Please Help Save Scotland

The Germans are arguing and it's not about the EU or immigration.  In June 2011 Angela Merkel's government launched a new energy policy which was prompted by the Fukushima nuclear power plant catastrophe in Japan.

Now the German environmental movements, the Green Party and the conservative Christian Democrats, are at loggerheads.  Many environmentalists want to see the expansion of renewable energies at any price but there is now a conflict because those who have been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the way things are going have decided they can keep quiet no longer.

What has happened is that the environmentalists role has changed from fighting road and rail projects to protecting birds and rare frog species.  Now they are forced to defend massive high-voltage power lines while being careful not to scare off their core environmentalist clientele, (those providing the basic funding).

A senior German politician claimed that investors in renewable energies were being 'serially harassed by the low-level regional nature-conservation authorities' and the state government wasn't helping to combat this.

According to the Speigel wind energy's fast growth has ended in Europe and nearly every country that subsidises renewable energy has been tinkering with changes or rewriting regulation.

At the moment the Scottish government continues to permit turbines to be built all over the beautiful Scottish scenery.  Soon the scenery on a journey from Perth to Edinburgh will include turbines for most of the trip and planning departments continue to approve applications very frequently.

I had no problem with small wind farms being built to aid small communities or a few major projects which would provide energy to the cities but do we want our famous and loved scenery to be blighted by turbines at every turn in the road?  I say no and concur with Rhona Weir's opinion. Rhona Weir is the widow of Tom Weir and is a great champion of the Scottish landscape.  You can hear an interview with her and windwiseradio here.

The petition to save our countryside is here and the deadline for signatures is this Friday, the 15 March.  I would ask you to contribute by adding your signature if you agree with Rhona Weir.

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The Technical Glitch and Freezers (part two)

A guest post by John Souter.

Part one is here.

“The role of Nature accepted, we then have to ask; whether in the affairs of humanity, any concept, system, practice or ideology which doesn’t improve the wellbeing, contentment, security and advancement of the majority of the species and its survival, has any claim to legitimacy or continuance by establishment or custom?”

I make no apology for repeating the questioned I posed in the Introduction to The People Business.

Our World today is, we are told, struggling through a major crisis; one that threatens our societies, the role and values we inherit from our stake in the business, and the balance sheet of improvement we leave for future generations.

Perhaps, given what’s at stake, we need to analyse very carefully, logically and judicially the pros and cons being claimed as the reality that demands we must react to this crises.

Undoubtedly this is a world crisis. But it’s a crises of our World; a systemic failure that can only have been created through manipulation by our species.

The ‘product’ at the core of this crisis has no natural function and even within the role of nurture has only a tenuous link to the measurement of value and fundamentally no legitimacy when it attempts to exploit nature ; which is exactly the intent when it attempts to grade and categorise the micro and macrocosm of our species.

We – Us are as natural a part of nature as the air we breath, the land we live on and the Earth and Cosmos that makes it all possible. We have a legitimate right to life and the development of our values. Why then should we be subject to ‘commodity’ crisis which to a large extent has been labelled and usurped by the few as a means of control over the many.

Is this financial hybrid sensible and functional in the models of riches it assumes when weighed against the scales of effects it demands,

Does it ‘drive’ the economics of societies evolution or merely distorts and diverts it by the smoke and mirrors of delusional gobbledegook.

Has science strived and pled in vain for sanity only to have a secular commodity, of no intrinsic value, to be raised on the plinth of idolatry and awarded the right of impunity to the effects of its actions and of those who proselytize its function.

Within the terms and statutes of The People Business has the executive –either elected or unelected – been granted the legitimate power to downgrade the quality of life dividends to its shareholders to that of serfdom, wage slave or debt peonage in order to conserve and continue its own incompetence?

This is the hellish morning we have woken to.

