Perfect 
In a not-entirely-unpredicted move, the UK Government has announced that it is going to give the go-ahead for drilling to start in the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea.
In not-entirely-unpredicted counter-news, the Tories have complained about it being too little, too late, and the environmentalists are saying the decision will contribute further to the climate catastrophe.
In reality, it will neither solve the UK's energy security problem or bring down bills for domestic consumers, nor will it lead to further coastal erosion of the east coast of England or flooding of Southport on the west coast. In the global scheme of things there's only a few cubic litres of gas down there, the way energy is priced on the international market is effectively a cartel anyway, and wherever the gas people use comes from, people are going to use the gas anyway.
It's this last point which I want to talk about in order to explain why the decision to allow drilling isn't the disaster the environmentalists say it is, and how it could have the potential to be beneficial, environmentally.
The Energy Mix
In terms of the main sources of where we get our energy from - gas, nuclear, wind, bio, and solar - the latter four are pretty much fixed in terms of what they can deliver; the nuclear reactors sit there and react, the wind blows, the compost rots, and the sun shines. We cannot spin up a new reactor when we need more electricity, we can't make the wind blow any harder (in fact when the wind is blowing too hard we have to turn the wind generation off), and we can't make the sun shine any brighter. In a very real sense, we take what we're given from these sources and be grateful.
It's not entirely unknown for there to be occasions when the sun and the wind are just right in late summer and early autumn that we can generate our electricity solely from our low carbon and renewable sources, and indeed generate more electricity than we actually need - when this happens, we export it through the France and Norway interconnectors. For the most part, though, these sources are not meeting all the need, and that energy needs to come from somewhere else.
Bridging the Energy Gap
There are two sources for bridging the energy gap when this happens - we import the shortfall in electricity from the various interconnectors which are part of the global energy grid, and we use gas, whether we're using that gas to heat our homes or using it to generate more electricity, whether we're using our own gas or whether we're using Norway's gas.
Gas is bad, but not as bad as it's made out
But here's the, shall we say, beauty of gas; unlike our low carbon and renewable forms of energy, gas can literally be turned off and on by the tap at the drop of a hat - we can store it, and we can increase or decrease extraction when stored stocks are running low or almost replenished. So with gas we can easily balance our shortfall of other energy generation in real time (and the people managing the gas and energy grids literally do balance it in real time, and it's paid for at the wholesale end similarly in real time), opening and closing the taps as demand rises and falls compared with the other sources of generation.
In an ideal world, we would have enough low carbon and renewable generation capacity not only to generate our electricity but to heat our homes, and we'd always be able to either sell any surplus electricity abroad through the interconnectors, or if everybody is experiencing surplus, brake the wind turbines and put covers over the solar panels.
But we are not in that ideal world; for the foreseeable future, we are going to need the convenience of gas for our overall heating and our electricity, and it surely makes sense to use our own gas rather than buying Norway's gas, even if due to how the North Sea licences were dished out in the 1980s that means our taxpayer is not benefiting from it now the way Norway's taxpayers are continuing to benefit.
In a world slightly more ideal than the one we live in, but still not completely ideal, the profits from increased gas production from the Jackdaw field could at least be invested in increased future production of renewables, rather than that investment having to come from the Education budget or the Defence budget.
What would you do?
If you're interested at playing the role of the Energy Secretary or Grid Manager, I've made a fun interactive tool - The Energytron - which lets you see what happens if you increase nuclear generation, or see how many more solar farms you'll need to reduce gas.