If the movie was produced today that one word might very well be two words, shale energy. Shale gas and could solve this country’s energy problems.  And what makes it even more valuable is that there is an ample supply of it in the United States (if our president would let us mine it).

Recent technology breakthroughs have made shale gas extraction cheap, and clean.

It had long been assumed that natural gas could only be extracted when, like oil, it had accumulated in underground reservoirs. But a far greater quantity of gas from organic residues is trapped in the rock itself, and the technology has now been developed to extract it by pumping in water mixed with salt and other chemicals at very high pressure. The advantages are enormous. Not only is it a remarkably cheap source of energy, but since most of the process takes place underground, its “environmental footprint” is minimal – far less than that of oil wells or open-cast coal mines, let alone those useless windfarms.

So miraculous is the potential of shale gas to change the world that several countries, led by the US and China, are already piling in to exploit it on a huge scale. And an admirable introduction to this energy revolution by Matt Ridley has just been published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, available online under the title The Shale Gas Shock, with a delightful foreword by the world-famous physicist (and “climate sceptic”) Freeman Dyson.

Ridley lucidly explains how and why shale gas is transforming the world’s energy prospects, and reviews the various objections which have been raised to it by environmentalists, to whom it is anathema. They hate it to the point of hysteria because it offers the prospect of a cheap and abundant fossil-fuel that could keep industrial civilisation going for hundreds of years, and is also, according to their prejudices, environmentally friendly, because its CO2 emissions are much less than those of coal or oil.

There are also major supplies of shale gas in Europe and in Israel. Yet in both the EU and United States, environmentalists have the upper hand and are preventing shale oil exploration.

One of the first actions the Obama team took when it assumed office in was to direct Secretary of the Interior Salazar to cancel 77 shale oil and gas leases in Utah. The next year they canceled 61 onshore leases in Montana. TheGreen River shale formation in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, has an estimated 800 billion barrels of oil, which is three times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. Federal law prohibits drilling for most of these resources. In the Bakken oil shale formation in the Dakotas, there are an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil.

In the Marcellus shale formation in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, there could be as much as 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the largest natural gas field in the world.

Number three in shale energy holdings is  Israel, they have developed technology to make shale oil drilling even cheaper and cleaner,  this will be used for Israel to extract its vast shale oil resources.

The British-based World Energy Council reported in November 2010 that Israel had oil shale from which it is possible to extract the equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil. Yet these numbers are currently undergoing a major revision internationally.

A new assessment was released late last year by Dr. Yuval Bartov, chief geologist for Israel Energy Initiatives, at the yearly symposium of the prestigious Colorado School of Mines. He presented data that our oil shale reserves are actually the equivalent of 250 billion barrels (that compares with 260 billion barrels in the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia).

Independent oil industry analysts have been carefully looking at the shale, and have not refuted these findings. As a consequence of these new estimates, we may emerge as the third largest deposit of oil shale, after the US and China.

Israeli scientists have found a way to produce shale energy, and water in the same process.

Yet new technologies, being developed for Israeli shale, seek to separate the oil from the shale rock 300 meters underground; these techniques actually produce water, rather than use it up.

The technology will be tested in a pilot project followed by a demonstration stage. It will be critical to demonstrate that the underground separation of oil from shale is environmentally sound before going to full-scale production. The present goal is to produce commercial quantities of shale oil by the end of the decade.

If the energy industry was allowed to fully exploit our shale reserves, not only would it bring down the price of Energy, create Jobs, help cut the federal deficit, and eliminate our dependence on foreign reserves.

Bringing down the price of energy and cutting our dependence on foreign reserves will also help the US in the war on terror as some of the money spent on OPEC oil gets transferred to the hand of terrorists in the Arab world.

Exploiting our shale reserves is a win-win for America, but sadly the President and his progressive friends are determined to turn America way from fossil fuels whether it makes sense or not, and that determination is more important to the progressives than the future well-being of the United States.

