Fizzing fuses in Central Asia

The break-up of the Soviet Union led to a free-for-all in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia

The Caspian Basin oil and gas fields of the former Soviet Union in Central Asia, particularly in the new states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, offer temporary alleviation from oil scarcity. These states are in China’s back yard, not the USA’s, and so the US military engages in a three-way chess game with Russia and China as all three scramble for influence within the region.

Kazakhstan, in particular, in addition to oil has the the world’s second largest uranium reserves, perhaps 817,000 tonnes of the world total of about 5.469m tonnes.  Everyone wants a slice of Kazakhstan – of its oil, gas, coal, uranium, iron ore, chromium, copper, zinc, silver, gold, and other vital components of industrial technology. A large country in the interior of Central Asia, with a population of 15.4 million, Kazakhstan was a republic of the Soviet Union until declaring independence in 1991. There is a religious divide, with rather more Moslems, 47 per cent of the population, than Russian Orthodox Christians, 44 per cent. Kazakhstan is not a western-style ‘democracy’:  President Nursultan A Nazarbayev, first elected in December 1991, has been in power ever since, and was re-elected for a further seven years in December 2005, with a stated 91.5 per cent of the vote. He is an executive president who appoints ministers and makes the big decisions. The Nazarbayev family control uranium, oil and gas, electricity, the rail and postal services, air transport, banks, and more.  Political opposition is not encouraged.

The uranium in Kazakhstan is of intense interest to China. The China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group Company and China National Nuclear Corporation, for example, have made uranium deals with the state-owned nuclear company Kazatomprom. Alarmingly, corruption within Kazakhstan’s nuclear industry is endemic:  the former chief of Kazatomprom, Mukhtar Dzhakishev, went to jail for 14 years in March 2010, for stealing large quantities of uranium and selling it to the highest bidders.

The US had announced in 2004 that was helping Kazakhstan to build a military base to protect the oilfields in the west of the country, and said that joint military training exercises would continue in the future.  NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, signed a liaison agreement with Kazakhstan in October 2005, following the July 2005 decision of Kazakhstan’s southern neighbour, Uzbekistan, to order the US military to vacate its airbase at Karshi-Khanabad within 180 days. This expulsion order, backed by Russia, was followed in September 2005 by joint Russian-Uzbek military exercises, and an order for the American news organisation Internews to quit Uzbekistan. The BBC was ordered out of Uzbekistan the following month.

Oil companies from around the world have significant investments in Kazakh oil fields.   They include Rosneft and Lukoil of Russia; Eni, Shell and Total from Europe; and Chevron and ExxonMobil from the USA. China gained a significant stake in the Kazakh oil industry late in 2005 when China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) bought Petrokazakhstan – which was based in Alberta, Canada – for $4.2 billion. As part of the deal, the Kazakh government (over which the Nazarbayev family has such a hold) received a holding of 33 per cent. A pipeline to carry Kazakh oil to China came into use in December 2005. An earlier pipeline, opened in 2001, takes Kazakh oil west to the Black Sea and Europe.  Many of the oil transactions made in Kazakhstan have been channelled through jurisdictions where secrecy is entrenched, such as Bermuda, and  Switzerland.

The USA and its allies certainly do not have control over Kazakhstan, where Chinese as well as Russian influence is growing rapidly.  The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, including among its members China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, is set on curtailing American influence in Central Asia. In 2009 China lent $10bn to Kazakhstan and bought into the energy company Mangistau Munai Gas.  A coup in Kyrgyzstan in spring 2010 replaced president Kurmanbek Bakiyev with Rosa Otunbayev, whose interim government lost no time in announcing its intention to close the US air base at Manas, north of the capital Bishkek.  The states of  Central Asia, or rather their rulers, are inclined to play the dominant powers off against each other, for material rather than ideological ends.  At the end of January 2010 Kazakhstan, for example, made an appeasing gesture to the US and its allies in NATO by agreeing to allow Afghanistan-bound military flights to cross its airspace, and non-lethal cargoes to cross overland, in return for supplies and training for Kazakh military forces.

