Prime Minister David Cameron is hoping that Britons will support hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, pointing to its use in the US as a success to be replicated. Religious leaders and some conservatives in his party aren't sold.
Cameron hopes to convince a divided British population that fracking will substantially bolster the country's supply of homegrown energy and that risks are minimal.
"The prime minister's vision of bountiful energy supplies from subterranean shale rock plays into the delicate politics of persuading his Conservative followers in the well-padded southeast of the country to accept his argument that, as he put it, 'the huge benefits of shale gas outweigh any very minor changes to the landscape.'
And his advocacy of the new technology, which opponents say risks poisoning groundwater and damaging the environment in other ways, has provoked a collision of faith and economics. Clerics in the northwest — seen as an abundant source of shale gas — have called on congregants to answer to their God and 'engage in biblical and theological discussion about their responsibility as stewards of the earth.'"
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