THE CARBON WAR

Give us moving pictures 159
I invite the investors in this room to imagine the situation if solar companies
were manufacturing and installing for $2 and selling on for $1. How long
could we stay in business? How long would you stay invested?
Yet somehow the rules of the junk-debt feast in the American shale allow
a different model. I wouldn’t call it a business model.
And it is a problem increasingly extending to oil operations outside the
US shale. The oil majors are piling on record debt, on their various mostly
unprofitable frontiers. They have hiked borrowing 60% in the first two months
of the year.
As for the environmental bad news, new figures for spills, leaks, and
ruptures across three states show that fracking operators ran up 2.5 violations
a day between 2009 and 2013. These breaches were hidden from the public.
It is often said that for fossil fuels to prosper, democracy and regulatory
oversight need to be put on the shelf. Nowhere is this clearer than with shale
and fracking.
London, 13 th March 2015
Tim Yeo, Conservative chair of the all-party House of Commons Energy and
Climate Change Committee, is stepping down today. A conference on UK
energy policy has been organised in his honour in Bloomberg’s London HQ.
Tim is a good man, a long-serving advocate of environmental action. He is
someone who fully appreciates the climate problem, and who is not scared of
telling his colleagues who don’t that they are wrong. Maybe this is why he has
been de-selected as a Conservative Member of Parliament.
But now he is telling his audience, in an opening speech, that the next
government should put shale oil and gas at the centre of its energy policy.
Opponents of fracking are misguided, he asserts.
I sit in the audience silently sighing. I honestly wonder if he could hold
that view were he to read the reports that I read every day. He clearly can’t be
seeing them. He would surely be wary of looking foolish if he were. “Misguided”
is a big word to use about people who hold a different view to yourself. Then
there is the risk of flogging a dead horse. This very day, aspiring UK shale driller
Celtique Energy has dropped its fracking plans in West Sussex. Restrictions
in the Infrastructure Bill are the reason for backing away from its proposed
sites at Fernhurst and Wisborough Green sites, it says. The threadbare list of
potential fracking sites compiled by the Guardian looks even thinner.