With competition hotting up for the oil, gas, uranium and other resources of Central Asia, long periods of political calm and good governance are about as likely as Gordon Brown starting a new career as a stand-up comedian, or Silvio Berlusconi becoming a monk.  It’s probably not a wise move to rely too much on Central Asia for our future fuel and power.

REVISED FROM ‘EMPTY PLATES TOMORROW’, April 11th 2010

Iraq: siphoning the oil — but not according to plan

Iraq has, according to recent knowledge, the world’s fourth largest oil reserves and tenth biggest natural gas reserves. The pretence that the war against Iraq, launched in 2003, was not about energy was all but over within a couple of years. Article 109 of Iraq’s post-Saddam Hussein  written constitution created the framework for oil companies to siphon off the state’s energy wealth. Article 109 of the constitution was key:

“Article 109

First: The federal government with the producing governorates and regional governments shall undertake the management of oil and gas extracted from current fields provided that it distributes oil and gas revenues in a fair manner in proportion to the population distribution in all parts of the country with a set allotment for a set time for the damaged regions that were unjustly deprived by the former regime and the regions that were damaged later on, and in a way that assures balanced development in different areas of the country, and this will be regulated by law.

Second: The federal government with the producing regional and governorate governments shall together formulate the necessary strategic policies to develop the oil and gas wealth in a way that achieves the highest benefit to the Iraqi people  using the most advanced techniques of the market principles and encourages investment (sic).” (my emphasis)

The ‘market principles’, in relation to the oilfields, were intended (by the US/UK) to be Production Sharing Agreements. Under such agreements the nominal ownership of the oilfields remains in the state’s hands, but companies which make sharing agreements can, under current accounting conventions, log the oil reserves in their own accounts. Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) last, typically, from 25 to 40 years, and a government’s share of costs and revenues is fixed at the outset of the contract.  This means that the oil companies alone benefit from increases in revenues. PSAs are rarely in the public domain because of commercial confidentiality, and so cannot be scrutinised by citizens.

Iraq had no pressing need for Production Sharing Agreements, as it has enough oil for its government to be able to raise international capital to develop the fields, and keep the profits for the benefit of the nation. This alternative, however, had too much of a socialist flavour for some western governments and multinational corporations. The fate of Iraq’s oilfields was planned well in advance of the Iraq War. The ‘Future of Iraq’ project, initiated by the US State Department, was in motion by April 2002. The project included 17 working groups, each including ‘experts’ chosen by the State Department, and including Iraqi exiles ill disposed to the dictatorial president, Saddam Hussein. The groups met in Washington and London. The working group for oil recommended that Production Sharing Agreements should be the way ahead for Iraqi oil, once Saddam was deposed. US and UK oil companies, notably Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP, and the Anglo-Dutch group Shell, all expected to benefit handsomely. Estimates in PLATFORM’s 2005 report, Crude Designs: The rip-off of Iraq’s oil wealth*, suggested that a sum between US$74 billion and $194 billion, over the life of the agreements, could go to oil companies instead of to the people of Iraq. These estimates were based on an oil price of just $40 a barrel, but in spring 2010 oil is over $80 a barrel. The higher the price, the greater the financial flows to the oil companies would have been, because of the way the agreements were to be constructed.

Iraq after the ‘Shock and Awe’ of the 2003 war joined the ranks of re-colonised states, an example of the  ‘disaster capitalism’ probed and analysed by Naomi Klein in ‘The Shock Doctrine’ (London:Penguin 2007).  In part the conquerors’ plan is still on track — there is enough violence to keep the  population cowed and to discourage outsiders from seeing what is going on — but in a fundamental respect, the plan has failed because, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars principally by the USA and its junior partner the UK,  world demand for oil exceeds ready supply, and there is intense international competition for Iraqi oil, enabling the government in Baghdad to set oilfield contracts that are extremely tough, and favourable to itself.

The largest party after the March 2010 government elections is al-Iraqiyya, secular but with a Sunni tendency, led by A’yad Allawi. The al-Iraqiyya group secured 91 seats. Previous prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition, secular but Shi’ite in orientation, was close behind with 89 seats, and the National Iraqi Alliance, a Shi’ite coalition led by Ibrahim al-Jaafari, obtained 70 seats. The election was beset with violence, corruption and fraud, and 499 candidates were, according to Wikipedia, banned from standing, mainly because of alleged links with the banned Ba’ath Party of the late Saddam Hussein.

