Financial Times: Fightback against the frack attack

Of all the people opposed to the contentious practice of fracturing rock deep underground to extract natural gas, Princess Brianna Caradja may be the only one claiming to be a descendant of Vlad the Impaler.

Yet that fearsome ancestry did not prevent her from being bundled into a police van during a Bucharest rally last month against plans to bring the “fracking” process to her native Romania. Her detention prompted headlines that the princess says were “quite helpful”.

On the other side of the world a week later, busloads of Australian farmers chanting “lock the gate” surged through the streets of Brisbane to defy gas companies hoping to drill on their land. The following week, protesters marched through Cape Town against fracking in South Africa’s arid Karoo plateau – a plan being fought by another blue blood, local landowner Princess Irene of the Netherlands, as well as Johann Rupert, the Richemont luxury goods billionaire. So goes the backlash against the global spread of fracking, for shale gas and other unconventional resources.  MORE (Registration required)