YP Letters: Price too high to pay in race for fracking

I THINK Bernard Ingham is showing his PR background and his lack of research into the drawbacks of fracking (Fracking is a price worth paying, The Yorkshire Post, June 1).

If fracking is so essential to the economy, where should it take place?

The Department of Energy and Climate Change has identified large areas of southern England as having the “best shale gas potential”.

The southern areas include Buckinghamsire, the Cotswolds, Wiltshire, Surrey and the South Coast.

We have a Conservative government that gets 40 per cent of its support from southern England.

The dominant economic activity is in the South.

It is a sound business 
principle to locate production as close as possible to its main market.

It therefore would make sense to pursue fracking in the southern and not the Northern counties.

Fracking is associated with unavoidable pollution of various kinds and it has the potential to cause damaging, if minor earthquakes.

Indeed, the prospect of 
this combination so alarmed 
the father-in-law of Geoge Osborne that he wanted 
fracking confined to the desolate North.

If the main beneficiaries of shale gas extraction are in the South, then the health and environmental risks should also be located there.

From: Glyn Wild, Highfield Terrace, Swinton.

WHY do you continue to publish the pernicious and dangerously misleading articles by Bernard Ingham? His claims that there is no solid evidence of global warming is preposterous. The last few years have seen the highest global temperatures on record.

Please remember that a wind turbine can be removed when no longer needed with little damage to the environment. A fracked gas well that goes wrong could damage the environment (and lives) for decades.

From: David Craggs, Shafton Gate, Rotherham.

FOR the first time I recently saw the aerial view of the Kirby Misperton fracking site in your newspaper. How in heaven’s name was planning permission given to lay all that concrete down, thus scarring the landscape?

I know that it’s been there quite a while, but one has to face the fact that the visual damage has already been done, and that further development will probably not make the site visually less pleasing to the eye than it is already. Once done, it was always going to be easier for the fracking company to press ahead with its future plans.

To me, it is rather like an energy company being given permission to build the turbine towers on a wind farm. How much easier it would then be for it to get permission to attach the turbine blades?

The landscape of East Yorkshire has already been ruined by wind farms. It would appear that North Yorkshire could suffer the same fate, but with fracking rigs. In this whole area the expression ‘the thin end of the wedge’ usually applies.

Maybe the expression Northern Powerhouse has another meaning, ie the region where the country’s power requirements are generated by whatever method is fashionable at the time. I would put my next month’s pension on there being no planning applications for fracking in the heart of the Cotswolds.

From: Tom Howley, Wetherby.

DISAGREEING with Sir Bernard Ingham invites cruel and vicious retaliation. Once an active Labour Party worker, he was converted to his extreme right wing views by Margaret Thatcher and with her was instrumental in the deregulation of the financial sector which resulted in the near destruction of the economy.

From: Henry O’Toole, Ripon.

WHERE do fracking opponents intend to get their energy from in the future? I admire NYCC for putting the national interest first.

Airport claim vindicated

From: Les Wilkie, Hutton Cranswick, Driffield.

ABOUT three years ago, I wrote to this paper about my doubts on the ability of Leeds Bradford Airport to claim international status – my experience on Monday afternoon confirms my doubts.

After stepping off my flight from Malta, it took 51 minutes for my wife and I to reach passport control.

For the majority of that time we stood in a stationary column of people wondering what precisely was going on.

There was one apology 
for the delay: “Too many 
planes had arrived at the same time.”

An international airport that complains about aircraft arrivals? Shut the ruddy place down and move to Doncaster.

Blair opinions hypocrisy

From: John Appleyard, Firthcliffe Parade, Liversedge.

TONY Blair is the latest figure in the Labour Party continuing the daily undermining of Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Blair carried out the biggest betrayal of a Labour government in my lifetime. Mr Corbyn should continue his good work of winning back disaffected Labour voters and the Blairites should stop complaining and start campaigning.

From: Dr Glyn Powell, Bakersfield Drive, Kellington, Goole.

TONY Blair’s assertion that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as premier would be a dangerous experiment is the height of hypocrisy. After all, in 13 years of Labour government control under both Blair and Gordon Brown, little was done to improve the lot of ordinary working people.