In an age of uncertainty, where the future seems hardly assured, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the all-too-human wish for security has manifested in a host of dogmatic responses, including religious extremism and the continued pursuit of economic growth at all costs.  Meanwhile, secular Westerners frequently end up becoming extremely busy, often because they’ve maxed out on credit and need to work like maniacs to service their debts.  Then, when taking the meagre leisure time they can grab, they might even pursue extreme sports (bungee and BASE-jumping, wing-suit flying etc), probably because a massive adrenaline-rush is the only way they can allow themselves to experience emotions that correspond with the zeitgeist.

Add then to this age of extremes, peak oil – “the point when further expansion of oil production becomes impossible because new production flows are fully offset by production declines” [1] – and you get extreme energy, the oil industry’s attempt to suck the last remaining drops out of the planet in order to feed what G.W. Bush himself referred to as our ‘addiction to oil’.  Coupled with waging wars to seize the last remaining productive oil-fields in the world, the pursuit of extreme energy has become another part of the ‘Business as Usual’ approach, which has for decades been busily burning fossil fuels, regardless of the consequences.

The technical term for sucking the planet dry is the ‘extractive industries’.  In the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea and now the Arctic waters, which are increasingly opening up due to the melting polar ice, the extractive industry is risky deep-sea drilling.  In Canada it’s the Tar Sands, where thousands of hectares of ancient Boreal forest – a traditional home to native peoples and millions of migrant birds – are being gouged away to leave open pits the size of cities and vast toxic lakes, all in the pursuit of the underlying sticky bitumen, that then has to be further squeezed to yield a few barrels of crude.

Meanwhile in the U.S. extreme energy takes the form of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as ‘fracking’.  This technology has been developed to drill deep into the Earth in order to extract methane, or ‘natural gas’, which as far as greenhouse gases go, happens to be one of the worst for contributing to global warming.  Employing millions of gallons of water and nearly 600 chemicals – all forced under intense pressure down into the rock to fracture it and thus to release the trapped gas – fracking is not by any stretch of the imagination an environmentally friendly process.  Roughly half of the highly toxic water comes back out, and, as so-called ‘processed water’, its storage is problematic, with spills often occurring. [2]

‘Gasland’, an award-winning film by Josh Fox, exposes the terrible consequences of this technology.  [3]  Injected with plenty of gallows humour, the film is nevertheless shocking viewing, documenting how American citizens in the vicinity of drill sites suffer from dangerous levels of escaping gas and polluted drinking water, which adversely affects their health and their livestock, and also harms wildlife.

Now companies such as Cuadrilla and UK Methane are planning to frack for shale gas in Britain.  And despite some initial setbacks, with two earthquakes having been caused near Blackpool, the government has given the green light to these companies to proceed, granting licences for large areas of the British countryside, including the Mendip Hills where I live.  Additionally, work is now beginning on another Faustian project here in Somerset – Hinkley C, one of a new generation of nuclear power stations planned for the UK.

In responding to protests about these extreme sources of energy, companies and governments are eager to peddle various myths and inducements.  How will we keep the lights on, they ask, if we don’t invest in these technologies?  Decreasing national energy consumption is never on the agenda – even though our housing stock is generally in a poor condition and could benefit from proper insulation, which would in turn reduce fuel bills and fuel poverty, along with the numbers of elderly people dying in winter.

Green-washing is another strategy used to justify extreme energy.  Nuclear is neatly labelled as ‘low carbon’ – even though the footprint of a nuclear power station from cradle to grave is massive – and the nightmare legacy we’re leaving for future generations, its highly radioactive waste, is brushed under the carpet.

Denial is another means to justify the ends of big business – a standard myth is that renewable energy sources would never meet our energy needs.  Plus public opinion has been divided on wind-farms (even though we’ve long accepted the armies of pylons snaking across the landscape) and wind-power is only a part of the spectrum of renewable energy sources available.

However, the big carrot in favour of big energy business is, of course, job creation.  And never mind if those new jobs are seriously detrimental to workers’ health – diseases such as cancer take time to develop and cannot be conclusively linked with industrial causes.  In an age of economic austerity, people are increasingly desperate.

The relentless activity of all these fossil fools can seem unstoppable.  And yet, parallel to the age of extreme energy, if you look carefully, another reality is emerging.  Here in Somerset we’re not just busily campaigning against fracking and Hinkley C, but are simultaneously witnessing the birth of a range of positive energy solutions.

Tellisford Mill, which lies on the River Frome just outside the town, is a Saxon mill site, featured in Magna Carta.  It was in a ruinous state when its current owners acquired it – but after much work, it was restored to power in 2007.  Employing a metal screw turbine, this ‘water-to-wire’ system now generates sufficient electricity to supply residents’ needs, and to feed surplus electricity back to the grid.

