Frackaday!

While sleeping off the night’s excesses amid a mountain of uncollected bin bags in Brighton I was surprised to bump into local MP, Caroline Lucas, in the early hours of this morning. “Community Service?” I asked, surprised that the court system had acted so quickly after her Public Order offence arrest yesterday. “No,” she said, “this is my regular shift. The council pay double time on the bins after hours and I need to pay off the overdraft.”

Surprised that an MP would be short of cash and brought so low as to need a second job, I pressed her on the matter

“No, it’s this global overdraft.” she said and went on to explain that humans have used up all the natural resources the Earth can provide for the year and are now in 'overdraft'. Caroline explained that we are at 'earth overshoot day', and have exhausted supplies such as land, trees and fish and outstripped the planet's annual capacity to absorb waste products including carbon dioxide. According to the Global Footprint Network, for the rest of the year, the world is in ecological debt, with supplies depleted, land degraded and carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere

I gazed up at the fresh dawn skies and undepleted land and countered that I had never noticed the world shutting down after August before and asked, “What happens next year then? Does the planet get a fresh stock of resources every New Year’s Day?” Caroline wasn’t listening. Instead she was furiously tapping at her iPad to find the evidence. “See?” she said, showing me, “We should aim to be like Gabon!” I gazed at a graphic. Sure enough, Gabon is well into ecological credit

“But Gabon’s a low-population, fertile, oil-rich country isn’t it?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied, “but here in the west we have a massive energy deficit. We are running out of oil and gas and soon we won’t be able to keep the lights on!” Her voice had edged an octave higher and her trademark stridency was showing through. “In a decade we will be like a Third World. When democracy fails we must take direct action to save our country now!

“But they told us in 1973 that the oil would run out by 1990,” I said, adding “and they also said there would be a new ice age by the end of the last century. None of that happened. And anyway, we are sitting on a gazillion cubic metres of natural gas, right here in Britain.

Caroline pondered this for a moment. “But it’s deep underground, in the shale,” she said, ”our only option is renewables!” She gazed intently at her iPad screen and found the page she was looking for. “Look!” she said, displaying the National Grid page, where the combined might of our thousands of creaking wind turbines was currently supplying less than two percent of our off-peak energy consumption. “Oh…"

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, as seagulls soared overhead in the clear skies. High overhead an airliner left chalk-mark contrails on the blue canvas. “Windpower won’t get you on your holidays.” I suggested and with that she stood up, resolved. The screen on her iPad faded as her battery died. “Can I borrow your phone?” she asked, “I need to book a taxi for Balcombe.”

Caroline Lucas - doing it right!

I sighed. “Back to the picket line?” I asked.

“Frack that,” said Cazza, “I’m with Cuadrilla – We must Dash for Gas!”

There be Dragons!

Everybody loves a bogeyman. In the face of a good old yarn about fire-breathing monsters tearing up the earth, eating whole villages alive and leaving behind the stench of brimstone, logic has no hearing. We’d rather thrill to tales of an evil Frankenstein who can create dangerous life from spare parts, than address the likely-impossibility of the science. In the past humans have been led to perform blood sacrifice on an industrial scale to assuage the dread caused by unappeasable forces of nature.

The ability of the human imagination to conjure up fear is so powerful that the shaman who stokes the fires can tinker with a crude fundamental unease to dream up ever more outlandish versions of the threat – add glowing eyes here, a touch of acid there. Invent an earth-shattering narrative and bingo, wait for the tributes roll in. In fact, draw up a detailed enough myth and you can make a living from it for ever more; ask the Vatican.

It seems that, even in the twenty-first century, we are no more able to overcome our irrational instincts than were our forebears and while we may not, beyond the age of ten, believe in demons and dragons any more, some of us are all too ready to invest our ancestral fear-seeking in other fripperies. Billions are spent in holding back the waves of time as the age and beauty industry peddles its outlandish claims. And it appears we’d rather accept a constructed conspiracy theory based on an unlikely series of sinister events than the much simpler explanation that the driver was a bit drunk; he crashed, she died.

