Polish Fractivists Occupy European Shale Gas Conference

I find it bizarre that although I was at that con­fer­ence, the only report in Eng­lish or Pol­ish  comes from a respected organ­i­sa­tion like NPR merely repeat­ing the alle­ga­tions of some­thing they found on YouTube.  A key theme of the con­fer­ence was gain­ing pub­lic accep­tance .The pro­tes­tors were even invited to stay and debate, but as in the US and UK, they don’t want to infect them­selves by join­ing in a fact based dis­cus­sion.
I said at the con­fer­ence that a key theme is that no one trusts any­one any­more.  Gov­ern­ments, priests, busi­ness, bankers, rat­ing agen­cies and espe­cially sci­en­tists:  any “expert” at all is con­sid­ered, espe­cially among the more para­noid, as being out for them­selves.
In Europe, we are proud to believe in soci­ety.  We aren’t sus­pi­cious when gov­ern­ments inter­fere in our lives by forc­ing us to put our wal­lets away at the doc­tors, insist that edu­ca­tion is free, spend money on pub­lic trans­port and infra­struc­ture and worst of all, demand that we take five weeks paid vaca­tion a year.  So when sci­en­tists and gov­ern­ment tell us that track­ing is safe,  we look at their  track record and gen­er­ally believe them.  No gov­ern­ment is per­fect, but they gen­er­ally don’t lie.Two points:  In Europe,  resources are a pub­lic good in that they belong to the state.  Roy­al­ties go direct to taxes where they are used for everyones’s ben­e­fit as above.  Given the choice of shale or ben­e­fit cuts, most peo­ple don’t choose the lat­ter.
Sec­ondly:  Do you realise how inac­cu­rate and insen­si­tive it is to men­tion frack­ing pro­test­ers as heir to Sol­i­dar­ity, or even in the same breath? What next?  Josh Fox as fight­ing the last bat­tle of the War­saw Ghetto?  Mark Ruf­falo as heir to Sit­ting Bull?

The anti frack­ing brigade in Europe often fol­lows the same model of PA.  Coun­try peo­ple really know how resilient the earth is.  They’ve been liv­ing off the land for two hun­dred years and have been putting fer­tiliser and fences all over the land:  it sur­vived and they got by.  City peo­ple have an unre­al­is­tic view of coun­try that they want to pro­tect, not the coun­try itself. City peo­ple worked in banks that raped the earth world­wide in the name of cap­i­tal­ism, but come the week­end or a com­fort­able retire­ment, they sud­denly become organic?  Most aren’t that hyper­crit­i­cal, but enough are to steal the resources from local peo­ple and hide them.

Look within the com­mu­ni­ties and the vast amount of “local” oppo­si­tion to frack­ing comes from  week­enders or retirees who sim­ply don’t want any devel­op­ment at all.  Josh Fox is a clas­sic exam­ple.  Why did he turn down $100K, a fig­ure that would solve his neigh­bours finan­cial prob­lems for ever?  Sim­ply because he could.  He isn’t a per­ma­nent year round res­i­dent and the cer­tainly doesn’t per­form any­thing his neigh­bours would recog­nise as work.
Yet he demands that his neigh­bours impov­er­ish them­selves by reject­ing shale money.  He thinks it is blood money.  Where did his money come from?  Apart from Moms and Pops?

“So when sci­en­tists and gov­ern­ment tell us that track­ing is safe,  we look at their  track record and gen­er­ally believe them.  No gov­ern­ment is per­fect, but they gen­er­ally don’t lie.“When you‘re not full of crap, you‘re quite funny. The more we/people know, the fun­nier you seem to be.