THE CARBON WAR

The men behind the wire 11
family strolls with a child in a pushchair. There are lots of first-time marchers,
lots of dogs, lots of pushchairs.
There are also lots of police. A few days before this mass weekend march,
the papers had carried extraordinary images of massed ranks of policemen
marching ahead of a lorry carrying drilling equipment to the site. Had they not
done so, it could never have passed the hundreds of early arrivals at the protest.
Is this what it comes to, in the fossil fuel endgame, I ask myself. The
storm-troopers of what looks suspiciously like an embryonic police state effectively
employed in the service of energy companies to force into place the
apparatus needed to squeeze oil from the ground in ever more extreme ways?
I am nervous. There are reports of police snatch squads diving into the
crowds, removing protestors, bundling them into vans and driving them off,
ignoring questions from bystanders and journalists as to why. I also hear tales
of police seemingly trying to provoke assaults by protestors, who are resolutely
peaceful as far as I can see up and down the road, and as far as I have read in
any newspaper.
All this is part of a pattern of policing in modern Britain that unnerves
me more with each incident I see or read about. Campaigners are becoming
convinced that the police are using extreme tactics in order actively to discourage
ordinary citizens from protesting against the plans of the frackers to turn
the garden of England into the morass of burning gas flares, toxic waste-water
handling sites, and intense lorry movements that a typical shale-drilling operation
requires in America. They are using random excess, as much as they think
they can get away with, to persuade people to stay at home.
Because I believe this, I have had to force myself to go on this protest. I do
not do so lightly. By placing myself in harm’s way – a strange and sad thing to
have to say about a police force – I am taking a non-trivial vocational risk. If
I have the misfortune of being arrested, and convicted of some trumped-up
offence, I will no longer legally be able to be a director of my own company.
I suspect that most people who profess to support fracking in the UK have
no appreciation of what a North Dakota-type shale-drilling operation looks
like, or the social impacts imposing it on the English countryside would have,
if commercial quantities of gas or oil are ever found in British shale. When the
drillers target oil, which can fetch a high price, they care not about gas, they
simply flare it. These days the burning gas flares from the oil drilling in North
Dakota shale light the area up so much at night that from space it looks like a
huge metropolis. Even at low US gas prices, one calculation has put the value
of the gas going up in smoke at more than a billion dollars.