What would we do with our large revenues? It is not necessary to be Nostradamus to imagine. At least one government would use this free gift of Nature (give or take the costs of extraction) to increase the size and emoluments of the so-called public service, and also the generosity of welfare payments: increases that any subsequent government would find it difficult or impossible to reverse. It would take enormous courage to do so, and courage is not exactly the first characteristic that one thinks of in connection with the British political class. Thus any change wrought by the large revenues from shale gas would almost certainly be in the wrong direction and would serve only to put off the evil hour of reckoning.

As for industry, something rather similar would probably happen. Cheap energy would obviate, at least to a degree, the need to become more efficient; it could (and I think would) be used to maintain wages that would otherwise not be justified and to avoid the necessity for innovation and adjustment. It would allow cheap imports and thereby raise not just the standard of living without concomitant effort, but permanently raise expectations. If the cheap energy were exhausted, the supposedly "healthy" economy would very soon stand revealed as a painted corpse.

Pasteur famously said that chance favours only the mind prepared, that is to say a mind that is alert, knowledgeable and flexible enough to realise the importance of phenomena that it happens upon by chance. In the same way, one might say that gifts of Nature, in the form of resources, favour only an economy prepared. The United States still has an economy so prepared; the United Kingdom has not.

What is the difference? No doubt it is a question of degree rather than of type, but as Engels once remarked, degree, when it is marked enough, turns into type.