What Lies Beneath

When students begin ploughing £36,000 into the Edinburgh University coffers next September they will no doubt expect that this money is used in a responsible way. The University’s Socially Responsible Investment policy and its Climate Action Plan certainly suggest that it will. However, students’ money is being used to finance some of the most environmentally destructive projects on earth, as well as runaway climate change, arms manufacturing and human rights abuses.

A Fracking Disgrace

When you hear the words ‘renewable energy’, what images spring to mind? Wind farms, solar panels and tidal energy turbines? What about a power station covering the area of 17 football pitches, with a 100 metre tall chimney that belches out the smoke from millions of tonnes of wood that has been shipped over from Florida? This is what Forth Energy is attempting to build in four locations around Scotland, including in Leith where people live just 200 metres from the proposed site. If the application is successful it will potentially receive billions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies from the Scottish Government.

"It's like a hotel with a guaranteed occupancy"

The Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke made headlines this week with his inflammatory rhetoric about a “feral underclass” charged with instigating the recent riots in Britain. However in amongst his comments about the “criminal classes” of Britain there was a serious point about how the British people are being failed by our criminal justice system. An unbelievable 73% of young men who have been to prison will reoffend within a year of their release, not because they are feral members of a criminal class but because their time in prison destroys any opportunities they may have had for gainful employment and leaves them ill-equipped to re-enter society. To his credit, Clarke has recognised this and during his time as Justice Secretary has sought to promote prison as a place of rehabilitation rather than simply incarceration.

A Society of Amateurs

When did the word amateur take on such negative connotations? We talk of an “amateur mistake” or an “amateurish performance”. What? The performance of someone who loves to perform? That sounds like a compliment. The word is derived from the Latin “amator”, simply meaning lover. Over time it has been constructed in opposition to “professional”, and the implication is that anything not pursued with money as the primary motive is second-rate, shoddy, worthless. When did money-making become a guarantee of quality? How many of our favourite albums, books, paintings, plays, films were pursued with dollar signs in the eyes of their creator? Unless your favourite film is The Hangover: Part 2 the answer is not many. In fact there’s a credible argument that anything created simply to cash in will always be tainted by this original sin. It will be soulless and trite (see The Hangover: Part 2.)

Botox on the Beach - A Poem

There's botox on the beach,
There's silicon in the sand,
Poseidon's striding out the sea with a scalpel in his hand,

Offsetting Flares

To the residents of Little Rock, Arkansas, news of Friday's earthquake near Blackpool would not come as a surprise. Shale gas extraction there was halted in March after 800 earthquakes in six months, including the strongest in 35 years, caused some bright spark to realise that perhaps forcing millions of gallons of water into the ground in order to fracture the rock might not have had the best impact on the region's seismic activity. Undeterred by this and evidence that the fracking process poisons water supplies, the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee of the House of Commons, Tim Yeo, last month declared concerns about the safety of fracking to be "hot air" and recommended that extraction proceed.