In a court of law, a judge or jury determines a defendant’s guilt or innocence. Evidence is presented, witnesses called, arguments are heard and eventually a verdict is reached. One may have lingering doubts or be unconvinced by the evidence, but an aspect of reality has been determined through a socially agreed upon method and to go against it is either crazy or principled, depending on what new evidence you can produce.
I have a strong faith in the courts and an even stronger faith in science and the strength of evidence. I like to imagine I aspire to being an evidence-based thinker, meagreness of ability notwithstanding.
So when I heard the executive director of the petroleum division of the Department of Minerals and Petroleum, Jeff Haworth, say last week at a breakfast talk hosted by the Bunbury Chamber of Commerce and Industry that fracking is safe, I was a bit shocked. Not because it is or isn’t safe, but because I realised I was not in a position to know. I was ignorant of enough of the details not to be entitled to an opinion.
And yet I had one: had you asked me the day before whether fracking is safe I would probably have said no and quite possibly without even that little pang that comes from speaking whereof we know not.
Now Haworth seems an unassuming man but he has the three qualities that make any speaker magnetic: long and obviously well-considered experience; an absolute command of the facts; and a prodigious ability to cite references to support them.
He began his talk by saying that there are three sides to the mining story: the companies’ side, the ‘green’ side, and the regulator’s side, this last of course being the DMP.
When he rattled off study after study declaring fracking safe, the evidence-based aspirant in me had to accept that it is: the state’s regulator in these matters has considered the evidence and reached a verdict if you like: on balance, fracking is safe.
As I listened I remembered an article by Rivka Galchen called “Weather Underground: The arrival of man-made earthquakes” that appeared in the April 13, 2015, issue of the New Yorker which examined how drilling and fluid injection are almost certainly creating earthquakes in Oklahoma.
I have no idea whether earthquakes are a risk here, but it made me think about how new evidence must be assimilated by official channels before a new ‘verdict’ can be reached.
Lest you doubt the DMP’s credentials, mining and energy law expert Dr Tina Hunter at the University of Aberdeen has named the department as one of the best three regulators in the world (the others being its South Australian counterpart and the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change). “The DMP is exceptionally competent,” she has said. The department’s primary concern, according to Haworth, is water safety.
Haworth spoke repeatedly and emphatically about the need for companies to secure a “social licence” to operate. Anecdotal research suggests those will be hard to come by, and last week Stratham became the first community in the region to withdraw that licence. Collie-Preston MLA Mick Murray has adopted a no-fracking stance based, he told me, on 75 per cent of people he talked to being opposed. That fracking is not an option in the South West – we have too much of a clay that expands on contact with injected fluid, blocking things up – has caused some to view this stance a little cynically, but that would be shortsighted.
Some things – emotions and an embarrassing amount of our decision making, for example – are beyond the reach of evidence, as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously demonstrated. Murray’s policy brings into the mainstream a sense that somehow in the South West oil and gas are not a part of who we are.
Yet Bunbury Energy CEO Wal Muir, who I also met last week, cites a very different set of numbers when asked about Murray’s 75 per cent, so the debate becomes much more interesting when all voices are heard.
Our ears (and minds) must remain open.
– Jeremy Hedley
