Farage’s party has had meetings with the Trump donor’s company
Reform would allow a fossil fuel firm owned by a Donald Trump donor to open a huge fracking site in Greater Lincolnshire.
The investigative environmental newspaper DeSmog has reported that the Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Andrea Jenkyns recently met with Egdon Resources, an oil and gas company owned by Texas-based Heyco Energy.
George Yates, who owns Egdon and Heyco, has donated more than $130,000 to Trump and other MAGA politicians since the beginning of 2019, according to DeSmog’s analysis.
The firm says it has discovered huge deposits of natural gas which is trapped in rock formations in the Gainsborough Trough basin, and would need to be extracted through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Jenkyns has said a Reform government would allow companies to extract the gas via fracking.
Fracking may be even worse for the environment than oil and gas extraction, as it uses toxic chemicals that release pollutants into the air and water.
The process can also cause small earthquakes that cannot be controlled, which was what led to it being banned in 2019, despite Liz Truss’ government briefly lifting the ban in 2022. The ban was then reinstated under Rishi Sunak’s government.
Fracking has also been banned by previous governments since 2011.
Yet Reform, which received £2.3 million in donations from fossil fuel interests between the 2019 and 2024 elections, is in favour of it. No surprise, given Reform has repeatedly said it would scrap net zero policies.
Tessa Khan, executive director at the research and campaign group Uplift, told DeSmog: “Reform’s pledge to hand out fracking licences to a Trump donor’s company shows exactly whose interests they serve – and it’s certainly not ordinary people. Fracking is dangerous, unpopular and has next to no chance of improving our energy security or bringing down bills”.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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