argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Environment
William Roffen Esterson (Labour, Centre-left): I completely agree with the hon. Lady that we should not open up a new fossil fuel front and increase the contribution to climate change; she is absolutely right about that. On planning, my local authority has now twice voted overwhelmingly against fracking in nearby West Lancashire, which affects my constituency as well, but the authority’s views are completely ignored by the approach the Government are taking. Does that not demonstrate that significant local interests should be taken on board? It cannot just be a national Government issue in respect of permitted development rights.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Environment
Stephanie Louise Peacock (Labour, Centre-left): I congratulate the hon. Lady on her powerful speech. On community engagement, does she recall a former Conservative Minister saying that fracking could take place in the "desolate" north? This is not good enough. My constituents do not want fracking and communities should be listened to.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Energy
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Labour, Centre-left): On building infrastructure around these sites, does the hon. Lady agree that it is slightly hypocritical that the development arm of CDC Group—the Government-backed development bank—that invests in infrastructure outside Britain would not invest in shale gas because of the infrastructure and climate change risk, but for some reason we are happy to do it in our own country?
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Environment
Geraint Richard Davies (Labour, Centre-left): The hon. Lady is probably aware that satellite data over the United States shows that 5% of the methane from fracking is leaked through fugitive emissions. Given that methane is 85 times more powerful than CO2 for global warming, that makes fracking nearly twice as bad as coal for global warming. Does she therefore agree that under no condition should we go ahead with fracking?
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Energy
Mark Phillip Hendrick (Labour, Centre-left): I came to this subject 10 years ago as a neutral, because I have a scientific and engineering background and am usually driven on issues such as this by the evidence, rather than political or ideological reasons. I deeply believe that we need a very varied energy mix for this country, and obviously as much renewable as possible, but I still think that nuclear power has an important role to play because it is much safer nowadays. In a very unstable world where we still need carbon fuels—with Russia and countries in the middle east and north Africa producing oil and gas—it is very important that we have our own indigenous carbon fuels that we can turn to as and when we need to. I was therefore quite agnostic when it came to the development of shale gas production in Lancashire I thank the House of Commons for producing an excellent paper on shale gas and fracking on 6 November, because it has provided a great deal of background on and insight into the issue. Until fairly recently, the issue hinged on exploratory development in Lancashire and, if I may, I will look back at what has happened in Lancashire in the past. On 1 April 2011—getting on for nine years ago—Blackpool, which is not far from my constituency of Preston, experienced seismicity, or a tremor, of 2.3 on the Richter scale, which was far too large. On 27 May 2011—again, nearly nine years ago—there was a subsequent tremor of 1.5 on the Richter scale. We were told that this was due to fluid injection into a fault zone, and that the fracking company, Cuadrilla, had already mapped out parts of Lancashire and knew exactly where the fault lines were so that it should never occur again.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Environment
Mark Phillip Hendrick (Labour, Centre-left): Yes, my constituents do feel the same, which is why I have risen to speak on this important subject. The city of Preston is obviously very close to these fracking sites To move on, the Government have insisted that controls are in place so that operators will have to assess the location of faults before fracking, to monitor seismic activity in real time and to stop if a magnitude greater than 0.5 on the Richter scale is detected. The figure of 0.5 is the one promised throughout the time that the developers were going through the exploratory phase and the development phase before they turn to production in Lancashire It is good to see the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) in his place. He was the Secretary of State at the time, and I recall being present in his office when he gave a great number of assurances about how fracking would be conducted in Lancashire. Of course, things have turned out rather differently from what he said at the time. He was the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change between 2012 and 2015, and he made the following statement to The Guardian. He said: "I wanted to make sure that…we have tough regulations to tackle things like methane emissions and any pollution to make sure that we have got things like water sustainability right." He went on: "If we are going to do fracking we have got to make sure that it does not hurt our environment and local communities benefit from it." We have yet to see local communities benefit from it. With coal, people in the north dug the coal, but it was those in the south and around London who made the profits from that. I do not want to see the same happen with fracking. Since then, local communities have been subjected to much higher levels of seismic activity. Over a two-week period in November 2018, there were something like 30 recorded events of seismic activity with a 1.1 magnitude tremor. That is twice the level indicated by the former Secretary of State, the Government at the time or Cuadrilla itself. The people of Lancashire have had enough of this. I came to this as an agnostic, and as somebody who wanted to believe that 0.5 was the level Cuadrilla was going to stick to. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Brian Baptie, head of seismology at the British Geological Survey, told journalists at a briefing in 2019 that the limit could safely be raised to magnitude 1.5 since that was a level similar to vibrations caused by a heavy bin lorry. I am sorry, but that is not what was promised. Since then, 50 geoscientists have sent a letter to The Times, on 9 February 2019, arguing that we should increase the limit even higher. That is not acceptable, and the people of Lancashire will not accept it.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Energy
