This is an abbreviated version of a recent speech to the Aberdeen Energy Conference:
The Scottish north-east is the country of Thomas Reid and ‘common sense’, and Patrick Geddes and ‘Work, Place, Folk’. I will use these three as the frame.
I look after 95-year-olds and travel and teach when I can. I have 50 years teaching and 16 books behind me: some relevant. Professor Niall Ferguson is more famous, but part of the problem. Chronological history is too important to leave to him or to Aberdeen’s Michael Gove, stranding pre-teens in the late middle ages.
I must explain what Geddes called the slide from technopolis to necropolis. In 1990 Professor Chris Smout, our great historian, started me on North Sea oil. What I found brought about the urgency that you get in Albert Camus’ morality ‘The Plague’. North Sea oil forced a new and complex historical process that few of its participants understood. It diverted attention from climate deterioration. A temporary glut enabled the 1989-91 ‘liberation’: dull communist bureaucracies were taken over by natural resource oligarchs, corporate law and crime. Its consequences? Look at Misha Glenny: from The Rebirth of History in 1991 to McMafia in 2005. Remember that our Buchan is also the birthplace of Forbes Magazine, of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, of ‘Gordon Bennett!’ Our Lords of Misrule.
Work
In the 1970s we learned to pump oil and gas from deep-water fields in ‘outer space with bad weather’. This was in a British society where heavy engineering was contracting, new control technologies were emerging (the IBM PCU dates from 1981) governments and the oil market were unstable. Britain itself was under threat in Ulster and Scotland. Its elite, imperial ideology no longer worked.
Results were remarkable: like positioning rigs by computer and satellite. But they were mixed. Norway’s Statoil controlled its work, partly by chance: gaining Iraq’s top oil economist. As for the UK (and Scotland with a third of UK ‘energy workers’) hi-tech imports in 1976 made it capitulate to the IMF. Was it, in the long run, any better-off than such ‘producer kleptocracies’ as Nigeria?
Our manufacturing has collapsed from 30% to around 10. This has hit innovation, training, culture and the responses of finance, government and quangos. There must be a drastically new set of technical priorities, backed up by changes in external relations.
Place
Scotland’s role in the 2010s will be more important than in the oil-rich 1970s, despite serious (and dangerous) manufacturing loss. Five fields count:
First: shifting from ‘palaeotechnic’ to ‘geotechnic’ power from the North Sea and Atlantic through innovative generation. Subsea rotors and pump-storage as game-changers.
Second: using Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), to pump European CO2 into depleting oil and gasfields, thus (a) limiting it, and (b) prolonging their output.
Third: improving housing and transport by decentralising generation. Building passive houses which require no heating. Decreasing high-carbon central-belt private transport through urban replanning and walking, cycling, electric public transport.
Fourth: anticipating a maritime transport crisis by the ‘North-East Passage’ north of Siberia, cutting 7000 km off the sea-route to Japan and China, providing break-bulk ports in Orkney and Shetland. Can the regime of giant, polluting, container ships survive?
Fifth: preventing the inundation that threatens the 50% of world population that will live on coasts and flood plains by 2050.
Germany has pulled round from post-unity strains to refinance eco-manufacture at over 20 % of GDP: twice our level. Our heavy industry, confined to ‘offshore’ or ‘defence’, has dissipated trained manpower to such dubious projects as the Forth Road Bridge and the aircraft carriers. Germany has poor marine energy resources yet, allowing for population, there are five German engineers to every Scot. Positive and highly-integrated German-Scots energy/conservation co-operation can be envisaged.
Against this we must tackle a collapsing ecology and society elsewhere. In autumn 1973 North Sea oil got its boost from a Middle East crisis which quadrupled the cost of an oil barrel. The world’s commercial oligarchies have ‘offshored’ inequalities and environmental costs; are over-reliant on complex, potentially uncontrollable, computer systems; have co-opted local elites without understanding their belief systems. They are complacent about their own probity and rationality.
The oil will run out. It’s essential as feedstock, industrial fuel, for air and sea transport, and much collective land transport. We can live without the private car. The Victorians did. It’s time to put rover to sleep. Cry your eyes out, Jeremy Clarkson.
Folk
Big oil ignored the capability of poor people save as primitive consumers – or treated them as mere units of production – to become weapons to destroy oligarchies, though not to replace them. The ‘suicide bombing’ Tamil assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 was the first such. High oil price/low wage creates – as well as ‘positioning’ and our production platforms – risky places like Dubai and risky people like Rich Ricci. Workforce alienation is now world-spread.
We have extreme wealth buying opinion and the collapse of open public fora in civil societies – the Niall Ferguson effect. We have the likelihood of sophisticated technical systems breaking down completely – the Macondo effect. This stemmed from the same marketised strain as BP’s Lord Browne’s university prescriptions. A recent conference in Princeton on belief and world inequality left an impression of :
First: The corruption of profession into lobby: accountancy, banking, corporate law. The alienation of the super-rich. The Washington effect. Second: the imminence of climate catastrophe: the mark of Storm Sandy on Manhattan. Superimpose this on the billion poor coastal-dwellers between the Gulf and the Philippines. There will be blood.
Finally: A century ago we had better historians than Niall Ferguson. George Orwell was reared on H G Wells. But Wells died in 1946 in the despair of ‘Mind at the end of its tether’. Looking back through his dystopias we sees not false bravura but the entomology of Henri Fabre and John Stuart Mill (another north-east local by descent) revisiting the huge constructions tiny creatures made, whether ants or coral insects, and their vulnerability. Remember ‘The War of the Worlds’:
A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, and scattered about it…were the Martians – dead – slain by the bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland
and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany
and Scotland
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