Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas site, 25 August 2017. Photo: Ros Wills
Just one in seven women would be happy about living within five miles of a fracking site, according to a new opinion poll.
The survey also found that almost three-quarters of Labour voters would be unhappy about fracking in their area
Overall, fewer people would be happy about living near a local fracking site than a small nuclear reactor.
But about two-thirds of people would be happy about an onshore wind farm or a single turbine locally.
The survey, by YouGov for the climate change organisation 10:10, sampled 1,660 UK adults randomly selected from the YouGov panel on 12-13 September 2017.
Gender
When asked how people felt about a fracking site within five miles of their home, only 14% of women said they were happy, compared with 65% who said they were unhappy. The figures for men were 25% happy and 58% unhappy.
Women were more likely to say don’t know (22% compared with 15% for men). But the overall figure for “don’t know” of 18% in this survey was much lower than the 51% recorded in the government’s quarterly WAVE tracker survey for “don’t know” or neither “support nor oppose”. (DrillOrDrop report on the latest WAVE results)
Politics
Only one in seven (14%) Labour voters would be happy about living near a fracking site, compared with 71% who would be unhappy and 16% unsure.
Even among people who voted Conservative, the single large party which supports fracking, just over half (55%) would be unhappy about living near a fracking site. 31% would be happy and 14% said they didn’t know.
Two-thirds of Lib Dem voters would be unhappy about a fracking site in their area, compared with 22% who would be happy and 12% who didn’t know.
How people voted in the 2016 EU referendum appears to make little difference in their attitudes to fracking. 19% of Remain voters were happy about living near a fracking site, compared with 23% of Leave voters.
Age
As with other surveys, support for fracking was higher among older people. Just 14% of people aged 18-24 were happy about the idea of living near a fracking site, compared with 27% of people aged 65+.
But the proportion of people who said they would be unhappy about living near a fracking site was little different across the age groups. Younger people were much more likely to say “don’t know” than people aged 50+.
Categories: Research
DRILL OR DROP? 
These attitudes are probably from the nonsense spoken by anti frack groups.
Water contamination, health effects, house price decline and so on. There is no evidence for any of this and one of the main anti groups, (Friends of the Earth) were unable to provide any evidence of these effects when I challenged em at the Advertising Standards Authority. They had to withdraw and promise never to repeat those claims.
The mantra is also about climate change, shouted loudly by people who heat their homes with gas, drive cars, and enjoy foreign holidays. The term hypocrite applies here. The best energy solution at present is home produced gas. Thats why the US has massively reduced its emissions, replacing coal with clean burning gas.
Onshore wind. Cheap as gas and supported by the majority.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/23/drop-in-wind-energy-costs-adds-pressure-for-government-rethink
When it blows its fine, except they are an eyesore for many people, unlike shale gas, which has a tiny visual footprint. What happens when the wind dont blow and the sun dont shine. Please dont say batteries John, as they are orders of magnitude away from doing the business.
By the way, science does not work on public support or democratic values. We could vote against gravity and its still going to be there
Anyone concerned about renewable storage should ask Germany how they do it.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-green-technology-record-power-generation-35-per-cent-renewables-solar-wind-turbines-a7820156.html
Of course the main advantage we have over Germany is that our wind speeds are far greater.
Looks like the ‘batteries or it won’t work’ has always been nonsense.
That said battery storage now has the support of our Government.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40699986
Or if you want the whole report
Click to access upgrading-our-energy-system-july-2017.pdf
Pro frackers really should try to keep up.
Let Centrica tell you how it’s going to be Radio 4 13th Sept 2017 21-00
Short interview with Mr Egan just before 21-00. It got cut short.
Carry on with nuclear and this is what we would get. Complete unnecessary madness.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/geological-disposal-understanding-our-work
Time to maximise our renewable potential and prioritise on energy saving technologies.
In case you are worried about the back up cost of renewables it is ‘modest’
https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-whole-system-costs-renewables
A small price to pay for clean energy.
The story of what we do with the surplus renewable energy we produce is touched upon in the Government report above.
The whole story will emerge soon. Electric vehicles will mainly be charged overnight. At the same time we over produce on wind.
This will be an excellent use of surplus onshore and offshore wind.
The renewable electric future is well on it’s way.
John, if it’s so cheap that it doesn’t need subsidies, and everyone is so favorably inclined toward it, then there must be thousands of large-scale wind farms in development, right?
John
The report was written by a power company who want to encourage the gov to get on with it, and provide some subsidy.
The best place for this is Dumfries and Galloway. If they can build them without subsidy, they why are they not building them?
Ken – can you provide some evidence that they “had to withdraw”? The fact is that you have tried on numerous occasions to get ASA to rule against anti-fracking groups with no more success that you had trying to get Mike Hill censured by IET (he was totally exonerated wasn’t he?)
