There’s so much good news coming out on the energy front at the moment that it’s hard to keep up. (Thanks for the first few to the Global Warming Policy Foundation which is really on fire at the moment)

Here’s a story from Forbes about attempts by scientists to tap into methane hydrate, perhaps the most powerful and abundant energy source on the planet:

They’ve done it in a laboratory: Scientists have injected carbon dioxide into the kind of  methane ice that underlies vast tracts of permafrost in the Arctic and lurks beneath the deep seafloor throughout the world.

In that experiment, the carbon dioxide exchanged with the methane molecules. While the CO2 was sequestered inside the ice, the scientists extracted an energy source that may exist in nature in greater volume than all other fossil fuels combined.

Here’s a report on China’s attempts to do likewise, by building an undersea base.

Located in east China’s coastal city of Qingdao, the base will cost 495 million yuan (76.2 million U.S. dollars) and will be a multi-functional institution that will aid China in its study and exploration of the ocean, according to Liu.

Scientists believe that the area’s seabeds hold abundant deposits of rare metals and methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas that may serve as a new source of energy.

Here’s a sensible, measured piece at Reason from my friend John Stossel on the currently more realisable dream energy solution, shale gas:

Frankly, I’m skeptical of all of them: lefty moviemakers who smear companies, companies with economic interests at stake, and the regulators, who are often cozy with industry and lack essential knowledge. The surest environmental protectors are property rights—and courts that assign liability to polluters.

But hydraulic fracturing is a wonderful thing. It’s not new. Companies have done it for 60 years, but now they’ve found ways to get even more gas out of the ground. That’s the reason gas is getting cheaper and panicky politicians no longer rant about America “running out of fuel.”

Natural gas is not risk-free, but no energy source is. Perfect is not one of the choices.

Here’s some good news for the Poles, who have massive shale gas deposits which they’re dying to exploit (not least so that they no longer need be exposed to economic blackmail from Russia) but which the EU is doing its damnedest to prevent because of its ideologically-driven campaign to impose  “renewables” at all costs on its various vassal states.

WARSAW — US President Barack Obama will focus on energy cooperation, including shale gas development, when he visits NATO partner Poland for the first time next week, a US diplomat said Wednesday in Warsaw.

“Energy is a pillar of Polish-American relations and it is sure to be the subject of discussions when President Obama visits Warsaw next week,” US ambassador Lee Feinstein told delegates to a shale gas conference here.

Global fuel giants are exploring Poland’s shale gas deposits, which a recent US study pegged as having a potential 5.3 trillion cubic metres of natural gas which could last Poland some 300 years.

The US has become a global leader in the production of natural gas extracted from shale, boosting its energy security, driving down prices and making it an exporter.

Poland hopes it could reap similar benefits. However, experts insist that with exploration in the very early stages, it is too soon to gauge commercial viability.

Ex-communist Poland covers 30 percent of its gas needs from domestic resources.

“The issue of shale gas has become an important element of Polish-American relations, strengthening the extra-military importance of the United States for Poland’s security,” Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told the conference.

Here’s some fantastic news from Canada: (H/T WUWT)

OTTAWA — Conservatives have kiboshed a carbon tax, Environment Minister Peter Kent confirmed Thursday.

“It’s off the table,” he told reporters Thursday after accepting an award from World Wildlife Fund International on behalf of Parks Canada.

“There’s no expectation of cap-and-trade continentally in the near or medium future.”

In 2008, the Conservatives floated a North America-wide cap-and-trade system trial balloon soon after U.S. President Barack Obama was elected.

But during the election campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned the carbon-tax scheme proposed in the New Democrat platform would spike gas prices.

Nixing cap-and-trade will likely be a sore point for the NDP caucus, but Kent said he’d ignore any sabre-rattling from opposition benches.

“It’s off the table,” he told reporters Thursday after accepting an award from World Wildlife Fund International on behalf of Parks Canada.

“There’s no expectation of cap-and-trade continentally in the near or medium future.”

In 2008, the Conservatives floated a North America-wide cap-and-trade system trial balloon soon after U.S. President Barack Obama was elected.

And here’s a piece of news so glorious it almost makes me want to cry: at least one tiny corner of the planet has seen sense and begun dismantling one of the most loathsome blights on the landscape human folly has yet devised.

Mark Duchamp writes in with this news from the Lerida, Autonomous Community (state) of Catalonia, Spain:

A judge ordered the removal of 45 wind turbines on the grounds that planning laws were violated. There was no “general municipal plan” establishing a “reserva del suelo” – i.e. the land was not legally declared appropriate for the erection of wind turbines.

But let me put all this in context. Why is it exciting? Why should we care? Because it confounds one of the key tenets of the Green Religion which, unfortunately, has so come to dominate global political thinking in the last three decades: that there is such a thing as “Peak Energy” and that we owe it to future generations to preserve “scarce resources” by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and migrating to renewables.

This, in essence, is the subject of my new book Watermelons. If you want to understand the real reason why Anthropogenic Global Warming theory prompted the biggest and most expensive outbreak of mass hysteria in history you must look beyond the science and examine the psychopathology of the environmental movement’s key thinkers. Whether it’s Rachel Carson or Paul Ehrlich or Aurelio Peccei (of the Club of Rome) or John Holdren or Zac Goldsmith’s uncle Ted or Jonathan Porritt or George Monbiot or even Al Gore and the Prince of Wales, each one of them cleaves to the same neo-Malthusian philosophy: that there simply aren’t enough resources to fuel and feed Mother Gaia’s burgeoning population and that therefore the only solution is to reduce population while simultaneously killing off the hateful economic growth which uses up all those “scarce resources.”

To the doom-mongers who hold this view, news first of the shale gas revolution and now of the methane hydrate revolution is like a slap in the face with a wet kipper. They hate it because it denies them the excuse they so badly need if they are to succeed in imposing on an unconvinced world their glorious New World Order in which an enlightened elite of experts (ie people like them) taxes, regulates and generally bosses around the rest of us in the name of “planetary responsibility.”

First Shale Gas; now Methane Hydrate. Sounds very much to me like there IS a God. And that He really doesn’t think much of those who engage in Gaia Worship.