Letters / Demonising fracking
Professor Paul Younger, a Yes voter, a distinguished expert in groundwater issues in the coal industry and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, who served, unpaid, on both the UK and Scottish Governments’ investigations into shale gas extraction has tossed a PR hand grenade through the Scottish Government’s open window.
Professor Younger, writing in The Times, expresses his dismay that, by temporarily banning the use of fracturing technology (“fracking”) in Scotland, the Scottish Government has ignored his panel’s conclusion that:
“The impacts are trivial compared to those I spent my career combating.”
He continues;-
“…the fuss which has greeted UK shale gas proposals has portrayed it as an apocalyptic development with unfathomable scope for damage. This is simply wrong.
“…Yet the Scottish government has repeatedly refrained from reminding people that the report even exists…….
“Stewart Maxwell claimed on the BBC that the report didn’t address public health issues (it did, at length). Corrected by the interviewer, he went on to claim that “many experts disagreed with its findings”. This is simply untrue.
“…In the days following the Yes campaign, I and other scientists watched in dismay as our social networks degenerated into wilfully uninformed anti-fracking lobbies…..”
Concluding, he wrote:
“In the midst of this carnival of misinformation, when I happened to publish an academic paper which demonstrated that the UK government’s hastily-introduced rules on fracking-induced seismicity are 40,000 times stricter than the rules for quarry blasting, I ended up with a death threat.”
Lovely!
The Scottish government’s energy policies, in this case, banning shale gas exploration in Scotland are contributing to increasing fuel poverty and, via the desperate dilemma, “heat or eat”, are driving people to food banks.
And this “anti-fracking” policy, it seems, is based on nothing more wholesome than demonising fracking, as a stick with which to beat Westminster.
Professor Younger’s short, compelling, article can be read at: www.thegwpf.com/paul-younger-why-strangle-the-golden-shale-goose/#.dpuf
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