It’s time to talk honestly about fracking

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/10/talk-honestly-about-fracking-britain

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Having access to gas is a matter of national security. Our homes and large parts of British industry need gas; any suggestion to the contrary is just not the real world. The truth is we are going to be using gas, including shale gas, for a long time to come (Stop fracking until evidence shows it is safe, says Burnham, 6 June).

Gas provides the basis for many of the things we use in our everyday lives, including medicines, medical equipment, food (through fertilisers), clothing, computing and cosmetics, as well as playing a vital role in electricity generation and providing heat for over 80% of UK homes. It emits half the CO2 of coal, and is a vital back-up to intermittent renewables – right now, we can’t have large-scale wind and solar without gas.

Given these facts we need to honestly consider the moral and environmental issues of transporting gas, including shale gas, across oceans and continents and being increasingly dependent on gas from countries with regulatory and environmental standards lower than ours. Gas also provides high-skilled employment for many hundreds of thousands of people in this country and this has the potential to increase still further.

The trade union GMB and UKOOG, the onshore industry body, this week announced a historic agreement to work together on these issues and we urge others to do the same. This agreement will help build understanding among local communities and further bolster the sector’s strong safety and regulatory standards. The industry is already regulated under the HSE, EA and Decc, has a comprehensive set of internal guidelines and a ground-breaking agreement around monitoring of fracking sites was announced last year.Gary Smith GMB unionKen Cronin UKOOG

• I welcome Andy Burnham’s call for a moratorium until stronger scientific evidence has been produced to show that it is safe to drill for gas. The environmental audit select committee’s report, Environmental Risks of Fracking, published in January 2015 to coincide with the infrastructure bill, called for a halt on fracking for shale gas on both climate change and environment protection grounds. The government response did not address all our concerns. While the subsequent Infrastructure Act benefited from amendments adding clauses 49 and 50 to introduce at least some degree of protection, there remain outstanding safeguarding issues. In a subsequent letter immediately before the election to the three main party leaders, I pointed out that the first of the new legally required reports from the Committee on Climate Change would not be available until April 2016. There is a risk that decisions on fracking wells in the interim will not be subject to the CCC analysis. Such fracking well decisions and permissions should therefore be monitored by the Department of Energy and Climate Change and notified to the CCC so it can produce an earlier report if warranted.

With the alarm sounding that the world could be on a path to a 3-4C temperature rise, all leaders – be it at the UN, at the G7 this week or in the Labour party – need to show how we can protect the environment and reduce overall carbon emissions to zero. Joan WalleyChair, environmental audit select committee 2010-15

• Our new government is hellbent on pushing shale oil and gas upon us. We are now, it seems, in a situation where the apparent “golden regulation” is allowing the use of one of the world’s most caustic and toxic chemicals, hydrofluoric acid, which is far more harmful than hydrochloric acid. It has been quietly buried away in a subsection of the Environment Agency’s new oil and gas consultation. This plan proposes to do away with site-specific permits and allow the industry to use “standard rules”. These catch-all permits erode protections and clearly make way for business – residents’ health and the environment are definitely a secondary consideration. Acid flushing or acidising with this substance is a nasty successor to fracking. Do we really want this chemical travelling up and down our country lanes and potentially jeopardising our health and our water supply? And by the way, who exactly is the Environment Agency working for?J HarrisBalcombe, West Sussex