On 12th August we published the outcomes of the 10th DECC opinion tracker. The blog post, entitled ‘support for fracking plumbs new depths‘, demonstrated that support for fracking had hit 0%. Little did we imagine that it could get lower.
Today, with the publication of the 11th opinion tracker, we have the evidence that ‘support’ can indeed become less than zero.
The ‘net support’ figure, plotted above, is the sum of those who support each technology, less those who oppose.
The big story is that with a slight reduction in overall support, fracking is now has a total *negative* support. It’s the first time that we’ve seen this for any technology at any time in the UK.
With the general election on the horizon, some conservatives must be wondering why their leaders are so strongly supportive of a technology which is self-evidently such a potential vote-loser.
Support for nuclear is up slightly, with a slight lessening of support for onshore wind. However, the key stat is that onshore wind is vastly more popular than nuclear and fracking, and is still a big vote-winner. It’s also a revenue generator that could have huge benefits for the public sector, although this fact seems to be treated as some kind of state secret by local authorities in Wales who have not so far shown little appetite to use revenues from renewable energy to shield their constituents from cuts in service provision.
Here’s the link to the relevant dataset.