Hydraulic fracturing, better known as ‘fracking’, is a central pillar of the UK government’s strategy on energy security. The rise of fracking in the UK, encouraged by current and previous governments, is based on an attempt to replicate the fracking boom seen in the USA and, in the last decade, technological advancements developed in the USA – specifically the merger of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques – have been exported around the globe. Significant shale deposits have been identified in the UK and exploratory drilling has been actively encouraged by UK governments since 2007. However, at these new frontiers the developing onshore oil and gas industry has met resistance in the UK, just as the industry has in countries all around the world. New coalitions of local opponents and more established climate and social justice groups have focused on the risks of environmental degradation seemingly inherent in fracking, with campaigners pointing to the real environmental impacts already documented in the USA.
Evidence from fracking in the USA demonstrates the risk of groundwater contamination and the uncontrolled release of toxic fluids.1 The US experience also illustrates the risk of seismic instability, a risk realised in the UK when the first test drilling was conducted in Lancashire in 2011. Considering environmental impacts more generally, fracking, as the extraction of unconventional fossil fuels, raises concerns about climate change and a declining commitment to renewable energy that appears to accompany an embrace of fracking.
Fracking involves the pumping of water, proppants (sand or similar manufactured granules) and assorted chemicals into the ground at high pressure, and opponents have highlighted the risks of land, air and water pollution, seismic instability, and the broader issue of maintaining a reliance on carbon-intensive fossil fuels in the face of global climate change. To understand how, and why, this form of fuel extraction is being so fervently supported by government and corporations in the face of both the apparent risks and growing popular opposition, we have to locate the development of fracking in historical, economic and political context. In doing so, the aims of this chapter are to explore the importance of fracking to contemporary capitalism, to demonstrate that fracking is an inherently violent process in terms of both its environmental and social impacts, and to illustrate why, in the UK, fracking has become an urgent government priority in the era of austerity.
Despite the environmental risks associated with fracking, its economic potential has been loudly championed by UK governments and the fracking industry as an essential component of a UK energy policy for the twenty-first century. Fracking was sold to the public by the then Prime Minister David Cameron as being ‘good for the country’ in 2014 and positioned as central to the government’s long-term economic plan. In the UK, the development of fracking has been accelerated most significantly within the austerity agenda imposed since 2010 and has been promoted by both government and the onshore oil and gas industry through appeals to energy security and economic recovery. This is not a coincidence. Rather than seeing fracking and austerity as disconnected issues, it is more useful to consider their connections as contemporary strategies of accumulation. Fracking is, in this sense, part of economic policy and is bound up in a particular vision of contemporary capitalism developed by successive governments in the UK since 2007. Positioning fracking within the austerity agenda, and moreover, positioning it within the wider neoliberal project that defines the politics of austerity, helps us to draw out its place within contemporary capitalism.
Fracking and austerity are united in their status as contemporary, interconnected forms of what David Harvey has termed ‘accumulation by dispossession’.2 Accumulation by dispossession is the concept deployed by Harvey to help us to understand that the ‘primitive’ accumulation described by Marx in final chapters of Capital is a continuous, omnipresent and vital component of capitalism, as opposed to a historic phase situated at its origins. In this sense, the regime of accumulation based on the predation, fraud and violence described by Marx is constant, and lies at the core of contemporary capitalism. In focusing on dispossession, Harvey has sought to draw our attention to processes by which wealth and power are increasingly centralised in the hands of a small elite and that this is achieved, in no small part, by dispossessing the public of their wealth and/or land. Crucially, it is through the foundational process of dispossession that the privatisation, redistribution and deregulation central to austerity are connected to the enclosure, exploitation and degradation of land and energy resources inherent in fracking.
According to Harvey:
contemporary forms of dispossession are now increasingly administered under the virtuous disguise of a politics of the austerity required to bring an ailing capitalism back into a supposed healthy state.3
The reliance on dispossession is key to neoliberalism’s central aim to ‘open up new fields for capital accumulation’4 and austerity and fracking must be understood as connected in their contemporary importance to capitalism post financial crisis. While fracking has been championed, and actively encouraged, by UK governments, since 2007, it has assumed greater urgency under the conditions of austerity. It has been promoted through appeals to the new common sense in the age of austerity, promoted as a significant source of revenue that cannot be wasted in times of hardship. Fracking has been lauded, most notably from 2013, by both industry and key figures in government (including very vocal support from Cameron and Osborne and now by the May government) for its potential to reduce gas prices, create jobs, help ‘hard workers’, bring money into local communities and increase living standards for the next generation. These appeals have clearly tied into the dominant narrative on austerity and the pursuit of economic security. The most explicit attempts to ‘sell’ fracking to local communities have come in the form of a shale wealth fund established by ex-Chancellor George Osborne to allow a percentage of the proceeds from fracking to be given to councils or community trusts to spend. This policy has been revamped by Theresa May in a promise to give money instead directly to households in areas affected by fracking. While remaining a tiny proportion of the potential revenues from shale extraction, these proposed payments, described by critics as bribery, are clearly aimed at communities suffering the effects of austerity.