The one where you’ve stubbed your toe on the file you were swotting up on for the scheduled ‘crucial’ meeting. The morning where the electric toothbrush is flat, the towel still damp and where the shirt button drops off; then the replacement goes into the wrong button hole. The tie dips into the cereal milk and the lace of a shoe you polished the night before breaks and the infallible country road short cut you take in order to avoid the gridlock to catch your commuter train has been invaded by a thousand cows who found a hole in the hedge. The morning when you give a sigh of relief when you find a seat on the next train to the one you intended then settle in the belief that you can still, by the skin of your teeth, make the meeting only to find the crucial file, the one you stubbed your toe on, is still lying in disgrace in your bedroom. Your life is in ruins. A fool clickety clacking on the track to purgatory, esteem of self has withdrawn leaving only the shadow of the person you were to slide into your niche of ‘routine’ business.

There’s a message on your desk. The meetings cancelled. Immediately you re-instate esteem and with it comes total recall of every coma, full stop and decimal point contained within the file – now you want to know why and who caused the ‘crucial’ meeting to be cancelled.

In The People Business it’s our board of directors who have cancelled the meeting. They have chosen not to hear our arguments; to stifle debate in the certainty it would include criticism of their incompetence with little by way of mitigation in support of the path they have chosen and, as a group, have levied rich rewards and remuneration from.

Without the fear of repercussion has responsibility any claim to power or reward?

They are fully aware the games up. That, they’re in full pelt down the slippery slope leading to the cliff edge. Their only hope is in the amount of collateral bodies (Us) they can push before them to act either as a redoubt before they face the edge or, as a last resort, act as a mattress of apathy to break their fall.

It seems mindsets die harder than habits – mine are, we should grease the slope, give them clear passage and, leave their fate to the laws of physics.

These are the cons of the technical glitch we are facing. The analysis of the pros and the failures of our board to maximise their potential and distribute them as dividends will be covered in Part 3.

John Souter

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The Technical Glitch And Freezers - Guest Post

A guest post by John Souter.

That’s the underlying problem. The cause of this crises that has sent the bandits of monetary spin into the spins within the spin they’re in.

I don’t know if any of you have read or heard of “Big History” – you can Google or Wiki it and get an outline. Basically it gives the development and their stages through the World from the Big Bang to conception and on through to the present. In essence it gives you the perspective of the wood as opposed to the tree of modern history which, against the measure of world time, is a sapling struggling for space, light, tenure and now given the present crises, legitimacy.

According to Big History our species has been on earth around 200,000 years, the vast majority of which we occupied our time as hunter gatherers – 10,000 years ago we switched to an agrarian lifestyle – recorded history covers the last 5,000 years of this, and 300 to 400 hundred ago (its sometimes called the enlightenment) we entered what they have labelled the modern era. Now, while there are still plots in this world where hunter gatherers still operate and farming has perhaps an even more significant role to play now and in the immediate future than it ever had in the past; the learning and development curve we as a species have had to innovate, refine and adapt to, has possibly accelerated so much in that relatively short time, our senses have been scrambled by the G force. So it’s perhaps not so surprising that a few moves or the odd slick spin should slip under the radar.

After all our brain hasn’t evolved solely to match that accelerated pace. Its capability, to a great extent, has probably been there throughout our history and, while we are slowly uncovering its mechanics and re-assessing its potentials the one thing it, and consequently we, are being swamped with is information.

Problem is some of this information doesn’t ‘do’ what it says on the tin. In fact some information is designed purely to disguise the fact of the information we have gleaned on the mis-information has reduced it to the level of ridicule so we blithely ignore it – which is why producers of soap commercials have been telling us their powder washes whiter year after year and while we ignore the claim with the contempt it deserves they keep using it because we keep buying it.

Okay admittedly that’s a frivolous example. But it’s one of probably thousands of information bights our brains cope with classify and file or dump everyday – a subliminal white noise of information and one that this generation has seen accelerate, had to cope with and hasn’t managed very well.

This model and the intellectual level of communication it demands has not only effected those it targeted it has also infected those who inflict it. They believe it works, as a consequence of which they believe the results it brings, which in turn makes the method adopted seem logical.

An example of this can be seen in Europe. A huge organisation is created, part of which divides its time between two centres, creates nothing but another layer of bureaucracy and political oligarchy, passes a law which says dead fish must be thrown back into the sea!

An organisation that spends a fortune from the money it extracts from its members to build a parliament for expensive representatives who haven’t the democratic power to hold or direct an unelected executive to account.

