Malachy

Well, there is certainly a difference, but it's one of blatancy rather than of intent. This film, from what I've seen of it, is a fairly nasty attempt to stir up hatred against Muslims, and as such it probably breaks British laws against such things. The other ironic thing of course about this issue is that Geert Wilders and the tabloids are shouting about the British government's censorship, but Wilders himself has been quite specific about his aims with this film: to ban the Koran in the Netherlands. And I'm not quite sure what you could call that if not censorship, and of a pretty extreme form. As I say, I don't agree with stopping him coming, but I don't think he should have been allowed to speak in the house of Lords even if he had entered the country. I don't think our parliament should be given as a platform to people with these kind of unpleasant, extremist views. He's an idiot, let him go and shout in a corner somewhere.

Well, there is certainly a difference, but it's one of blatancy rather than of intent. This film, from what I've seen of it, is a fairly nasty attempt to stir up hatred against Muslims, and as such it probably breaks British laws against such things. The other ironic thing of course about this issue is that Geert Wilders and the tabloids are shouting about the British government's censorship, but Wilders himself has been quite specific about his aims with this film: to ban the Koran in the Netherlands. And I'm not quite sure what you could call that if not censorship, and of a pretty extreme form. As I say, I don't agree with stopping him coming, but I don't think he should have been allowed to speak in the house of Lords even if he had entered the country. I don't think our parliament should be given as a platform to people with these kind of unpleasant, extremist views. He's an idiot, let him go and shout in a corner somewhere.

It's slightly ironic that so many folk are up in arms about this - in fact, these are exactly the same folk who have supported keeping out the Islamic preachers who've been stopped from entering Britain, or Louis Farrakan, or any of the 270 other people who've been stopped in the past four years. If you want to make a point about censorship, you have to be consistent. I don't think he should have been stopped, but he shouldn't really have been asked to speak in the House of Lords either. David Irving wouldn't be invited, nor would an extremist Islamic preacher. It was a poor idea.

And when you're teaching English as a foreign language, students generally want to learn one or the other - British or American English. Or at least to have difference pointed out to them.

As a noun, 'sport' is more common in British English and 'sports' in American English. Sports is obviously the plural in both British and American (as in, 'tennis and football are sports') it's just that Americans tend to use that plural sense as the indefinite noun as well.

Well our snow has all gone. The ground is clear and it's raining in Fair Isle! I suppose we're closer to the tropics.

Er, there seems to be some confusion. The chief executive is not a councillor. He's not elected, and he doesn't have a vote. Imagine the SIC is a company - he's the boss. Whereas the elected councillors earn a lot less, and are like the board of directors. They're in charge of making the big decisions on direction, he's responsible for putting them into practice. Something like that.

Ha, well I didn't suggest that a high salary guaranteed a good candidate would get the job, just that in theory it increased the likelihood of not getting someone who wasn't good enough to do the job elsewhere...

I've just checked that bit and you're possibly right, but it's an ambiguous sentence: It say he was "the first person with no prior experience of local government to be appointed as the highest paid official in any of Scotland's 32 local authorities" I actually read that as meaning that he was the first person with no local government experience to be appointed as chief executive in any Scottish local authority (the 'highest paid official' bit just being another way of saying 'the top job', whatever title that may be). Your interpretation makes sense too though, I'm just not sure which is right. It may well be that it's the highest paid (taking island allowance into account), but...?

He doesn't have a department - he's in charge of the whole council. I suppose the argument for £90,000 is that the wage has to be about the same as it would in any local council, otherwise you have no hope of attracting a good candidate to the job. If you offer considerably less then the only people who will apply will be those who couldn't get a job elsewhere. So there is some logic to it.

You might not think an article about Hazel Blears by George Monbiot would be the most interesting piece of reading on a Tuesday morning, but I urge you to reconsider. This is one of the most passionate and perfectly directed pieces of writing I've read in a long time - pinpointing exactly what is wrong with British politics and politicians, and why the electorate have become so cynical and disengaged with the whole process. Brilliant! http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/10/hazel-blears-george-monbiot

Mahatma Gandhi?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Well I wanted to make sure that no-one would ever guess who I really was, so I didn't use my surname.

