The new conservative Prime Minister has announced the resumption of hydraulic fracturing tests and the abolition of environmental protection laws inherited from the European Union.
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Arrival at Downing Street just three weeks ago, the new conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss announced a series of measures considered by activists, NGOs and opposition parties, as unprecedented attacks against nature in the Kingdom- United. Resumption of hydraulic fracturing tests, programmed abolition of environmental protective laws inherited from the European Union, massive resumption of gas and oil exploration in the North Sea …
From the 1 er October, dozens of associations – Just Stop Oil, Britain Insulate, Fuel Poverty Action, Animal Rebellion, etc. – Mobilized all over the country to make their dismay heard. The members of Just Stop Oil, who advocate civic and peaceful disobedience (and whose dozens have already been imprisoned for having blocked roads and refineries), promised to “occupy Westminster”, the country’s political institutions, During the weekend and then gather every day of October at 11 am in front of Downing Street.
On September 22, Downing Street confirmed the lifting – in England only – of the moratorium on hydraulic fracturing decided in 2019 by the conservative leader Boris Johnson, after years of opposition from local populations and experiments by the company Private Cuadrilla Resources, in Lancashire (north-west of England), having sparked on the Preston New Road site a 2.9 earthquake on the Richter scale. To justify its decision, Liz Truss cited the war of Russia against Ukraine and the need for the United Kingdom to explore “all means” to achieve energy independence. The manager would also like the country to become a net exporter of energy by 2040. Jacob Rees Mogg, her Minister of Energy, even estimated that the maximum intensity of the tremors authorized during the fracturing tests was “too low “(they are currently limited to a magnitude of 0.5).
However, no geological data proves that the country’s shale gas reserves are considerable or that the rock fracturing process (by injection of sand and water under high pressure) is sure for the environment and local populations. On September 22, on Downing Street request, the British Geological Society published a conclusive report that predicting the risks of earthquakes and their magnitude remained “complicated and constituted a scientific challenge”. Even Kwasi Kwarteng, the current Chancellor of Liz Truss’s Echiquier, doubted the interest of hydraulic fracturing in early 2022, when he was still Minister of Industry. Fracturing is not the panacea to lower gas prices, he declared in February, companies that could extract it “are not charitable companies”. Mr. Kwarteng explained that it was better to focus on renewable energy sources and nuclear…
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