Part of the Mendip Power Group, Tellisford is one of a number of micro-hydroelectric mills on the Frome and Mells Rivers.  Along the 13-mile stretch to Freshford, where it joins the Avon, the Frome falls 50m, allowing for 26 mills, one every 0.5 miles, and several other mills have now installed turbines.  Beautifully, of course, when water is discharged at the end of a tailrace, it’s as clean as when it entered, and can simply continue downstream to generate more power.

It’s been calculated that harnessing the power from all the streams and rivers in the UK could produce 10,000 GWh per year, enough to supply 3% of national generating capacity.  It doesn’t sound like much, but if we combined energy conservation with a range of positive energy solutions could the UK really avoid extreme energy sources?

Estimates suggest that Hinkley C may provide around 6% of the nation’s electricity needs.  Construction is to be carried out by French giant EdF, one of the world’s largest energy companies.  Ahead of this new nuclear power station becoming operational, it’s worth noting that just six companies are currently responsible for generating 99% of the UK’s electricity.  These six – an extremely small number where energy production is concerned – effectively dominate the market and no doubt have a strong lobbying influence on government policy.

Buyer beware – although new nuclear power stations being built here will not be financed through public money (i.e. taxes),  consumers will pay through future increases in their fuel bills.  Perhaps this is one of many good reasons to consider switching to green providers, for example Green Energy, Good Energy, or Ecotricity?  These companies encourage the development of electricity generated from renewable sources – the wind, the sun and the sea – and from green gas, often made from food waste.

And despite the myths to the contrary, there is in fact sufficient evidence to confirm the possibility of generating enough clean, green energy to supply our needs.  Figures from the No Need for Nuclear campaign show that in 2010, 80% of the UK’s demand for electricity was generated from burning fossil fuels – one of the major causes of global warming – while 13% was from nuclear, with 6% from large-scale renewable energy production (such as wind-farms), and a remaining 1% saving from efficiency.  However, using detailed research data, No Need for Nuclear has projected that by 2020 it would be possible to have 77% generated by large-scale renewables, 6% by small-scale renewables, 12% by micro-generation, 5% saving from efficiency, which, with neither fossil fuels nor extreme energy in the mix, adds up to 100% of demand in 2010. [4]

Meanwhile, citizens everywhere are taking back the power from the extreme energy giants.  According to Positive News, in Germany 51% of renewables are owned by citizens, whilst here in the UK, a new coalition of groups, including The Co-operative, the National Trust, the WI, the Church of England and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, is calling for this new, localized approach to generating energy, and to reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere. [5]

Here in the market town of Frome where I live, Jensen Button, our most famous local celebrity, is celebrated for burning petrol at extreme speeds on a Formula 1 racetrack.  Less newsworthy, perhaps, but a far more significant contribution to the future has been the town council’s recent announcement that the solar panels on the roof of the town’s most popular central venue, the Cheese and Grain, had reached a milestone – having generated £1,000 worth of electricity in the two months since they were installed.

With visions of electric cars one day rolling up to recharge in the Cheese and Grain car-park, might that roof be another example of how the future could look if we stopped believing the energy giants’ myths?  If we do so, the surprise is that there are many British jobs to be found in positive energy solutions.  In fact, The Campaign Against Climate Change, supported by several trades unions, has calculated that up to one million new jobs could be created by meeting targets to reduce carbon emissions.  These ‘climate jobs’ would be in factories that make the infrastructure for generating renewables – such as wind and marine turbines, and solar panels – and then in installation and maintenance; new jobs would also be created in areas such as manufacturing and installing home insulation; improved public transport; manufacturing electric cars and buses; and training and education in all these sectors.  [6]

One of the benefits of consciously living with and accepting uncertainty is that although we cannot be sure of anything, at the same time everything and anything is possible.  This means that it’s up to all of us to co-create the kind of future we’d prefer.  So why might a picture of clean, green energy and the creation of a million new jobs still seem remote from current reality?  The answer is that we’ve been steadily moving towards this age of extreme energy for several decades now.  It’s been the inevitable consequence of the values and beliefs of our dominant culture and of our economic system, neoliberal capitalism.  Now our work is to inform ourselves of what else is possible, and to help to make it become a reality, before it’s too late.

Helen Moore

Notes

1. Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review magazine
2. For more information visit www.frack-off.org.uk
3. To see a trailer of Gasland, visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8
4. www.noneedfornuclear.org.uk
5. www.positivenews.org.uk
6. www.campaigncc.org

AT THE LEVESON INQUIRY

Christopher Twigg

A GLIMPSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY

If we go back, if we walk into the old darkness, we will find

Washington brooding under the long bridges,

The dead still ablaze in the anguish of the egg,

Screams reverberating in the compression chambers of shells,

Soldiers that disappear into the tunnels inside the flashlight,

Sioux bodies falling, and soap buried alive.

