Just as fracking off the coast of Spain was been fingered as the cause of more than twenty earthquakes in recent days, yesterday Environment America released a study pointing out that 280bn gallons of toxic waste water were produced by fracking in 2012 – enough, apparently, to flood all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft deep toxic lagoon. Personally I couldn’t imagine a more fitting fate for Washington, but when the amount for this year has been totted up, the oil business could ship the toxic stuff over to the Costa Brava and pour it into the seabed cracks. It would kill every fish still left there after overfishing more or less wiped out the stocks, but hey, zero is zero – minus numbers don’t count.

Now fine, I know that Environment America ‘would say that’, but either the industry produced 280bn gallons or it didn’t…and it appears this isn’t some political back-of-envelope Camerlot style fantasy number: EA relied on data from industry and state regulators to compile their report. It’ll be interesting to see what the fracking guys make of this – especially for me, as my colours are nailed very firmly to one mast when it comes to fracking here in merrie olde England: as I’ve posted before, our water resources simply couldn’t cope with that level of usage – and we couldn’t dump the toxic water (about half of all produced) in some remote wasteland, because we aren’t the USA. This also explains why the Yanks did atomic testing there during the 1940s, and we didn’t do any here.

Fracking is another of those subjects like climate change where the truth is that nobody knows for sure. But what we must all be wary of is business getting the scent of profit in its nostrils, and doing what it always does in that circumstance: explaining why everything will be alright really. And quietly hiding all the bad news. I posted about that syndrome recently too, but the blinkered drive to frack Britain to smithereens continues to gather pace.

The list of businesses which, in the last century, denied, bent, hid and then bent some more research evidence about their death-related ideas should be the subject of a book, as it’s a very long list indeed: all the cigarette companies, all the lead producers, all the asbestos manufacturers, all the atomic energy generation firms, milk marketeers, breweries, distilleries, DDT sprayers, whalers, fast food retailers and major soft drink outfits from Coca Cola to Nestlé have put out some porkies of enormous proportions – big enough in fact to keep Blighty self-sufficient in bacon butties on white bread, which by the way are also bad for you.

I’m not a killjoy; I drink too much, I like chips, love foie gras and can tuck into lamb with the best of them. I just don’t like being lied to. The more venomous the defence of such liars gets, the more suspicious I become. But I also have to smile when we reach the Useful Idiots stage, which these debates always do. And when this happens, you can always rely on that classic British amateur Dan Hannan to be on the side of the Angels. Of death.

Danny-boy began his enthusiastic support in favour of fracking in November last year, with an objective blog entitled “Let’s get fracking!” His best soundbite from that one (he gave a speech to the EU Parliament as well) was, “Greens don’t like fracking because they don’t like prosperity.” There’s a grain of truth in that statement, but not a lot of science. Hannan followed up his extensively researched opener with several others including one where he recorded that, “My constituents are more angry with anti-fracking protesters than they are about drilling”. Well Dan, that could be because they all live in Surrey, voted for you – and are thus irreversibly dense, smug and generally ill-informed. But it has nothing whatever to do with the case for or against fracking as an energy extraction form.

Dan knows this perfectly well of course, but the enormous height of his IQ is carefully balanced by the short length of his debating trousers. Here’s another belter from Dan, Dan the Fracker Man: “If previous generations had taken this [negative] attitude, we’d be pre-industrial.” Yes, and if thalidomide’s makers had shown more care, Britons would have 23,000 more limbs than they currently do. Fifteen-all – yah-boo sucks.

What you never see Dan do is (a) answer a reasoned argument or (b) mount one himself that isn’t hopelessly selective: “America is booming and the EU isn’t, this proves that free markets work”. Well Mr Hannan, that should’ve read, “Obama is lying and the EU is even worse, this proves that having dickheads in power is bad for the rest of us”.

This is what Dan wrote last June in his Telegraph blog: ‘Some campaigners talk of water pollution; others, a touch histrionically, of earthquakes. If either was a remotely serious prospect, we’d know by now. There has been a great deal of fracking in the United States, but not a single instance of groundwater being contaminated.’

Well, what we know by now is that the statement is bollocks from start to finish. It is the hopelessly lightweight assertion of a man in a hurry. And those in favour of fracking right-now-please-immediately are in such a state of mind because (1) Dan’s Party along with all the others screwed up energy policy and development for fifty years and (2) big business wants to make lots of munnneeeee as quickly as possible.

This is not about profit and  prosperity, it’s about profiteering, material obsession and performing proper due diligence. Fracking is a desperation venture for Britain to take on, and Daniel Hannan is a dangerously featherweight go-for-it. We need a proper debate before we dig Britain up any more – not more infant playground name-calling.