RECENTLY the attention of the press has rightly been on the awful events in Manchester.

It will have escaped the notice of some, especially important as the election looms, that parliament and the public have been misled on the likely impact of shale development on climate change.

This is the conclusion of a Talk Fracking report published in the latest edition of Ecologist and available online. In September 2013, the Mackay/Stone report persuaded the Government, and our MP, that “with the right safeguards in place, the net effect on UK greenhouse gas emissions...will be relatively small”.

In arguing this, and to justify their fracking stance against informed opposition, the Government ignored and continues to ignore the Howarth report of 2011 which argued that shale gas emissions could be more damaging to the climate than those of coal-fired power generation, preferring the 2013 Allen study now rejected by the body which had part funded it.

The current report by Paul Mobbs, while highlighting these facts, concedes the validity of the process of the Mackay/Stone report, but argues that the data used in arriving at the Government-preferred conclusion is seriously incomplete, collected predominantly by a method which consistently produces much lower levels of leakage than those indicated by an alternative method.

The Mackay/Stone report is thus “completely discredited”: a moratorium must be implemented “until we can state the impacts with certainty”.

Voters may wish to ask themselves which party will seek to ignore this call and resume the rush to frack.

David Cragg-James, Stonegrave, York