I'm perplexed by the UK government's seemingly contradictory ...

I'm perplexed by the UK government's seemingly contradictory  moves on fracking.On the one hand, they are lauding a local gas industry as essential to a country whose gas reserves are rapidly depleting, where 80% of houses use gas heating and 60% use gas for cooking. On the other, they have set the "seismic bar" so low that an elephant f*rt would cause an 18 hour stoppage! And having set it so low, they now find it too politically risky to raise it to a workable level. It would have saved us all a lot of angst and money if they had said 5 years ago that they don't support local gas and they will import their increasing needs.

And while I'm here, Refracktion  please explain to me how it is in the interest of climate change mitigation to have gas extracted on the other side of the world and shipped to the UK to keep you toes toastie in winter? I support your insistence that renewables are the future and a rapid transition is required, but "rapid" is a relative term. With UK renewables currently producing only a few percent of total electricity, "rapid" could be 15- 20 years!

So, in the meantime, why not replace coal with the gas under your feet which emits much less carbon, especially when properly managed, than coal, and certainly less than poorly regulated gas transported halfway around the world