Is there any debate about fracking?

Where is the debate or is it a case of just take the medicine, its good for you because we are telling you and here's a hundred quid to swallow it. 

This is what the Daily Telegraphy reported as to the government's case for gas shale tracking:

David Cameron set out the economic benefits including cheaper energy bills for millions, tens of thousands of jobs and windfalls for communities which are sitting on vast reserves of shale gas. He also pledged that fracking would not damage Britain’s countryside and would only result in a “very minor change to the landscape”.

'It’s been suggested in recent weeks that we want fracking to be confined to certain parts of Britain. This is wrong. I want all parts of our nation to share in the benefits: north or south, Conservative or Labour. We are all in this together'. 

Mr Cameron made clear that the potential benefits are too good to ignore. He said that fracking has “real potential to drive energy bills down”, adding: “It’s simple – gas and electric bills can go down when our home grown energy supply goes up.

There were also large rewards on offer to communities which find themselves sitting on vast reserves. He said: 'Companies have agreed to pay £100,000 to every community situated near an exploratory well – somewhere where they’re looking to see if shale gas exists. If shale gas is then extracted, one per cent of the revenue – perhaps as much as £10million - will go straight back to residents who live nearby'.

He said: 'We must make the case that fracking is safe. International evidence shows there is no evidence why fracking should cause contamination of water supplies or other environmental damage, if properly regulated'.

'If properly regulated'. Ah yes, its called Privatisation. Give pigs wings and they will fly. 

Here is the argument against fracking presented as facts quoted from http://www.dangersoffracking.com

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside.

Each gas well requires an average of 400 tanker trucks to carry water and supplies to and from the site

It takes 1-8 million gallons of water to complete each fracturing job

The water brought in is mixed with sand and chemicals to create fracking fluid. Approximately 40,000 gallons of chemicals are used per fracturing.

  

Up to 600 chemicals are used in fracking fluid, including known carcinogens and toxins such as…

The fracking fluid is then pressure injected into the ground through a drilled pipeline.

500,000 Active gas wells in the US X 8 million gallons of water per fracking

 X 18 times a well can be fracked

The mixture reaches the end of the well where the high pressure causes the nearby shale rock to crack, creating fissures where natural gas flows into the well.

During this process, methane gas and toxic chemicals leach out from the system and contaminate nearby groundwater.

Methane concentrations are 17x higher in drinking-water wells near fracturing sites than in normal wells

Contaminated well water is used for drinking water for nearby cities and towns.

There have been over 1,000 documented cases of water contamination next to areas of gas drilling as well as cases of sensory, respiratory, and neurological damage due to ingested contaminated water

The waste fluid is left in open air pits to evaporate, releasing harmful VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere, creating contaminated air, acid rain, and ground level ozone

In the end, hydraulic fracking produces approximately 300,000 barrels of natural gas a day, but at the price of numerous environmental, safety, and health hazards

There are numerous YouTube videos showing water on fire from drinking pipes in areas of Australia and other hazards in the USA. The sheer amount of water used and problems of storing and disposing of contaminated waste alone is alarming not to mention the demand for eater during a drought.

There is nothing so blind as greed. Effort should surely be increased to reduce our energy consumption and develop alternative technologies?

Well they warned us

        'The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years'.

         Well they warned us that we had a decade to make a U-turn and now the decade is up, but the problem today is every observation or 'fact' is immediately cancelled out by those who argue the opposite and despite the scientific age we live in, nobody seems to know, or we just don't like to face up to reality.

The day I met Maggie

      Margaret Thatcher died on 8 April 2013. I had the honour to meet her in her first term of office as British Prime Minister - I recall in 1980 a slightly stooping ordinary looking woman dressed in a light blue twin set scuttling into Kensington Town Hall carrying a handbag as the audience stood to greet her.

     Anyone handing out an award to 100 people might be pushed to say anything original and immediate to each and it is unlikely they would compare notes afterwards which would be interesting. As I stood on the stage waiting for my cue I was briefed that I had 18 seconds to converse with her. I walked on to the announcement  'Jeremy Broun visited furniture designers, manufacturers and retailers in Sweden, Finland and Italy'. As she handed over the medal and I shook her hand she softly whispered 'well done, I hope you taught them a thing or two'. I was too mesmerised by the occasion to say anything more than 'thank you' but on exiting down the stairs I immediately thought why didn't I say 'on the contrary, ma'am, I was there to learn from them '. I had bought a pea green flared felt suit for the occasion, far too tight around the shoulders and crutch to comfortably wear much again so I mothballed it my 'Maggie Thatcher suit'.

