Safety rules need to be technologically neutral

We might sometimes give the impression that we’re entirely against any form of public regulation. This is not so. We’re pretty happy about the effective ban on private armies for example - no one really did enjoy the Wars of the Roses, the last time such were generally allowed. Our arguments are more about we don’t want this regulation, or that type of them.

Within this is an insistence that any form of regulation must be technologically neutral. For example, one of the messes being made over climate change is that bans and subsidies and so on are not neutral. Certain methods of doing something are preferred, others lambasted, rather than what should be done - certain results being preferred or lambasted. It’s energy/emissions that is the importance, not whether this is done by windmills, solar, biofuels or whatever else. The structure of the system should be, should have been, technologically neutral as to what produced the energy/emissions trade off set.

So it is here with seismic issues:

Truss told to increase earthquake limits to kickstart fracking revolution

Current restrictions prevent ‘a proper test’ on whether the UK's resources are commercially exploitable

No, we don’t need to increase limits. We just need to have the one set of limits for all technologies which might produce quakes - or, more likely given the subject, quakelets.

Current rules require drilling to stop if it causes tremors of 0.5 or more on the Richter scale.

Experts say tremors at this level occur naturally and often, at a magnitude so low it is imperceptible to people above ground. The current limit blocks any realistic possibility of exploiting shale resources commercially.

Fracking companies want parity with other industries, for example geothermal energy, which is allowed to create earthquakes of higher magnitudes than 0.5. In the US, fracking-related tremors of up to 4-magnitude are allowed.

Yes:

Professor Richard Davies, a leading petroleum geologist at Newcastle University, said fracking had thus far “not been a major source of earthquakes” and that coal mining had caused “many times more”.

And yes and quite so.

The perceived problem is earthquakes. OK, so there should be a limit on activities which produce earthquakes. We’re fine with that. But that limit should be technologically neutral. It matters not whether the quake is produced by the Eden Project going geothermal (and they did produce a quake which blew through that fracking limit), Cornish Lithium extracting that metal from geothermal waters, someone mining for copper or tin, any other form of underground mining or fracking. Earthquakes are earthquakes, they’re what should be regulated.

At which point, if we stick with this 0.5 limit for all activities then we have no mining - no, none at all of the underground type - nor geothermal. And, clearly, no fracking. Or, we have a limit that allows those possibly “good” things like geothermal but that necessarily means that the limit will also allow fracking.

Whatever the rules are they need to be technologically neutral. Otherwise they’re just politics playing that favourite game of picking losers.