Shoulda gone fracking

Relying upon foreigners is, according to The Guardian, a bad idea:

There is another way to bolster energy security and independence: decarbonized and decentralized energy. Using local, renewable resources to power, heat and cool a community, with battery storage for backup, provides immediate relief from being precariously power plant-dependent or grid-dependent.

As Yvette Cooper is also saying, relying upon foreigners for essential items is a bad idea:

Global fertiliser supplies must be freed up within weeks to avoid disaster, with harvests suffering and food prices rising, the UK’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said.

The war in Iran has frozen shipments of fertiliser through the strait of Hormuz, creating a supply crunch that has already damaged farming in the UK, Europe and the US and is having its worst impacts in the developing world, where farmers cannot afford the higher prices now being charged.

“The world is sleepwalking into a global food crisis,” Cooper said. “We cannot risk tens of millions of people going hungry because one country has hijacked an international shipping lane.”

Well, OK. The major input into fertiliser is natural gas. Therefore we not just desire but must have - for those security and independence reasons - our own local, domestic, plentiful and cheap, supplies of natural gas.

Thus we shoulda gone fracking and, in order to gain security and independence for the future, must go fracking now.

After all, there’s not that much point in starving ourselves in order to beat climate change, is there?

Tim Worstall