U.K. Regulator: Activists’ Fracking Claims Not Backed up by Evidence
Thursday January 5, 2017
The United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) — an independent regulator charged with preventing misleading, harmful and/or offensive advertisements — came to an informal ruling this week that the anti-fracking group, Friends of the Earth (FOE), released leaflets that could not be backed up by evidence.
While we don’t enjoy seeing government suppressing free speech (and are thankful we live in a country where that’s prohibited — usually), we can’t help but notice a bigger issue here: the lack of evidence that underpins the entire anti-fracking campaign, domestic and abroad.
Interestingly, these misleading and unsubstantiated claims by FOE regarding health impacts, drinking water, asthma and property values just happen to be remarkably similar to claims regularly made by U.S. anti-fracking activists, as the all-too-familiar examples on the following image from the leaflet shows.
FOE was given one year to produce evidence of the above claims, but failed to do so. As a result, ASA reached an agreement with FOE that the group could no longer make such claims against fracking “in the absence of adequate evidence.”
ASA CEO Guy Parker explained the decision further:
“So let me be clear. We told Friends of the Earth that based on the evidence we’d seen, claims it made in its anti-fracking leaflet or claims with the same meaning c...
