YP Letters: Fracking should hold no fear for the countryside

I CAN well understand the outrage of people like Mrs Dinah Annabel Holt at the prospect of fracking in the beautiful Yorkshire countryside (The Yorkshire Post, Letters, November 12).

I do wonder, however, if she would have been as ready to take up cudgels to defend an area such as that where I live, and which until the demise of the mining industry, was in the middle of the South Yorkshire Coalfield. (I’m sure her father would have been aware that his comfort of heat and light came from such sources).

The fact is that our nation’s power has got to come from somewhere, and we ought to be grateful that our island appears to be endowed with this store of shale gas.

Mrs Holt’s indignation reminds me very much of the stance, once taken mainly by our southern cousins, to stoutly oppose any scheme of industrialisation which they feared might affect their green and pleasant land.

It was always “No — not here! Put it Up North with all the other muck” and by implication “and where they don’t know any better!”

Well, let me say that areas like ours have done their bit for some generations and it would not now be unreasonable for others to willingly take up the opportunity for supplying the necessary energy for Britain’s survival in the present age, which by good fortune would be available by fracking. The disruption caused by this process is minute by comparison with that of our coal-mining past.

I’m sure Mrs Holt’s father Colonel Legard would have realised that a total breakdown of the UK economy through lack of energy, was far more likely to ‘destroy The British Isles’ than the minor disruption caused by fracking.

From: David Cragg-James, Stonegrave, York.

The report of the Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change early in October seems to have acted as the wake-up call we have been waiting for.

We are cautioned that we have approximately until 2030 to take control of those factors which are contributing to man-made climate change, primarily but not exclusively emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels. The time for denial and prevarication is over.

Bristol City Council has just unanimously declared a state of climate emergency.

Will York follow?