Res Publica Simon Carr
Charities and climate campaigners have taken over from Labour and the unions in teaching people how to define who they are
‘Fracking causes cancer: fact!’
And not only cancer – lung disease, increased risk of heart disease, heart attacks, strokes and premature mortality.
Is that a fact? Is it true? Does fracking really cause cancer? How would we know?
The computer says yes, fracking does cause these things – and also no, that fracking doesn’t. The internet contains multitudes.
The Natural Resources Defense Council produced the above list of maladies. Forbes magazine counters (with examples) that this organisation uses junk science to scare the public and attack business.
The Colorado School of Public Health claims fracking causes low birth weights. Its report adds to the protest case and caused New York to ban the practice. The claims were rejected by the Colorado Department of Public Health, which created the data on which the claims rest. The department issued its own report declaring no link between fracking and birth weight.
There’s something for everyone in our post-truth society. Everyone has the facts and alternative facts. Whom do we believe?
There is a live assertion that fracking is causing increased lung cancer in Pennsylvania, through the release of radon. Your correspondent, unused to such detailed work, went through the increase in tumours in each county of Pennsylvania over a five-year period and matched them against the number of fracking wells in those counties. The official data showed an increase in a majority of counties but it didn’t correspond to the number of wells. Thirty out of 34 frack-free counties had higher than expected levels of cancer.
So, does fracking cause cancer? Without taking these pains, you might wonder at the lack of a class action by ill shale workers. Or any specific, definite, proven, causal link between fracking and cancer in the most litigious and compensation-prone country in the world.
In the absence of what you might call court-ready evidence, you might wonder why fracking causes such turbulence.
The anti-frackers have done an amazing job. Public support for shale extraction has crashed with only eighteen per cent of people now strongly in favour of it. The protesters are a rainbow coalition that has come together to save the world from capitalism, big business, the government, global warming, Islamophobes, misogynists, migration watchers, car-drivers, fur-wearers, grammar schools and cis-gendered carnivores. And they don’t call themselves protesters but protectors – of the planet and its resources.
This coalition is united behind a set of virtuous principles that has mobilised local residents by playing upon fears of house prices collapsing, health epidemics and a burning shires landscape pocked by monstrous rigs and swathed in noxious gases.
Roughly 2,000 oil and gas wells have been drilled in the UK. None of these fears used to come into play. Most wells got nodded through planning without objection, and the current oil and gas wells dotted around the country are almost impossible to find without knowing where to look, so hidden from view are they. So what has changed? The national passions that are aroused and displayed by fracking seem to be caused by something other than fracking. The people who climb up on containers, ‘slow-walk’ lorries, or disrupt supply chains by following drivers home and threatening them, are using fracking as a proxy.
With the decline of trade union membership and the collapse of the Labour Party, Left-wing energy is finding expression in new ways, and bringing in new recruits.
NGOS and charities, most prominently Friends of the Earth, are coming together to teach the sort of skills formerly associated with organised labour: the legal limits of direct action, the effective use of social media, marches and music festivals, fundraising and story-telling, how to recruit new members and build your movement. This is new.
Not only can people feel good about badging themselves as a protector of the planet, but they can also break bread with like-minded people who hate Trump and voted Remain. Being against fracking means that you don’t have to go into too much detail about what you are for.
Local residents affected by fracking who are concerned about their house prices and the health of their children embrace the care, attention and understanding of the community campaigners who are mobilising them.
But they might want to look at what is mobilising these groups. It is an agenda of de-industrialisation, of stopping all fossil fuel extraction, of using electricity from wind and sun only, of living in smaller communities that do not use cars and certainly don’t use planes.
I wonder how many householders would swap their homes for solarpowered huts?