‘Fracking’ Debate Divides Britain

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/world/europe/Fracking-Debate-Fractures-Britain.html

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LONDON — Over the years, Britain has shown itself to be cozy enough in its trans-Atlantic ties to follow the United States into all kinds of dangerous spots, from Iraq to Afghanistan. Now, eyeing the American energy revolution that has come with “fracking” to unlock a bonanza of oil and natural gas, Prime Minister David Cameron has again lofted his banner to tread where America has led.

But this newest campaign resonates in a different, not-in-my-backyard kind of way. His quest to emulate the United States’ success in hydraulic fracturing to tap underground reserves is much closer to home, touching the emotive ties that bind an island nation to its land and evoking a resistance to technological advance recalling the Luddites who battled change in the textile industry in the early 19th century.

The prime minister’s vision of bountiful energy supplies from subterranean shale rock plays into the delicate politics of persuading his Conservative followers in the well-padded southeast of the country to accept his argument that, as he put it, “the huge benefits of shale gas outweigh any very minor changes to the landscape.”

And his advocacy of the new technology, which opponents say risks poisoning groundwater and damaging the environment in other ways, has provoked a collision of faith and economics. Clerics in the northwest — seen as an abundant source of shale gas — have called on congregants to answer to their God and “engage in biblical and theological discussion about their responsibility as stewards of the earth.”

Politically speaking, thus, the debate over fracking may be just as perilous as the hazards of military adventures in far-flung lands.

Robert Woollard, the head of a network of the party’s supporters, said recently that Conservative leaders risked “alienating their own voters by going hammer and tongs for fracking.”

Mr. Cameron offered his most unequivocal endorsement of fracking in an article in The Daily Telegraph.

“If we don’t back this technology, we will miss a massive opportunity to help families with their bills and make our country more competitive,” Mr. Cameron said, promoting the new technology as a means of reversing dependence on energy imports as Britain’s North Sea reserves dwindle.

“Even if we see only a fraction of the impact shale gas has had in America, we can expect to see lower energy prices in this country.”

But the discussion of fracking and its potential environmental impact is not limited to economics. If Continental Europeans bond with their lands in almost mystic ways, from the invocation of La France Profonde to the somber pull of Germany’s forests, Britain’s approach has always been marked by a struggle between tradition and revolutionary technology and by the competing claims of rich and poor.

In the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, a sharp-elbowed material culture — evoked, for some, in the poet William Blake’s depiction of “dark Satanic Mills” — supplanted an earlier generation’s reverence for unspoiled nature.

Coal mines and steel plants, railroads and cramped row houses spread a patina of modernity across the land, particularly in the industrial north.

Those enamored of older ways bridled at the transformation wrought by the steam engine and the factories.

As William Wordsworth, the high priest of Romantic Britain’s worship of natural phenomena, wrote:

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

As in that era, the fracking debate has conjured social distinctions between the hardscrabble north and the more bucolic south, where protests against fracking in leafy West Sussex have already signaled a broader opposition.

Last month, a conservative peer, Lord David Howell of Guildford, south of London, declared blithely that “there are large, uninhabited and desolate areas, certainly in parts of the northeast, where there is plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s residence, and where it could be conducted without any threat to the rural environment.”

The fact that Lord Howell is the father-in-law of Britain’s Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, an advocate of fracking, only deepened the impression of a north-south contest cemented in place by political rivalries. The southeast is generally seen as part of the Conservative heartland, while the Labour opposition trawls for votes in the north.

“Neville Chamberlain spoke of pre-war Czechoslovakia as a faraway country of which we know nothing,” a Labour peer, Lord Jeremy Beecham, snapped back in response to Lord Howell’s comments, referring to the pre-war British leader accused of appeasing Adolf Hitler in his annexation of the Sudetenland.

“Lord Howell clearly has a similar view on the northeast, and his comments once again highlight the Tories’ problem with the north.”

Such was the outcry from people living in the northeast that Lord Howell withdrew his remarks, although a couple of days later he said that what he had really meant to say was that fracking should take place in the northwest — the location of, among other things, the Lake District National Park and areas under the diocesan tutelage of those same Anglican clerics who threatened their own crusade against fracking.

“Natural gas extraction is increasingly presenting people with a choice between economic gain and a healthy environment,” the clerics in Lancashire said. Their complaint had a particular point: Fracking tests in the northwest, near the blue-collar resort of Blackpool, in 2011 were found by investigators to be the probable cause of small earthquakes.

The north-south brouhaha was enough to persuade Mr. Cameron to insist that “we want all parts of our nation to share in the benefits: north or south, Conservative or Labour.”

The challenge facing him is to convince people that, as he put it, “we are all in this together.”