Thursday 8 September 2022

Fracking will see ‘devastation of the countryside,’ charities say

Fracking will see ‘devastation of the countryside,’ charities say

Prime Minister Liz Truss announced new measures today to combat the ongoing energy crisis, including a £2,500 cap on energy bills and the accelerated use of shale gas and fracking to boost the UK’s energy security.

Environmental charities have condemned this decision, with countryside charity CBRE’s Director of Policy, Tom Fyans, stating: “The brutal reality of fracking is that to get any meaningful amount of gas from the ground would require wholesale devastation of the countryside.”

He claims for the amount of fracking we’d need to meet gas demand, 4,900 football pitches of land would be required to build more than 6,000 sites for the next 15 years.

Fyans labels fracking the “least popular and least effective way of enhancing energy security.”

Damage to national parks and the UK’s areas of outstanding natural beauty have also been quoted as reasons for CBRE’s disgruntlement at the Prime Minister’s support for fracking.

In the same vein, Greenpeace UK have slammed the announcement, with Oil and Gas Campaigner Georgia Whitaker stating fracking “will not lower bills [and] will not make us less dependent on volatile gas markets. It will not reduce our carbon emissions.”

She concluded: “The manifesto promise on which this government was elected was that fracking would not happen unless the science changed, which it most emphatically has not.

“Communities who have this nonsense inflicted on them in the name of an out-of-date ideology will be wondering who their elected representatives are really representing.”

The Prime Minister stated today in the House of Commons: “We are also accelerating all sources of domestic energy, including North Sea oil and gas production. We will be launching a new licensing round, which we expect to lead to 100 new licenses being awarded.”

Written by

Bruna Pinhoni

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