Shale gas incompatible with UK carbon commitments – HoC talk

Dec. 2013 Shale gas: a golden age or a gilded cage?  House of Commons

Presentation to the “all party group for unconventional oil and gas” chaired by Dan Byles MP and with speakers David Kennedy, Chief Executive of the Committee on Climate Change and Professor Neil Hirst, Senior Policy Fellow at the Grantham Institute. The presentation demonstrated how the maths and science around the UK’s repeated international commitment to make its fair contribution to avoiding a 2°C rise in global temperature left no emission space for a new fossil fuel industry. No amount of careful regulation, monitoring, or even the introduction of carbon capture and storage, can reconcile shale gas with avoiding dangerous climate change; from a UK, or indeed EU, basis, the two are simply incompatible.