Sugarbeets that give blood migrate to the stars,

Drunken ward-heelers crawl in the icy gutters.

Our history is the story of something that failed:

A greedy fire is burning on our fingertips,

Fingers that turn over pages of deeds, fingers on fire,

Fingers that would light the sky if lifted at night.

Robert Bly

from The Insanity of Empire

Mike Lesser

Robert Tasher

A Puzzle

“When Christian turns upon Christian,” his father was saying. “That is the hardest. This? This is nothing.” They were sitting at the dining table with Leon’s uncle Joseph. “Nothing. But when Christian turns upon Christian they become deaf, as Leon’s poet says, ‘like an old remorse, or an absurd vice.’”

Junko was in the kitchen preparing dinner and what would be his father’s late and meager supper and Abu Keiko was in uniform. He was sipping a Pepsi. He was on a twelve-hour shift tonight. Joseph had come around for dinner and sat in the fourth and empty chair at the dinner table. There were four more stained white polycarbonate seats for guests, rarely used now, and kept down in the basement closet with the weapons and the old mortar. In the closet there too were three AK47s and a thousand rounds of ammunition in crusty boxes, their labels flaking like pastry. All that was left from his arsenal—there was a time before Leon was born when Abu Keiko sold an AK a month to feed his wife and young daughter. In the basement shelter too were couches and a day bed, covered in dust sheets, old whisky bottles from before Abu Keiko gave up drinking, and there were Christmas lights and candles.

At the table Leon sipped a glass of water and unfolded and refolded a damask napkin. Joseph always became quiet and measured and smiling when Abu Keiko held forth. They all knew the old man was getting his energy up for a long cold night out in the open, so they let him talk; hold forth. Joseph studied the table cloth, smiled at Abu Keiko occasionally, smiled at Leon and studied the table cloth again. Dinner was breakfast: hummus and olives and bread, augmented just a touch with sardines in oil and coriander.

“Most of these trouble makers are just children,” Abu Keiko said. “They use the children for the silly business.”

“Yes,” said Joseph patiently. “Just teenagers.”

“Teenagers should get second chances. Men can only buy them. Leon,” he turned to his son, “if you only knew, before—people were happy! People smiling. Now no one laughs, no one smiles.”

“It is hard to smile when you’re bashing yourself in the head,” said Joseph.

“Hezbollah are for the people and I love them, but they are too frisky.”

Joseph was looking at Leon too. “I saw your son today,” he said. Leon looked up. Joseph was talking to his father but he was looking straight at him. “He was walking Place Sassine with a big Spinneys bag full of shopping and a long sad face.”

“Today? No,” said Leon, confused. “No, I don’t think so.”

“You looked like an actor who had lost his movie.”

Leon felt a momentary high panic. “No I … that wasn’t me.”

“The government is a genie. Poof.” Abu Keiko made an exploding-hand shape. “A genie.” He had turned in his seat and was addressing them all via Junko in the kitchen. “Where are their whispers and pale faces now? And these people whose houses we guard—this Kuwaiti with his Sri Lankan maids—they rape them, you know that?”

Junko came in arms full of plates of food.

“Abu Keiko,” she said, “not at the table with your brother and your son.” She began to lay the plates, frowning.

“Yes, they hold their passports, they rape them, they pay them a pittance. One of these Kuwaitis has three dogs. One of these dogs costs one thousand dollars a month for food and doctors. Not people. Dogs.”

“Abu Keiko,” Junko scolded him again.

“Here in my heart is love,” he said warmly and touched his chest and beamed around the table.

“Junko,” said Joseph, “this is too generous.”

In the kitchen door Junko turned and stood at a strange angle, and met eyes with Leon. She looked hurt by the compliment, and said just, “No, it’s all we have.” She went back into the kitchen. Joseph and Abu Keiko began to tear the bread. Leon moved some food to his plate, but his stomach felt vague and uneasy, and he sipped more water. He felt an urge to check his phone for messages, or to send a message to Etienne, or Bashir, as if they were businessmen, partners. He felt better when he knew he would not.

“One thousand dollars,” reiterated Abu Keiko to his brother, who shook his head.

“It’s terrible. A dog.”

“A man needs a hammock in the annex with a view of the sea. This is what an old man needs.”

“Mmm.” Joseph looked up into midair and began to softly sing. “I swear on my soul, to Sri Lanka I will go. From Sri Lanka I won’t return, unless I kill or die.“

“A hammock in the annex with a view of the sea.”

“When will the election happen do we think,” Joseph said.