Who is A’yad Allawi? He is a neurologist, born in 1945 and resident in the UK between 1971 and 2003. In 1978 he plotted with a group of generals in the Iraq army to depose Saddam, an unsuccessful venture that resulted in a nearly  successful assassination attempt on Allawi when he was living in suburban Surrey, near London. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, Allawi’s wife and children are, in 2010, still living in the UK.

After the 2003 war, Allawi returned to Iraq and was created president of the Governing Council, working under the direction of the American, Paul Bremer,  who led the Coalition Provisional Authority until the first post-war elections in December 2005.  Those elections were not a total success for the conquerors. Many in the USA’s Defense Department had favoured former exile Ahmed Chalabi — a relative of A’yad Allawi — as ‘their man’ , but Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress did not win a seat. The elections were a victory for the United Iraq Alliance, a coalition of Shi’ite groups, which secured 128 of the 275 seats. The Kurdish parties from northern Iraq gained 53 seats, and the parties dominated by Sunni Moslems, 44 seats. It was a nominal government unable significantly to improve the living conditions, or even to physically protect, the people of Iraq.

The 2010 elections have resulted in the extremely westernised Allawi, an  opponent of Saddam and the Ba’ath party over decades, leading the largest bloc in the Council of Representatives, with the previous (USA-approved) prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, heading the second bloc. Surely huge quantities of oil would soon be flowing into the hands of western oil corporations?

The process of commercialising Iraq’s oil reserves is well under way, but it is not via Production Sharing Agreements. Instead, demand for its oil is so strong that the Iraq government has the power to insist on  fixed-fee contracts, and so will benefit itself from future oil price rises.

The first round of contracts, in 2008-09, saw BP of the UK and CNPC of China beating Exxon Mobil of the US and Petronas of Malaysia to  secure the contract to exploit the Rumaila oilfield. In the second round, in 2009, the winning corporations included Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total of France, Japan Petroleum Exploration Company, Statoil of Norway, and Lukoil and Gazprom from Russia, as well as CNPC and Petronas.  Sonangol of Angola, TPAO of Turkey and Kogas of South Korea were also participants in winning bids.

Exxon Mobil is the only US company in the list.

And the moral is? Too early to say, as Zhou Enlai, premier of China from 1949 to 1976, is reputed to have commented about the impact of the 1789 French Revolution. Nevertheless, would the US have attacked Iraq so ferociously, and caused so many deaths in the process, if the ruling circle had any idea that within seven years, the liquid gold would be siphoned away in so many non-American directions?

Lurking uneasily in the background is the question of what the USA (and its UK sidekick) can do now to guarantee their energy supplies for the next few decades.

* Crude Designs: The Rip-off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, from PLATFORM, November 2005. PLATFORM assesses the impact of British oil corporations on development, environment and human rights. Crude Designs was co-published by the Global Policy Forum, Institute for Policy Studies, Oil Change International, New Economics Foundation, and War on Want.

See, for more information:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Iraq/Oil.html

http://www.iraqoilreport.com/oil/production-exports/complete-round-2-results-3371/

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/how-iraq-is-punishing-

Revised from Empty Plates Tomorrow

Oil and gas flashpoints

Natural gas: Russia has nearly twice as much natural gas as any other country – 1,680 trillion cubic feet in 2004, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Iran came next with some 940 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, followed by Qatar (910 trillion), Saudi Arabia (235 trillion), United Arab Emirates (212 trillion) and the United States (189 trillion). Nigeria, Algeria, Venezuela and Iraq completed the top ten natural gas nations. Six of the ten nations with the largest gas reserves are largely or overwhelmingly Muslim countries.  Of the remaining four,  Nigeria is split (often with animosity) between Muslim and Christian beliefs, while Russia, Venezuela and the USA are predominantly Christian, at least in cultural heritage. Religious differences between producing and consuming nations may well intensify the political and economic conflicts over energy resources that are likely to grow as reserves shrink. At consumption rates of around 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas annually, the world has enough for about 60 years.

