Kenneth Roy
It is possible
that the first minister
just needs a holiday
Kenyon Wright
Let’s not cut the number of MSPs
Andrew Hook
Could Scotland
have its own
Ivy League?
Angus Skinner
Are we ready not to have government?
Christopher Harvie
Whit thochts
anent oor
ain time?
Alan Fisher
The riot in Greece
Alison Prince
Tough oil is with us.
There is no way back
to the time of plenty
Catherine Czerkawska
The problem with euthanasia
Tessa Ransford
Works of art are not good
for anything. They are
an end in themselves
Rear Window
Springburn diary
16.06.11
No. 418
Catherine Czerkawska
John Cameron (15 June
John Cameron is not alone among the proponents of euthanasia in writing about it in a curiously impartial manner. In order to formalise ‘physician assisted suicide’ in law, somebody would have to be expected to kill somebody else or facilitate suicide even in cases where the physician might be morally and professionally convinced that such a course of action was wrong or at the very least, premature. The vast majority of physicians – for reasons which are all too obvious – do not want this responsibility. They are correct not to want it. It is not my right to expect somebody else to bump me off, however ethically or mercifully. There is a world of difference between this, and what happens in hospices, where an escalating need for pain relief – in my experience never denied and freely and expertly given – will eventually result in the death of the patient. But during that process, people must be treated with love and dignity whatever the cost and however long it takes. Why are we, as a society, so horribly afraid of relying on other people? Of ‘becoming a burden’? It’s part of the human condition. We are born that way, we end that way, and our whole lives are inextricably linked with others. The idea that we are ever really ‘in control’ is as much of a fiction as Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. The very stuff of which we are made is part of some continuum. It should be a cause for rejoicing rather than shame.
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The shore at Berneray
by Islay McLeod
Tough oil is with us.
There is no way back
to the time of plenty
Alison Prince
In his article last Wednesday (8 June
Out there beyond the sand bucket, a serious situation has been recognised, not by a handful of Green lunatics but by the big businessmen at the top of the economic pile. They know that world oil production by conventional methods is coming to an end. Nothing hysterical about that, they’ve seen an implacable reality. In response, they are working hard to exploit what they call ‘tough oil’. The new technologies include the mining of shale oil and hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) of deep-lying rocks where gas lies trapped. The conventional right- wing will applaud this as a way to extend the status quo, but there are some tricky implications. Let us look at some facts.
Shale oil is a low-grade tar, outcropping as open-cast coal used to. Extracting it is less efficient than drilling for crude oil and costs a lot more, but desperate need drives the industry. The surface mining process rakes up swathes of shale that have to be washed with vast quantities of water. This alone is a matter for concern, for water itself a finite resource, as we are seeing at the moment in the drought warnings for central England. Between one and five barrels of water are needed in order to produce one barrel of shale-oil. After being used for this purpose, the water is acidic and highly toxic, contaminated with dangerous pollutants including mercury.
The process is not new – it has a long history. Estonia first started exploring shale oil almost two centuries ago, in 1838. The West, with far better resources to hand, ignored it, but by 2005 Estonia was the leading global producer of shale oil. Web pages on their technology are trumpet-blowing, but admit that there is at present no known way to restore land to use for agriculture or building when it has been left derelict by this process.
In 2002, about 97% of air pollution, 86% of total waste and 23% of water pollution in Estonia came from that industry. It also produces large quantities of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Significantly, Section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act prohibited the US government agencies from buying oil produced by processes that produce more greenhouse gas emissions than would traditional petroleum. Hence the rush towards American and Canadian exploration of their own shale-oil resources.
‘Fracking’ is the process of fracturing deep-lying rock by forcing in pressurised water, causing underground explosions designed to release trapped liquid gas. There’s a lot of fracking going on. A New York Times report on a 2011 study by Congressional Democrats stated that ‘oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009’. Leaked EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) documents showed that hydraulic fracturing had resulted in significant increases of radioactive material in major rivers and watersheds, including radium and carcinogens such as benzene. The amount of benzene discharged from one fracking site into the Allegheny River was 28 times the accepted levels for drinking water.
‘Tough oil’ is going to bring tough times. There is little hope of going back
to the state of plenty that so many of us (though not all) have enjoyed as
a normal right.
Whether or not one condones the use of these desperate technologies, it has to be recognised that they point to the presence of a growing oil supply crisis. The Guardian reported last weekend on the extensive UK and US purchasing of land in Africa for the growing of biofuel crops. A massive increase in crops grown to feed car engines means there is less to feed people. Starvation, already rising globally, will quickly reach crisis point for those dispossessed people. There is silence from the purchasers on this prospect, but their unspoken answer is obvious. Some things have to be expendable.