Louise Margaret Haigh (Labour, Centre-left): It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey). The Government are considering bypassing local authorities entirely and removing the need for planning permission for fracking, because fracking has little or no support in our communities. Ministers have been hypnotised by the success story in the United States, without considering the critical difference between the US and the UK, which is that the US has vast tracts of low-density land that it can exploit. For fracking to be a viable part of our energy mix in the UK, two things are necessary—tracts of land with low population, and broad-based community support—but we have neither The Bowland shale gasfield, which is by far the most sizeable in the UK, is where the viability of fracking will live or die. It covers land from Lancaster in the north to Sheffield in the south and Whitby in the north-east. One well—just one—has been introduced to that basin, in the teeth of opposition, and even that has lain dormant for many months due to tremors. The gasfield covers almost all the major metropolitan centres of the north of England: Liverpool, Manchester, Preston and, on the right side of the Pennines, Derby, Sheffield, York and north Leeds. It is an absurdity that the Government think that a fracking basin that covers a population that runs into many millions is viable Rather than recognise those inherent flaws, which are caused by trying to impose an industry with a dubious environmental record on a highly populated sweep of land, the Government are instead trying to override the local population entirely. If communities cannot exercise their democratic right to oppose fracking through the planning system, how can the Government maintain the presence of localism? There is no broad consent for fracking in the way that there often is for other uses of the national infrastructure projects regime.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Energy
Louise Margaret Haigh (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There can be no pretence to localism when the Government are riding roughshod over the voices and rights of local authorities and local people, not least because of the documented seismicity risks. Since October last year the Preston New Road operation has triggered three red level tremors and 57 earthquakes, not to mention the risk to aquifers. Denying the local community a meaningful say is utterly anti-democratic and perverse It is not too late for the Government to rethink their approach and recognise that the obstacles they find in their way should not just be bulldozed through inappropriate legislation. At a fundamental level, the prospects for an advanced shale gas industry in the UK are completely and utterly flawed.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Environment
Thangam Elizabeth Rachel Debbonaire (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), who argued very well for his community. I recently said in this Chamber that I wanted to be able to look the next generation of Debbonaires in the eye when they are 18 and say that I had fulfilled on my promise for us to stop climate change—for us to be the generation of policy makers who halted it and even managed to reverse it—but we are not going to do that unless we stop taking new fossil fuel sources out of the ground and invest instead in renewables Bristol has declared a climate change emergency. Local communities in my constituency are taking part in many different initiatives to do their bit, but local communities can do only so much, and we need national leadership. I really would like the Government to consider following Bristol’s lead and that of many other local councils around the country and declare a national climate and environment emergency, as Labour did earlier today, and take the policy actions that are needed. That includes stopping fracking In 2015, the Government declared that there would be no fracking in national parks and sites of special scientific interest, but I sat on a Delegated Legislation Committee—oh goodness, the thrill of those DLs—in which Government Members were suddenly shocked to realise that my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) was pointing out that the Committee was about to pass a regulation allowing fracking under national parks and SSSIs in certain circumstances. The most that they were able to muster was an abstention, but we voted against it. That was not what we were led to believe when the Infrastructure Act 2015 passed through Parliament. The public and Members were led to believe that there would be no permitted fracking under national parks and SSSIs. As well as the argument about climate change, there is an argument about protecting the countryside Most of all for me, however, the argument is about climate change. I want this to be the generation of politicians who declared that national and international climate emergency and put it into every single one of our policies, making sure that with every single decision we take, we think about how it will either contribute to or mitigate climate change. The young people I met outside in Parliament Square three weeks ago and in my constituency on other climate strike demonstrations and in schools want us to do that. They want us to stop fracking and to invest in carbon-neutral technologies. They want us to be the world leader that I know we can be, and I urge the Government to follow their lead.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Energy
