[pf] George Monbiot, The Guardian: how easy it is to shut down the UK

· for the Positive Futures list: 

If it's oil-based, it's poison. 

  It maybe OK in small amounts, but you're smashed if you use too much.

· An excellent article.  D.

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Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 11:14:41 +1200
From: Paul Bruce <.-.-.@actrix.gen.nz>
To: GreenViews <GV@greenLists.org.nz>
Subject: [GV]George Monbiot observes how easy it is to shut down the UK

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/petrol/story/0,7369,368070,00.html
As we knew from bombing Serbia: refineries are the key.  Paul

George Monbiot observes how easy it is to shut down the UK
  Special report [for The Guardian, UK]: the gasoline war

Thursday September 14, 2000

Next Friday is European Car Free Day. The idea, promoted by
environmentalists and local authorities, is to encourage people to leave
their cars at home. I think the organisers would agree that it's building
up rather nicely.
Next time green campaigners want to keep cars off the road, they should
dress up as truckers or farmers. When seven people tried to blockade a
refinery in Essex last year, to highlight the fact that North sea oil is
being given away to the companies exploiting it, they were pounced on by
police. Some of them were arrested for obstruction even though they were
standing on the verge.

The truckers and farmers, by contrast, seem to have been able to smash the
oil industry almost casually. The oil firms insist that their capitulation
has nothing to do with the fact that they too would like to see fuel duties
reduced. They can't let their tankers go, they argue, because their drivers
have been intimidated. When pressed yesterday, a Shell spokesman explained
that on Friday last week, someone threw a traffic cone at one of the
company's trucks. Next time anti-capitalism protesters want to bring the
entire economic system to a halt, they should threaten it with a piece of
plastic.

But it is interesting to see how easy it has been, with or without the oil
companies' collaboration, to shut the United Kingdom down. If I were a
hostile foreign power hoping to bring Britain to its knees, I wouldn't
bother with helicopter gunships, genetically engineered bugs or indeed any
form of direct combat at all. I would merely do what Nato did in Serbia,
and bomb the refineries.

After the second world war, the government set out to ensure that Britain
would never again be so vulnerable to an economic blockade. Alarmed by the
narrowness of our escape from starvation, it set out to revolutionise
British agriculture, to reduce our dependence on other nations.

Fifty years of farm subsidies have achieved precisely the opposite: far
from increasing the area of Britain's farmland producing food for human
beings rather than animals, they have decreased it, to just 8%. Far from
reducing our imports, they have massively increased them, as we cannot now
farm without vast quantities of fossil fuel, fertilisers and pesticides. As
the writer Marion Shoard has pointed out, if Britain had really wanted to
ensure its food security, it would have invested in horses.

Other economic sectors have been exposed to disruption by similarly
clear-sighted policies. As one of my correspondents, Thomas Powell, has
argued, rail had to be replaced as the principal means of transport in
Britain because it was too durable. Neither the tracks nor the rolling
stock wore out rapidly, with the result that turnover, and therefore
profitability, were limited. The railways had to be destroyed and replaced
with a system that needed continual renewal. Unsustainability is not a
by-product of our road-based transport system, but its primary objective.

While railways, like roads, are vulnerable to bombing, they require far
less fossil fuel to run. Indeed, with electrification, in theory they could
- like most of our key services - be powered entirely by renewable energy.
But today, like every other economic sector in Britain, they can be
rendered inoperable simply by means of a minor disruption in the supply of
a commodity largely controlled by foreign powers.

Neither government nor industry appears to be worried by the fact that our
profligate energy use means our supplies of natural gas are running out.
When the North sea's stocks disappear, they will be replaced by gas
transported to Britain via the new "Interconnector" and pumped back into
the depleted submarine reservoirs. It looks neat, until you realise that
Britain's access to its primary means of power generation will depend on a
pipeline running all the way from the Caspian sea - surely the most
strategically exposed energy-supply scheme ever conceived. Britain, in
other words, is vulnerable because it is unsustainable.

These concerns might look comfortably remote. Britain is not currently
threatened by any foreign power. As members of Nato, far removed from the
nations in which we have waged war, we would seem to have little cause to
worry about invasion.

But if the government really believes that Britain is invulnerable, why is
it spending £23bn on something called "defence" this year? Why has it been
engaged in urgent discussions about whether or not our armed forces are
capable of responding? I find it hard to understand how a government that
claims to be so concerned about defence seems unable to grasp that it
doesn't matter how much we spend on our armed forces, if the economic life
of the nation can be terminated by taking out Britain's 15 oil refineries.

In fact, it might not even take hostile action to destroy us. While oil
companies have sought to talk up their share prices by insisting that they
have endless supplies on tap, evidence is beginning to emerge that world
oil production will peak then start to slide within 20 years. If we don't
do something about it pretty fast, Britain will grind to a halt whether or
not our refineries are attacked.

So, quite aside from the environmental consequences of our profligate
fossil fuel use, switching to dispersed self-generating power sources is
surely an urgent strategic priority. The defence of the realm, in other
words, depends upon investing in renewable energy.

But this government, which knows everything about tactics and nothing about
strategy, has so far done as little as possible to encourage such
investment. While Denmark is aiming to produce 50% of its power from wind
by 2050 and Swedish researchers have developed new cells that will bring
the price of solar energy down to the price of oil within 10 years,
Britain, the windiest nation in Europe, has shown that it regards the issue
with contempt.

First the government appointed Lord Marshall - who, as chairman of British
Airways, lobbied hard against proposals to tax aviation fuel - as head of
its energy tax review team. Then, last month, Tony Blair persuaded the G8
summit to elect as head of its global task force on renewable energy the
chairman of Shell, a company doing its utmost to increase sales of fossil
fuels. Why should we bother defending ourselves from hostile powers, when
the enemy is already inside the gates?

g.monbiot@zetnet.co.uk

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sent to the Positive Futures list by David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/index.html#top
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