IT was very worrying to see the reports recently of proposed shale gas exploration around Lancashire.

These geological surveys are nothing less than a first step toward full-scale fracking, with the inevitable damage and disruption that brings. Water pollution, air pollution, earth tremors, and the industrialisation of our countryside is what Fracking would mean, as it has in other countries.

And the frackers are no respecters of local authority boundaries, given that they can drill up to three miles horizontally under ground.

The government is determined to make it even easier for them by removing the land owner's right to object, or even to know, that their land is being drilled under.

The advent of fracking does not mean there will be plenty of new jobs in the area.

The estimates of jobs that would be created has been cut back by the government's own advisors, and the threat to existing jobs in tourism and agricultural, key sectors for North West England, are all too real.

Even the operators admit that fracked gas will not bring down prices; nor will it “protect us from the Russians”; we get about 2 per cent of our gas from Russia.

And the time it would take to develop UK shale gas production to a useful level is at least 10 years.

A recent report by Ernst and Young shows that the so called shale gas boom in the USA, has been more of a speculators bubble, with production at wells dropping off by up to 90 per cent in the first year, and huge write offs of operator debt.

Our best hope for an affordable energy future is to vastly improve the insulation in our homes, new and old, to use all energy more efficiently, and to invest heavily in renewable energy, of which we have an abundance in the UK.

If you don’t want Bolton's landscape drilled to hell and your tap water polluted, vote Green this month.

A Cartmell Bolton