Oil: Saudi Arabia has long claimed the world’s largest reserves of oil, which in 2004 were about 262 billion barrels. Some analysts question the accuracy of Saudi Arabian oil reserve estimates, which are probably lower than  claimed. Clues suggesting depletion include the injection of water into oilfields to flush remaining oil into the wells; a rise in output of heavy crude at the expense of more valuable light oil; and a scarcity of new wells to replace those that are pumped out. The data on which reserve estimates are based are not open to international scrutiny because the state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, has a monopoly on oil extraction and chooses which information to reveal, and which to conceal. Saudi Arabia is in many ways a client state of the USA, which sponsors the  ruling al-Saud family.

The list of nations with the largest oil reserves is similar to the gas list, because the two energy sources are generally found in close proximity. After Saudi Arabia, the oil reserve leaders are Canada, reported to have almost 179 billion barrels in 2004, mainly in oil sands; Iran, possibly about 126 billion barrels; Iraq, 115 billion; Kuwait, 101 billion stated in 2004 but in reality probably much less; United Arab Emirates, 98 billion; Venezuela, 77 billion; Russia, 60 billion; Libya, 39 billion; and Nigeria, 35 billion.

Table: States with the greatest oil and gas reserves, 2004

Source: Energy Information Administration, US federal government, January 2005.

Five miles below the sea bed in the Gulf of Mexico, American and UK oil companies located, after a prolonged period of expensive exploration and test drilling, a new oilfield that could hold between three billion and 15 billion barrels. Yet even if it became technically feasible to extract the lot, it would amount only to between five and 25 weeks of world oil consumption.  It would not even make up the probable gap, over 50 billion barrels, between Kuwait’s published reserves of 101 billion barrels at the end of 2004, and the much smaller quantities that may still be underground. Petroleum Intelligence Weekly reported on January 20^th 2006 that the Kuwait Oil Company reckoned, privately, on reserves of just 48 billion barrels – and only some 24 billion barrels of this much smaller quantity were fully proven.

The world’s fairly easily extractable oil reserves would be enough to last maybe 40 years from 2010, if annual consumption did not exceed the 2009 level of just over 31 billion barrels. If there  still remained easily extractable reserves of oil, companies would not be drilling thousands of feet below the sea bed, as Chevron is doing 140 miles out from land in the Gulf of Mexico, drilling to 19,000 feet under the bottom of the ocean, in a venture costing nearly a million dollars a day.

Democracy? Not for client states

The trouble with democracy is that voters can elect leaders whose priorities collide with those of the world’s most powerful governments and corporations.   Thus the USA, supported by the UK, protects the al-Saud dynasty in Saudi Arabia, but opposes the elected Islamic religious government in Iran. In Saudi Arabia the al-Saud family has absolute power and selects all the leading ministers. There is no ‘democracy’ in the western sense, but the steady flow of energy to the rich world persuades western governments, by and large, to keep quiet about it.

The oil state of Kuwait does have elections (men aged 21+, who can trace Kuwaiti ancestry back to 1920 or earlier, can vote), but the administration is controlled by the al-Sabah family. United Arab Emirates is a federation of seven states (Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm-al-Qaiwain). Each state is ruled by an emir who selects a supreme council. Qatar is also an emirate, where the emir and several ministers belong to the al-Thani family. The West regards all these as friendly states.

In Algeria, where poverty and violence are endemic,  western oil companies dominate energy supplies and western money props up the secular régime. Socialist Libya, materially  a more equal society than its neighbour Algeria, was on the USA’s blacklist for 27 years until May 2006, when the then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the resumption of diplomatic relations. Oil companies had been lobbying Congress to remove Libya from the ‘evil’ list (although the administration maintained that energy supplies had nothing at all to do with the decision). The West’s long opposition to Libya had more to do with distaste for the ‘Revolutionary Leader’, Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi, and with his alleged financial support for international terrorism, than with concern for the population’s political rights.

