I wanted to explain why I'd not been attending to some of the detailed debate of the shale gas threads. The most important reason was what you've dubbed my 'energy policy epiphany'. I also explicitly said in the first post that I wanted to deal with the following:

What it means to be on this blog. How trolls are identified. And, rather more concretely, how the shale gas debate is changing the ground rules of the national debate. I intend if I have the chance to come to all that.

I thought your question about the difference between climate science and energy was good and fair. But follow-ups could easily lead us into tens or fifties of comments that don't fall into the above. So this isn't the thread for them.

I'm not afraid to chart a somewhat solitary course in BH Discussions from time to time. I don't think the number of different names or nyms on the scorecard correlates strongly with quality in all cases. It's a more subtle relationship than that. But I would welcome feedback, especially on the video where Thomas Sowell comments on Obama's 2012 State of the Union address, which had such a deep impact on me in April.

He has very little power over the economy or the legislature and everyone understands that.

Everyone? Irrelevant to the point I was making. This isn't someone 'keeping me company'.

Talk among yourself, 1001. You are refuting something I never said or thought.

OK, let's do a couple of spinoff discussions from this one. Three days ago I wrote this:

Everyone on this blog, including lurkers, taken over the last five years, say, is a really interesting set of people. But uniform in their opinions they ain't. Or in their interests.

I then checked to see exactly when Caspar and the Jesus paper was first posted. August 2008. It's surely right to celebrate Five glorious years. See you there. The Implications of UK shale can wait.

There was another important link between the two levels in my mind

1. 'everyone on this blog' and trolls
2. the shale gas debate

and that was misdirection. Trolls exist to take important blog discussions off course. And I'm sure the same goes in the vital energy debate that the UK and the whole of Europe is now involved in. For me the Balcombe protest was always a deliberate red-herring. Thanks to Christopher Booker and Richard North we are now wising up.

The great Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke said something oft quoted about evil and how it triumphs. But he also said this:

There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.

We would do well to take on both of Burke's insights, both in blog and real world.

I got a superb answer from Richard North after a heated four-day debate with Dung over this:

Alex Cull's link answers all our questions and would appear to leave our shale gas plans dead in the water.

As it happens Richard agrees with me that there is everything to play for. What are the wider lessons of further time-wasting attempts to demoralise Bishop Hill readers? That not everyone on this blog is as worthy to speak for everyone on this blog or at least be taken seriously by everyone on this blog? I'll leave all that to the attentive reader.

It was the next day that Dung said you are once again inserting your views on pseudonyms into threads on the topic pages. That was in fact a debate he had started on a main thread on Aug 20 which lasted through to Aug 22. I hadn't said a peep on the subject since that point. A strange sequence for others to ponder. I'm now off for my promised autumnal hibernation. Have fun, everyone still on this blog :)