Economics of fracking are not sustainable

Every time environmental concerns surrounding fracking are flagged up its proponents point to the huge economic benefits it will bring.
If you believe the pro-fracking lobby, in 10 years time everyone in counties Fermanagh, Leitrim and Cavan will be millionaires.
The rest of us will be on the pig’s back as well, paying just a few pence for our household energy and earning huge salaries working for multinational corporations attracted by give-away electricity prices.
Much has been made of the vast sums of money that could be invested and the employment opportunities that fracking will bring to rural communities.
Australian company Tamboran, which last week announced plans to begin exploratory drilling in Fermanagh, has in the past proposed making a £6 billion investment in Northern Ireland that would create up to 600 jobs.
However, while 600 jobs is nothing to be sniffed at in times of economic hardship let’s just look at those figures again.
For every £10 million invested, Tamboran would deliver one job. Wao.
Compare that to US blue-chip services firm Concentrix which in April announced that it would create more than 1,000 jobs in Belfast following a £36 million investment, with £3.5m support from job-creation agency Invest NI.
Last month the Newry-based technology firm First Derivatives said it would create just under 500 high-paying jobs, with £3.9m worth of support from Invest NI. That works out at about £7,800 per job.
Neither of those companies will have a long-term impact on our landscape, or pump toxic and highly explosive chemicals into the ground and potentially causing earth tremors. It is also important to remember that Tamboran are only predicting that ‘up to’ 600 jobs ‘might’ be created if they are allowed to frack in Fermanagh. Up to 600 could mean anything between zero and 599.
The ‘could’ has to be offset against the actual.
Fracking would see the large-scale industrialisation of Fermanagh’s picturesque landscape which draws in significant numbers of tourists every year.
There are an estimated 800 jobs in the county’s angling sector and hundreds of employed in tourism in hotels, guesthouses, restaurants, bars and other visitor attractions.
Is anyone really suggesting that we put these actual jobs at risk for a ‘possible’ 600 jobs or less?
Another supposed economic benefit is that Northern Ireland and the Republic will get cheaper gas and electricity.
The suggestion that those nice international conglomerates will sell shale gas to us really cheaply simply because it came from under our land is naive beyond belief.
Profit margins drive exploration companies, not pats on the head and ‘sure here’s a few quid for your troubles’ because we let them destroy our landscape with drilling sites and pipelines.
Ask the people of Scotland if their petrol has been any cheaper than in England or Wales for the past 40 years simply because they produce 65 per cent of Britain’s oil.
A quick online price comparison will tell you that the cost of diesel last week was on average higher in Scotland than in England and Wales.
And the experience of Scotland suggests that being the source of a lucrative income generator is not necessarily going to make the ordinary man and woman on the streets of Fermanagh, Leitrim or Cavan or the rest of Ireland, north or south, any better off.
The Scottish economy generates just over £26,400 per person every year, compared to £22,300 for the UK as a whole. This performance is significantly boosted by Scotland’s North Sea oil and gas industry.
However, when it comes to disposable personal income the average Scot is around £400 per year worse off, at £15,300, compared to the UK average of £15,700.
The world is hurtling towards an energy crisis as oil and gas supplies run out and many have gleefully hailed shale gas extraction as the solution.
But it is a carbon-emitting energy source and the global consensus is that if climate change is to be halted, or at least slowed, emissions must be reduced.
The environmental arguments against fracking and the need to develop renewable energies have been well flagged up but fracking supporters are trying to counter and win public approval with promises of wealth generation.
If the shale gas deposits are viable huge profits will be made by the companies who can get to it.
However, just as a planet dependent on carbon-based fuels is environmentally unsustainable the arguments being put forward by the fracker-backers that it will also bring financial rewards for Fermanagh, Cavan and Leitrim and the island’s two jurisdictions are economically unsustainable.
First published in The Irish News opinion pages on August 28 2014

The Blue Lough

A walk into the Mourne Mountains this morning brought home how bad last month's fires had been.
I'd seen the huge areas of scorch damage a few weeks ago when walking along the Brandy Pad, but this morning's walk past Annalong Wood was through some of the worst damage.
Much of the wood is now charcoal, large open spaces giving a clear view over to the other side where there used to be a curtain of forest.
Some of it has survived but the rest will have to be replanted, hopefully with native species this time rather than ubiquitous pines.
Further on up large tracts of scrubland are blackened and the recent heavy rains seem to have washed away the charred heather and even the topsoil in which it grew to expose the rocky ground beneath.
Even though I walk this route more than any other in the Mournes the landscape was a new one to me, the surrounding peaks were the same but the ground around them had physically changed.
The silence was more intense than ever, no crickets or bird song, just a couple of cawking ravens on the slopes of Slieve Binnian.
I went on up past a little mountain called Perscy Bysshe, past a cluster of bog cotton in one of the pockets of undamage heather and sat on the shore of the Blue Lough, pictured above.
On the opposite shore were the steeply inclining slabs of Slievelamagan but even up here there was evidence of scorch damage... and then among the charred soil I saw a couple of green shoots.
It might take a few years but the mountains will recover, despite the crisp packet-dropping, boot-eroding (my own included) and cigarette butt-incinerating efforts of those who come here.
Another encouraging thing was a small stunted tree that I always look out for along the path leading to Percy Bysshe was still there. I didn't see it on the way up, but its well off the path and hard to sight sometimes, camoflaged agains the surrounding heather.
But coming down again I saw that it was still there, like the only stage prop in Waiting For Godot, standing stunted but surviving in the fire-blasted mountain heather surrounding it.

