Well, Frack me

Wednesday 21st August

Fracking is in the news, and yet we really know so little about this technology.  What we do know is that all mineral extraction; coal, metal, oil and gas is a very messy business.  In some ways all human achievement has been built on extracting stuff from our planet, stone, iron, coal and now oil and gas.

We take it for granted that when we turn on the tap we get hot water.  Gas comes down the pipeline and into our homes, or it is the power to make electricity, which we also take for granted.  But someone somewhere has to put up with the oil derricks, the drilling, the pipelines going over their land, the ships polluting the sea, the smoke bellowing into the atmosphere.

There was a period when it seemed inevitable that wind or wave or solar power would break through and become the predominant form of energy creation. (or extraction – because as we know energy can neither be created or destroyed)  There was the golden dawn of the nuclear industry, with its promise of abundant clean and cheap power.  It never happened; and the problems of storing the waste have never been solved.  There are objections to building wind farms, as if the pylons and lorries driving oil around the country aren’t ugly; I think the windmills are quite beautiful.  And what about all the plans to build wave barriers, and solar and hydro-electric – what happened to them?

In truth the powers that be – Capitalism in short, do not want cheap energy.  Too many investors are making too much money with the messy polluting oil and gas industries for anything to change quickly.

And now we have fracking.  True it may make us a bit less dependent on Russia and Arabia, and in theory there is loads of it down there.  But there is loads of coal too, and we no longer dig coal.  At the end of the day, in the economically greedy world we live in it will be big business which decides and environmental concerns will be shoved to one side, just as easily as the protestors at Balcombe.