![]() As part of his war efforts, Vladimir Putin has restricted gas supplies to Europe, causing energy prices to soar.Ĭarbon Brief’s daily analysis of newspaper coverage has closely monitored how a small, but vocal minority of Conservative-supporting newspapers and commentators have ramped up their calls for new types of fossil-fuel production, including fracking, often making factually inaccurate claims about how this could ease the energy crisis. (See Carbon Brief’s interactive analysis of how newspapers have covered climate change.)īut just a few months after COP26, Russia invaded Ukraine, which sent shockwaves through the world’s energy systems. Johnson’s campaign coincided with an ongoing shift in how UK newspapers covered climate change – with editorials published in support of fracking dropping sharply between 20. Wales has also had a moratorium in place since 2015 and there have been moves to ban it in Northern Ireland.Īt the UK’s last general election in December 2019, the Conservative party manifesto reaffirmed the party’s commitment to a fracking ban in England, saying: “We will not support fracking unless the science shows categorically that it can be done safely.” From the 2019 Conservative party manifesto.īolstered by a decisive election victory, then-prime minister Boris Johnson was keen to paint himself as a “green” prime minister.Īhead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow in November 2021, Johnson announced several high-level climate commitments, including a pledge to make the UK “ the Saudi Arabia of wind power” and a 10-point climate plan for a “ green industrial revolution”. The Scottish government already had a policy of opposing fracking since 2015 and the Scottish transport minister recently confirmed there are no plans to issue any fracking licences. Why is the UK government lifting the ban on fracking?įracking has been banned in England since November 2019, following public outcry over minor earthquakes at a test site in Lancashire. This is after a scientific review concluded that forecasting the occurrence and size of large earthquakes “remains a scientific challenge”.) (UPDATE 22 September: Business and energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg has confirmed plans to lift the ban on fracking and indicated that the government will consider raising the limit on the size of earthquakes that are allowed to take place at drilling sites. In this factcheck, Carbon Brief examines why the UK government is – once again – revisiting the fracking debate, as well as the evidence confirming that investing in shale gas would do little to cut bills or boost energy security. The move to lift the ban comes after a small group of right-leaning publications and commentators have ramped up their calls for fracking, often making factually inaccurate claims about how this could ease the energy crisis. However, the most recent government polling finds that just 17% of people support fracking, compared with 90% for solar. Truss told parliament that her fracking drive will be contingent on “local support”. The UK’s new prime minister Liz Truss has used her first major policy address to announce an end to the moratorium on fracking in England.Īnnouncing the move – which breaks a promise made in the 2019 Conservative manifesto – Truss claimed it could “get gas flowing in as soon as six months” amid an energy crisis.īut, as her own chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has acknowledged recently, it could take up to a decade for shale gas to make a sufficient contribution to domestic supply – and any amount of fracking is unlikely to stem energy price hikes, which are almost entirely driven by wholesale gas prices set internationally. ![]()
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