The Guardian: James Lovelock - The UK should be going mad for fracking
Scientist James Lovelock is the man behind Gaia theory and once predicted doom for our climate. In an interview with The Guardian, he discusses why fracking is the future.
Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it: the amount of CO2 produced by burning gas in a good turbine gives you 60% efficiency. In a coal-fired power station, it is 30% per unit of fuel. So you get a two-to-one gain there straight away. The next two-to-one gain you get is that methane has only got half its energy in the carbon, the other half is in the hydrogen, so there's a four-to-one gain in CO2 output from the same amount of electricity by burning methane. Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it. The fear of nuclear is now too great after Fukushima and the cost of building new build plants is very expensive and impractical. And it takes a long time to get them running. It is very obvious in America that fracking took almost no time at all to get going. It happened without any debate whatsoever. Suddenly you found there was this abundant fuel source. There's only a finite amount of it [in the UK] so before it runs out we should really be thinking sensibly about what to do next. We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price. Hydro, biomass, solar, etc, have all got great promise, but they're not available tomorrow, or even in 10 years.