In some respects, the UK has been among the world’s most successful countries at taking action against climate change over the past few decades. Yet that progress could be reversed and thrown away for a few years of slightly cheaper gas for a few people, and a lot of profits for even fewer people.
That’s because new prime minister Liz Truss has pledged to overturn a 2019 ban on “fracking” for shale gas in England. It’s true that the transition to low-carbon energy was never going to be easy. But shale gas is methane, a fossil fuel with high carbon emissions, while fracking has already been trialled unsuccessfully in the UK and its re-emergence is not founded on new evidence which can materially change results. This is not an act based on data but on desperation and dogma.
The first problem is there simply isn’t enough gas. For fracking to become a large-scale viable business in the UK, a very large geological resource of shale gas is essential. The enthusiasm for shale gas trials in the UK between 2011 and 2019 was founded on government-commissioned reports from the British Geological Survey (BGS), which predicted that many tens of years worth of gas supply may exist beneath central and northern England, south-east England and central Scotland.
