Energy issues have always confused me. Growing up I was always told that we’re an island nation built on coal and surrounded by fish.
I always had a tribal instinct that took enormous pride in the courage and resilience of miners and their communities. I always regarded them as the shock troops of any proletarian battle against the forces of reaction.
And yet, while there was always something noble about miners there was a contradiction, how on earth can anyone who supports the cause of workers emancipation conspire to send men into dangerous and unwholesome working conditions? To labour in dark hideous holes often miles underground with the possibility of death or serious injury only a pickaxe stroke away?
Yet we need more and more energy, our demand appears insatiable and with the destruction of the mining industry despite millions of tons of good coal underfoot we need to find alternatives.
This always presents me with a range of dilemmas. Nuclear power for years seemed to me to be a reasonable alternative, but events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Japan two years ago have convinced me that maybe nuclear is not all its cracked up to be.
The oil industry is not all that it’s purported to be either, just ask the folk in the Gulf of Mexico whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed by those careless cowboys of multinational oil production-BP!
So we turn to our green friends who preach wind power, solar power and even wave power. Sustainable energy looks good and probably is good but it all seems like too much hard work to me.
Yet according to those clever chaps in the energy business there is a new wonder solution lying even deeper than the coal seams below our feet.
The wonders of fracking!
The possibility of almost anywhere in this country you can sink a well, send some water and sand down under very high pressure and hey ho – gas and oil in royal abundance.
All our problems solved!
Well they may be right, but I’m not convinced that the technology is that good. A minor earth tremor near Morecambe does not convince me that it’s the answer to an energy junkie’s prayer.
What is even worse that the boys in the fracking business aren’t even state businesses where their political masters might have some sensibilities to electors’ concerns.
What this small island needs is a planned energy policy, with the providers and suppliers of energy under public control.w