At the final Beesley lecture of this year’s series, on reducing the costs of lowering carbon emissions, an old chestnut of an economic argument was raised, to the effect that UK shale gas production, even if it starts to happen in the relatively near future, “will not affect UK prices for many years to come because it will not be marginal supply for a long time yet.”
The context here is an interesting one: the main thesis of the lecture was that current policies of providing subsidies to favoured technologies had foreclosing or excluding effect on alternative approaches to decarbonisation, and that part of the exclusionary effect occurred by way of attempts to prevent the development of lines of analysis and reasoning that threatened the privileged policy narratives.