There has never been a single ruling sustained by the ASA council against any anti-fracking organisation has there? Or if there has perhaps you can point me towards it?
However they have ruled at least twice against your fracking pals:
https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/cuadrilla-resources-ltd-a12-203806.html
and
https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/breitling-energy-corporation-a14-262157.html
It seems to me that if anyone is speaking any nonsense here then the evidence clearly points to your industry friends. What do you reckon? Hmmm?
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I’m a big fan of shale gas and I have a home that is near several well pads, but I wouldn’t characterize myself as “happy” to have well pads nearby. I’m not happy that there’s a cement plant a few miles away, and a refinery a little further on either. I wouldn’t be happy to live near any kind of industrial plant, or even a large shopping mall. If you assign my views to the whole population (as I think they are widely held) then our lands should be nothing but forests and meadows, maybe some farms would be okay (as long as they didn’t use fertilizers and dirty the water).
So, no, nobody is really “happy” to have a well pad or any other industrial installation anywhere near them. They would rather never see these things, but they deal with them because they realize that life as we know it would be impossible without these things. Individuals would rather have natural gas come from some far off land so that they don’t have to acknowledge the costs of production. Out of sight, out of mind. But the collective understands that this is neither an environmentally sound policy, nor a fiscally prudent one, nor one that makes sense from a foreign policy perspective.
And I would wager that the perspectives in this poll would change a great deal if the question was posed more accurately:
“Would you rather have a fracking pad within 5 miles of your house, or have your house surrounded by 350 wind turbines spread out over 4000 hectares?”
Regardless, the idea that opinion polls should dictate energy strategy is one that is highly suspect. Just ask South Australia!
Refricktion/Peeny/GBK ….I’m up for ‘“Would you rather have a fracking pad within 5 miles of your house, or have your house surrounded by 350 wind turbines spread out over 4000 hectares?” Brilliant.
Sorry you are so unhappy about living near a fracking site….perhaps you are on the wrong side?
I think you’re in the minority, Sherwulfe. But we won’t know until someone pays yougov to run the survey in an unbiased manner.
So, the results by YouGov for the climate change organisation 10:10, who sampled 1,660 UK adults randomly selected from the YouGov panel on 12-13 September 2017 showing a preference to onshore wind energy generation means either a) they are in the minority or b) the survey is biased aka wrong…dear me; living in Trumpton.
We are turning our faces into the wind, speeding towards destination clean.
Fear of the unknown.
A pretty poor use of polling, and surprising that polling companies should get involved.
There is no experience for people living near a fracked site in the UK, so there isn’t an experienced audience to ask, or to pass on their experiences to the wider community.
I live near an oil refinery. They are good neighbours and help clean up the local environment. That is experience I could call upon if a poll was conducted on that subject. If I lived in a country where there were no oil refineries I would not be able to make an objective opinion.
Someone has wasted their money.
The question is ‘would you’ not ‘do you have experience of’….keep up
It is actually rational self interest that drive those fears – for anyone who does their homework. The risks and dangers are known independently af any Greenpeace or FoE statements. The only fear I’m seeing here is that of KW & MC facing up to the facts. Complaints and records of air and water contamination, ground water depletion and property devaluation are legion in the States, Canada and Australia. To expect the risks to be totally different here is irrational.
So, those interviewed for the poll “had done their homework”. Randomly selected something else you want to ignore? That takes speculation to fabrication. Rational and irrational is something that the antis have a problem with, don’t try and lay it at my door and use fabrication to do so, PhilipP.
You seem to need an awful lot of “comfort blankets”. It is a sign that there is little substance behind your argument. Who knows, if you had some efficient gas central heating, like the majority of UK households, you could do with less comfort blankets?
Pacifier link in case anyone has spat one out recently.
Recommend a glow in the dark version for those who are concerned the lights will go out without UK shale gas.
https://uk.vitazita.com/en/buy/nuby-pacifier-glow-in-the-dark-orthodontic-6-18m/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMImdn736Sx1gIVb7ftCh22GAx-EAQYBSABEgIDXPD_BwE&ef_id=V10hxwAABBbVZNpx:20170919125026:s
It is called democracy, the citizens of the UK are the UK and whether you like it or not, the majority do not want fracking.
This article will reconcile and unite posters on this site fracker and anti fracker. And even mending the love lost between GBK and Refracktion, Peeny and Phil C.
m.investing.com/news/commodities-news/quiet-energy-revolution-underway-in-japan-as-dozens-of-towns-go-off-the-grid-530398
Nat Gas and Renewable wedded together nicely.
