We have been assured by the government that this only involves a tiny pipe going underneath our feet and there is nothing for us to worry about. That is not the experience that is being reported from any part of the world where fracking is actually taking place.
The whole principle of fracking is to drill sideways and then to release gasses at high pressure deep underground. The MP for the Dales can't know for certain where these gasses will emerge. Or exactly where the high pressure water will run through the complex geology of the Dales. It is faintly possible that he may have done a calculation of how many lorries will be required to transport the waste water away from the sites. If he has then he hasn't told his constituents what the number will be. Or which villages that water will be carried through. Or where the vast quantity of water and the complex chemicals it will contain will be disposed of. Or how we can trust the assurances about safety coming from a government which signed up to the Paris climate change agreement but cancelled solar subsidies one month earlier and passed fracking across the Dales one week later.
The local impact of fracking is bad enough. The global impact of a short sighted policy of spending even more money on yesterday's fossilised policy of burning carbon instead is even worse. Morally it leaves the UK expanding its extraction of fossils at exactly the time when the whole world has committed to do the opposite. Economically it is just as daft.
The Paris climate change deal guarantees a rapid expansion of the alternative energy market. Any government wanting to get its country at the front of this coming technological transformation would be investing huge amounts of money in solar energy, the offshore wind industry and carbon capture. Since May the UK's government has deliberately cut investment in each of these new industries.
Instead of the north powering ahead of the world economy by being at the forefront of the new technology the government is taking it right back to the worst place it can be. A part of the country where it is OK to develop dirty extraction industries. It is hard to understand how an MP representing this part of the country could possibly support such a policy and then expect to be trusted when he talks of developing a northern powerhouse.