Is the EU Stopping Britain's Shale Revolution?

EU member states have always had very different attitudes to the production of energy. France is proud of its expertise in nuclear energy while in Germany it is a political no-no.Alarmingly, however, these NGOs are treated with great deference in Europe. Take the European Environmental Bureau, which supported last year’s anti-fracking position paper. In a memo to the Lithuanian presidency of the European Union it argued, in typically bureaucratic prose, that, ‘based on the EU’s precautionary principle, for member states where shale-gas exploitation is not banned, ensure that those projects have to undergo an EIA [Environmental Impact Assessment] taking into account the still limited knowledge on this technique and the high risk level associated’. The bureau is also pushing for the ‘environmental impact assessment directive’ to be made far stricter and to take into account climate change. If the bureau got its way, shale gas exploration in Britain and other EU states would be caught up in years of red tape.