Does the infrastructure bill give carte blanche to inject any substance an operator chooses?

Today's fuss is over the infrastructure bill currently going through parliament. The purpose of this bill is to reduce the amount of time spent in court arguing over subsurface access rights and trespass issues.

However, anti-fracking activists have today tried to claim that the bill is an attempt to subvert existing regulation, allowing operators to inject whatever fluid they want without any safeguards. The Guardian has some typically scaremongering coverage here.

Greenpeace are claiming that

"Ministers are effectively trying to absolve fracking firms from responsibility for whatever mess they’ll end up leaving underground"

while Friends of the Earth claim that

"The government appears to be trying to sneak through an amendment which would allow fracking firms to reinject their waste under people’s homes and businesses" 

Are they right? Of course not.

6 seismologists jailed after L'Aquila earthquake

Yesterday, 6 Italian seismologists and 1 public official were jailed for the actions in lead-up to the L'Aquila earthquake that killed 309 people in 2009.

This is a hugely alarming decision, and one is immediately put in mind of medieval witch-trials, where some old woman could always be blamed for the latest crop failure/flood/natural disaster and punished for it.

The legal implications could also be significant. What scientist would now ever want to make any public pronouncements about anything pertaining to public safety? If I were an Italian volcanologist, epidemiologist, or weather-forecaster, I'd be very worried about the legal precedent that has now been set. As everyone on twitter was quick to point out, Michael Fish must be very glad that he's not Italian.

Of course, in a case as important as this, it's worth going into detail about what actually happened. A week before the earthquake happened, a series of smaller quakes occurred across the area. The 'Committee for Major Risks' was convened to assess the seismic risk. The 6 seismologists themselves did not speak to the public, but the government official on the panel (who was not a seismologist) was interviewed by the press after the meeting, and he said there was little risk of a large earthquake, that the tremors were in fact releasing accumulated strain energy, reducing the probability of a large quake. Rather famously, he said that people should relax with a glass of the local multipulciano.

One week later, the quake struck, the old stone buildings of L'Aquila collapsed, and 309 people were killed by falling masonry.

There is obviously a huge amount of emotional anguish associated with the case: 309 people died and many many more lost their homes and possessions. In such a situation, it is human nature to want to blame someone and to see them punished: medieval witch trials happened for a reason after all. A a species we're not very good at accepting acts of god - somebody must be to blame. And it's very clear when you read the statements of those who lost loved ones in the quake that they are glad that these scientists have received such lengthy custodial sentences.

But lets examine these events from a seismological perspective. It is well established that seismic predictions are pretty much impossible. What the (non-seismologist) official told the public was in essence correct: often small seismic events do release strain energy. If you take the San Andreas fault as an example, there are creeping sections where small-scale seismic activity occurs regularly, and these sections rarely experience the larger quakes, and then there are the 'locked' section, where little seismicity is occurring, where it is most likely that the next 'big one' will occur. Sometimes, large earthquakes are preceded by a swarm of smaller ones.

So, what the official should have said is: the risk of an earthquake is no higher that it usually is (which is still appreciable, because you are living in central Italy, which is a seismically active area). But there is no evidence for an increased risk. This is probably the most scientifically accurate description of the situation. I guess that's where the miscommunication has happened, where no increased risk became 'no risk, have a glass of wine'.

But what where the alternatives for the committee? To suggest an evacuation? Based on the available evidence, this would have been an irresponsible decision to take. Evacuations can be extremely costly, both economically (as everyone leaves their jobs for weeks), as well as to human health as the risks to the old and frail of moving thousands of humans from their homes into temporary shelters for what could end up being weeks. And a key thing to bear in mind with evacuations, is at what point do you allow people back to their homes? With something like a volcano, it's obvious that once the volcano has either erupted or died back down again, then you can let people back.

But with an earthquake, there would be no evidence to say that people could have returned. Bear in mind that the quake happened a week after the committee met. Had they ordered the evacuation that day, do they really think people would still have been happily waiting it out in tents outside town 7 days later with no large event appearing to happen?

What else could they have done? Reminded everyone of what to do in the event of an earthquake (hit the deck, get away from buildings if you can, get under a table or doorway if you can't. Avoid anything glass. Watch out for falling objects/masonry. Sure, that would be helpful, although really this should be happening all the time in an area with high earthquake risk. But would this have helped the 309 people at L'Aquila? These people died because the buildings they were in collapsed. The majority of the buildings were old, stone structures with little or no re-inforcement: they were a disaster waiting to happen. If anyone is to be blamed for the deaths at L'Aquila, it is whoever failed to ensure that building standards were enacted/enforced. It would have been a very expensive operation to retro-fit all these medieval buildings, but this would have been the only way to save the lives of these 309 people.

Instead, blaming and imprisoning these seismologists sends entirely the wrong message. It solves no problem: public understanding of risk is not improved, while the science of risk assessment, or least the likelihood of scientists even attempting to communicate this to the public, may be severely damaged.

Fracking on trial: the verdict

Update: The judge has delivered sentences of 1 to 2 year conditional discharges and £750 fines: seems reasonable (being not-very-legally-minded, I'm not sure what the maximum and minimum sentences available were, but presumably this is towards the lenient end)

Update 2: Links to news coverage: here, here, here and here

Today sees the verdict of the trial of the 'fractivists' who stormed a drilling rig in Lancashire last year. The defendants have been found guilty of trespass and disrupting lawful activity. The defense was that they were preventing an unlawful activity from happening, which is a permissible reason do take an otherwise illegal action.

