Gas fracking should not be allowed anywhere says top environmentalist

Gas fracking should not be allowed anywhere says top environmentalist by The Irish Times, August 20, 2012
THE GOVERNMENT would “become the shoeshine boy of the [shale gas] industry” if it allowed fracking to take place anywhere in Ireland, according to the Nigerian human rights activist who heads Friends of the Earth International. Nnimmo Bassey said Ministers “should not be allowed to sacrifice the environment on the altar of corporate greed” – as they had done for decades in his own country, where “the entire nation was Shell’s concession”. … There were plans to carry out fracking – the hydraulic fracturing of rock to extract shale gas – in the Karoo, an arid area of South Africa’s eastern Cape, where the wells would be up to 5km deep, and there was “no indication where the water would come from”, he said. .. He believed fracking “should not be allowed anywhere” and that it would “lock us into further dependence on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, which is exactly what the industry wants”. It was necessary to press the Government “not to give licences, because the damage we’re going to face may not be reversible”.

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