Fracking - where is it headed ?

[Lamplighter]

Fracking is not an issue in the U.S. only....


NY Times
ROGER COHEN
August 26, 2013
Britain’s Furor Over Fracking

BALCOMBE, England — The lovely green hills of the High Weald are Tory country,
a corner of West Sussex full of affluent residents who commute to London and like their golf
and ambles and thatched cottages.<snip>
But peace and love are not the story. This is the heavily policed front line of Britain’s fracking war.
A conflict has erupted over Prime Minister David Cameron’s vision
of turning the English countryside into hydraulic-fracturing central, a place
where West Sussex would release its inner West Texas.

“There’s about 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas lying underneath Britain at the moment,”
he enthused this month. Extracting even one-tenth of it would provide 51 years of gas supply.
The man who vowed in 2010 to head “the greenest government ever” was adamant
in an article in The Daily Telegraph: “We cannot afford to miss out on fracking.”

To which banners on the road outside the village of Balcombe offer this retort: “Fracking kills.”<snip>

So Cameron has stuck his neck out on fracking, with little or no national debate.
He has vowed to win the fracking cause while avoiding any major speech
on the government’s supposed commitment to low-carbon energy.
Like the Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s advocacy of genetically modified food in the 1990s
— an attempt that failed — he has taken on nature-loving middle England.

Why? There is huge money involved....
<snip>