Right-wing economists will probably agree. Where there is mounting pressure on a scarce global resource such as oil, the international economic structure is threatened, so lesser concerns must be ignored. Already, we are seeing proposals from America to cut the global economy free from the hand-to-hand money used by ordinary people. We ourselves have seen how little the public matters when there is any threat to the financial system, even when brought about by its own fault.
John Cameron accepts the recession as fact, but a further fact is the way it has increased the urgency of the search for a world commodity that will underpin a floating dollar – though no such commodity may ever exist again.
Conventional oil is no longer reliable, the new technologies are alarmingly expensive and the housing market beloved of Thatcher has been worked to collapsing point. Hedge-fund buyers who intervene between barrel price of oil and the eventual customer have further muddied the outlook but trading must go on, regardless of polluted rivers and tap water so full of methane that it is flammable. We are committed to wringing the last dregs from the world’s resources so as to maintain the status quo of international power and profit. The more sensible thing would be to accept that we are coming to the end of an age of fossil fuel abundance that can be seen in retrospect as quite short. In the face of this, we need to look at simpler, more sustainable ways of living, rather than rush to the abyss in the final high-octane trappings of luxury.
Since the end of WW2, oil has given us every provision we could possibly want – not just cars and aeroplanes but domestic machinery, plastics, building materials, fertilisers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals. As we are forced towards the new and far more expensive technologies, the price of increasingly scarce oil will inevitably rise to a point beyond the resources of many people. The Scottish Government has wisely recognised this fact, and has accordingly committed the country to the production of sustainable power. Scotland’s topography suddenly becomes its greatest asset. Its hills and rivers and surrounding sea mean that we have a far better chance than most nations of being self-sufficient in electrical energy.
Had Margaret Thatcher not squandered Scotland’s oil to pay Britain’s housekeeping bills, we might be in the same secure state as Norway, which put its oil revenue into state ownership and is now ranked among the most successful countries in the world. As it is, we have to start from near scratch. Scotland will undoubtedly feel the effects as oil shortage impacts on the global economy. It’s not difficult to see that long-haul air transport of foodstuffs will become uneconomic, or that car ownership will become a luxury. Already, people on Arran where I live are increasingly using car-share arrangements, and thinking twice about a 15-mile round trip to buy groceries. Local shops are beginning to benefit as a result.
‘Tough oil’ is going to bring tough times. There is little hope of going back to the state of plenty that so many of us (though not all) have enjoyed as a normal right. The end is not nigh, and with any luck, never will be, but big changes certainly are. In many ways, I look forward to them. We will have to learn to be more creative in devising ways to live without the assumption that everything can be bought. There will be casualties, as we are already seeing. Governments under pressure are not fussy about who gets hurt, and the vulnerable go first. But the general view will be a lot more interesting than the one from inside a bucket of sand.
Alison Prince is an author and editor in Arran
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16.06.11
No. 418
Catherine CzerkawskaJohn Cameron is not alone among the proponents of euthanasia in writing about it in a curiously impartial manner. In order to formalise ‘physician assisted suicide’ in law, somebody would have to be expected to kill somebody else or facilitate suicide even in cases where the physician might be morally and professionally convinced that such a course of action was wrong or at the very least, premature. The vast majority of physicians – for reasons which are all too obvious – do not want this responsibility. They are correct not to want it. It is not my right to expect somebody else to bump me off, however ethically or mercifully. There is a world of difference between this, and what happens in hospices, where an escalating need for pain relief – in my experience never denied and freely and expertly given – will eventually result in the death of the patient. But during that process, people must be treated with love and dignity whatever the cost and however long it takes. Why are we, as a society, so horribly afraid of relying on other people? Of ‘becoming a burden’? It’s part of the human condition. We are born that way, we end that way, and our whole lives are inextricably linked with others. The idea that we are ever really ‘in control’ is as much of a fiction as Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. The very stuff of which we are made is part of some continuum. It should be a cause for rejoicing rather than shame.
The shore at Berneray
by Islay McLeod
In his article last Wednesday (8 June
Out there beyond the sand bucket, a serious situation has been recognised, not by a handful of Green lunatics but by the big businessmen at the top of the economic pile. They know that world oil production by conventional methods is coming to an end. Nothing hysterical about that, they’ve seen an implacable reality. In response, they are working hard to exploit what they call ‘tough oil’. The new technologies include the mining of shale oil and hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) of deep-lying rocks where gas lies trapped. The conventional right- wing will applaud this as a way to extend the status quo, but there are some tricky implications. Let us look at some facts.