Yes TW, thats the way other intelligent countries and some US states are going (like California) too – smart flexible grids and micro-grids with decentralised generating capacity. Gas CCP or CHP plants can meet meet peak demands (were renewables plus storage can’t) for the near term… the ‘peakers’ are expected to be phased out before long.
Fusion generators (if they’re ever going to work at scale) will need to hurry up and become viable if they’re going to get a look in within the next 25 years.
Phil C and who? I see no chips? I love everyone and everything TW, even an ranti ranti, though I couldn’t eat a whole one, they tend to repeat on me.
Stephen Sanderson is on camera as saying this (fracking, acidising, onshore oil/gas etc) needs to be a back to back industrialised process to be economically viable. This will therefore lead to many platforms, each with many wells, spread across any area where the industry is permitted to go into full production. This will have a massive impact on those areas, not just with regard to the sites themselves but all the ancillary activities. To say this would be a tiny visual footprint is absurd.
The claimed massive fall in US emissions is debatable. Firstly are these emissions backed up by real world measures or are they simply extrapolated. (I’d actually like to know the answer.) Independent real measurement surveys have shown massive increases in methane emissions in the US, specifically in areas where fracking has taken place. And we all know that in the short term methane has more of an adverse impact on climate change than CO2 emissions.
Glad to here that oil companies do indeed clean up after themselves, sometimes.
He was talking about multi wells on a single pad [edited by moderator]. Octopus drilling and horizontal drilling takes away the need to do what you just [edited by moderator] {described}
Buurrrp!
They clean up a lot better than nuclear Malcolm! How far is Sizewell from PNR? Cuadrilla even look after nesting birds. RSPB having to attempt to block gannet mincers off the Scottish coast.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the accuracy of US emission measurements, perhaps turn your eyes to China in that respect. I know who I would believe-one, a country where you falsify data and you will be sued until you bleed, another where you would be promoted.
Back to back industrialisation today-tomorrow it will be the process will be uneconomic. You can’t have both, because again what is speculation becomes fabrication.
I really find it quite interesting that it is a group of antis who continue to post on DOD who disrespect the intelligence of their audience, and occasionally suggest they do their own research. I would suggest doing both is not a recipe for success. (Not aimed at you Malcolm, just a general comment.)
Falsifying data KatT is not democracy. That was the tractor factory output from Russia in the late 1960s early 1970s. If you are unable to read market research results I would give it a miss. It is becoming a little silly. For anyone who knows what such data means, just a clue to those who don’t, you can not ignore those who have no view. Obviously the antis can and do, for their own reasons, but if you worked in marketing (as I did) and took that viewpoint to your BOD they would suggest you left your car keys at reception on the way out.
The majority of those surveyed are not against fracking. Those against fracking are a larger number than those who stated they supported fracking, but they are a minority of the audience surveyed, ie below 50%. Below 50% is not a majority. (Yes, it can be, but not in this type of survey.)
I know statistics are difficult when Red Len can be voted in with just over 5% of the members votes, but that is not a matter of statistics, that is back to tractor output. I think we should stick with statistics.
Ex – MOBIL OIL , VICE PRESIDENT
Does NOT like fracking.
In this interview he talks about the nightmare of the fracking industry in the USA and how it puts out MORE damaging greenhouse gases than Coal or other types of fossil fuels.
https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/223239-us-fracking-industry-pollution/
Perhaps Drill or Drop could ask him to do a guest post? Paul, Ruth and Mandy?
Jackthelad, he’s an anti-fracking activist, who happens to have worked at Mobil. So what? He has no more experience with fracking than you or I. Mobil wasn’t involved in fracking when he retired 17 years ago. Get the facts, man!
Dear me MC. Are you suggesting the You Gov survey is falsified data? As an ex marketeer you obviously know the difference between data and information, don’t you? Data is the raw response, information is the interpretation. I would say your interpretation of that data is creating false facts; the blight of our times.
To suggest to an audience that fracking has no harmful environmental impacts worth mentioning is not only disrespecting their intelligence it is treating them with contempt: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/04/17/the-environmental-and-social-impacts-of-natural-gas-fracking/#56180b81a76b
And your UK data is where PhilipP????
Do you not understand that some practices in the USA and in the UK are actually different? To avoid confusion, let’s try non oil related.The recent “outbursts” against Chorine washed Chicken in USA. UK produces the same chicken but do we wash with chlorine? Or, how about hormone implanted beef cattle. We produce beef cattle in UK, some intensively, do we feed them hormones? Or castrating male pigs. We produce pork and bacon in UK, do we castrate male pigs?
I could have referenced a number of other industries, but I suspect the point is made.
Some people look further than Giggle, and outside the blinkers. Ignore them by all means.