In the statement from the judge, he ruled that "It is clear to me that Cuadrilla is not committing an offence on the land". Clearly, Cuadrilla has undertaken every action required of it by local councils, and regulatory bodies. And bear in mind here that so far Cuadrilla have undertaken exploratory drilling and testing only. I'm sure that if Cuadrilla does find gas and decides to roll out production wells across Lancashire, then further planning permission and regulation will presumably be required. So the defense is perhaps misguided in arguing that action had to be taken to avoid the widespread despoilation of the Fylde peninsular, because Cuadrilla have not yet received permission to do so. They are currently testing the water, to see whether fracking is capable of releasing the reserves under Blackpool (it may be that they can't, in which case this would be a real much-ado-about-nothing).

What this case really highlights are questions over the fitness-for-purpose of the regulatory regime. Fracking has been used in many wells in the UK in the last 20 years. However, the scale of these fracks is much smaller than those envisaged for most shale gas applications. Clearly, the smaller scale fracks are covered by existing law (the law which renders Cuadrilla's activities lawful). However, do the existing regulations need amending to deal with the larger-scale fracking? I suspect that they do, and will be (we are already seeing this happen informally as Cuadrilla take on various obligations, such as the seismic monitoring of this and future sites, which, by current law at least, I'm not sure they are mandated to do).

Finally, a word on the fracktivists themselves, because what I've seen has surprised me. They have their own, very professional-looking website, where you can find out more. But the professionalism of the protestors is quite striking. I imagined the opposition to fracking to be a loose band of concerned locals (think of the people interviewed during the Gasland film, for example), the classic little guy fighting the big nasty corporations. However, among others the defense we able to call as witnesses an MP, a Cornell professor, environmental consultants, and scientists from the Tyndall Centre and more academics. Add on to this the fact that the protestors are not from Lancashire, but made the trip from Brighton specially, which kind-of devalues the protest a little - where are the people from around the affected area? Are they less upset about it than professional protestors making the trip from the other end of the country? This is certainly a common theme seen in the US, with Pennsylvania locals a lot more accepting of shale gas than New Yorkers coming through for a nice weekend before heading back to the big city.

Anyway, we are still awaiting sentencing at this point. I'd hope that the judge passes lenient sentences (I have absolutely no idea what the minimum and maximum proscribed sentences are), because any law that effects peaceful protest (even if it has a high nuisance value) does make me rather uncomfortable (even if I am in favour of well-regulated shale gas extraction in the UK).   

Fracking activists on trial

Today is the 3rd day of the trial for the fracking activists who stormed Cuardilla's drilling site in Lancashire, climbing the rig and dropping banners. They have been charged with trespass and assault, and are being tried in Preston Magistrates Court.

You can follow updates on twitter with #frackingontrial. Also, the trial appears to have its own website.

The defense for the case relies on the 'necessity of action to prevent damage to property'. This was the defense used by protesters who stormed the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station a few years back. The argument went that turning the power plant on would release large amounts of CO2, causing global warming that would damage property. The defense for this case is that allowing the fracking to go ahead would have caused damage, so performing an illegal activity (i.e. trespass) to stop it becomes legal.

I'm no legal-beagle, so the question for me is, where does the burden of proof lie? Do the protestors have to show beyond doubt that the activity they prevented would certainly have caused damage? Do they have to show a likelihood of damage based on the balance of probabilities? Because over a million wells have been fracked in the US, while contamination issues are limited to about 10 extremely localised sites, and it's only the Cuadrilla site in Blackpool that have experienced felt seismicity. So the balance of probabilities would suggest that fracking does not cause problems unless something (usually poor well cementing) goes wrong (10 in a million is a 1 in 100,000 chance).

Similarly, on the wider global warming issue, we are seeing US green-house gas emissions falling dramatically as a result of shale gas production. I know we all like to think of Americans as gas-guzzling climate-destroyers, but the USA has seen the largest CO2 emissions reductions of any country on the planet since 2006. The reason: electricity from coal generation is down from ~50% to ~30%, with shale gas filling most of that gap. Because gas produces half as much CO2 as coal when burned, making that switch reduces CO2 emissions a lot. It's getting to the point when coal companies are going out of business. Meanwhile, in the UK, coal-fired power is booming as gas prices keep rising, seeing our CO2 emissions. It's becoming clearer and clearer that boosting gas production, using shale gas, reduces gas prices and takes coal off the market, reducing CO2 emissions.

For those who like to talk of Howath's methane leakage rates, it's been taken apart again (for the umpteenth time). I'm aware that a statement from Howarth has been included in the case, I wonder if any of the rebuttals have?

Or is the level of evidence required lower than that? Is it a question of acting in good faith? I've no doubt that the fracktivists have a genuine belief that fracking is certain to cause damage. Is a genuine belief (regardless of evidence) sufficient to justify action? As I say, the whole legal edifice confuses and nauseates me in equal measure, so I've no idea what the requirements for this case will be. The verdict is due tomorrow I believe, so I guess we'll get to find out soon.

I'll finish by saying that, whatever the outcome of this particular trial, I am in general concerned by the gradual erosion of our civil liberties. I don't want to see any decisions taken that curtail a person's right to (non-violent) protest, regardless of the fact that I am in favour of (strongly-regulated) fracking in the UK, so I would like to see these guys acquitted.