To Frack or Not to Frack?

‘I AM EXPENSIVE. That was the title of one of my shows where the girls looked like Barbie dolls, all so spoilt and dressed up,’ said Dame Vivienne Westwood, the legendary fashion designer, once. ‘It’s a good name for a fashion show but it also means ‘I’m not cheap. I don’t want a McDonalds or a cheap holiday, I read books, thank you very much.’ Finally, it implies we are privileged, subsidised by all these people in the world and we have some sort of responsibility. I am expensive. I cost the earth.’

Westwood’s comments, made some time ago, become more pertinent with her involvement now in the environmental fracking row. Many people now think that fracking might cost the earth, and in particular your earth, where trespass laws are now being changed so that fracking firms can drill under private land without permission. Greenpeace activists have been holding protests about the process since its implentation, but what’s worrying to Westwood, and her son Joe Corré, is that reportedly over 50% of the country don’t actually understand fracking.

Fracking is a process whereby gas is extracted from rocks by blasting them with high-pressure chemicals and water so that they fracture, releasing the gas trapped inside. Its technical name is ‘hydraulic fracturing’, and it is controversial because a number of potential environmental risks are associated with the process, which include: ground water contamination as the chemical-infused fluids seep into clean supplies, risks to air quality through ‘migration of gases’ up to the surface, the mishandling of waste products, and seismicity itself: earthquakes.

“This is a sad example of putting money and profit before people.”

Yes, in the US where the process has been most aggressively implemented by their government to date, several earthquakes were noted in 2011, which were thought related to the process. Although the magnitude was relatively small, there is of course no guarantee that every quake will be of a similar size. Westwood and Corré, concerned that vital governmental decisions were being taken in the UK without proper public consultation, decided to set up an awareness campaign, the ‘We Need To Talk About Fracking’ project.

But why is fracking being so dominantly pushed through by both the US and UK governments? Essentially it boils down to global politics and, in particular, energy politics. With much of our energy reliant on Russia’s massive gas reserves or the Middle East’s oil supplies, it also makes us vulnerable to our uncertain international relations with both these territories. Remember when Russia flexed a political bicep by cutting off gas supplies to the Ukraine in 2009? With fracking being used to access our own energy supplies of gas, we circumvent this ability to essentially blackmail countries. The US has been particularly supportive of this push internationally, with Secretary of State Hilary Clinton having personally visited ‘Eastern Bloc’ states like Bulgaria and Romania to encourage a fracking boom.

‘I know that in some places [it] is controversial,’ she said in a 2010 speech, ‘but natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel available for power generation today.’ Except it’s not very clean: huge quantities of methane gas leaked from fracking wells could cause as much contribution to global warming as carbon emissions. What it does benefit however, is not only the US government politically, but also financially the US energy companies who will move in to conduct the fracking internationally.

We live in an anxious global political climate, with Russia rumbling to our East and the darkly murderous force of IS gathering strength in Iraq and Syria. To be more reliant on our own energy seems like a vital plan. But why not invest in clean, renewable energies like wind farms and solar panels? Because this doesn’t fit with David Cameron’s pro-privatisation Tory party, where tax cuts have already been offered to fracking companies. In the US, investment in renewable energies has seen a 5% dip since fracking was introduced. With so much potential danger attached to fracking, this is a sad example of putting money and profit before people.

40,000 people marched through London against climate change last weekend, saying ‘it’s Time to Act’. Westwood’s message for years has been against the mass, throwaway consumerism of popular culture, asking people to take an awareness in their world. With fracking a process that could potentially pollute your drinking water, and send tremors through the walls of your home, Westwood’s quote becomes more pertinent: ‘I am expensive. I cost the earth.’