Carbon Brief: Lord Lawson's shale gas boosterism

Lord Lawson, chair of climate skeptic thinktank the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), has come out for fracking in the Sun today. No surprises there, perhaps. His endorsement comes days after eccentric London Mayor, Boris Johnson, encouraged the government to leave "no stone... unfracked", including fracking the capital .

The Chancellor, George Osborne is a shale enthusiast, and must be thrilled all these Tory grandees are coming out to support his favourite energy source. But is the shale gas boosterism justified?

The British Geological Survey (BGS) released an updated estimate of the UK's shale resources a few weeks ago, putting the figure at a whopping 1300 trillion cubic feet.

Those are big numbers, so the media often tries to condense them - telling us how many years that amount of gas could power the UK for, or how much that is compared to other countries.

Lawson does the same, but his numbers don't seem to match up with what we currently know about the UK's shale reserves.  MORE