There are no easy answers, (Dr Michael Hughes, “Wind Power Morality” 26 September), and the ethics of neodymium processing deserve serious consideration, and yet, apart from their wind-turbine use, there seems to be every likelihood that neodymium magnets are used in various electric motors around the fracking well site, (as well as in the MRI scanning so crucial to modern medicine).
That wind farms' use of land is inefficient compared to an “energy equivalent shale-gas fracking pad”, and that bird and bat deaths will result from habitat disturbances involved in establishing a wind farm seem undeniable facts, and yet species are not imperilled, the landscape might be altered but (probably) not permanently destroyed, at least not on the scale that a proliferation of fracking wells would entail.
Similarly, shale gas will produce energy more efficiently, but at what cost to the planet, to humanity and especially to the poor. Anthropogenic global warming will cause starvation through crop failure, and promote social upheaval, followed by wars and massive migratory events of which we are now experiencing a foretaste.
To mention the possible effects of shale development on human health, on our landscapes, on our agricultural and tourist livelihood in those areas (like the writer's) immediately affected by the threat of fracking seems almost an irrelevance.
No, the answers are not easy, but there are clear indications that renewables, not shale development, must be promoted.
Yours sincerely,
David Cragg-James, York
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