The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

a hint to the credibility of the folks at your 2nd link should be that under their "Latest News in Fracking" link they talk mostly about coal. The "grassroots activism" picture shows an oil well even though the story is supposed to be about shale gas. And this:

...shale gas, is likely to undermine renewable investment. Anyway, gas is now being seen as low carbon by the EU, and will receive subsidiesthat should have gone to kick-start the clean, renewable…

sounds like an illiterate's version of an obama campaign ad. The insinuation that subsidies will go to shale gas vs "renewables" in Europe is false. The sentence does not specify shale gas but that's one of the wonderful tools of propagandists. If read literally and out of context, it might be accurate; however, it is entirely false in the context of the page and site.

I think the ecowatch folks were one of the early adopters of a story last year from a couple living near the Weyburn field in Canada who claimed that injected CO2 escaping from the oil reservoir was causing explosions and killing animals on their property (no CO2 was escaping from the oil reservoir). After the story quickly made its way into vehicles like the NY Times it quickly died because it quickly became apparent to everyone that the complainants were truly wacko (i don't mean extremist but really nuts - eccentric would be too kind).