But not everybody is that stupid. Oh no. For those who care not for their appearance and hold no reverence for the memory of princesses spurned; for those who see through the mountebankery of the eternal-youth racket there are bigger fish to fry; at least there would be had they not seen through the blatant lies of the protein production industry and turned to veganism instead. For them, the big evil is oil and money, money and oil. The two go hand in hand and the modern-day crusader knows that where there is money, there is evil. They’ve never forgotten the Sheriff of Nottingham

The pragmatic approach to the extraction of oil and gas recognises that we have been digging, drilling and demolishing for centuries to extract the materials we want. Mountains have been flattened or cut in half to bring roads and rail and waterways have been diverted to create canals and reservoirs. Whole settlements have been abandoned – but more often because the resource has run out or become too difficult to extract than because of the adverse effects of the industry. But that’s too prosaic for the fracking protesters.

Suddenly, in an age of unprecedented wealth due largely to the harnessing of cheap energy, we have to flagellate ourselves in penance as a new religion comes of age. After fifty years of myth and legend they claim the perverse narrative that doing the thing that has brought all the benefits of progress is a palpable evil as dread as any dragon, as powerful as any volcano. Whipped into froth by their own high priestesses they will brook no argument. Feed Gaia or die in her vengeful flames, they believe.

Right on, sistah! 

The Anti-Gas movement is no less an industry than gas itself, with its own lies and legends. There is even some credible suspicion that its furtherance is funded by the inefficient and unsustainable-without-subsidy wind power industry. What is certain is that the convinced anti-fracker is a believer and not a critical observer, quick to deny others the known benefits of cheap energy in support of an unproven ideology. I do hope they don’t hypocritically employ the fruits of the industry they so fervently oppose. But, of course, pointing that out would spoil a good story.

What the frack?

We all do our bit for the environment, don’t we? Well, sod the environment; good citizens all, we should moderate our reliance on imported fuel use, if not for the planet then for the simple common sense of it. Has nobody been listening these past few years? Are you not aware that the country is broke? According to the Express, one in three will be too poor to buy sufficient heating for winter within the next two years.

While I don’t buy their scaremongering figures for one moment, I certainly agree something needs to be done. And it won’t be the Green Deal, which will turn out to be yet another well-intentioned government scheme that ends up benefitting large businesses with access to capital before being consigned to history when the money runs out, like all the others. 

It’s just tinkering at the margins in pursuit of political ambitions instead of getting a grip on the real issues. And for the few who genuinely benefit it always costs the tax payer dear while keeping them potless.(That will make it all the easier for the rampaging Muslim marauders to finally gain the majority hand – George Galloway’s is a patient, long-term treachery, be warned.) 

As a nation what we need is to make or save money and whatever god you don’t believe in, Nigel Lawson reckons shale gas and oil is a gift from him. To become self-sufficient in, nay a net exporter of fuel, would be all that we need to be back in the game. And if that is good news then reports that the Blackpool shale deposits in the Bowland Basin could be fifty percent larger than first thought has to be even greater news. 

We could kick out the unwelcome ‘economic migrants’, get our own industries working and our idle off their arses and off welfare. We could fuck off the German wind farms and say so-long to pointless solar PV and get Britain back on its feet again. And as for the fears of the Green-Meanies, do they not realise that an earthquake in the area would cause millions of pounds-worth of improvements to Blackpool?

Even Environment Minister, Owen Patterson, says the same. “invest in shale gas, which doesn't require public subsidy, unlike wind farms.” The coalition must, as a matter of utmost urgency, pursue what could be the saving of our once independent nation from the threats that currently threaten to overwhelm it. Social politics, white flight, brain drain, the deficit and the disastrous involvement with the EU. But it may already be too late. Those greedy burghers at the Stasi are already seeing power slip from their grasp and are demanding a slice of the action. 

What am I saying, a slice? No, like all the other European gangsters flooding the country, they intend to take control altogether. Well I say we tell em’ to frack off.

And so does Boris Johnson.