I was 33 years old and making innovative handmade furniture in a tiny cramped underground workshop without natural light. My ideas were too forward looking for the hidebound British market so indeed it was a huge shot in the arm for me to win the Churchill scholarship that took me away from 'Little England' and discover my ideas were shared abroad but also that I would soak up much of Scandinavian and Italian culture in my chosen field. 

   However, now some 33 years on I have observed how the spin on history changes and Maggie became a hate figure to younger generations whose parents she encouraged to pursue individual plight. But the dominant opinion today is largely second hand opinion and I suspect the hate has another agenda. People forget how much Margaret Thatcher not just led but echoed a change in attitude in Britain. She was a person  of her time and greed was already in the air. She held the view that encouraging individual enterprise and reward would benefit society but in so doing may have ironically destroyed a sense of community. But she, like others was contradictory. I'm not a politically educated or inspired person but am bound to hold views about welfare, education and commerce, a complex and conflicting mix in itself.  Yes she was not entirely right (longterm) in my opinion to sell off Council houses (reducing the safety net for genuinely needy) and clearly wrong over the Poll Tax and I do remember events that happened at the time. She was surely right to stand up to the unions who were crippling this country and engaged in blatant class war. There is no universal right that anyone born into an occupation in a particular community can continue that for ever. Migration and change is the story of civilisation and as an individual I have personally had to adapt and adjust to suddenly and unfairly losing valued jobs in the area I trained. Also I have a 'Facebook culture' thrust on me to conform to whether I like it or not and the destruction of letter writing, the art of communication, arguably ruined by emails! These things destroy sense of community also. Arguably miners communities could have been protected but at what cost to the economy? The strikes were self-interested causing chaos and misery for millions of ordinary Britons.   
      Margaret Thatcher was above all a world player with unique influence on a par of Churchill (who fought for freedom we abuse). She got dialogue with Gorbachov and charmed Reagan, cementing ties with the USA and helping break down the Iron Curtain. We seldom question the impact of American culture on our own culture today? She also (astoundingly) clawed back an EEC rebate that still remains largely intact today.

     Margaret Thatcher was arrogant and had audacity, clearly attributes of a strong leader! Inevitably power corrupts and she did became too extreme and I guess history will paint a divided view but then Britain today since Thatcher has become more divided, more greedy with political opposition betraying its roots and it is easy to pin the blame on just one person. One thing I learned on that day I met the Prime Minister was never to judge a woman with a handbag, appearances are deceptive! Margaret Thatcher RIP. 

Love thy 'Nay'bour

       Strongly influenced by a Christian upbringing and believing in 'God' until I was about 45 years old, I consider I had a good start in life in that respect. Such a childlike belief warded off cynicism until a much later age. 

       Sadly my older sister Jill's fundamentalist belief in Jesus Christ the saviour caused a rift between us in latter years when she frequently used the words 'devil, sin and demons' whenever we spoke on the phone. I could never accept the notion we are all born dirty sinners before we even breath the first breath of life.  It was, however, on her death bed that she held my hand and said with her familiar loving smile 'I'll be waiting for you'.  It would indeed be an arrogant atheist not to consider the possibility that there is the 'other side' - heaven, spiritual unity, eternal union and peace, or whatever. I have no greater intellectual capacity to argue for or against a God and am always stuck at the point of how human suffering can be allowed by a so-called loving God, so in turn I refer back to the only thing I know - the human condition - the use of human language passed down through the ages to explain or bring some kind of order to our lives. I refer to the Holy Bible in which the Ten Commandments seem to be a pretty basic human code of conduct irrespective of the existence of God. 'Love thy neighbour' is a fundamental commandment and strategy for co-existence. And so too is 'Do unto others....'

     The shock that consumers have been duped into eating horse meat when they were told it was beef leads us to automatically blame others - first the Romanians who have a lot of horses and then the French and in no time at all the finger is pointed closer to home in a Yorkshire abbatoir. Of course Government ministers, the Food Standards Agency, Jimmy Saville and the ex-chief of the Royal Bank of Scotland are to blame, but what about the people working at the abbortoires, their wives and daughters, the van drivers.... did they not know or were they not party to a degree of the scam? Do they, do we not care what we do to others?  

      The word 'morality' has been firmly deleted from any public/media dialogue for decades and what is going on in the horse meat issue is the tip of the iceberg in a culture that has consciously allowed image (what is on the label) to override content, substance or truth. Switch on any television soap and the script is to swindle, cheat, outdo and make a fast buck out others. This is the daily sermon that replaced the church service many years ago! the staple diet. You could call it a fundamental lack of love for fellow human being and the drug is ....money, lotza money! Sad.