The oil and gas wealth of Nigeria is enriching energy company directors and shareholders, but has intensified corruption in this desperately poor and increasingly polluted country, torn by civil wars and Christian-Muslim religious divisions. The West takes Nigeria’s oil: over 40 per cent of it goes to the USA. Oil wealth has not trickled down to local people, but just the opposite: pollution and land expropriation destroy their livelihoods. The Nigerian national constitution of 1999 says that 13 per cent of national oil revenues should be distributed to the regional states, but even if the money ever reached the states, it was rarely used for sustainable development purposes. The Nigerian Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that this constitutional right applied only to revenues from oil wells on land – thus leaving Nigeria’s growing off-shore oil industry out of the equation. The regional states demanded a higher share of on-shore revenues to compensate, but the federal government refused to meet their demands. So oil pipelines in Nigeria suffer frequent attacks by the government’s political opponents, who draw willing support from impoverished communities.

Russian and Canadian powerstores

Russia, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, was a beleaguered state. Billions of dollars in oil, gas and other raw material sales drained out of the country to foreign companies and to the oligarchs who acquired, with the apparent approval of the then-president Boris Yeltsin, national assets at knock-down prices. Vladimir Putin, president of Russia from December 31st 1999 to May 7th 2008 and subsequently prime minister,  re-established state control, but in the teeth of intense criticism from several western governments, and from western and Russian corporations.  The oligarchs moved abroad – London is a popular haven – and spent freely on mansions, yachts and football.

The oil and gas regions of Russia are in western and northern Siberia including the Arctic shelf, the Volga-Ural region, and the North Caucasus, and many are close to ethnic and religious flashpoints. In the far north, energy extraction has to contend with extremely cold, hostile climates. The Russian state-controlled oil and gas company Gazprom, in an acrimonious price dispute with Ukraine, chose New Year 2006 to shut off gas supplies to its neighbour. The Ukraine merely siphoned off Russian gas in transit by pipeline to Western Europe, provoking a chill of alarm from Romania to Germany. Gazprom’s aggressive action would scarcely have been contemplated without full support from Putin. Energy reserves give Russia renewed global power.

Handily in the USA’s back yard and traditionally a friend, Canada sits on 179 billion barrels or so of oil in the tar sands of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Extraction of crude oil from tar is energy-intensive, however, and requires huge quantities of water.  The consortium Syncrude Canada Ltd is a leading force in the extraction of oil from tar sands, harnessing the resources of several oil companies including ConocoPhillips, Imperial, Mocal and Murphy.  As a location  for extraction Canada has advantages of relative political stability and wealth equality, but the tar sand workings are environmentally destructive and yield little energy gain.

Who knows? The truth about ‘known’ resources is hazy and hidden in hubris.

Abbreviated from Empty Plates Tomorrow

(Over)confidence in technology

“The facts about our energy resources are sobering. The rapidity with which we are finding ways of spending that energy, often without realizing it, is shocking. The problems attendant in tapping unused reservoirs of energy are discouraging. Just the same, no one should say that man’s standard of living is likely to toboggan for lack of energy – cheap energy. This optimism comes not from a blind faith in the scientist and engineer but, instead, from an infinite confidence, supported by a long record of the past, that man’s ingenuity is equal to the task.”

– Charles A Scarlott, writing in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, published in 1956.[i]

This quotation from Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth reflects the confidence in technology that characterised the middle years of the twentieth century. Charles Scarlott was, at the time, manager of technical information services in the public relations department of the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California. From the perspective of the first decade of the 21^st century, the words ‘information services’ and ‘public relations’ themselves sound warning bells. Mr Scarlott was very well aware of rapidly rising energy use, even back in the 1950s, but trusted to the human mind to invent new, cheap and plentiful forms of energy, and policymakers by and large accepted this rosy vision.

It hasn’t happened yet.

Petroleum, gas and coal are organic products of past aeons.[ii] Petroleum is a mix of hydrocarbons*, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and other chemical elements, originally organic matter – phytoplankton and zooplankton – that has been transformed by bacteria, by heat and by pressure, over millions of years. Natural gas is predominately methane, mixed with ethane, butane and propane. Methane, CH₄, is a by-product of rotting vegetation. Butane and propane are more complex gases than methane, but like methane are alkanes, the ‘paraffin’ group of hydrocarbons. Coal, a solid hydrocarbon in gradations from lignite at 70 to 80 per cent carbon to anthracite at over 90 per cent carbon, is compressed ancient former living matter, typically large ferny plants.

