Gary Smith of the GMB says that Labour’s fracking ban is “an abdication of our environmental and moral responsibilities” (Report, 27 September). Clearly he hasn’t been reading the Guardian: otherwise he’d know that climate change is so serious that we need to leave most fossil fuel reserves in the ground. He also seems unaware of the Committee on Climate Change’s technical advice that fuels used by 2030 should produce an average of no more than 50g of CO2 per kilowatt hour. Natural gas generates nine times that and, with the risk of fugitive emissions, fracking is likely to produce more. If you want to deliver skilled jobs in an environmentally safe manner, look no further than investment in housing retrofit to deliver massive energy savings in our housing stock, the second leakiest in Europe. There’s also the option of reviving the growth of solar power, where 30,000 skilled jobs disappeared last year when the feed-in tariff was slashed.
John Rigby
Exeter
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