Please sign our petition to call on Camden council to publicly oppose thecontroversial practice of fracking in our borough and commit to reject any licences for drilling.

We are generally satisfied about Camden Council’s green energy policy, but it does not state disapproval to fracking as part their commitment to maximising clean and renewable energy.

Since the borough of Camden is under consideration for fracking by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, we need their assurance that it won’t happen in our own backyard (however unlikely it may seem).

Fracking is a risky technique to extract shale gas, by pumping water and toxic chemicals at high pressure, which cracks open and fractures the rock deep underground in order to release natural gas.

The shale gas industry says that chemicals are a very small percentage of the liquid pumped underground, but given the enormous quantities of water used, this still represents a huge quantity of chemicals. Fracking a shale gas well takes approximately 15 million litres of water; if we go by a commonly used percentage and assume that the chemicals make up a mere 0.5% of the water used, then this means that each fracking operation involves a staggering 75,000 litres of chemicals.

The UK Government has given the green light despite the fact that it contributes towards climate change, and mounting evidence from the USA and Australia that it can cause water contamination; there is plenty of footage caught on film of people setting fire to the dirty water that comes out of their taps due to the high concentration of gas that has leaked into the groundwater supply from nearby fracking sites.

The risk is especially high in the Southeast of England since according to Defra almost 90% of our water supply comes from groundwater.

Even if the wild assumption of our government that fracking will reduce energy bills in future is correct, this must not come at the expense of risking contaminating our water supply, and compromising on the health of people and wildlife; particularly in our densely-populated area, with an increased risk of air pollution (which is already bad eno