So Ghostrider is really your surname?!

Hmmm, well then I predict the next Chief Executive will be.....Mike Grundon!

I'm not sure I agree with this either. When the Tesco expansion application was accepted there was concern from some councillors that they had no legal means to stop it going through, despite the objections. I can't see any legal reason why this application wouldn't go through, given that there's no change of use required. It should be the same situation - rubber stamped. Unless its only big south firms that can get through planning hoops, and things that are actually good for Shetland can't.

Indeed. But if you look at the costs for all types WITHOUT subsidies, nobody would be building wind turbines. The same is obviously true for nuclear.

I'm shooting myself in the foot by saying this, since I oppose the windfarm, but I think I'm right in pointing out that virtually all energy production is subsidised by the government, so wind is not specifically vulnerable.

Well you've managed to pick one piece of data from that report that, for one part of the UK, goes against predictions. I'm not going to presume to speak on Dave Wheeler's behalf, but I can fairly confidently say that he is not a climate change denier. In fact, I interviewed him a while back on that subject. What he says seems to contradict some of your statements earlier in this thread to the effect that Shetland's weather has not changed at all in recent decades.... Dave is talking here obviously about the changes that he has seen in his own professional observations in Fair Isle: "In the last 30-plus years, the number of days with snow lying at 0900 hours between December and February has fallen by over 40 per cent. At the same time, the number of days on which snow or sleet was observed to have fallen (at any time during the day or night) has dropped by 25 per cent." "Sea temperatures also continue to rise, most notably during the summer months, with a one to two degree Celsius rise over 30 years." "An analysis of the daily mean temperatures appears to show that, during recent years, temperatures fluctuate (on a time scale of days to a week or so) far more widely than they did 20 to 30 years ago. I believe our climate is becoming even more variable than it was." No offence, but I would rather take his word for it than yours.

I don't really need to dismiss those points because those paragraphs were concerned with attacking VE, which, like Ghostrider, I oppose, for the reasons I set out earlier. I stuck to his last paragraph because it is his feelings about climate change that I fundamentally disagree with.

I prefer to call it healthy scepticism of the motivations and intentions of the scientific/political community, just as I have very similar feelings about religion due to what I would like to think was a healthy scepticism of the motivations and intentions of organised religions, whoever they are. I prefer to call it wilful ignorance. And this utter nonsense about the motivations of the 'scientific/political community' (as if there has ever been such a cosy consensus between those professions) is just that - utter nonsense. Am I not right in thinking that George Bush denied global warming right up almost to the end of his tenure, and that Sarah Palin also denied it. So does that mean that people like them are in the same camp as you - healthy sceptics? Had they analysed the data as carefully as you and come to the same conclusion? Or are they idiots? Or were they in the pay of oil companies? The scientific community did not arrive at the current position all at once. Some more radical scientists have been saying we have a problem for a long time. Others have moved towards their position gradually as the empirical evidence steadily amassed. Scientists have not been paid by politicians to think a certain way, because politicians don't want climate change to exist. It's a complete pain in the ass for them that it exists because if they want to deal with the reality of the situation they will have to make very very unpopular decisions. And I very much doubt they will ever make those decisions. Instead they pay lip sevice to the scientists because if they don't they will look like complete idiots (hence the reason George Bush eventually relented). However bad the politicians say it is, you can bet it's a lot worse. And if you listen to the scientists it certainly is a lot worse. They are positively screaming at governments the world over to actually do something constructive, and they are being more or less ignored. There is no cosyness at all between them. Of course, if your idea of science is reading the 'science correspondent' in the Daily Mail or the Sun, the complete opposite is true. Scientists have been bribed into lying by nasty left wing politicians who want us all to pay lots more 'green taxes' so they can spend it all on prostitutes and Koran lessons or something. The propaganda against the evidence for climate change sounds no less ridiculous than the holocaust deniers or those claiming the Jews were responsible for 9/11. It takes a lot of effort to ignore the evidence, that is why I called it wilful. You have to ignore so much, so often, that you must walk around like a child putting its hands over its ears and singing "lalalalalalala" very loudly. If you want to see what's changing turn off Top Gear and look outside. Speak to folk who know about the weather - talk to meteorologists rather than your pals. Talk to people who know about the land, about the environment. Speak to the Inuit - ask them if anything's changed. I suspect you'll get a different answer from the one you've currently got.