Justin Piers Richard Madders (Labour, Centre-left): There is no doubt that shale gas exploration, or fracking, has caused great concern up and down the country, but what is also of concern is the feeling that this Government are trying to move the goalposts and lock people out of being able to express their concerns. People from many different communities and, indeed, with many different political perspectives have been united against this heavy-handed and undemocratic approach, including people in my own area. On 18 October last year, Labour, Conservative and independent Cheshire West and Chester councillors voted unanimously to oppose the Government’s approach, and that cross-party consensus is building in communities throughout down the country. It is high time the Government stopped this dash for gas and listened to what communities are saying.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Environment
Justin Piers Richard Madders (Labour, Centre-left): I am sorry, but I do not have time By transferring responsibility for these decisions to a permitted development or centralised system, the Government are, in essence, making it easier to apply for permission to carry out fracking than to apply for a two-storey side extension to a semi-detached house. Friends of the Earth has warned that the plans "pervert the planning process and could make England’s landscape a Wild West for whatever cowboy wants to start drilling and digging up our countryside." The Campaign to Protect Rural England calls it "an outright assault on local communities’ ability to exercise their democratic rights in influencing fracking applications" and adds that it "reads like a wish list from the fracking companies themselves." If we are truly going to take back control, we should have a genuine democratic procedure, not a stitch-up that benefits a few private interests The Prime Minister has said that our climate is the most precious thing that we can pass on to the next generation, and we would all agree with that, but how can those fine words possibly be consistent with these proposed changes? The Committee on Climate Change has stated categorically that supporting unconventional gas or oil extraction is incompatible with meeting our binding targets under the Climate Change Act 2008. We have spent months in here trapped in a Brexit mess of our own making, and all the while the impact of climate change both at home and abroad is happening around us. Are we so wrapped up in our own squabbles that we fail to fully appreciate the enormity of this Last month, February, was so hot I was walking around for several days in a T-shirt, which was very nice at the time, but actually the Februarys I remember growing up in were pretty inhospitable. So while I was warmed by the rays of the sun I was haunted by the thought that once again we were experiencing unseasonably warm weather, and then I thought about the constituent who told me their daffodils had arrived in December, the recent reports that the world’s insect population is declining rapidly and the fact that places as nearby as Spain have lost 1 million hectares to the desert in recent years I fear that when we put all that together it is clear that we are sleepwalking into a climate catastrophe, and that unless we really begin to face up to the fact that we need to shift away from carbon-producing energy sources and we need to do it now, we will be the last generation to enjoy the benefits of industrialisation and it will it be the next generation who suffer the consequences of our selfish inaction.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Environment
Geraint Richard Davies (Labour, Centre-left): Shale gas is 95% methane, and according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change methane is 85 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for global warming, although the Government have kept to the 2013 figure of 36 times. That means that given that fugitive emissions are 5%, fracking is almost twice as bad as coal for global warming, and NASA has satellite imaging showing that the amount of methane has grown exponentially, having plateaued in the 1990s. So if we are to fulfil our Paris commitments, we cannot go forward with fracking. But instead, we see safeguards, tax incentives and the displacement of renewables; we see the end of onshore wind, nothing much in terms of solar, not having the Swansea tidal lagoon and so forth. We should be going in a completely different direction Apart from the global warming issues, there is the issue of water. The Minister will know that millions of gallons of water with hundreds of toxic chemicals used as lubricants are pumped into the ground, and half of it then has to come back. Often it is carcinogenic or even radioactive. We simply do not have the infrastructure to treat that water; we have nowhere to put it, as they do in the United States. President Bush bypassed the clean air and clean water directive to allow fracking so that he would have a strategic gain over Saudi Arabia. We are not in a position to do that sort of thing. We cannot deal with the lorries, the transport and the wider environmental infrastructure When I was a member of the Council of Europe I put forward a paper, "The exploration and exploitation of non-conventional hydrocarbons in Europe". It was adopted by France, and the Macron Government decided on that basis to abolish, and not continue with, fracking. I have a fracking Bill now, which I urge the Minister to look at. It says that at a minimum we should ensure that fugitive emissions are limited overall to 1% and 0.1% at the wellhead with capping and no flaring Our children are telling us about climate change. We should take that seriously, but with the possible advent of Brexit we may be in the hands of big multinationals using tribunals to fine us. If once they start fracking we withdraw tax concessions, they will fine us. In the case of Lone Pine v. Canada they charged the Canadian Government hundreds of millions of dollars because Quebec had a moratorium on fracking. Similarly Wales does not want to do any fracking, and if we go ahead with Brexit and with fracking as we are planning it, we will be under the cosh of multinationals as well as breaking our Paris commitments and ruining the future for our children.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Environment
