This year’s Glastonbury festival looks set to have a fracking theme. Petroleum Exploration and Development Licences (PEDL) have been issued across Somerset, including recent licences covering the festival site.

Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon will be holding sessions on fracking in the festival, their single “Don’t Frack my Mother” is about the controversial methane gas extraction technique which has caused many US states such as Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Colorado and Pennsylvania to ban fracking. EU countires such as France and the Netherlands have suspend all fracking operations. Artists Against Fracking, formed by John Lennon’s former partner and son, features names such as Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Robert De Niro , Anne Hathaway and The Black Keys who will performing on the pyramid stage on Sunday night.

Michael and Emily Eavis signed a petition saying their land will not be fracked, but the government’s consultation which closes this summer on August 15th is looking at changing trespass laws in Somerset to allow Shale Gas Extraction, fracking under the Glastonbury festival Site without requiring permission.

 

A group of festival locals calling themselves http://www.frackfree.org.uk are gaining attention with a self built fracking rig and collecting thousands of signatures for their online petition though SMS “text FRACK to 60777 (standard network rates apply). This is a growing trend in the USA of home and land owners becoming ‘fractivists.’ The group of locals quote EU reports and David Smythe Professor of Geophysics at the University of Glasgow

“The UK shale basins are heavily faulted, from the shale layer right to the surface, in contrast to those of the USA. Pre-existing faults provide a potential fast-track pathway for fracking fluid and produced gas to escape upwards into drinking water aquifers and even to the surface.”

A spokesperson for the group said

“House prices fall where they drill, you can’t sell you home when theres a tower flaring gas next to it. Cancer and Leukaemia rates have skyrocketed in the USA next to these sites and the water can be contaminated with methane and chemicals such as benzine. Have you seen the film of people setting fire to water coming out of taps! Thats real. Somerset is such a beautiful place, its my home, its going to become an industrial hell if these companies drill here. I will fight it for my family and my kids anything is better than that.”

Posted on: June 25, 2014