eing arrested is not usually a positive career move for a British politician.
But Caroline Lucas, the only member of parliament for the UK’s Green Party, has become something of a people’s champion since her arrest on August 18. That’s because she was detained by police at a protest against “fracking”, a controversial method of extracting oil and gas from underground.
Miss Lucas was the star attraction last week at the annual Green Party conference, in my hometown of Brighton, which includes her constituency. The protest at which she was arrested was in Balcombe, a village a few kilometres from Brighton.
Fracking involves injecting water and chemicals at high pressure into gas- or oil-bearing underground rock, to extract hydrocarbons. The process is, depending on your point of view, either a valuable new technique to meet the world’s energy needs, or else a destructive, dangerous new source of profits through pollution. It would be fair to say Miss Lucas takes the latter view.
Thus when Cuadrilla, a British-based international firm specialising in “‘hydraulic fracturing” (to give the process its proper name), announced plans for exploratory drilling in the area, Miss Lucas and several thousand others converged outside the site, setting up an impromptu camp and forming a loose confederation with local residents, whose law-abiding sensibilities have been compromised by the prospect of drilling beneath their homes. Since July more than 80 people, now including Miss Lucas, have been arrested at the site entrance.
The stakes are high in the fracking debate, for the country is said to be at risk of power blackouts by the middle of the decade. As North Sea oil production wanes, there is a powerful allure in the prospect of as much as 2.3 quadrillion cubic feet of shale gas – enough for 25 to 50 years – beneath our feet.
Cuadrilla (which has ten similar licenses to drill elsewhere in the UK) says the extraction process is safe and far more environmentally friendly than importing gas from overseas. Opponents emphasise the risk of water pollution, methane emissions and even earth tremors (as recorded in the town of Blackpool in 2011 after fracking was conducted nearby).
The Balcombe impasse may soon be resolved: Sussex police have now issued an eviction notice to the campaigners, ordering them to pack their tents and their placards and go home. But this will not be the end of the matter. Wherever fracking is mooted now there will be someone, somewhere, who’ll shout “not here, mate”.
Here’s the problem: in Spain, Ukraine, Poland and other European countries experimenting with fracking, there is ample space in which to drill, far from densely populated areas. But Britain is so crowded that even adjusting your necktie runs the risk of poking somebody’s eye out. Everyone here wants cheap, clean energy, just as we all want high-speed rail links, out-of-town shopping centres and more prisons. We just don’t want them anywhere near our homes.
The Fukushima disaster has stalled Britain’s nuclear-power plans for the foreseeable future. And wind and solar power, regarded by many as both clean and sustainable, can deliver sufficient output only if we’re all happy to contemplate enormous turbines festooning the horizon in all directions, or great stretches of our green and pleasant land vanishing under miles upon miles of solar panels.
Whether Britons can be won over to fracking by the promise of lower energy bills remains to be seen. As for Miss Lucas, she may not be in a position to influence affairs for much longer, at least not in Westminster: predictions say she will lose her seat in parliament at the next election.
For while she may be a national heroine on environmental issues, back in her constituency refuse collectors were out on strike this summer, and piles of rubbish disfigured the streets for weeks on end.
The dispute has now been resolved, but many local voters retain the opinion that she handled the issue ineptly.
It may prove to be her undoing, for if there’s one thing calculated to strike terror into the heart of any Englishman – more than blackouts, more than earthquakes, even more than the contemplation of nuclear power plants – it’s having our dustbins left unemptied.
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer based in London