Never heard of candles?

Heard they were a woman's best friend in the days before batteries.

Right now Britain is teetering on the edge of water stress, with many areas forced to introduce hosepipe bans during the summer months. And this problem is predicted to get worse.

Now, the above is BEFORE the arrival of fracking - an industry which consumes colossal quantities of water - 50% of which it pollutes to some lesser or greater degree.

My question is - who pays fracking's water bill? If the industry pays just like us I just don't see how it's economically feasible. If they pay subsidised or no water costs then surely (given the self-defeating equation you derive from the first two paragraphs) any fuel savings we might receive will only be chewed up by higher water costs.

Joe Public will pay. Capitalism has broken down. All risk will be picked up by the masses. All rewards will go to the "developers" (ie the destroyers). The easiest way to deal with the energy crisis is for people to use less and get tid of the plethora of electronic goods / devices that clutter our homes.

I think they will either use seawater if the process allows it, which is more or less free, or abstract their own groundwater. Need a licence from the Environment Agency to do that but its considerably cheaper than buying it from a water company. Water stress is more to do with supply infrastructure than the product itself - for the moment at least.

The water conversation lobby have been warning us for years that we are almost at the point of no return insofar as addressing the issue of adequate fresh water supplies.

I think when dreaming up their "nightmare scenario" ten or twenty years ago even they couldn't imagine a future in which not only the rate of water usage continues to climb but that we pollute the remaining with chemicals so toxic even governments are afraid to name them.

Ahh, so that's why the route of HS2 was changed. Obviously diverted by George so as not to interfere with any future fracking operations!