Following the decision last year by New York state to ban fracking for natural gas, a group of senior doctors and academics in the UK has called for a similar, nationwide moratorium on the extraction technique. This would extend the ban on „unconventional oil and gas extraction“ announced by the Scottish government earlier this year to the rest of the UK. The Welsh Assembly has already passed a motion against fracking, which is a highly controversial technology in many European countries and not widely deployed there.