Opinion

Political Columnists: The Frack-turing of a Nation

Nishanth Bhargava and Medha Valluri
December 1, 2022

Two writers with opposing views tackle the issue of British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s reversal of a 2019 ban on fracking. Although the new PM Rishi Sunak has since reinstated that ban, the question remains: is fracking a necessary part of our future?

Pro: The Future of Fracking

Human beings lack the razor-sharp teeth, immense strength, and incredible speed that many animals in nature have at their disposal to survive. In fact, compared to most creatures, we’re pretty scrawny, forcing us to rely on our technological capabilities. Humankind has achieved this with great success: in the 1920s, roughly 500,000 people per year were killed by environmental disasters. That number has dropped to less than 7,000 deaths by 2021. Since the industrial revolution, we have learned to utilize machines in ways never possible before, and we require dependable sources of energy in order to raise our standard of living.

Although industrialization may impact the environment around us, one must not forget that we are still finding better ways to conquer the dangers and unpredictability of nature around us. Fracking provides a consistent and simple method of utilizing the energy that humans need through the process of high-pressure fluid injections through rock formations to extract natural gas. Over the years, fracking helps create jobs and stabilize the economy; the average income increased from 10 to 20 percent as a result of fracking, according to the WWS. Fracking is a necessity as it allows energy to be created and utilized in an efficient and widespread way, by unveiling abundant natural resources and increasing the standard of living worldwide.

A ban on fracking means getting rid of a safe and inexpensive way of unlocking abundant natural resources. It also means a decrease in supply across the entire global market, or in other words, a massive increase in the cost of all energy—including the heat inside your home, the ability to easily cook and dry your clothes, and to generate electricity for the lights used to open up your household. It also leads to an decrease in energy security over the world, as other sources of energy like wind and solar rely mainly on the flexibility of resources like natural gas and oil.

Fracking also helps keep gas prices low; in 2015, according to WWS, drivers saved almost a full dollar per gallon at the pump because of fracking. Liz Truss, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, made the right decision when lifting this ban, as she was able to take a clear glance at the energy-crisis through a pro-humanity lens.

Although Truss’s political perspective might be a good decision for us, it’s possible that lifting the fracking ban means deeply impacting the environment in a negative way. Having a well-maintained environment is a good thing for humanity, but before one deems environmental manipulation to be “exploitation,” it’s important to ask, by what standard? One can only think that the impact on our environment is evil if they believe that human progress should be sacrificed at the altar of conservativeness. There is no possible way to increase the lives of human beings without impacting the very place we live. To destroy nature for the sake of destruction is evil, but condemning this technological advancement which improved the standard of human life is unreasonable.

Even more, a fracking ban does more than hurt the advancement of our lives, it also devastatingly impacts nations’ need for a constant supply of energy to increase their standards of living. In fact, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory, more than 40% of all Sub-Saharan countries don’t even have an official source of electricity. Poorer countries especially need easy access to the reliable energy provided from fracking, because they are still working to increase their production and wealth to a point where they can support their citizens past the point of basic subsistence. Introducing fracking can keep energy prices low in homes, as fracking helped reduce gas bills by $13 billion between 2007 and 2013.

Overall, Truss’s decision to promote natural gas and other reliable forms of energy by lifting the fracking ban across Europe substantially helps the economy and leads us one step closer towards securing energy security worldwide. Lifting the fracking ban is the morally right thing to do, as it helps advance humanity’s chance of improving their lives.

-Medha Valluri

Con: The Frack-turing of a Nation

On October 13th, the Daily Star launched a YouTube livestream featuring two British flags, a scone from Greggs, and a head of lettuce with a blond wig. It asked one question: can this lettuce outlast Liz Truss? The answer was yes—with approval rates in the single digits and polls showing a resounding victory for the opposition Labor party in any hypothetical election scenario, Liz Truss had been fighting a losing battle to retain power in Westminster until her resignation on October 20th.

Though Liz Truss may be gone, her disastrous legacy still haunts Britain, manifesting itself in widespread discontent with Tory governance. What could be the most lasting legacy of her tenure, however, was her reversal of a 2019 ban on fracking, which extracts natural gas from shale. Despite the Truss administration’s claims that the overturning of fracking restrictions would allow the United Kingdom to develop energy independence and pull down rising energy costs, such action will only leave Britain in economic, environmental, and political ruin.

The administration’s argument that fracking will cause gas prices to fall is patently absurd given Britain’s current energy situation. The key problem with the Conservative plan is that British natural gas reserves are far too small to have any real impact on the prices of domestic natural gas. Government agencies themselves have pointed out this fact, stating bluntly that “our gas reserves—offshore or from shale—are too small to impact meaningfully the prices faced by UK consumers.”

Though senior administration officials have acknowledged this, they are quick to point to the current energy crisis and claim that fracking would help reduce energy costs in the short term. As sizable fracking operations could take years to develop, however, it is difficult to see how new rigs could be made operational in time to address the current crisis. Since fracking is too difficult to scale as a short-term solution to an energy price shock and too low in volume to meaningfully meet British natural gas demand in the long run, the economics of domestic fracking as a method of supplying energy to Britons are highly suspect.

In her proposal to the House of Commons, Truss emphasized that fracking would only occur in areas where there is “considerable community support.” What community? And what support? Recent government polling has shown that the British public overwhelmingly opposes fracking by a margin of 45% to 16%. More recent polling of solely Conservative voters shows that even they have their doubts, as less than 50% of them actually support fracking. Meanwhile, green options such as wind and solar garnered a nearly 90% approval rate among the Tory base.

Moreover, the “communities” that would be affected most by fracking do not lie in traditionally Tory areas—most shale deposits lie either in Scotland, where the nationalist Scottish National Party dominates, or in Northern English counties with a long-standing history of support for the Labor Party. With fracking struggling in popularity among Conservative voters themselves, it is difficult to see how the government would gain support for fracking in the heartlands of the opposition. The popularity of fracking with the British people has been grossly overstated by the Conservative government.

Although the collapse of the Truss government cannot be blamed exclusively on the issue of fracking, their deregulatory agenda was one of many factors that contributed to their eventual demise. The Conservative government’s fracking bill bared to all Britain the naked antipathy that Truss and her government held for working-class Britons and the youth in a time of financial hardship for many across the Union. Apart from the obvious environmental concerns, fracking is simply an impractical solution to a long-term energy crisis that hinders our ability to pursue renewable options with greater longevity. Despite their best efforts, Liz Truss’s administration now lies with the natural gas they fought so hard to extract—deep, deep underground.

-Nishanth Bhargava

The Hawkeye

Political Columnists: The Frack-turing of a Nation

The Hawkeye

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