The government is cutting subsidies to renewable energy whilst increasing subsidies for fossil fuels, the only G7 country to do so. The government also claims that the way forward is ‘lower-carbon secure energy sources, such as nuclear and shale gas’.
Lord Browne former chairman at UK shale gas company Cuadrilla, now executive chairman of L1 Energy, a Russian oil and gas firm, was appointed in 2010 as the UK’s fracking Czar and he appointed hundreds of people across government departments as advisors/lobbyists.
Yesterday, 16 December 2015, the government voted to ‘allow fracking for shale gas 1,200m below national parks and other protected sites.
Neither fracking nor nuclear are clean energies, they both come at enormous cost and are anything but renewable.
It has been discovered that Halliburton have been dumping nuclear waste in fracking drill holes for decades and the UK government has weakened its regulations to allow ‘passing any substance through, or putting any substance into, deep-level land’.
The government has implemented regulations to fast track fracking applications denying local authorities a say.
Britain is at the tipping point, up against powerful corporate interests whose bottom line is profit. The environmental impact is incalculable and there have already been earthquakes in the UK confirmed as having been caused by fracking. Many rural areas do not have the road infrastructure to cope with the enormous trucks and the amount of traffic that fracking involves. Each well, which can be fracked multiple times, uses millions of gallons of water which is mixed with toxic chemicals which cannot be cleaned. Fracking carries no guarantees and water tables and aquifers are at risk as is the environment and inhabitants, human and animals, from pollution.
The Kichwa tribe in the Sarayaku region of the Amazon in Ecuador went to the COP21 climate conference in Paris to point out that the Earth is our living home, they are fighting oil companies who want to exploit their ancestral land. Their fight is our fight. There are no back seats in this battle. Money will not give us the Earth back and we’ll never see a dime of the profits, we are the ones who will pay in every way, even down to cleaning up the mess dirty energy and corporations leave behind.
https://frack-off.org.uk/the-fracking-czar-lord-john-browne/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35107203
https://www.rt.com/uk/195868-uk-fracking-companies-substance/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21120-how-fracking-caused-earthquakes-in-the-uk/
https://www.gaslandthemovie.com/whats-fracking/faq/water-used
https://www.gaslandthemovie.com/whats-fracking#faq