Victoria's Green Matters - 26th April 2012

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:Our ‘greenest government ever’ has given the go-ahead for hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ for shale gas to proceed in this country. Its scientific report, released last week, tells us that as long as ‘robust measures’ are in place to monitor the seismic risks involved with fracking, it is OK for it to continue. So, we only have to worry about the earthquake risk, do we?

We don’t need to wonder about the damage to the areas surrounding these drilling sites; where returning waste water and nasty chemicals which will have been pumped underground to release the gas will be stored; what damage to underground water courses will occur when this process takes place; the release of methane, a damaging greenhouse gas, during the procedure; the fact that there will need to be 6 to 8 wells per square mile around each of the 10 sites to be explored, resulting in 800 wells in Lancashire alone. How many wells will there be in our part of East Kent? Most importantly, this shale gas is not a green option.

It is a fossil fuel which releases carbon dioxide (CO2) when it is burnt to release energy. True, it releases only half the CO2 of coal, but this is still too much for our ever warming climate. We are a windy island, surrounded by water. We should be harnessing the power of the waves, the tides, the wind and the sun in a mix to give us our energy from clean, renewable sources.