In an age when clarity and level headed commitment is needed more than ever before, the politicians add another level to the morass that is politics. A self perpetuating growth industry for evangelical liars, tarts and tribunes spouting tripe, demands dead fish are dumped back into the sea in the name of conservation.

Admittedly the above is only a slightly less frivolous example. But it’s one that is mirrored in one way or another in all the institutions, governments and power brokers that juggle for control of our business and the relationship and sustainability it has with the natural elements that makes it all possible.

As I write, these ‘power brokers’ (our businesses executive) are claiming we need to review and revamp the policies and revalue the equity we hold in the business. They claim we have a liquidity problem?

And they are right we do have a liquidity problem. We also have problems of population growth – energy resource and supply – ecology and contaminations – quality and sustainability – we have all sorts of problems that have to be addressed and solved. All are legitimate threats to the continuity and quality of our lives, but not the one they want us to waste our time, efforts and lives on – namely the money game. Continue to allow them to waste our time and lives on that and they’ll lead us into the swamp of oblivion.

Money as an agreed rate of exchange has a minor purpose when it relates to the law of supply and demand of real products and services. Demand is controlled by the availability of resources –if it’s impossible to get a quart into a pint pot it’s asking for a miracle to get a quart out of it – money distorts this and claims it can and our leaders and politicos with all their free loading current account thinking have hitched on to it and pawned our futures by doing so.

Whether we can redeem our future and get a chance to revise the values and objectives of our business depends very much on not only resolving the money issue but in resolving the technical glitch it has highlighted and led us into.

(extract from The People Business) Part 1.

John Souter November 2011

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What Is The Greens Answer To Our Future Energy Needs?

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This week the first licence for the gas drilling technique known as fracking, was granted in Scotland, with more likely to follow.


This was passed to me by Edward.  It originated from Phllip Foster.


Shale Oil has been extracted in Scotland for 100 years.


Of course Huhne is ignorant of the fact that shale oil and gas extraction is nothing new.  In reality this was the first large scale operation of its kind in the world - in West Lothian, Scotland.  The operations were only ceased when they were undercut by directly extracted oil from the USA and the Middle East.


The company founded by James 'Paraffin' Young extracted vast amounts of petroleum from coal and shale in West Lothian for more than 100 years and at the peak, extraction was almost 3 million imperial tons per annum.  Bathgate chemical works was then possibly the largest on Earth.


Billions of tons of shale and coal remain underground in the area.


While environmentalists, such as Friends of the Earth Scotland, want a ban on the fracking process, I find it difficult to determine exactly what the green lobbies' answer is to our future energy requirements as they're against nuclear, coal and now fracking. Do they really want to destroy the country, both economically and socially?


We need energy to survive. Part of our political representatives' duty is to ensure the people are provided with adequate energy at affordable prices. No energy source is free from risk or damage to the environment, but if shale is found and can be retrieved at a sensible cost, surely that can only be good for Scotland.

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Unclaimed Subsidies

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No matter how 'attractive' politicians try to make solar energy it would appear the average householder isn't falling for it.  Could it be that they don't believe the UK government?

Most Scots associate solar with sunshine and thus shun the high installation costs of domestic solar panel technology which they consider would be of little benefit. If solar was the way to go housing developments would be including solar in their designs.  They are not.

Add to that the fact that Scottish Renewables say they are being charged too much to connect to the electricity grid and the mounting opposition to wind farms being given the go-ahead around the north western edge of Scotland's largest national park and there's a serious threat to the Scottish government's renewables target.

Is Scotland - or the rest of Britain for that matter - benefitting from wind turbines?  No. Consumers are the losers because added to their energy bills is the cost of the huge amounts paid in subsidies to wind farm companies, two thirds of which are based abroad.  Businesses from Denmark, Japan, the US, Norway, Sweden, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany also own British wind farms and according to the Renewable Energy Foundation think tank from next year, £523m in subsidies will go to foreign companies.

Did I ask whether solar and wind energy will benefit domestic consumers in the future?  No I did not, because we all know the rip-off will continue and we're powerless (excuse the pun) to do anything about it.

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One Scientist's Opinion

Courtesy of Dr Grumble

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