Tree planting

One of Ireland's leading environmental activists has called on writers to take a leaf from the book of a Co Down novelist.
Tony Bailie’s second novel ecopunks is described as an “environmental parable for the 21st century” and features a troubled eco-warrior as its central character.
While the novel, published by Belfast Lagan Press, was printed on recycled paper Bailie decided to go one step further and has planted 20 native Irish trees to help offset the carbon footprint resulting from the production process.
Bailie said: “I felt that taking on an environmental theme for my fiction brought additional responsibilities to me as a writer and even when I was writing it I decided that I would have to do something more than making sure it was printed on recycled paper.
“While ecopunks is aimed at a general readership, I did not want to simply tap in to the green zeitgeist without making a genuine effort to be true to the principles espoused by my main characters and the ethos of the novel.”
Bailie, a journalist with the Belfast-based daily The Irish News, worked with the paper’s gardening columnist John Manley to identify a plot of unused land beside the Co Down coast and what trees to plant.
Mr Manley said: “We planted native species such as crab apple, beech, hawthorn, elder and birch – all sourced bare-root from Conservation Volunteers tree nursery at Clandeboye, just outside Belfast.
“The patch we planted is close to the sea, out on the edge of the Lecale peninsula. We hope this small copse will one day provide a welcome shelter and resting place for migrating birds as they come in off the Irish Sea.”
The initiative and the theme of the novel have been welcomed by Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland Director James Orr.
Mr Orr said: “This book is not just a great story but a parable for the way in which we need to stop taking our planet for granted.
“The interlocking themes of a road destroying ancient woodland and nuclear catastrophe is set against the context that our time on Earth is a fraction of geological or ecological time. This book reminds us of man’s hubris and short-sighted arrogance in assuming that we are not party of nature.
“This is an also international story but could easily have been set in Ireland given what is happening to the natural world.
“With this superb book, Tony Bailie has given us great literature with a powerful message that none of us can ignore.”
Ecopunks is part adventure story, part psychological thriller and part New Age philosophy that raises serious questions about the impact of modern living on the world’s climate.
It tells the interweaving stories of eco-warrior Wolf Cliss, alternative archaeologist Kei Yushiro and Irish musician Lorcan O’Malley. All three are troubled characters in this intimate story about principle and belief that stretches from Eastern Europe and the rain forests of Asia to South America.
ecopunks by Tony Bailie is available from Lagan Press or from Amazon.


Above press release went out to media in Ireland and Britain this week.

Notes From The Edge Times by Daniel Pinchbeck

In among a series of essays about climate change, economic meltdown, the role of the artist in society and the flaws of monogomous relationships, Daniel Pinchbeck also turns his attention to alien contact, crop circles and breaking through into his unconsciousness with the use of psychedelic drugs.
He is a new age philosopher whose name has become synonymous with the year 2012 and Mayan predictions that humanity is at the end of a 5,000 year time cycle which heralds the the dawn of a new era - and in some extreme scenartios the end of human civilization.
Pinchbeck often tries to put a distance between himself and some of the more outlandish themes in the sense that he will rehearse the theories that crop circles in the Wiltshire countryside are the manifestation of a higher consciousness or alien attempts to communicate with humanity, before stepping back and offering a more mundane possibility.
He is at ease writing about 'energies' associated with certain places but will throw in a self-conscious note of caution as if to say to his sneering detractors that he knows it might sound ridiculous but lets just air the argument before we shoot it down.
"While writing my books, I discovered that I was able to keep an open (if skeptical) mind, while exploring subjects that make most people flinch, whether shamanism, psychedelics, or crop circles." (P58)
This placing of a distance between himself and some the subjects he tackles in his essays enhances Pinchbeck's credibility as a commentator when compared to some of the more adamant 'new age' philosophers, and indeed their maintream detractors, who would have us believe that their theories are incontrovertible.
Despite this Pinchbeck is not shy of making the odd sweeping statement. In his essay on 'The Sexual Revolution, Take Two' he writes:
"Wars and other mass psychoses such as facism can be linked to sexually repressive or abusive practises in childrearing. The unnatural desire for power over others and control of other people's reproductive functions by fundamentalists and leaders of the radical right could be the result of psychological complexes caused by distortions of sex energy in early childhood, leaving permanent wounds." (P37)
Psychology, environmental meltdown, humanity's loss of contact with the very nature that allowed it to evolve, geopolitics, alien contact, shamanism, traditional psychedelics and the role of the artist in society (or lack of a role) provide some of the themes.
There is no single narrative as in his earlier, much-better, 2012 The Year of the Mayan Prophecy, which had just as many diverse ideas but seemed much more focused. That is probably because Notes From the Edge Times is a collection of essays and articles writen for a variety of publications over a two-year period.
Nevertheless Pinchbeck is never dull and this serves as a good introduction to his ideas.
He is not from the school of thought that 2012 will be a year of global catastropy in which climate change or some other man-made disaster will herald the end of society. He is more optomisitic and sees it as the beginning of a new period of evolution in which humanity will reconnect with the planet which enabled it to evolve.
He predicts a new global consciousness in which tribal values will be reinstated and people will be more open to the insights from within. Maybe it is all a bit hippy and idealistic, but then a world based on hippy values would surely be much better than the one we are presently inhabiting.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/

Ecopunks

ecopunks is now available to buy from amazon.co.uk. There are also copies available in Waterstones in Belfast and at The Bookshop at Queens.