THE issue of fracking and coalbed methane extraction is one of great significance to all of us in the Forest right now.

Frack Off Our Forest (FOOF) organised an excellent awareness day on Saturday 8th January at the West Dean Centre – it was packed. There is much to be concerned about.

Irrespective of whether there is or isn’t any methane to be collected from the coal seams, once the exploratory rigs are in place there is a possibility that they will be used to drill deeper into the underlying limestone and sandstone formations.

We should oppose even the current exploratory rigs for three reasons.

•While the proposed exploratory wells on their own are unlikely to have a huge impact, they are harbingers of a much more devastating process with multiple wells and extraction points.

Significant amounts of contaminated water and ground movements are predicted and there is much alarming information from the United States and Australia of the impacts that these processes have had on local communities, even in much less sparsely populated and geologically more stable areas than the Forest.

At a time when the Forest is increasingly developing a tourist economy and attracting people, businesses and investment, this process may well leave us with blighted land and contaminated water, reduced property values and an impoverished economy.

The companies involved claim that the process is perfectly safe, does not contaminate land or water and does not cause earthquakes if done properly and all goes to plan.

BP would have said the same about deep drilling before the Deepwater Horizon disaster or SoCalGas about the current huge methane leak at their Porter Ranch storage facility in California. Sooner or later something goes wrong and the question is ‘how bad can it get?’

•Fracking is being imposed by central government and the large multinational companies that they are influenced by.

The law has been changed to allow directional drilling under areas and properties where it would not previously have been permitted and local democratic planning and oversight controls appear to be being emasculated or manipulated.

This is a view that was reinforced when I attended a meeting of Gloucestershire County Council’s environment and communities scrutiny committee on January 13.

While the government is well aware of the country’s impending energy shortage, for which privatisation of the energy generation system and a reliance on market forces is largely to blame since 1979, they should not allow the large corporations that have profited from this policy to continue to set the tune.

Other European counties are accelerating the transition to renewable energy sources, often by encouraging locally owned wind and solar facilities.

This has the benefit of by-passing large corporate self-interest, getting local support and engagement and is technically more efficient.

Generating energy from renewables is not a technical problem and storage methods that will overcome the problem of matching demand to availability are now starting to come to market in the form of batteries and other storage media.

The challenge is the political will to look forward and not backwards. In the Forest we are fortunate to have the excellent Resilience Centre which is trying to develop low impact, locally-owned energy generation schemes and we should support their efforts.

•All this is against a longer term trend of needing to address climate change. Rigorously measured carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by over 25 per cent since 1958 and by an estimated 40 per cent since the start of the industrial revolution.

The ultimate impacts of this on the climate are still uncertain but the need to change course rather than continue experimenting with the planet is now clearly accepted.

At the Paris climate conference last year, the Prime Minister committed to accelerate the process of reducing carbon emissions with increased urgency, yet government policy has been in the opposite direction since the 2015 election.

Support for renewables by encouraging new energy efficiency businesses and local generation schemes has been cut back and a green light given to proceed with fracking at all costs.

This is a panic measure to forestall the rapidly approaching shortages, but at the expense of risk to our and our children’s long-term home.

The Forest has been exploited by external profiteers, let down by local political representatives and the community left with the legacy before. Let’s make it different this time.

We all need to find out as much as we can about what is going on and press our elected representatives to listen before it is too late.

– Dr Nigel Salter CEng, FIET, Soudley.