Frack You, Germany

On April 1 (!), the German government passed a draft bill concerning fracking. This was not an April fool hoax, so Red Baron is stunned. With my country promoting renewable energies, I had always assumed that fracking is a no-go in Germany. Fracking means fossil energy and energy from fossil sources, something we must reduce rather than increase.

I know that most of my compatriots are against this new way of exploiting Mother Earth too. However, there is only a tiny hope of parliamentary rejection as the proposed bill must only pass our Bundestag (House of Representatives), where the ruling grand coalition has a comfortable majority. Although the Länder (States) are directly concerned - strangely enough, according to our constitution - the approval of our Bundesrat (Senate), where the Greens in coalition with the Reds have a majority, is not required. This is why the Green ministers of the environment of North-Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg immediately protested: They demand further restrictions on fracking, or the bill must not come into force.

However, our federal government is not that quick on the trigger for the draft bill is nothing other than a legal framework. Being strictly against fracking, our Federal Minister for the Environment, Barbara Hendricks of the Social Democrats, was visibly embarrassed when she presented the draft bill to the press. She said that the main reason for the government proposal is to provide legal certainty. In addition, all exploratory drilling will require a license and is only allowed beyond a depth of 3000 meters. This should ensure that no chemicals will seep into the groundwater table. Concerning the many other restrictions, Hendricks went so far as to call the bill a fracking hindrance law.

The reactions of the industry were commensurate. They called the constraints utterly excessive: In Germany, the profitably exploitable reserves are at depths between one and two thousand meters.

©Die Grünen and their fracking monster

Red Baron is strictly against fracking, not so much out of fear of groundwater contamination but of exploiting our last fossil energy reserves. The world should finally accept that our future, or our grandchildren's future, depends on renewable energies.

And the markets behave as they always have behaved: Since the US is exploiting fracking on a large scale intending to become independent of foreign fossil fuels, the oil price has dropped to such a low level that extraction in the States has become uneconomical. This shows that cheap energy no longer assures steady growth but instead will stop investment in renewable energies.

Stop fracking!

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