Hydrocarbons drove the explosion in agricultural productivity in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Natural gas is the chief feedstock for nitrogen fertiliser manufacture. Irrigation, pesticide production and mechanised cultivation are fuelled by oil. Lavish use of hydrocarbons gives the illusion of limitless potential growth in food production, an illusion that permeates all forms of economic activity.

Yet the energy that powers non-essential ventures, such as extravagant leisure complexes, will soon be needed for more basic survival purposes, notably food production. An indoor ski centre in the oil state of Dubai opened in December 2005. It is 85 metres high, covers 22,500 square metres, and has five slopes, the longest 400 metres with a 60-metre fall. The temperature inside is –1 to –2 degrees C (28 to 30 degrees F) all the time, when outside it may be over 50 degrees C (more than 120 degrees F). The annual electricity consumption will be staggering. The SkiDubai dome, owned by the Majid Al Futtaim Group, is at the extreme end of energy-hungry leisure and tourism ventures that have no purpose other than entertainment – perhaps a valid undertaking from the perspective of the individual company, but dubious in the context of uncertain world energy supplies.

Losing the land

Energy-guzzling agriculture degrades whole environments. In the USA, the world’s most careless energy consumer, these are some of the consequences:

● On the central prairies, topsoil is eroding 30 times faster than natural processes can create it.

● The cropland acreage declines by around three million acres a year. Two million areas are lost to waterlogging, erosion and pollution. A million acres more succumb to roads, suburbs, shopping malls, and industrial developments.[iii] Three million acres is 4,688 square miles, 0.13 per cent of the whole land area of the United States, lost each year. That is an area three-fifths the size of Wales, or larger than the whole of Gambia or Jamaica.

● Irrigation for agriculture (often using electric or diesel-powered pumps[iv]) is depleting aquifers. Several vital aquifers in the USA’s southern states may be useless by the mid 21^st century.

By the mid 1990s, the food eaten by the typical American every year had devoured the equivalent of 400 gallons of oil[v] on the way to the plate or take-away carton. Food production in the USA uses up about 10 times more energy than is contained in the final product. Before the industrial revolution, food depended on the sunlight, which made plants grow to feed people directly, or indirectly via other species of animals feeding on the plants. People increased the productivity of plants and animals by selective breeding, and by organised cultivation and animal husbandry, and they spread animal waste, in the form of farmyard manure, to improve the soil. Farming this way was labour-intensive. One person’s direct labour might yield sufficient food to feed three or four other people, but one person could not feed a village, let alone a small town — until fossil fuels formed a temporary, one-time-only army.

Britain’s gas habit

Energy consumption in the UK is still rising, and in 2004 was 6.4 per cent more than in 1995: 235.6 million tonnes of oil equivalent* compared with 221.5 million. Natural gas fired the increase, usage rising from 32.4 per cent of total consumption in 1995, to 41.5 per cent in 2004. Natural gas is of course finite, despite its reassuring name. Renewable fuels contributed only a tiny amount, 0.2 per cent – the same as in 1995.[vi]

Energy consumption in the UK, 1995 and 2004

Percentage of inland energy consumption, primary fuel input, not seasonally adjusted.

Source: Calculated from table 1.2 in Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2005, from the Department of Trade and Industry.

About a third of Britain’s energy supply is converted into electricity. Most electricity in the UK is generated in power stations fuelled by coal or natural gas. Forty per cent of electricity TWh (terawatt[vii] hours) are fuelled by natural gas, coal generates another 33 per cent, and nuclear energy about a quarter. Just one per cent of British electricity is from renewable hydro power, and the amount of hydro power generated has actually fallen since 1980. The UK’s national grid infrastructure is at the end of its planned 40-year life. Many power stations are inefficient, and the nuclear plants are nearing the end of their lives. The margin between production capacity and peak demand has become wafer thin.

