On October 16, 2009, the Houston Chronicle ran an Outlook piece by Dr. Ronald Sass— a fellow in global climate change at the Baker Institute and Professor of Natural Sciences emeritus at Rice University–complaining that Texas governor Rick Perry was getting his ideas about climate change from unreliable sources. Apparently, that Governor Perry is not hopping on the climate alarmism/policy activism bandwagon has Dr. Sass a bit concerned. Make no mistake about a political agenda of the giver of this advice that goes far beyond natural science issues.

Dr. Sass argues that the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be the end all and be all of the physical science debate. But he is behind the times. The IPCC report is several years old, and the latest theory and empirical data is pointing in more benign directions than at the height of the climate alarm in the late 1990s.…

Editor’s note:  This article is the second of two on shale gas production.  The first dealt with the U.S. situation; this one looks at the potential impacts of shale gas production in Europe and China.

Natural gas production in Europe, currently just over 11 Tcf, has been falling rapidly over the past decade.   About three fourths of Europe’s gas is produced in just three countries: the UK, Norway and the Netherlands.  Production peaked in 2003 at 13.5 tcf.

Consumption, on the other hand, continues to rise.  Gas use in Europe stood at 20.5 tcf in 2008 and is likely to increase further as coal-fired power plants retire or are phased out of service for environmental reasons.  Most of Europe’s imported gas comes from Russia (about 80%), with the remainder mostly as LNG.…

Last weekend, Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) co-authored an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation).”

Kerry and Graham want to pass a Senate companion bill to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as Waxman-Markey, for its chief sponsors, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA). Waxman-Markey narrowly passed in the House by a vote of 219 to 212. Only eight Republicans — under 5% of those voting — supported the bill.

Republican Opportunity

The overtly partisan character of Waxman-Markey is one of the reasons some observers conclude that Congress will not pass a cap-and-trade bill this year. Cap-and-trade “works” by raising consumer energy prices, and Democrats are loathe to increase household utility bills and pain at the pump unless they can snooker Republicans into giving them bipartisan cover.…

Editor’s note: This article is the first of two posts on shale gas production and concerns the U.S. situation. The second will look at the potential impacts of shale gas production in Europe and China. While some have interpreted shale gas in terms of coal displacement in power generation, this new competition has profound (negative) implications for the viability of politically favored renewables in power generation.

Shale gas formations have been known for many years. But only in the 1990s did an understanding of hydraulic fracturing technology make production of gas from such formations feasible technically. And it was not until the middle of this decade, with U.S. domestic gas prices consistently above $10/mmbtu, that shale moved from an interesting future resource to a major current reserve.

The U.S. Department of Energy now estimates that recoverable shale gas resources in the U.S.…