"Environmentalist organizations will lobby hard against it [fracking - ed], citing all kinds of reasons for opposing it, but the main reason is the political one that it does not require changes in our behaviour, or the requirement to live more simply...
...The energy problem has been solved, and someone should at some stage tell this to governments so that their behaviour might change."
Madsen Pirie at the Adam Smith Institute (emphasis added). Robert Bryce has a longer and better article on coal at the Manhatten Institute's City Journal.
The radius of Pirie's point must be further described: the continuing use of fossil fuels over the next century or two does not, of itself, demand that no changes - no improvements - be made to the efficiency of electricity production and transmission or even consumption patterns; the point does not reach that far in its implications.
What Madsen Pirie ought to have added is that an abundance of cheap energy is the light under which all pretense for State enforced behaviour changes can be exposed; the futility of enforced carbon dioxide reductions, the uncertain nature of climate change and, above all else, the insistence that State aggression is morally wrong - all these are panels with which to reflect that light back upon the Left's miserable little green emperor.
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