Category: Political Issues
So what happened yesterday? Well first of all we were treated to a report from the Commons Environmental Audit Committee. This hard-hitting report was hugely critical of fracking. It made it abundantly clear that fracking was incompatible with the UK’s obligations towards climate change mitigation. The full text of its...
On Monday morning (26th January 2015) the Environmental Audit Committee published its report into the “Environmental Risks of Fracking” It came out with 19 hard hitting conclusions and recommendations which are reproduced in full below. Being published on the day that MPs debated the Infrastructure Bill the report was a...
Hello? Is there anybody there? What’s it like in your parallel universe Nigel? We read in Hansard that arch climate shale denier and shale gas supporter Lord Lawson of Blaby said “We have now had a reply from DECC, which is the most complacent reply I have ever seen from...
Well, desolate and derelict actually http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fracking/10828543/Government-drive-for-fracking-losing-thousands-of-Tory-votes-Lord-Howell-warns.html http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/fracking-lord-howell-george-osbornes-3536842 Alan Tootill has summed up what has actually been said by Lord Howell below and, beneath the hype it is quite interesting and revealing. The atmosphere at Mr Osborne’s next family gathering may be a trifle frosty. On consideration, he has the right...
The BBC reported this week that Greater Manchester’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Tony Lloyd, had made the perfectly reasonable point that shale gas exploration firms should pay a levy towards the cost of policing anti-fracking protests, because they stand to make “huge sums of money” out of their work. (Of...
When we look at the many dimensions of the fracking argument one of the most important is the question of climate change. The recent The IPCC 5th Assessment Report ran to over 2,000 pages long but you can see the key points distilled into haiku format in this 2 1/2...
Sometimes politicians seem to be unable to forget figures which make them feel comfortable, even when more recent numbers contradict them, so yesterday we saw Mr Cameron trotting out his favourite 74,000 jobs from fracking rubbish? “Rubbish?” I hear you ask … Well, we demolished this figure on this blog...
[I should point out that when this post was written DECC had confirmed to me that the figures were UK wide. (I asked the question of them because press reports were very confused and the report itself was not 100% clear to me) It has since become apparent that these...
A while back we published a critique of the Institute of Directors predictions that fracking would result in 74,000 jobs. https://www.refracktion.org/index.php/dan-byles-and-the-74000-jobs-joke/ We argued that the basis of the calculations was childishly simplistic, and we asked how an MP like Dan Byles could put his name to supporting them. We were...
Sometimes, as we read about the Coalition Government’s clumsy attempts to justify their failure to put together a coherent energy policy to carry us through the next decades we smile. Sometimes we despair. Today was one of those days. In a feeble attempt to bite back at Ed Milliband’s headline...