down style protesting going on and given recent revelations about policing such things, a potential for even more bitter civil liberties issues arising. Will the costs of handling civil discurbancc also be including in the licenses? I suspect they won't; and that will mean effectively a hidden taxpayer subsidy. Better surely not to create that situation in the first place.

Secondly are the fairly major concerns about more immediate enviromental impacts. The fears about earth quakes would appear to be well founded at the moment. As do concerns about contamination of water tables and the effects on crops (I note the recent case in East Yorkshire). Again, failure to take such concerns seriously is likely to risk civil discurbance and raises the question of who will pay for policing, court cases, etc.

Thirdly, it's hard to work out why the energy security issues cannot better be met by pursuing even more rigourously the non-carbon paths already beginning to be explored and which show considerable and accelerating promise. Given this alternative strategy shows every chance of furthering several good outcomes (decarbonising, local jobs, regional jobs, potential for Britain to rejoin global leadership in related areas of tech ...).

Add that for many of us there is a big suspicion that the present government are too fond of  doing things that work well for informally influential friends and moneyed interests but are not necessarily helpful to the welfare of the wider population and for which our grandchildren will curse us heartily, and you have a recipe for a much less happy nation and huge costs in the short to medium term and stacking up exponentially as climate change accelerates.

See some further views here.
You might also 'enjoy' this news piece:

A silver lining in the dark clouds of oil price rises

In the longer term oil prices have to rise and there's no getting away from that long term trend. Sometime, somehow, people are going to be paying more both for the raw material and for the on-costs it imposes. We have to face this fact and the answer is not to ask for tax breaks to try to keep business as usual, but to begin to plan to reduce oil consumption and invest in post-oil technologies. In this view there is an interesting note to be made about behaviours already changing. in this article (which is in the form of an open letter to the King of Saudi Arabia): Majesty, We Have Gone Mad. George reminds us. "the high price of oil is currently the only factor implementing British government policy. The government claims that it is seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, by encouraging people to use less fossil fuel. Now, for the first time in years, its wish has come true: people are driving and flying less. The AA reports that about a fifth of drivers are now buying less fuel(8). A new study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature shows that businesses are encouraging their executives to use video conferences instead of flying(9). One of the most fuel-intensive industries of all, business-only air travel, has collapsed altogether" (~There's a reference cited in the article).

The issue is how to help people in the shorter and medium terms to adjust and to make the structural change as just as possible. The problem with that is that most people just want things like they were and don't want to have to face the reality. Heck, I don't want to (and I don't have a car, but I do travel by bus and train and my food is still hauled from place to place), but I do have to recognise that the price will start to concentrate minds and force/encourage different mentalities and opportunities for business and livelihoods. The thing is to help those least willing and able to recognise that they can adjust, but that trying to hang on is a losing option. My worry is that it will be too little, too late and civilisation will revert to a new dark ages, collapsed under it's own greed and having eaten up its own foundations.

I do wonder how far the haulage industry has thought through their protests: in the short term I can't see there being a huge reduction in haulage because we are so committed to moving things around. It will take time for the new decisions to affect infrastructure and in the meantime we will have to pay the increase in prices. It's the medium term that is going to see the changes: as people grow their own and businesses source locally more. So the solution will have to be to invest in training and building capacity to respond. How we do that latter is the real and important political decision here. Now, there is also an issue about competition with other EU hauliers, and perhaps that does need addressing, but let's not miss the point here: this is the leading edge of structural change in the economy which peak oil is (or will shortly) bring. Whether this is the leading edge of peak oil is still debateable, but at the least it is a harbinger.

The end of the world as we know it

As befits heading into a season characterised by reflection on death [Hallowe'en and Rememberance day gone and Advent to come],
I've been doing some very sobering reading lately which pretty much makes a lot of talk about emerging church, postmodernity, human interaction with technoogy etc etc look like arranging deckchairs on the Titanic or whistling in the dark at best. I knew that we were running out of oil. What I hadn't yet grasped was the implications of that. I had forgotten or failed to factor into my thinking just how much of what we routinely do is powered by oil: our agriculture relies on fertilisers and pesticides mmade from ... oil; our food is transproted huge distances by ... oil; much of what we by is made from plastics in whole or in part and plastics are mostly made from ...oil. Our constructions and even manufacture of energy alternatives is dependent on oil. Oil is woven into our lives in countless ways some signiificant, some trivial, alll eating away at a non-renewable resource whose production has just peaked or is about to. To catch a sense of where my sobering has come from read this:
"Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the 'crash' that many fear -- a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the 'soft landing' that many people hope for - a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. Joseph A. Tainter"

I am contemplating how our preaching and worship can give a greater sense of urgency about the voluntary change alluded to above and to the removal of consumerism from our day to day thinking. One of the things that impressed me about the Nine O'Clock Service was the utter seriousness about this issue. And in all the developments in Alternative Worship and emerging church since then, we have not really recovered that strand -and it's about time we did.

Then there is the urgency of developing ways to commend and make possible the peace transitions that will be required. How can we create the preconditions and conditions for justice and peace for aocieoties where scarcity and the consequent heavy temptations to bullying violence are in the ascendant? Is peacemaking practical politics in a world of scarce energy?