How the Kremlin must be howling with laughter now green zealots have sabotaged our fracking bonanza
WHO do you think will be most delighted by news that the UK’s commissioner for shale gas has quit in dismay at the Government’s craven surrender to lobbying by so- called environmentalists? Vladimir Putin, that’s who.
It might seem odd that the regime that unleashed biological and plutoniumbased weapons of contamination in Salisbury and London should be in league with environmentalist campaigners against shale gas ‘fracking’ in the UK. But it’s not odd at all.
Russia’s economy relies upon Europe remaining dependent on the vast Siberian gasfields for its energy. The prospect of the UK becoming self- sufficient in gas, and even an exporter ourselves by exploiting the colossal reserves revealed by the British Geological Survey, is deeply unwanted competition for Moscow.
That’s why the English-language TV station RT, funded entirely by the Kremlin, has engaged in ludicrous scaremongering about the consequences of gas ‘fracking’ in the UK.
For example, Max Keiser, who presents the Keiser Report for RT, claimed that ‘frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles’ because fracking ‘is giving British children cancer’.
According to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former secretary general of Nato: ‘Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with environmental organisations working against shale gas, to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.’
Wasted
The ‘shale gas gives you cancer’ tactic has been shamelessly employed in this country by Friends Of The Earth. It had been handing out leaflets promoting the idea that ‘silica’ — that is, sand — injected at high pressure into shale rocks to force out gas from thousands of feet below ground, would cause cancer.
Following complaints, the Advertising Standards Authority, after a 14-month investigation, told Friends Of The Earth it should stop promoting this terrifying untruth. Remarkably, a Friends Of The Earth spokeswoman, while saying it had withdrawn the leaflets, still told the BBC and Channel 4 News that the organisation ‘stands by everything it says’.
One of those who complained at these scare tactics was a Lancashire vicar, the Rev Michael Roberts: his parish is in one of the areas that the exploration firm Cuadrilla regards as highly prospective.
Not only were his parishioners being unscrupulously terrorised, but this was an area of high unemployment desperate for the return of some industry.
As the shale gas commissioner, Natascha Engel, pointed out in her resignation statement: ‘A perfectly viable industry is being wasted because of a Government policy driven by environmental lobbying, rather than science, evidence and a desire to see UK industry flourish.’
The specific issue vexing Ms Engel is that the Government is refusing to relax a rule that if the fracking caused an Earth tremor of over 0.5 on the Richter scale, then site operations should cease for 18 hours.
This makes the exploration process untenable. And, as Engel points out, a tremor of 0.5 on the Richter scale would scarcely be felt by humans.
The limit was not based on scientific advice: geo- scientists had told the Government that a limit of 1.5 would be absolutely safe as the maximum allowable tremor — which itself is less than the limits of between 2 and 4.5 in the United States, where shale gas has been produced in vast quantities with no casualties among the population.
Bear in mind that the Richter scale is logarithmic: so a 0.5 magnitude tremor is over 3,000 times smaller than one of magnitude 4. Thus, in February, 49 geo- scientists signed a letter to The Times pointing out that the 0.5 limit was not just ‘ so low as to threaten the potential development of a shale gas industry in the UK’, but that ‘this is far below the levels set for comparable industries in the UK, such as quarrying, mining and deep geothermal energy’.
I can vouch for that. Within a couple of miles of my Sussex home lies the country’s largest reserve of calcium sulphate, otherwise known as gypsum, used to make plasterboard. The miners, who run a 24-hour operation, conduct controlled explosions 300ft or so below the surface.
I’ve never come across a local who is bothered about this.
But for a gas exploration company, such practices would be illegal — and we’d have Extinction Rebellion, Dame Emma Thompson and all, demonstrating on our doorstep if it weren’t.
Thwart
Yes, because gas — being a fossil fuel — is now deemed unmentionable in polite company. Yet while gas-burning emits CO2, it does so at less than half the amount, per unit of energy, as coal.
Thus the U. S. shale gas boom, by displacing coal, has resulted in that great country now recording its lowest CO2 emissions since 1985: and its switch from coal to shale gas has been vastly more effective in cutting emissions than anything achieved by the use of wind or solar power.
That is not good enough for the politicians now trying to suck up to schoolchildren who apparently believe that unless the UK goes ‘zero carbon by 2025’, they will never grow up to have children of their own.
Thus Jeremy Corbyn yesterday said the UK should declare a state of ‘climate emergency’. Yet he — and the Government — said nothing when Cumbria County Council last month gave the go-ahead for Britain’s first new deep coal mine in 30 years.
This makes it all the more idiotic that craven politicians thwart the creation of a new industry which could help transform our prospects for the better (and rule out any need to buy Russian gas).
They must be cackling in the Kremlin.