Shale oil is a low-grade tar, outcropping as open-cast coal used to. Extracting it is less efficient than drilling for crude oil and costs a lot more, but desperate need drives the industry. The surface mining process rakes up swathes of shale that have to be washed with vast quantities of water. This alone is a matter for concern, for water itself a finite resource, as we are seeing at the moment in the drought warnings for central England. Between one and five barrels of water are needed in order to produce one barrel of shale-oil. After being used for this purpose, the water is acidic and highly toxic, contaminated with dangerous pollutants including mercury.
The process is not new – it has a long history. Estonia first started exploring shale oil almost two centuries ago, in 1838. The West, with far better resources to hand, ignored it, but by 2005 Estonia was the leading global producer of shale oil. Web pages on their technology are trumpet-blowing, but admit that there is at present no known way to restore land to use for agriculture or building when it has been left derelict by this process.
In 2002, about 97% of air pollution, 86% of total waste and 23% of water pollution in Estonia came from that industry. It also produces large quantities of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Significantly, Section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act prohibited the US government agencies from buying oil produced by processes that produce more greenhouse gas emissions than would traditional petroleum. Hence the rush towards American and Canadian exploration of their own shale-oil resources.
‘Fracking’ is the process of fracturing deep-lying rock by forcing in pressurised water, causing underground explosions designed to release trapped liquid gas. There’s a lot of fracking going on. A New York Times report on a 2011 study by Congressional Democrats stated that ‘oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009’. Leaked EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) documents showed that hydraulic fracturing had resulted in significant increases of radioactive material in major rivers and watersheds, including radium and carcinogens such as benzene. The amount of benzene discharged from one fracking site into the Allegheny River was 28 times the accepted levels for drinking water.
to the state of plenty that so many of us (though not all) have enjoyed as
a normal right.
Right-wing economists will probably agree. Where there is mounting pressure on a scarce global resource such as oil, the international economic structure is threatened, so lesser concerns must be ignored. Already, we are seeing proposals from America to cut the global economy free from the hand-to-hand money used by ordinary people. We ourselves have seen how little the public matters when there is any threat to the financial system, even when brought about by its own fault.
John Cameron accepts the recession as fact, but a further fact is the way it has increased the urgency of the search for a world commodity that will underpin a floating dollar – though no such commodity may ever exist again.
Conventional oil is no longer reliable, the new technologies are alarmingly expensive and the housing market beloved of Thatcher has been worked to collapsing point. Hedge-fund buyers who intervene between barrel price of oil and the eventual customer have further muddied the outlook but trading must go on, regardless of polluted rivers and tap water so full of methane that it is flammable. We are committed to wringing the last dregs from the world’s resources so as to maintain the status quo of international power and profit. The more sensible thing would be to accept that we are coming to the end of an age of fossil fuel abundance that can be seen in retrospect as quite short. In the face of this, we need to look at simpler, more sustainable ways of living, rather than rush to the abyss in the final high-octane trappings of luxury.
Since the end of WW2, oil has given us every provision we could possibly want – not just cars and aeroplanes but domestic machinery, plastics, building materials, fertilisers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals. As we are forced towards the new and far more expensive technologies, the price of increasingly scarce oil will inevitably rise to a point beyond the resources of many people. The Scottish Government has wisely recognised this fact, and has accordingly committed the country to the production of sustainable power. Scotland’s topography suddenly becomes its greatest asset. Its hills and rivers and surrounding sea mean that we have a far better chance than most nations of being self-sufficient in electrical energy.
Had Margaret Thatcher not squandered Scotland’s oil to pay Britain’s housekeeping bills, we might be in the same secure state as Norway, which put its oil revenue into state ownership and is now ranked among the most successful countries in the world. As it is, we have to start from near scratch. Scotland will undoubtedly feel the effects as oil shortage impacts on the global economy. It’s not difficult to see that long-haul air transport of foodstuffs will become uneconomic, or that car ownership will become a luxury. Already, people on Arran where I live are increasingly using car-share arrangements, and thinking twice about a 15-mile round trip to buy groceries. Local shops are beginning to benefit as a result.
‘Tough oil’ is going to bring tough times. There is little hope of going back to the state of plenty that so many of us (though not all) have enjoyed as a normal right. The end is not nigh, and with any luck, never will be, but big changes certainly are. In many ways, I look forward to them. We will have to learn to be more creative in devising ways to live without the assumption that everything can be bought. There will be casualties, as we are already seeing. Governments under pressure are not fussy about who gets hurt, and the vulnerable go first. But the general view will be a lot more interesting than the one from inside a bucket of sand.