The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #148595 Message #3451731
Posted By: Stu
14-Dec-12 - 07:10 AM
Thread Name: BS: Fracking now give the go-ahead in the UK
Subject: RE: BS: Fracking now give the go-ahead in the UK
"If you're going to invoke science, get it right, FFS, otherwise you just sound like a prat."
Fair enough, I was at the arse-end of a busy day (and I am a prat). My mistakes. Anyhow, the concept is sound.
I'm not against fracking, if it's done properly. However as has been mentioned before there are big question marks over the safety of hydrocarbon extraction and the industry has shown a rather lax approach to the subject in the past, with often fatal consequences for its own employees and catastrophic for the ecosystems where safety measures have been inadequate. Of course this goes for all hydrocarbons, which we are now forced to extract by going into increasingly hostile environments that pose a real risk for the workers and environment, with operations facing conditions that are possibly beyond their ability to cope with.
At some point we need to grow up and face the problem of energy consumption and the climate disruption it is causing. The developing nations will have to use alternative technologies to meet their energy needs as the wealthy corporate-run nations drive up the cost of energy as they screw every penny from their own populations. In those countries which are developing the infrastructure for a hydrocarbon-centric energy network simply doesn't exist and they couldn't afford it anyway, and which might be vulnerable in politically unstable countries. These countries will develop locally-centred renewable, clean energy solutions that can be maintained without involving some profiteering suit, and they'll be all the better for it.
It should be pretty obvious that were the feckless slimeballs in charge of this country actually interested in long-term regeneration we could get the jump on the other rich countries by developing a green energy industry that researches and manufactures clean, renewable energy solutions. We could sell this to those developing countries, and everyone else who will have to follow eventually. Unfortunately both the neo-tory wasters that were the previous New Labour government and the current shower of posh boys with the capitalist cock-up-their-arses didn't have the wit or intelligence to see that the opportunity was there, and ripe for development.
As Gideon and his henchman (the execrable bilgebag that is Owen Patterson) gleefully kick the green industry into touch we are seeing a future industry, which we have the brains and brawn to make us world leaders in, die before its even got started. Their 'Green Deal' initiative is a pretty pathetic and risible attempt to make us all make our houses more energy efficient by, er, making us pay for it (whilst energy-guzzling big businesses are exempted from paying the additional green development costs in the energy bill introduced in November). In effect, the 'Green Deal' is total non-starter as poor and middle-income people will never be able to afford it. Of course, as the energy bills rocket due to the ever-incresing cost of hydrocarbons our most vulnerable suffer over the winter . . . but then there can never be enough dead pensioners to change Gideon's nasty little mind. He and his mates can afford it; it's only a few quid, so what the fuck?
We are a country that produces the some of the best scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs in the world, and this is an opportunity that whomever is running the country seems determined to piss up the wall, and that is very, very wrong.