According to the political logic driving the fracking agenda, it would be foolish to fail to exploit the resources at ‘our’ disposal when communities are suffering from the unavoidable pain of austerity measures. But the call for the exploitation of natural resources for the benefit of the nation – where the relationship between the British public and fracking was explained by Cameron through the mantra of ‘we’re all in this together’ (see Vickie Cooper and David Whyte’s Introduction to this book) – is an attempt to conceal a process of dispossession. Fracking must be understood as a quintessentially neoliberal form of resource extraction, as it involves, at its core, advances in the commodification of nature into previously inaccessible zones. The basic form of fracking involves the physical enclosure and privatisation of land and resources, a process that in reality serves only the interests of corporations. The necessary industrial infrastructure, even for exploratory drilling, requires the establishment of a site licensed to a corporation and as opposition grows, the importance of barricading the drill site is heightened. We see here the importance of the ‘fence’, of the physical partition, in much the same way it was in the original formulation of the idea of private property.5 The physical partition of the drill site is the tip of the iceberg. Fracking involves horizontal drilling technologies that have the capacity to extend up to 6000ft from the well site. Highlighting both the risks and realisation of the impacts of fracking has been central to resistance movements against fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction around the world in recent years. In various actions, protesters have focused on the physical enclosure of a site because it arguably heightens the potential for environmental damage, concealing the process from those communities who stand to suffer.
The potential for what Rob Nixon describes as the ‘slow violence’ of environmental damage6 (see also Chapter 15 by Charlotte Burns and Paul Tobin) is inherent in the physical process of fracking and, crucially, runs far beyond the partitioned site above ground. It is the new technological fusion of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling that has enabled the exploitation of previously inaccessible or unprofitable shale reserves, and as a result, this violent remaking of space has both a visible and invisible dimension. Many campaigners have pointed to the reach of fracking companies, in terms of the land they effectively colonise and their potential negative environmental impacts; opponents have argued that the violence visited on the natural environment has immediate and obvious consequences but also long-hidden ones as well.
In the contemporary era, states and corporations have a major problem in that accumulation by dispossession is central to the survival of capitalism, but it is in response to acts of dispossession that capitalism meets its most significant source of resistance. The strength of anti-globalisation and anti-austerity movements is a testament to the centrality of struggles around dispossession, but it is in response to the privatisation and degradation of the natural environment that neoliberalism has met its most powerful sources of opposition and this is illustrated in the growing environmental movements around the world. It is here also that the importance of the state is further revealed in both facilitating acts of dispossession themselves through state-corporate alliances and in the policing of resistance.
While one of the key ideas of neoliberalism is that the state should ‘roll back’ and shrink in size, the reality is that states across the world have been restructured and reorganised in this context rather than reduced in size and importance. Cutting back the state’s involvement in social provision and quality of life has of course been all too real, and intensified under austerity programmes, but in practice, state intervention, and more particularly the state’s capacity for violence, is central to neoliberalism. Capitalism requires the state to be ‘an enforcer of austerity’7 (see also Chapter 19 by Robert Knox), and in the same way the development of fracking in the UK has been reliant on state interventions that have included substantial tax breaks for the fracking industry, changes to property laws to disarm opponents, government-led opposition to EU regulation, the issuing of drilling licences in the face of local opposition, and the provision of government-funded boreholes. The importance of state intervention in this context is reinforced here, but it is arguably in the response to dissent that we see more clearly the significance of the capitalist state’s monopoly over the means of violence. The two sides of state intervention – the regulation and organisation of privatisation and dispossession, and the repression of resistance – are as crucial to the onward march of onshore oil and gas extraction as they are to the endurance of austerity.