When considering that apparently unacceptable Request for transparency as to what NASA was thinking in agreeing to spend my money that way, our Notice and the alarmists’ reaction in the current “ClimateGate” context, also consider the following relevant excerpt from “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed” (pp. 104-104). That nice red cover would look great under the tree this year, even if what’s inside the cover is burning the retinas of the global warming industry right about now:

RealAlarmists

Putting a bow on this package of interwoven relationships and back-scratching in pursuit of the elites’ agenda (and largely at taxpayer expense) comes the leading alarmist webblog RealClimate.org. Seemingly established in 2004 to counter, of all things, Michael Crichton’s novel, State of Fear, RealClimate serves as the popular science media’s main touchstone for alarmist memes second only to Gore and his advisor Hansen – and we see here that this is really a distinction without a difference. This outlet is populated by none other than NASA’s resident alarmist mouthpiece – and official spokesman for Hansen’s GISS shop – Gavin Schmidt. Although RealClimate touts the unpaid nature of their writers’ work, the time-stamps on Schmidt’s often highly personal blog posts make quite clear that these actually come on the taxpayer dime, as well. Other RealClimate writers include “Hockey Stick” Mann and Hockey Stick-related Casper Amman.

It turns out that Realclimate.org is owned by an outfit that is in essence a non-profit public relations firm called Environmental Media Services (EMS), “dedicated to expanding media coverage of critical environmental and public health issues”, whose Pittsburgh office houses the RealClimate server.[1] ActivistCash.com describes EMS as “the communications arm of leftist public relations firm Fenton Communications.”[2]

EMA’s listed registrant, Betsy Ensley, engages in the objective, non-partisan pursuit of “manag[ing] BushGreenwatch.org, a joint EMS-MoveOn.org public awareness website”.[3] She also apparently ran WomenAgainstBush.org, and former Harvard string theorist (and still-hilarious climate blogger) Lubos Motl notes that when Ensley was campaigning against John Ashcroft her secretary was Kalee Kreider, now Al Gore’s spokesperson.[4] MoveOn is of course in part a George Soros venture, and attentive climate realists recall the kafuffle over Soros supporting Hansen’s alarmism.[5]

Motl describes EMS as “primarily an organization to pay for junk science about food and beverages, often hired by food companies to damage their competitors”.[6] This is known as “black marketing.”[7]

This is not inconsistent with my own experience with Fenton, which I first encountered nearly two decades ago. Then, they were representing a “green” lawn care products company in a legislative effort to craft new federal laws creating a secure place in a market otherwise dominated by those whose products attain prominence through competition. This is a modus operandi that will sound very familiar by the time you finish this book. Fenton has also been associated with every questionable campaign from chasing Alar off the shelves by leveraging weepy celebrities and fear tactics to promoting Mother Sheehan’s tour.[8]

As critics note, the idea that RealClimate is just a bunch of unpaid “real scientists” is risible, given their methods of argumentation are often little more than smear, ridicule, cherry- picking science, and pronouncing themselves and their exclusive little climate clique as only the few “qualified’ to have an opinion on man-made global warming. RealClimate’s members, like Andrew Dessler of Grist and writers for the Soros-backed Climate Progress, perpetrate a unique form of “qualification thuggery” by which anyone skeptical of their agenda are unworthy to comment, typically because they skeptic does not affiliate with the UN IPCC. When the skeptic is an IPCC author or reviewer, well he’s still unqualified. And “mere physicists” such as Freeman Dyson, or chemists, or economists, are also unqualified, but only when they disagree. After all, Dessler is a chemist, and the IPCC’s “chief scientist” is no such thing at all, as you’ll see.

Absent agreement, this unholy alliance of activists, Big Science and other vested interests responds so viciously to even the whiff of dissent that it is impossible to not wonder what it is they are afraid of.

[2] http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/110.

[3] http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=326603649

[4] Lobos Motl, “Bonus: Funding of RealClimate.org”, The Reference Frame”, April 7, 2008, http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/04/green-trolls-edit-wmo-bbc-reports.html.

[5] See, e.g., Noel Sheppard, “NASA’s Hansen Claims He’s Being ‘Swift-boated’ by Critics”, NewsBusters, September 28, 2007, http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/28/nasa-s-james-hansen-claims-he-s-being-swift-boated-critics.

[6] Motl, ”Bonus: Funding of RealClimate.org.”

[7] See discussion also at http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/110.

[8] See Horner, “Politically Incorrect Guide to global Warming and Environmentalism”, pp xv-xvi.