Shale gas bill will affect you!

FOR anyone who sees the need to transition away from fossil fuels, – and even for those who don’t – the Infrastructure Bill, currently moving through the House of Lords, should ring alarm bells like no other.

This Government is going all out for shale gas with claims it can be done safely, even when the Royal Society warned ‘beware of cumulative risk’. Risk scales up each time you drill, and fracking needs thousands of wells. The Government acknowledged escalating climate change requires us to move away from fossil fuels. So even ‘maximising the safe recovery of petroleum’ doesn’t make sense.

But the Bill clearly states ‘maximise economic recovery’. As a ‘principal objective’ economic concerns would trump all others. Every disaster I can think of in the history of oil and gas happened when industry cut corners to save money. Maximising economic recovery = doing it as cheaply as possible. Whether the Government has realised or not (perhaps industry wrote the Bill for them) all other concerns like community objections, health, regulations protecting aquifers, air quality and wildlife habitats would be less important than ‘economic recovery’ – by law.

Reading on in the same Bill, the implications start to show. Changing what is now technically trespass – the drilling under your home without your permission, to a ‘right of use’ for oil and gas. Then another ‘right’ for industry quietly added – to “leave any substance in the land’. Fracking fluid waste is radioactive. Its disposal is notoriously problematic. It could be dumped under your home. No limit on quantity. Surely not? This bill puts the wishes of the oil and gas industry before everything else. It needs to be stopped before it becomes law.

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