Gas under our feet

SIR – Is our Prime Minister hoping that the wind will be blowing when Vladimir Putin turns off the gas?

That we have 50 years of our own gas left (report, March 6) but are not using it is lunacy.

Jonathan Moore

Wimblington, Cambridgeshire

SIR – One reason that so many people object to fracking is that they are often ignorant of the science.

Many of them – whether they admit it or not – are obsessed by the danger of earthquakes. They have seen on their televisions the devastation caused by major earthquakes in Haiti, Indonesia and other far-flung countries, and assume that the same could occur here.

It is time for independent scientists and bodies such as the British Geological Survey to be more proactive in explaining that it is highly unlikely for there to be earthquakes in, for example, the Preston New Road drilling site of more than 3.1, and to illustrate with clear examples the maximum damage that such a low disturbance could cause.

The anti-fracking demonstrators remind me of the demonstrators against nuclear energy back in the 1960s. They were often CND activists who believed that, because of the word “nuclear”, the reactors might blow up like bombs. No doubt if nuclear fusion, the holy grail of energy production, ever becomes a real prospect, their successors will be out in force to ban its use.

Dr Norman Burrow

Preston, Lancashire