This is welcome news as it paves the way for a secure, domestic, low-cost solution to the thorny problem of replacing the UK’s obsolescent capacity to generate electricity, with a low-carbon footprint feedstock. Many of the deposits are in the North, which would benefit from the investment; but they are also present in the south. In order to make the most of the opportunity, new policy is in order.

In war, and we are in a war, when one side sees signs of weakness, it is time to act and exploit the vulnerabilities; go on the offensive. The weapons we have are social media, email, and our telephones. Here are some of the battles we could win if we join in the fight for American jobs, economic growth, and affordable energy.

When burning fossil fuels, all of it still remains here on earth where it has always been, we merely reorganize the elements into different compounds and relocate it to a different altitude, from below ground to the surface with a tiny portion of it winding up temporarily in the atmosphere until it gets sequestered yet again into more plants and animals, a cycle that shall repeat and renew.

I petition for the following action to be taken:

To immediately stop the closure of any Power Station

To update existing conventional fuel Power Stations including Coal.

Not to allow any Power Station to close unless a replacement is up and fully running

To be self sufficient in Power Generation within the next five years

I say let’s keep the old geezers warm right now, what the heck, they’ve been good to us, mostly, and lets provide inexpensive energy to the world, and thus encourage industry and agriculture to feed and clothe people, and let the grandkids deal with the dang future. That’s what our own grandparents did. They didn’t dick around trying to figure out the problems that we would face today. They faced the problems of their day.

Remember, it is the Obama Administration, under pressure from environmentalists and the likes of Rep. Markey, which is preventing US consumers from benefitting from an “increase in wealth transfer and export revenues.” The economic benefits, as proven by the latest study, far outweigh the potential for higher energy prices. It is time to allow the shale gas revolution to reshape the global energy market.

The bottom line is that, contrary to the peak oil fantasists, fossil fuels are going to become more available, not less.

After years when our energy policy was being dictated by green wishful thinking, by the likes of Lord Deben and by state-subsidised pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth (which first invented, then helped to draft, the Climate Change Act), reality is at long last breaking in. The green make-believe that has cast such a malign spell over our country for far too long is finally on the run. Truly, last week was history being made.

George Osborne will promise to make Britain an “even more attractive place” for the oil and gas industry in a blow to Liberal Democrat ambitions to shift away from fossil fuels.

The Chancellor will today praise “remarkable” oil and gas companies for making the most “significant contribution” to the UK economy in the energy sector. Mr Osborne will say gas is crucial to meet the UK’s electricity demand throughout the next decade and beyond.

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil - the decline of global supplies - is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.

For the Conservatives, there is a political bonanza to be had from this moment. Dismay about wind farms has been particularly acute among the party’s grassroots. It is no surprise that Ukip is making the most of its opposition to turbines. Switching off subsidies for wind farms puts clear blue water between the Tories and the Lib Dems. And if played right, it could put Mr Cameron on the side of a global energy revolution that promises to keep the lights on, lower the cost to voters, and energise his electoral prospects when he most needs it.

If Harold Hamm is convinced the Bakken will give up 24 billion barrels, a play 80 times bigger like the Bazhenov would imply 1,920 billion barrels. That’s a preposterous figure, enough oil to satisfy all of current global demand for 64 years, or to do 5 million bpd for more than 1,000 years. Rosneft, says Clint, has already estimated 18 billion barrels on its Bazhenov acreage. Either way, it looks like they’ll still be working the Bazhenov long after Vladimir Putin has finally retired and the Peak Oil crowd realizes there’s more oil out there than we’ve ever imagined.

Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?

Next Wednesday a mass lobby of Parliament will take place as part of National Fair Fuel day. The TPA team will be there and we need your help to persuade the Government to cut Fuel Duty on petrol and diesel. We've previously revealed the excessive motoring taxes that drivers are facing across the UK and Wednesday is your chance to make your voice heard about the cost of motoring.

We’ve already got the digital revolution and the switch from consumption to savings after the GFC, not to mention the rise of China and India. Now we have the death of peak oil.

While we cripple ourselves in an expensive display of ideological superiority, nations such as China, India and Brazil are forging ahead. It does not have to be like this. We are a uniquely energy rich country with plentiful supplies of oil, gas and coal, as well as nuclear expertise.

We should be exploiting our resources to become richer, not submitting to green lunacy to make ourselves poorer.

