Our Ethics Manager Anna Laycock considers what we can learn from recent debates on fracking.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Not long ago, the papers were full of stories about local opposition to wind and solar farms, and politicians were rushing to condemn these hideous eyesores. In April no less than 106 MPs said they would fight any and every wind farm proposal in their constituencies and solar farms were castigated as a “monstrous desecration of our local natural environment“.
And then along came fracking. Suddenly, renewables didn’t look so hideous after all.
It’s questionable whether the political invective against renewables ever truly reflected public opinion – the government’s own surveys didn’t seem to suggest so – but when the alternative is fracking, our preferences become clear. A recent YouGov poll found that almost seven times more people would prefer a solar farm nearby than a fracking site. Faced with a choice between energy developments in their local area, 40% chose a solar farm, 25% a wind farm, 10% a nuclear power plant, and just 6% opted for fracking.
Crucially, this was a choice between energy developments on their doorstep – not a choice of whether to have a development nearby or not. This is important, and the growing level of public awareness about fracking is doing a very important thing: it’s bringing home the message that there is an industry behind the energy we consume without consciousness, and that industry has impacts on our environment.
As Andrew Simms argues, “The fracking debate is reminding many that the energy we take for granted actually comes from somewhere. Using less, or having more clean, community-owned renewable sources suddenly seems more attractive than injecting chemical cocktails into the ground not far from your home”. For many people, NIMBYism has suddenly become less of a black-and-white issue, because there are limits to how far we can distance ourselves from the resources we need to power our lives. Could we become a nation of YIMBYs instead?
This will be no bad thing, but if the focus only extends to our local environment, we’re ignoring the bigger, more critical picture: the global limits we will exceed unless we decarbonise our energy sector. “This should be the only thing that matters to fracking opponents” argues Zoe Williams – and she has a point. Scientists are now 95% certain that climate change is human-made, yet those who deny that climate change is happening, is caused by us, or is a threat to the future of humanity, continue to gain public and political attention.
Becoming more connected with sources of our energy, and realising that there are fundamental limits to what we can burn – whether it’s the oil running out or catastrophic climate change – should not be so difficult for politicians to grasp. After all, those advocating austerity argue that “the nation cannot and should not live beyond its financial means”, as Simms notes. And yet the dominant narrative seems to be that “we can and must, in effect, live beyond our environmental means” – because we choose to value money above all other things.
Just as we’ve lost the sense of connection between our energy intensive lives and the sources that power that energy, we’ve lost a sense of connection between our money and the impact it makes in the real world.
What we choose to do with our money – how we invest it and how we spend it – shapes the present and the future of our lives and our planet. The failings of the financial system are not an abstract problem. They hurt real people, as Ecology CEO Paul Ellis argues: “This is not some technical infringement of some law. There are direct impacts on society, and on a very large scale.” And not just people, but the planet. Recent allegations of HSBC’s contribution to the destruction of Malaysian rainforest are the latest in a long line of sorry tales of money making the world go wrong.
Everything we do is bounded by planetary limits. All of our choices, from the individual to the national to the global scale, from the way our financial system works to the way we power our PCs, need to reflect that. Our response must be to reconnect with the systems that underpin our society and economy, and reassert our agency to shape those systems.
You have a choice where your money is invested. And you have a choice whether your energy supplier supports fracking or sources its energy from renewables. The choices you make – the choices we all make – will decide whether we create a future that fits within our planet’s ability to sustain us.