BALCOMBE, England — The lovely green hills of the High Weald are Tory country, a corner of West Sussex full of affluent residents who commute to London and like their golf and ambles and thatched cottages. So it is a surprise, in this conservative heartland, to stumble on an encampment of hundreds of activists, foraging in the hedgerows for edible greens, sawing wood for fires, playing flutes and generally enacting a kind of mini-Woodstock.
But peace and love are not the story. This is the heavily policed front line of Britain’s fracking war. A conflict has erupted over Prime Minister David Cameron’s vision of turning the English countryside into hydraulic-fracturing central, a place where West Sussex would release its inner West Texas.
“There’s about 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas lying underneath Britain at the moment,” he enthused this month. Extracting even one-tenth of it would provide 51 years of gas supply. The man who vowed in 2010 to head “the greenest government ever” was adamant in an article in The Daily Telegraph: “We cannot afford to miss out on fracking.”To which banners on the road outside the village of Balcombe offer this retort: “Fracking kills.”Bianca Jagger has joined the battle against the dash for gas. A Green M. P. has been arrested. So has Natalie Hynde, daughter of the rockers Ray Davies of the Kinks and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. Scuffles have erupted at the gates of the site where Cuadrilla Resources — whose chairman, Lord Browne, once headed BP — is drilling for oil, and is suspected of doing exploratory work for possible fracking.
Arthur Melduish, 29, emerged bleary-eyed from his tent. “Fracking is not wanted here on this planet,” he said. “It would poison our water supply. I’ve read how in the United States you can light your taps. We don’t drink fire in this country.”In fact — as shale gas production in the United States shot up from very little in 2000 to well over 10 billion cubic feet per day in 2010 and as gas prices have tumbled — the case that fracking causes severe groundwater contamination remains unproven, even if many studies suggest links to deteriorating quality.
Fracking involves shooting a cocktail of water, sand and chemicals under pressure into rock to fracture it and release the gas. It poses problems of methane leakage, and the disposal of huge quantities of waste water. In densely populated, water-strained areas, like southern England, these issues become especially acute. Europe as a whole is skeptical. France has banned it, as has Bulgaria. German beer makers are angst-filled.
So Cameron has stuck his neck out on fracking, with little or no national debate. He has vowed to win the fracking cause while avoiding any major speech on the government’s supposed commitment to low-carbon energy. Like the Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s advocacy of genetically modified food in the 1990s — an attempt that failed — he has taken on nature-loving middle England.
Why? There is huge money involved. Beyond economic considerations, fracking has become one of those hot-button politico-cultural issues (like G. M. crops) where you demonstrate your credentials in a post-ideological world. It is a cause to bray about before you consider the complex science, a badge of allegiance.
Cameron, whose Conservative Party faces an election in 2015, is more concerned about losing votes to the right (the Euro-skeptic U. K. Independence Party) than to the left. As fracking’s cheerleader, he secures his right flank — and gets The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Times of London behind him.
Sue Taylor, a chartered accountant and longtime Tory, is unimpressed. She appears at Balcombe’s Half Moon Inn pub with three friends and a T-shirt that reads “Conservatives against fracking.” She has started a Web site and just donated $30 to a local store collecting for the protesters. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she says. (At the bar four men are grumbling about the “rent-a-mob” down the road.)What has enraged Taylor is the absence of any debate or scientific review, Cameron’s U-turn on protecting “Areas of Outstanding National Beauty” (the High Weald is one), the threat to water and the unsavory politics: The local Tory M. P. is Francis Maude, who, as minister for the Cabinet Office, appointed Lord Browne in 2010 as the government’s lead nonexecutive director, an advisory role.
Taylor’s friend Jackie Bedson says: “This is worse than anything the Bushes ever did — well, that we know of.”These Tory women’s fury is justified. I think fracking should have a British — and European — future. Shale gas is an important new element in global energy supplies, a cost cutter and a geostrategic game changer that lessens Western dependence on Russia and Iran. But Cameron, by talking about the need for transparency while providing none, has undermined that future, and pretty Balcombe may well be precisely the kind of place least suited to it.
