Campaigners desperate to prevent the birth of a U.K. shale gas industry have glued themselves to walls, barricaded country lanes and climbed drill rigs. Yet their most potent weapon is more prosaic: lawyers. Anti-shale groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are using environmental and property law to challenge drilling at every turn, and it’s working. Production is now likely to start in 2018, two years later than originally envisaged, partly because getting permission to explore has been so slow, said John Williams , senior principal at Poyry Plc, an energy consultant in Oxford. The delay is frustrating Prime Minister David Cameron ’s goal of boosting economic growth and cutting energy prices through developing shale resources. For the protesters, no good can come from hydraulic fracturing, the process that uses a mix of pressurized water and chemicals to prise fuel out of shale rock. They say it pollutes […]