Further frackery
Since our Corrie Hall showing of Gasland, the alarming film about shale gas, the conflict about fracking has heated up. In Britain, which common sense would see as too small a country to contain the environmental devastation of this technology, the determined frackers are buckling on their gun belts.
‘We’ll spend whatever it takes,’ thundered Lord Browne, former BP chairman and now Fracker-in-Chief of Quadrilla Resources, Britain’s sole contender for the riches of shale gas. He added, ‘We did the North Sea very well. This nation can do extraordinary things.’ Um – up to a point, Lord Browne. Scotland is not too happy about what happened in the North Sea. And very few people are happy about the prospect of contaminated water, vastly increased carbons emissions and the occasional earthquake.
Even the US, albeit belatedly, is getting worried about the toxic process. The New York State Assembly has just voted by a 95-40 majority to impose a two-year moratorium on hydraulic fracturing and if passed by the Senate this will close the state’s doors to fracking in New York’s portion of the Marcellus Shale basin until May 2015.
A fracking fracas in Bulgaria …
Zornitsa Hristova posted a report on the Occupy.com site on March 9th.
‘Last January I was going out for a protest again. My husband was helping me tie the sling for the baby and my ten-year-old was asking whether she could borrow my camera, because she wanted to be a journalist …This particular protest was against shale gas fracking – a subject that looked too abstract to provoke mass interest.’
‘There were thousands of people, and the meeting point simply couldn’t hold them. They were mostly young, and they looked civil and educated. We were not the only ones who had brought kids. As the march started, we had no idea just how many we were – the street was too narrow to see. But then we went on to the broad central street that goes to the House of Parliament, and we saw there were thousands of us. People were laughing, because the media were wrong – they were not alone.’
But the media had the upper hand, Zomitsa found. The three main TV channels made no mention of what was taking place, even though the protests went on for two days. National radio preserved its independence, though, and mounted a strong presence online, where people were posting their own photos and videos. The campaign went on.
‘Ecological organisations managed to attract a huge number of young people who occupied the most central traffic point in the city, Orlov Most (Eagles Bridge). They started gathering in the adjacent park, then blocked traffic, sat down on the streets and sang. The police tried to pull out individual protesters but the crowd pulled them back. Some girls hugged the policemen, trying to speak to the humans behind the helmets. Others danced. …The invariably young, middle-class, well-educated profile of the participants later prompted some commentator to say that they were politically futile, that this was a lifestyle act and it would never be politically important.’
Whatever the reason, Bulgaria’s Prime Minister suddenly gave in and announced that fracking plans were to be stopped. Zomitsa takes a disillusioned view of this, saying that the ‘notoriously populist’ prime minister had grabbed the chance to step out of the limelight because his police files had been published, proving that he was both part of the Mafia and a police informer. ‘People are now making jokes about the Mafia feeling socially disgraced,’ Zomitsa remarks, then goes on shrewdly, ‘But none of the major political parties want to rule at a moment when people are shouting against the political class as a whole. After all, parliamentary elections are just a few months away, scheduled for May 12. And for a government that clearly failed, unpredictability is not a bad thing.’
… and the effect of Gasland
A consulting firm called Control Risks has produced a report titled The Global Anti-Fracking Movement: What It Wants, How It Operates, and What’s Next. It makes clear that protests against fracking are going on in more than thirty countries, across six continents.
Although the report is intended to provide gas companies with a plan for squashing the anti-fracking movement, people concerned about the environment or public health will find it worth reading for at least three reasons (besides entertainment). It contains reams of hard data about the movement, it identifies the tactics that have been most successful so far, and it ultimately backs up many of the movement’s key arguments.
