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Karoo a Fracking Disaster

Karoo a Fracking Disaster

Fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well. This is of course the basis for fracking but also the root of the problem in the Karoo.

As you may or may not know Karoo is a severely water stressed area and as mentioned above, fracking requires huge amounts of water in addition to which they also need to inject displacement and cracking chemicals deep into the earth to pressure the shale gas out. This represents immense risk to the people of the Karoo as their long term water sources and thus viability immediately come under stress. Logically speaking it boggles the mind as to how fracking in any form could be allowed in the region but this is really where the story begins.

Money and Corruption vs People

If you were to look at the concept of fracking as a title fight, you would have on your left hand side your typical international oil giants and their proxy local companies. On your right hand side you would have the people of the Karoo represented by a few people and organisations. In theory the fight is already unbalanced as none of the parties in the Karoo carry the financial might of any of the oil giants. Yet to make matters worse it would seem as though the referee or in our example the government is already bias in favor of big oil. Thats right. Put another way the government has to skew the outcome of its decision making process in favor of big oil and away from section 24 of Act  108 of the constitution which protects the public’s right to an environment that is not harmful to their health of well being. And why would they do this? Because the ruling party the ANC is a major shareholder in Shell who has been granted the exploration rights. In fact so blatant is this position that the ANC increased its stake in Shell up to 28% just before it the green light for exploration was granted. Hmmm suspicious much?

Defending the weak

I would imagine that the ANC and their big oil buddies thought that it would be quite a simple matter to slide this through, after all they could simply disguise it under the job creation banner(which isn’t true by the way). But sadly for them a few people decided to stand up and knock them down. Thus although all are not mentioned here, I would like to show you below (with links) who the unknown champions for this cause really are:

Afriforum – Funders, drivers and all around heroes

Deryk Light- Derek Light Attorneys and Conveyancers

Jonathan Deal – Treasure Karoo Action Group

Round 2 Interviews are in edit, so stay tuned for more.

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