Since 2013, the UK has witnessed the exercise of police violence in response to community opposition to fracking. Mirroring community responses to fracking around the world, the attempt to privatise public resources, combined with an apparent disregard for the natural environment on behalf of states and corporations, has elicited opposition from established campaigners and local residents in each of the sites selected for exploratory drilling. The Network for Police Monitoring has documented policing of anti-fracking protest, observing strategies that have included:
large-scale operations, inappropriate police powers and arrests, the disproportionate use of physical force and a reluctance to negotiate in good faith with protesters.8
The particular experience of the Barton Moss Community Protection Camp, in Salford, Greater Manchester between November 2013 and April 2014, is illustrative of the capacity of police to respond to protests against fracking. At Barton Moss, a coalition of social justice and climate activists, alongside local residents, established a protest camp and mounted a five-month campaign of disruption to delay the exploratory drilling operation and raise awareness about fracking. While seeking to disrupt the operation, the protesters maintained a committment to peaceful, non-violenct direct action in line with the principles of other anti-fracking protests in the UK and in keeping with the principles of the environmental movement more generally. These actions, however, elicited a tough response from Greater Manchester Police (GMP), who met the protest with a substantial police presence at almost every protest event and utilised a significant number of Tactical Aid Unit (public order) officers in the routine management of what were relatively small-scale daily protest marches (on over-policing of anti-austerity protestors, see Chapter 23 by Rizwaan Sabir). There were more than 200 arrests – including the detention of children, pregnant and elderly protesters, and the violent arrest of women – alongside many additional reports of police misconduct related to GMP’s management of the protest. Bail and arrest powers were routinely abused in the management of the protest and research by the authors found that violent behaviour and harassment were central features of the policing operation including sexualised violence by GMP officers experienced by several women who were involved at Barton Moss.9 In refusing to facilitate a peaceful protest, the police at Barton Moss did not simply fail to fulfil their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights but mounted an operation predominantly concerned with stripping the protest of legitimacy and justifying its suppression. We saw at Barton Moss how, through an alliance between police and corporation, a non-violent protest was repressed, and the actions of the community affected were repeatedly presented as irrational and dangerous responses to an uncontroversial and necessary process.
In considering contemporary forms of accumulation by dispossession, Harvey stressed that these processes require the power of the state to impose them upon communities, by force if necessary.10 As we saw at Barton Moss, and subsequent anti-fracking protests in the UK, as well as at protests against the slow violence of environmental degradation globally, the use of police power to pacify resistance illustrates the continued dependency of capital on state violence. Forms of protest approved, or at least tolerated, by the neoliberal state include only those that do not threaten the status quo. Any real attempt to disrupt or even bring into question the fundamental features of the current order fall outside the incredibly narrow definition of ‘peaceful’ protest and are thus defined as unacceptable, and responded to as such. The emphasis on respecting the right to peaceful protest enables police to justify the repression of protests that they can designate as outside of accepted parameters. This is as evident in police responses to environmental protests as it has been in response to anti-austerity protests around the world since the financial crisis.
A substantive opposition to fracking or austerity involves posing a threat to the reproduction of contemporary capitalism and these opponents are responded to by states and corporations in line with the threat that they pose. An effective opposition to any form of accumulation by dispossession is anti-capitalist. As the policing of those movements who seek to disrupt accumulation illustrates, states alongside private security forces continue to be willing and able to exercise violence in response to resistance movements. Recent experiences of fracking in the UK and across the globe have demonstrated both the environmental and social impacts that define the process. Those communities attempting to confront the slow violence of environmental damage are in turn being countered by the violence of the state. To seek a future that spares the planet and its protectors from this fate is to imagine, and begin to enact, an alternative to capitalism; those actively challenging the status of fossil fuels in our current order are already doing this, but they do so at great risk. Challenging the violence of neoliberalism involves us exposing the current role that dispossession plays in reproducing and exacerbating inequality. Here our task requires us to dismantle the common sense of austerity and to understand that in this context a process such as fracking is not simply peripheral to capitalism but central to its survival. Governments and corporations know this, and that’s why they are, in the words of David Cameron, ‘going all out for shale’.
Websites were last accessed 2 November 2016.
1. Greenpeace, Fracking’s Environmental Impacts: Water, n.d., available at: http://tinyurl.com/h9bekpb
2. David Harvey, ‘The “new” imperialism: accumulation by dispossession’, Socialist Register, 40, 2004, 63–87.
3. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, London: Profile, 2014, p. 58.
4. David Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as creative destruction’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610, 2006, 22–44, 35.
5. Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, pp. 68–9.
6. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
7. Craig Browne and Simon Susen, ‘Austerity and its antitheses: practical negations of capitalist legitimacy’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 113 (2), Spring, 2014, 220.
8. Netpol, ‘Netpol secures funds until 2018 to campaign to change anti-fracking protest policing’, 8 July 2016, available at: https://netpol.org/2016/07/08/new-jrrt-funding-fracking/
9. Joanna Gilmore, Will Jackson and Helen Monk, Keep Moving! Report on the Policing of the Barton Moss Community Protection Camp, Liverpool: Centre for Crime and Social Exclusion, Liverpool John Moores University and Centre for Urban Research, University of York, 2016.
10. Harvey, ‘The “new” imperialism’.