To the delight of green agenda advocates, fracking has once again been banned in England by the UK’s new Prime Minister despite the country facing a serious and potentially years-long energy crisis.
Rishi Sunak, the UK’s newly minted Prime Minister, has once again banned the use of fracking in England despite there being serious fears regarding rolling blackouts this winter as a result of the ongoing energy crisis.
While it was never suggested fracking could help keep the lights on this winter — it will take months to make progress on the energy drilling process that has been banned for years in the UK — increasing the gross energy supply available to the UK has been seen as an important step in making sure another energy crisis like this isn’t able to happen. Among the routes to that are fracking, more drilling for oil and gas in the north sea, nuclear, and offshore wind.
Legalising fracking had been a major policy announcement by the Liz Truss government after confirming the technology as being safe for use. Now, just weeks later, Sunak has reversed the position back to a ban, depriving Britain of one of the energy sources that helped the United States become a net energy exporter.
Concern about a Sunak U-turn on the ban lifting began early Wednesday afternoon where he seemed to imply — unclearly — that he would reimplement the ban on fracking during Prime Minister’s questions on Wednesday.
After some confusion, a spokesman for the Prime Minister later confirmed that fracking was “back in the bin”, a move that has been justified via reference to the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto.
“You’ve got the position set out in the manifesto [banning fracking], which the prime minister pointed to,” Reuters reports the spokesman as saying.
“Obviously it’ll be for BEIS (the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy department) to come forward with a bit more detail on that,” they went on to say.
Meanwhile, the man at the centre of the bringing back of fracking, former Energy Secretary Jacob Rees Mogg, has been booted out of the cabinet by the Sunak administration, despite attempts by the Brexiteer to ingratiate himself with the multi-millionaire leader.
Although the move is likely to concern many Tory party voters who are seeing their monthly energy bills surge, the shift back towards the Conservative Party’s green agenda of old is not all that surprising considering the context of who is in power.
For many, the appointment of Rishi Sunak to the top job has been seen as a coup orchestrated by the globalist faction of the Tories against the more nativist elements, with Sunak himself holding views very much in line with the World Economic Forum on issues of economy and climate.
To make matters worse, while it appears that the grassroots of the party would have much rathered see the likes of lukewarm Brexiteer Boris Johnson return to office, the way the leadership race was run made it so that most party members were not consulted on the appointment, allowing Sunak to largely just walk into Number 10.
With Sunak, the UK is now facing a significant push towards higher taxes, with the implementation of many green agenda policies, as well as a centrally controlled digital pound, also possibly being on the horizon should this Prime Minister too be booted from office.