By 2020 electricity supply could be 40 per cent below the peak demand experienced in the early 21^st century, a gap of some 2,000 megawatts* (MW).[viii] London and the South East already produce only about half of the electricity the two regions consume, and are dependent on the national grid transferring supply from other regions. By 2023, only three per cent of the UK’s electricity – at 2005 consumption levels — will come from nuclear power, unless there is a major new building programme. Coal deposits could, if used wisely, help the switch from an oil- and gas-dependent economy to a more sustainable future, but of course Mrs Thatcher’s governments, from 1979 to 1990, closed most of the mines.

The UK became a net importer of gas in 2004. New Labour, waking up too late to the decline in natural gas output from the North Sea, saw two ways to salvation: the construction of storage terminals for imported gas, and a new generation of nuclear power stations. A gas terminal on Kent’s Isle of Grain came into use in 2005, and in 2006 storage tanks for liquefied natural gas were under construction at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire. The capacity of the pipelines carrying gas from Norway and via Belgium was being enlarged.

The Department of Trade and Industry’s energy review, launched late in January 2006, was on the face of it an opportunity for a searching public debate on the energy choices ahead. Even while the review was in progress, though, Tony Blair was dropping hints that the government had already decided to build a new generation of nuclear power stations. The previous policy was for both nuclear and coal-generated electricity to be well on the way out by 2020, to be replaced mainly by gas and to a lesser extent by oil. This strange plan took no account of the reality that fossil fuels are finite.[ix]

Energy companies everywhere are desperately searching for more oil, more gas. The nations that have large proven reserves are flashpoints for future conflicts that could interrupt the global food trade, and increase hunger.

The UK’s National Health Service has a £102.3bn budget for 2010-11. Doesn’t look much? £102,300,000,000? The problem with zeros is just that, they convey nothing. Yet £102.3bn is £1,644 for every one of the 62.222m people in the UK in 2010.

No one, apparently, likes to contemplate cuts in the NHS, which as a concept has become a Great Unquestionable, like ‘Democracy’ in the world’s wealthiest nations, or ‘Capitalism’ as a force for good.  In my mind it is long past the time when we should have begun to interrogate these and other ‘Common Sense’ notions that permeate our lives. I am very interested in ‘Common Sense’. If anyone has an hour or two to spare in Didsbury, Manchester, there is quite a bit about Common Sense in my (little read) PhD thesis, to be found in the library at Manchester Metropolitan University, and titled: ‘Lay Inspectors, Educational Values and Policy Change: the significance of emergent outcomes’.

The ‘Common Sense’ that the NHS is too essential to subject to deep scrutiny means that counter arguments will be unpopular. The journey of any belief from startling novelty to general acceptance is paved with persuasion, as summarised by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who noted “pure persuasion leading to the conversion of a minority; then force exerted to secure that the rest of the community shall be exposed to the right propaganda; and finally a genuine belief on the part of the great majority, which makes the use of force again unnecessary” (‘Power: a new social analysis’ by Bertrand Russell, George Allen & Unwin  1938, 1960 reprint by Unwin Paperbacks, p.93).

Given the nasty situation of government debt which could easily exceed the UK’s GDP, if bank bailout money is not recouped, juxtaposed with rising costs of energy and raw materials, and the expense of protecting the nation against the extreme weather events that appear to be a manifestation of climate change, and the NHS’s annual budget of £102.3bn begins to seem one sacred cow too many.

An important issue for me is whether we have a National Health Service or a National Medical Technology Service. A health service would surely focus on preventative medicine, and a vital part of that is the availability of nutritious fresh (and that means local) food.  In reality, though, the NHS has become the source of technological interventions which often keep people alive but not in a healthy condition. I am not anti-technology, but it is a matter of balance. With any technology, we have to ask “just because we can do this, should we do it?” The technology-led approach has turned ‘health’ into ‘illness’, and has closed local community services because of the funding needs of huge medical technology centres a.k.a general hospitals,  which need vast car parks for staff and patients, and which require the consumption of large quantities of oil and gas — as fuel and power — to function.

The NHS, it appears to me, has turned us into a nation of ill people dependent on machines and drugs to try and restore ‘health’, and I think we need to re-examine the purpose, scope and costs of the service.

The same tendency to technology-led gigantism applies to schools, too, but I’ll return to that another time.