        And while the Government pushes out of work people to take up any job as a second option and become cheap labour for multi million pound employers, the Government find themselves in an illegal position, but has anyone asked the university graduate who won her case, who promised you a job with that meaningless degree in the first place? I recall being suspicious of the term 'gap year' as a ploy by universities to get bums on seats before youngsters left schools and travelled the world for fear they might not come back. 
     Someone told me many years ago that people don't like to face the truth. So there's no problem then, it doesn't matter if its horse or donkey meat as long as its fast and cheap! 

  

  

The tail wagging the dog

      Recently in the news it was reported that doctors are being advised to be careful in prescribing Benzodiazepine tranquillisers. 'Diazepam' and 'Lorazepam'  

come from this family of drugs.  I didn't get as far as reading who is advising them but all I know is my dear late sister Veronica Jill was addicted to a prescription drug called 'Ativan'  over a twenty five year period and one readily prescribed to me for a few years. She tried in her own way to raise public awareness by appearing on a daytime television programme that highlighted this  toxic family of drugs and their dangers were known decades ago.

      Anyone suffering severe depression will likely have associated anxiety, a terrible 'no hiding place' affliction and this kind of treatment is basically a sledge hammer to the senses with longterm effects on the nervous system and arguably now an impact on Dementia, I nearly forgot to say. During a hospital stay - my closest encounter of hell on this earth (my state of mind, not the hospital), I was given hefty does of 'Diazepam' and probably one of the greatest acts of will and determination in my life was to throw them down the lavatory pan and face my demons in full consciousness when I was discharged. I was even offered money on the street for my prescribed drugs.  

      To this day I refuse to take medication and this  includes alcohol in large doses. When things get really bad it is a glass of cider or red wine as there is no doubt drugs affect the mind. But I would be ignorant to wrong say drugs are wrong for managing all mental conditions and I suspect as with everything else rthere is a payoff called side effect. The term 'side effect' has a similar ring to 'clean' energy when talking nuclear. In an ideal world we would need no doctors but at least we should have the trust that their judgment is sound. 

     I lost my mother Jean in childbirth due to medical neglect. She shouldn't have died. She died bleeding of an internal hemorrhage and there was no care present. It was a tragedy that should not have happened. In my youth my father mistakingly overdosed on insulin as he was diabetic and in his coma was pumped full of more insulin by a freshman doctor in hospital. 

      As a young man trying to deal with the socially tabooed condition of depression I had a rare doctor who happened to be elderly and a Christian. He would book me in for his last surgery of the day so he could give me a little extra time and the biggest therapy was having someone genuinely caring to listen to me. Financial worries were part of the depression and he knew I was a furniture maker struggling to make a living with no outlets for my avant grade designs. He suggested an empty shop window I might approach a local businessman about and I took on that shopwindow at a rent of £3 a week on the busy A4 road. I called my shopwindow 'The Bath Carpenter' and my unusual furniture got a wide audience due to traffic jams right by it. Thanks to my doctor. That was in 1977 but the doctor of today in the society of today paints a very different picture. Heaven only knows what will happen when doctors have control of the purse strings. 

      

My Aunt Wilhemina Barns-Graham

      My aunt Wilhelmina or 'Willie' to family and friends was a celebrated British painter and member of the St Ives School who's centenary was 2012. She died in 2004. Few people had heard of her outside the inner art sanctum (certainly in my youth when I mentioned her to artist friends) and although her CV included major galleries around the world, she received public recognition (The CBE) much later on in her twilight years. 

     Willie was the sister of my mother Jean who died having me. We were virtually the only practising creatives in the wide family apart from my late half-sister Barbara.  In her work I recognised the importance of technique and how learning the rules gives one true freedom to break away. Her early water colours were a fantastic expression of mastery of technique and indeed technique was instrumental in much of her abstract work such as using paper hole stiffeners as a collage in a particular phase in her work. 

      I am no art critic, although she once asked me my opinion about some of her last paintings and then she said 'you sound just like like the Sunday Times art critic who was down here last week'. The fact is anyone could see she was a fantastic artistic brimming with creative energy right up until shortly before her death and if any work of art truly evokes feeling then finding language to describe it is not rocket science. Perhaps equally importantly she was one of a small group of prominent women, such as Mary Goldring, who spoke on Radio Four about various topics. I recall her as a great story teller, just like my late sister Veronica Jill. 

    The point of this short comment here, is one of the apparent lottery of life and how, in misspelling her name in a letter of congratulation may possibly have cost me an inheritance to be an innovative furniture maker operating from a 'stately' home, instead of a tiny cramped basement workshop without natural light in an artisan terraced property!  Life is certainly a mystery in the cards that are dealt out:

  Willie amongst fellow painters in St Ives (circa 1947)

'Penniless artists' mentioned in the video is a generalised term based on the assumption that many artists lack the financial means to sustain their art and therefore a trust set up to help talented young people by way of offering scholarships is an entirely worthy cause.