I recently received a comprehensive wind power report from the UK. This report contains the real results of UK wind power facilities. It is very revealing. For example, it quotes, in detail, the significant number of days during the past year when the entire system produced essentially no output at all. What this tells one is that the entire installed wind capacity needs a backup consisting of some really reliable source like coal or nuclear.

What then is the point of large-scale wind power if one needs a second source in reserve? I am not aware of any place in the world where the installation of large-scale wind energy has actually resulted in the decommissioning of other significant power sources.

I’m not the first person to have noticed that wind farms only generate electricity when the wind is blowing. On a freezing day, when the country turns up its electric blanket, the ear hearkens to what Robert Bridges called “the stillness of the solemn air”. No wind. However many turbines bristle on Welsh mountain tops or pylons stride through the Great Glen, we’ll only be tickling the nose of our energy crisis. We’re missing those targets to reduce emissions by a country mile. Yet as the winter progresses, life for some of the poorest members of society will become more difficult because of it. Food and fuel are going up in price, fuel by more than it need do because of those wretched wind farms.

When the Confederation of British Industry and the big Trade Unions are in policy agreement, it amounts to reliable circumstantial evidence for taking the opposite view. For example, the employers' organisation and the TUC were both in favour of early British entry into the euro, a powerful establishment consensus which Gordon Brown was wise enough to thwart.

Even if only ten per cent turns out to be commercially recoverable this would still be enough to meet Britain’s gas supply needs for around 15 years. In time it may be enough to offset the rapid decline in gas from the North Sea, and to remove any need for imports.

The key justification for the subsidy as being necessary to protect the vulnerable by ensuring access to energy therefore wilts upon scrutiny.

What is important is that LPG has become an important driver of our economic lives and Government of Ghana must take bold and creative steps to ensure reliability and sufficiency of supply through the creation of an enabling environment for more investment in output.

Shale gas is a get-out clause for people who want cheap and clean energy, but it doesn't include the lifestyle changes that hardcore environmentalists want us to make. This is a point that’s been made plenty of times before. But the environmentalist movement's ludicrous opposition to shale gas exploitation underlines its true aims. Many of them don’t really care about the environment, they care about pushing people around. What a shame that, for political expediency, they’re being allowed to.

Mr Huhne, who once described nuclear power as a ‘failed technology’, now says it is an essential part of getting Britain ‘off the oil hook’.

So there you have it. After the biggest and most expensive propaganda campaign in human history, leading to the biggest tax increase in human history, trying to stop “global warming” that isn’t happening anyway and won’t happen at anything like the predicted rate is the least cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money in human history, bar none – and that’s saying something.

The thing about gesture politics is that the politicians (that’s us) get to make the gestures and the proles (that’ll be you) get to get the bill. I think I’ll have another moat. Torquil, don’t you dare put that expenses claim form on the fire. Think of the carbon footprint!

The media suggests a nuclear catastrophe, a mega-meltdown, and that the apocalypse has already begun. It is almost as if the 10,000 deaths in Japan were actually victims of nuclear energy, and not the earthquake or the tsunami. Here again one has to remind us that Fukushima was first hit by an unimaginable 9.0 earthquake and then by a massive 10-meter wave of water just an hour later. As a result, the facility no longer found itself in a highly technological area, but surrounded by a desert of rubble. All around the power plant the infrastructure, residential areas, traffic routes, energy and communication networks are simply no longer there. They were wiped out. Yet, after an entire week, the apocalypse still has not come to pass. Only relatively small amounts of radioactive materials have leaked out and have had only a local impact. If one considers the pure facts exclusively, i.e. only the things we really know, then it exposes the unfounded interpretations of scientific illiterates in the media. One can only arrive to one conclusion: This sorrowful state will remain so.

Whoever are pulling the poltical strings behind the scenes are playing a dangerous game. Do they want to recreate some sort of feudal society in which only a few are left at the top to run everything? That strategy will destroy western civilization. The comforts of life will go away. It takes a complex structure to educate a population, maintain services, and innovate. Great innovations are not planned by a centralized authority. Ideas pop up in a chaotic process. It takes a fertile society for innovation to be successful. Centralized command and control governments don't allow innovation to occur efficiently. The control stifles the creativity. Creativity requires freedom of thought, which challenges the controlling authority.

Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called "the Earth," all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.

