Big Six and Fracking

There has been an interesting debate on fracking on the BBC's Question Time. It's at the very start of the programme in which an audience member brings up the inquiry by the energy regulator OFGEM into whether the "Bix Six" energy companies: British Gas, Npower, SSE, Scottish Power, E-on and EDF, had cornered the market and are now tacitly colluding to shaft the customer for every penny they could get out of them. This was something I brought up last year, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/energy-price-rises.html (E-on used to be called Powergen and ran a series of wonderful nonconformist adverts that I loved, featuring the actor Simon Day as "Bob", a nonconformist mystic, see: http://uk.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/35462. I think it's more than sad that they rebranded, it's sinister!). Lord Wolfson responds by saying that the Big Six should be left within the market as it is, but in doing so added: "This country could have cleaner, cheaper energy if we adopted gas, if we went for fracking." I'm glad to say he got a loud boo from the audience, one from the Bohemian heartland of Brighton. However the presenter David Dimbleby, a Bullingdon Club-member, skilfully steered the conversation away from fracking and we had to wait over ten more minutes before somebody else in the audience picked them up on it again. Roger Helmer of UKIP made a good point, that Government energy policy is dithering so badly at the moment that nobody knows exactly where we're going over future energy; although I don't think he appreciates that this confusion is probably deliberate. My own suggestions are simple and clear, see the link above, and fracking should be out of the question. In fact I consider it a weapon of mass murder and ecocide.

Sources: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26772518 and: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03zjzhq/Question_Time_27_03_2014/.