Green activists have found a new way to villainize hydraulic fracturing in Britain: claiming that sand, one essential component of the sluice pumped at high pressure into horizontal wells to “frack” shale, will give people cancer. . . .

By this logic, greens ought to be calling for the quarantining of beaches—to hear these activists tell it, the sand you’d be tanning on there would be as big a cancer risk as the UV rays you might be soaking up.

This kind of campaigning isn’t unique to this specific green group, either. It’s part of a pattern of behavior employed by the modern environmental movement, in which sober analysis of important policy decisions is overrun by overwrought and often emotional rhetoric—baseless fear-mongering. For a group that prides itself on being joined at the hip to science, greens show a remarkable tendency to ditch the facts when it’s convenient to serve their point, and this latest sand-causes-cancer campaign is a great example of that.