Mathew Richard Allen Rodda (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies). For me, the context of this debate is quite simply the deeply worrying issue of climate change. We face a stark choice if we are to avoid extreme and potentially unstoppable change to the climate: do we continue to develop and exploit fossil fuels, or do we leave them in the ground? It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stop dangerous climate change if we do not leave fossil fuels, including gas, in the ground. We can and must take a more responsible and sustainable approach, and that is why we need to stop the exploitation of shale gas I also want to talk about the issue of local planning, which other Members have spoken about today. There have been test wells in eastern Berkshire and other parts of the south-east, as was mentioned earlier. Many residents in Reading, Woodley and the Thames valley have deep concerns about our local environment. In our area, there is a long history of concern about the effects of noise and pollution from major infrastructure projects such as the expansion of Heathrow and large-scale gravel extraction. The very last thing that residents in our part of England need is a major new environmental threat I am conscious of the time, but I just want to add my support for a range of other points that have been made today. In particular, I would like to support and endorse the concerns that have been expressed about the relative weakness of the planning system and about the Government’s policy on energy—particularly renewable energy—and their deeply mistaken policy of cutting the feed-in tariff and not investing in wind power, solar energy and other renewables such as the tidal power project in Swansea bay. These mistaken energy policies stand in stark contrast to the policies of many other Governments, including the last Labour Government.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Energy
Mathew Richard Allen Rodda (Labour, Centre-left): I am afraid I am running out of time We have just 12 years left to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. Local communities around the country have serious and substantial concerns about fracking. Given the climate crisis and the need for radical change in energy provision, and given the indisputable local concerns, shale gas exploitation has to stop, and it has to stop now.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: Government Operations
Clive James Charles Betts (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister has talked about having faster applications. Can he explain how precisely that would be done in a way that allows communities to be fully consulted? Furthermore, as I understand it, the Government have done no impact assessment on their proposals. Does he intend to do one at any stage?
Sittings of the House (29 March) — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: International Affairs
Kevin Denis Brennan (Labour, Centre-left): I note that the motion talks solely about the withdrawal agreement and not the political declaration. Has the Leader of the House had any thoughts or information on whether an amendment that included the political declaration would be acceptable or in order?
Sittings of the House (29 March) — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: International Affairs
Christopher John Bryant (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to the Leader of the House for reading out the motion; that is helpful for the House. So far as I understand it, if the motion were carried tomorrow, the Government would not be able to ratify the withdrawal agreement treaty. Is that correct?
Sittings of the House (29 March) — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: International Affairs
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): I am at a loss to understand how this House can put into law section 13 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and then the Government can offer us only one part of that. What advice has the Leader of the House had on whether what the Government are doing is legal?
Sittings of the House (29 March) — House of Commons, 2019-03-28
Topic: International Affairs
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Section 13 is in front of me, and it is extremely clear. Paragraph (1) says: "The withdrawal agreement may be ratified only if…the negotiated withdrawal agreement and the framework for the future relationship have been approved by a resolution of the House of Commons on a motion moved by a Minister of the Crown" That is the original legislation that we fought for—the right for this sovereign Parliament to have its say on both things together. As I put it earlier, these are two horns on the same goat. The goat’s head cannot be divided as the Government are seeking to do. This is an extraordinary and unprecedented reverse-ferret of the commitments that have been given by Ministers to this place: that we should have our say on both items together. Is it not extraordinary, Mr Speaker, that this comes right on the day when we know that far-right demonstrators will be gathering in Parliament Square?