People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

In a future world you bathe when the state dictates and you use your appliances when the state says you can, you watch the TV when the state says you can, its all about who is the field hand and who is the boss man, who has the whip and who has the flayed back. The steady implacable progress to a totalitarian bully boy state, the regime believes that this is our future, a post democratic future, a modern future brave new world. Democracy degenerating before our eyes and we are unable or unwilling to wake up and smell the coffee. Little by little the state takes over and dictates the actions of the people for its own good you see. Little by little the rules and laws get pettier and the punishments get stronger, the regimes powers grow alongside its arrogance and confidence as the power and confidence of the people ever weaker and as the people become to rely on the state more and more the state becomes ever more arrogant, dictatorial and bullying in nature and demeanour.

In a truly free market, entrepreneurs make profits by directing resources from lower valued to higher valued uses - as ultimately determined by consumers. The "clean energy economy" of which Ritter speaks assumes government knows what kinds of energy we should be using. It cannot have such knowledge. Only the free market can say.

Idle machines are hummimg back to life. The country has set up a 3 shift pattern that will role 24/7 as long as the wind blows - no business would risk wasting one second of power-time, as they call it. Some of the old folks remember how it used to be, with shops and factories closing at 5. Now you can go to the bank, have a haircut or get your groceries at 2am on a Sunday. In fact, to avoid confusion they did away with week days. There are just months and day numbers. There are still some people who can calculate what day of the week it is - or would have been - today. But they are considered troublemakers who hanker over the past.

Dow Jones reports on a startling U-turn by Britain’s ultra-green government has caught investors off guard and shock waves across the markets will likely precipitate the further rush from green energy projects to shale gas.

Supplies of natural gas could last more than 250 years if Asian and European economies follow the U.S. unconventional reserves, the IEA said.

Indeed, in so far as there is an energy security problem in this country, it stems entirely from the Government’s obsession of ensuring by means of massive subsidies, combined with growing penalties and restrictions on the use of gas, that we become heavily dependent on wind power. That government-imposed insecurity has three dimensions. First, there is the inherently unreliable nature of wind, which sometimes blows and sometimes does not. Secondly, there is the question of whether it is practically possible to build and install wind turbines on the scale required to meet our energy needs, leaving aside the huge economic and environmental costs of doing so. Thirdly, there is the fact that an indispensable component of wind turbines is neodymium, a rare mineral, which is mined and refined—in a highly polluting way, incidentally—only in China, so we are dependent completely on China.

The authoritative International Energy Agency does not foresee any substantial scarcity of oil and gas in the near to medium future, and coal reserves remain sufficient for centuries to come. As to global warming, the absence of a statistically significant increase in average worldwide temperatures since 1995 obliterates that assertion.

Meanwhile, recent peer-reviewed studies indicate that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere (natural or man-made) have minimal effects on climate change - while others demonstrate that, on balance, this plant-fertilizing gas is beneficial, rather than harmful, for mankind and the biosphere.

All this argues for a closer look at the cost/benefit relationship of investing in renewable energy projects, to prevent a massive waste of financial and natural resources on unreliable and thus uncompetitive forms of energy. Since every cloud has a silver lining, the ongoing economic crisis might give extra impetus toward that end.

If mountaintop removal to extract high quality coal at reduced risk to miners is unacceptable and unsustainable – how is it eco-friendly and sustainable to clear-cut mountain vistas for wind turbines? Blanket thousands of square miles with habitat-suffocating solar panels? Or remove mountains of rock to mine low-grade rare earth mineral deposits for solar panel films, hybrid batteries and turbine magnets?

Wind farms are nonsense on stilts -- quite literally on stilts, now I come to think of it. They cost a fortune to put up, they deliver an intermittent and unpredictable trickle of electricity in return. The little power they produce is expensive, they are turned off if the wind is too strong -- or if their output is surplus to requirements, as is happening at night. Then we have to pay for expensive conventional back-up, constantly fired-up and ready to go when the wind drops. And we need a cool £10 billion of new investment in the Grid to cope with this new world of distributed and intermittent generation.

The free-market vision stresses that these impoverished people should not be subject to energy rationing by government. Solar panels and industrial wind turbines can only generate a fraction of the energy produced by diesel generators or a conventional power plant—and are much less reliable. Energy brawn is needed, not inferior but politically correct energies that appeal to energy planners.