True cost of fracking is yet to be measured on a meter

The shorthand caught on, nevertheless, and it endures, usually as a reproach to the nuclear industry. Yet those who favour that kind of power probably shouldn't complain too much. Had the public learned what Strauss and his colleagues in Britain and North America were really saying in the fifties, enthusiasm for the friendly atom might have been muted.

From the start, the sole realistic hope was nuclear might one day produce energy at a "viable" price. It would always struggle to match coal, oil and gas in terms of simple direct cost. It had no chance of ever being as cheap as hydro. Nuclear was one answer to a perceived capacity problem. Somehow, nevertheless, the industry never got around to killing the idea nuclear generation would become cheap.

BP's oil strike in the Forties field in October 1970 also allowed the brief delusion that Britain's status as an exporting country might create domestic prosperity. Scotland's nationalists could do all the sums. Everyone else spent better than three decades working out that the North Sea's wealth kept balance-of- payments nightmares at bay and paid for the dole. It did nothing at all for our bills.

Privatisation was supposed to do that. Sell off the utilities, ran the promise, and let the consumer benefit from market efficiencies and competition. For the fabled consumer, an education in the nature of speculators and cartels followed. The household enjoying cheap energy from major suppliers has yet to be identified.

You are entitled to pause, then, when David Cameron makes a pitch for hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking. "I think we would be making a big mistake as a nation," says the Prime Minister, "if we did not think hard about how to encourage fracking and cheaper prices right here in the UK." In short, here we go again.

Cameron has a point, nevertheless, when he says the process has led to a sharp fall in natural gas prices in the United States. Imports have been cut, exports could begin in 2020, and America has outstripped Russia in gas production. Advocates of the technology, supported by Goldman Sachs analysts, also like to boast the US is on course to become the world's leading oil producer. Energy independence, altering geopolitical relationships everywhere, is supposed to be in sight.

Not unnaturally, Cameron fancies some of that. The estimates of Britain's potential reserves, onshore and off, are extravagant. Cuadrilla Resources, the US-UK-Australian firm, claims its field in Lancashire alone contains 200 trillion cubic feet of gas. This is in a country that uses three trillion cubic feet a year. Estimates of the jobs liable to be created if the industry has its way are also spectacular. Then there is the prospect of ending Britain's dependence on Russian gas.

Revenue, jobs and a shift in the balance of international power: what could go wrong? Cameron can see precious few problems. "Nothing is going to happen in this country unless it's environmentally safe," he said this week. "There is no question of having earthquakes and fire coming out of taps and all the rest of it."

In addition to "very clear environmental procedures", the Prime Minister got carried away and promised affected communities £1 million in compensation "immediately" if they went along with fracking. The actual figure turned out to be £100,000, but who was counting? For Cameron, happy days are (just about) here again. He has not said gas will be too cheap to meter, but he has certainly promised low, low prices.

Last week, the Prime Minister meanwhile forgot to mention another effect of America's fracking miracle. Its effect on the renewables industry has not been a happy one. With plentiful oil and gas once again in prospect, bad old habits, corporate and personal, are returning. Nor has the sinking of more than a million wells using fracking been as unproblematic as Cameron would like to believe.

Ground water has been polluted. Air quality has suffered. Unpleasant chemicals and assorted waste have become serious problems. The tales of "fire coming out of taps" might count as TV novelties, but they are true. Since the drilling companies have shown a marked reluctance even to identify the chemical substances employed in the fracking process, unsettling conclusions have been drawn.

Humanity's attempt to squeeze a little more juice from the planet has been controversial on every continent. The French have banned fracking. Quebec has suspended use of the process while other provinces carry out reviews. Anti-fracking protests have become common in South Africa and Denmark. In the US, the state of Vermont has banned the technique. The Blackpool earthquake that saw drilling suspended in the UK counts as a minor phenomenon.

If Cameron has a real problem it exists, for now, in his Home Counties heartland. The people of Balcombe in West Sussex are not in the "desolate" north, but in Tory middle England. They are vehemently opposed to fracking within their patch of green and pleasant land. The signs are they are supported widely. But that, ironically enough, raises a question for other people as well as politicians.

Many don't care for fracking. Others detest wind farms. Some have no time for nuclear. Few sensible people now believe the unfettered use of fossil fuels is a smart idea. Some who audit environmental impacts can even explain cadmium-polluted water prevents solar panels from being quite as "clean" as users like to believe. Dissent, like energy policies, might not be sustainable.

No fracking in the commonly understood sense is planned for Scotland at the moment. There are schemes afoot, though, for the variant known as coal-bed methane extraction at Airth, near Falkirk - in the teeth of protests and a public inquiry - and for similar work across the central belt. Fracking is not "necessarily" the next stage, it is claimed, but those who fear pollution in the Firth of Forth and health risks are anything but convinced.

As am I. Big energy never tires of making big promises. Like David Cameron, it tends to dismiss fears and guarantee a solution to every problem. One outcome in this country has been a combination of fuel poverty and pollution, followed by the mad insistence energy use has nothing important to do with planetary warming.

Yet anyone who is sceptical of grand schemes and quick fixes has to answer the challenge of demand on a planet whose human population continues to grow. If the developed world cut its energy use tomorrow, what hinders emerging nations in their drive for industrialisation? As the sly propagandists for big energy like to ask, what keeps the lights on?

The truth is there are no simple, spotless answers. Fracking might just be the desperate remedy that will remind us of the fact. Reject it and we will be forced to think again. Call that an unintended outcome.