What is fracking and why should I care about what happens in far off Lancashire or Yorkshire?
Fracking is the means of extracting the last few drops of oil/gas from ‘barrel’ Earth. Fracking uses a lot of resources to produce the oil/gas, but because the price for this commodity is high it becomes economically viable and allows for a few people to make vast amounts of profit from it.
As an analogy – if a barrel of oil is like a can of cola, then fracking is the equivalent of a small can which is shaken vigorously and opened! The environmental consequences are a devastating mess.
Due to secrecy laws in the USA, reporting of health and environmental harm were hidden, but like the gas, oil and frack fluid, these leaked out. Scratch the surface of the internet and you don’t have to dig deep there to expose the reality of fracking. At pressures of around 15,000 psi (car tyres are around 30 psi ) at varying depths underground, rock that is usually solid and stable is blasted and pumped full of friction altering fluid. Fracking uses toxic chemicals, vast quantities of drinking water (poisoned forever), micro-fine particles and large amounts of energy. This requires thousands of truck movements per well, hundreds of thousands of oil/gas wells and construction of short-term pipelines and truck roadways across the countryside serving them. Noise, dust, truck movements, spillages and leaks are routine for this highly industrialised process, set to scar our pristine countryside and contaminate our drinking water. Earth tremors will become commonplace as the anti-friction frack fluid seeps between our rock strata – this even besides the fact, that if we go down the fracking fossil fuel route we face catastrophic climate change! Why would anyone want this? PROFIT, it all boils down to profit.
What happens in Yorkshire is very important to us in Cheltenham, Cirencester, Morton-in-Marsh, and elsewhere in our region. To prevent this environmental disease called fracking, we have to stop it at source, before it has chance to take hold. Fracking is already threatened in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, Warminster area, Wiltshire and in the Mendips, Somerset. We are already being targeted, as we are surrounded! DEFRA’s own survey has shown that if the local population is made aware of what fracking involves, that population becomes very strongly anti-fracking! We at Frack Free Cotswolds are keen for everyone to learn about fracking. The Government and Gas/Oil Industry would rather you didn’t know about us!
At Frack Free Cotswolds we will be going to support those in Yorkshire on July 30th to help them resist the Government forced commencement of fracking there, in order to prevent its ever coming here. If you care for our future, please consider joining us and lending support by membership/and or by donation. Let’s keep our future environmentally fit for generations to come.
Support us in making our voices heard in York on 30th July.
