- Bishop Hill blog

There's quite a lot of newspaper coverage of fracking this morning, which will no doubt be of interest to readers.

In the Telegraph, Robert Mair, who headed the inquiry by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering into the technology, gives a level-headed summary of the risks - such as they are - and the responses.

Neil Hamilton, the eccentric Tory turned UKIP bigwig, has a green-bashing piece in the Express

So Green MP Caroline Lucas was arrested in vain? Not at all. Facts and logic don’t feature in her campaign to return us to a pre-Industrial Revolution nirvana. Sadly, Lucas has no sense of history either.

Meanwhile, at least one Tory MP is getting nervous.

George Hollingbery, a parliamentary private secretary to Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has warned that he will be “manning the barricades” if there is any danger posed to water supplies by shale gas exploration.

Mr Hollingbery, the MP for Meon Valley in Hampshire, warned that gas fracking could be “disastrous” in his county because of the area’s fragile water supply.

A more level-headed response to the scares put around by the greens would be a calm examination of the risks. This would put the minds of sane people at rest. Of course in the rarefied world of politics it's more effective to scream and join in the panic, so Mr Hollingberry's response is hardly surprising.