I am not sure whether I am pleased or distraught that it is probably exactly this kind of wilful ignorance that will stop the VE project going ahead.

To offer a quick explanation, there are of course lots of different kinds of greens/environmentalists. Very few of them - possibly none - oppose wind power wholesale. But in some ways it is a question of priorities. Wind power is a green option. It what you might call pale green. Projects like VE are intended, essentially, to prop up our current system, keep things ticking over as they are, by using renewable energy. It will not in fact reduce carbon emissions at all because energy consumption is increasing - it will simply cover a bit of that extra demand. But there is an argument (and I would support this view) that our current system is inherently unsustainable, and that propping it up is in itself an anti-environmental stance. If we are to make a serious stab at reducing emissions we must start by reducing demand not increasing supply. Then, of course, there is the issue of the mills themselves, and turning Shetland's wild landscape into an industrial landscape - that is very easy to oppose. After all, exactly what are we trying to stop climate change for? Is it merely to save our own skins, and our own society. Or do we also value the natural world itself? If we do, then surely destroying the natural world in order to stop climate change is counter productive? I would say that it is. (There have been similar positions in the past, with environmentalists opposing 'green' schemes, particularly dams). Petrocelli - I wasn't arguing that a system of micro-renewables would be suitable for Shetland. Since this debate began many people have been saying, "why can't Shetland produce more renewable energy and be more self-reliant in that respect?" And the answer of course is that we can. But that people would not accept the sacrifices that would entail, ie - inconstant power. I would say that we should accept that. AT - you have highlighted exactly the difference between our views. You believe technology alone can save us, I think a complete change in our attitude toward the world we live in is required. All these stories of giant mirrors being put into space to reflect some of the sun's rays - it's all ridiculous. It is our craving for development, for 'progress', for technology, for more and more of everything, faster, better, cheaper, that has caused this problem. I fail to understand why we should have everything our way. Things have gone pear shaped - to have any chance of dealing with it we must look at the cause and change it. We must not keep digging.

Communities probably would need to remove themselves from Shetland's grid if they wanted to use more wind power. The Burradale mills produce about the maximum Shetland's grid can handle. Because the energy is inconstant, we need a constant source always churning away to cover any fluctuations. Unless people didn't mind fluctuations.... And there is the real problem. People would mind. People are not prepared for the lifestyle that they've become accustomed to to be disrupted in any way by the necessary reduction in emmissions. That is why they are proposing schemes like Viking Energy. My outlook on this planet's future is just as pessimistic as AT's, but I fundamentally disagree with him on the necessary course. We both see that there is an immense problem here, and that sacrifices need to be made. But whereas AT thinks it is acceptable to sacrifice our local landscape, biodiversity and ecosystem in order, perhaps, to help a little in the wider struggle for sustainability, I do not. If we accept that we are responsible for the mess we're in then it is us who should make sacrifices, not nature. The attitude that we can replace nature with technology in order to sort things out is just a symptom of the very problem that has caused this mess. ("Cut down the rainforest" I hear them cry. "Replace it with solar panels!") All through this thread, AT has maintained that it is possible for us to retain our standard of living and save the planet. I maintain that it is not possible. We are going to have to make sacrifices pretty soon, and those sacrifices can be made willingly and sensibly, or else they will just happen without warning. Our electricity system in Fair Isle is currently split between wind and diesel generation. When there is wind, the mill turns, heating our water and radiators. When there is enough wind, all of our power comes from the mill. At that point the diesel generator turns off, and there is a half second gap between when we have no power. When the wind drops, the diesel generator switches on again, and there is a five second gap with no power. That five second gap is crucial, because that is the kind of sacrifice that people (including people like AT) are not prepared to make. That is the reason that Shetland cannot produce more renewable energy without shackling itself to the British grid. Until people show a willingness to make sacrifices themselves then we have no place suggesting destructive projects like VE. The planet may still be PHUQed but at least until that time there will still be some places we haven't yet tarnished.