“Politics in this country is one long and very dangerous soap opera full of lies and repetitions and clichés. Every episode’s climax leads to no resolution. We are in season fifty-eight at least, and few of the original cast remain. Apart from those grizzled old men—like me—who are typecast and cannot get another job.”

Joseph snorted derisively—Leon could see him trying to steer Abu Keiko away from somewhere maudlin. “Who would employ an old liability like you?”

“Of course, indeed,” said Abu Keiko, pleased, and serenely scooped hummus with a cone of rolled bread. “Junko, ma belle.” She came out with a small bowl of salad and sat down and smiled at Leon. “Ma chère,” said Abu Keiko. “Delicious.”

“I’m ashamed to offer so little,” she said, and smiled at the two men eating.

“Not at all, not at all,” murmured Joseph. They ate in silence for a while. “And so what happened to you?” said Joseph. He gestured with a piece of bread at the bandage on Leon’s neck.

“We are forbidden to ask,” said Abu Keiko solemnly.

“Oh, then a love bite. This is why the shopping. It was some gift—she is a fiery one.”

The two men laughed and Junko laughed too and she ran her hand up Leon’s shirt and scratched his back the way she always did, and Leon finally relaxed a little and let her, and ate a couple of olives. Abu Keiko was leaned back in his chair and he contemplated the table for a very long time and then he leaned forward and looked very intently at Joseph then Leon then back at his brother again.

“In the Lebanon,” he whispered, “in the old days, there were many types of people. We came, after much bloodshed, to understand that only half of the people were normal people who could be relied upon to always tell the truth. The other half of the people, we discovered, were vampires. They looked like normal people. But they were vampires, and vampires never tell the truth. And but what made everything more difficult was that after a time, a terrible time, half of the normal people became insane because of the situation and began to uncontrollably lie. And what made it even worse then after this was that after a while, a terrible, terrible while, half even of these vampires too became insane. These vampires were lethal but they told the truth. It was terrible and complicated. You see, normal people don’t tell or believe in lies. But those who are vampires and the insane—everything they spoke and everything they believed in was a lie.”

There was a silence. Leon’s eyes felt wide and he was nauseous again. His mother’s hand had slipped from his shirt and she sipped her tea.

“Yes?’ said Joseph. “Believe it or not we’re paying close attention.”

“But who could tell, in those bad old days, when you spoke to someone or when you heard that someone speak, if anything, anything they said was true?”

Leon had a sudden vivid memory of his father. In the memory he was in this same mode: playful, portentous and mock-profound. His father was slowly separating his thumb in two, just visible behind the screen of his fingers, hissing in pain though clenched teeth until he relented as if in defeat to his agonizing effort, and slowly returned his thumb and magically melded the joint again. All the while Leon and Keiko screaming, a silly trick made wonderful, with that hissing, with those clenched teeth.

“How could you tell between a person and a vampire? Or if a person was normal or if they were insane and spoke and believed in lies? Or if then a vampire had gone insane and spoke in fact, believed the truth? How could you tell?”

A long, long silence fell and Joseph studied the table and gamely tried to figure it out.

“You couldn’t,” said Junko, with great mock-sadness, barely distinguishable from the real. “Not ever. It’s awful.”

“No,” Joseph said slowly, “You could ask him trick questions—”

“Could you? It would take time? Several questions?” said Abu Keiko brightly. “Suppose he was armed? Suppose he threatened to bite? Suppose you had only one question. Suppose your question to all those people of the Lebanon was, ‘Are you to be trusted?’ What would the answer be? Leon?”

Leon’s neck was throbbing and his throat was dry and he took another sip of brackish warm water.

“‘Are you to be trusted?’” he repeated.

“Yes. ‘Are you to be trusted.’”

“They would all say yes,” Leon said.

“Ah.” He nodded, pleased. “They would all say yes, wouldn’t they.”

“So?” said Joseph. “Yes, I see. What do you ask then?”

“’What do you ask?’” said Abu Keiko.

“What do you ask?” said Junko. “How can you know?”

“My God,” said Abu Keiko and suddenly he rose from his chair. “See how much time has passed. I must be off to work.”

“Oh,” said Junko and Joseph together in great mock-disappointment and fell back in their chairs laughing.

“Perhaps with time and experience you can parse this complex situation. Tune in to next week’s episode. When all will be revealed. I promise. The government promises.”

“Buffoon,” said Joseph.

“No, a cruel man. A wicked man,” said Junko, and she turned sharply, smiling, to Leon. Her face changed abruptly when she saw what he looked like.

“There are no real vampires,” he said. His stomach heaved again and he turned sideways away from her and threw up three olives and a great clot of transparent bile in a pool on the floor.

Carl Shuker

from Anti-Lebanon, a novel-in-progress

Paula Rego

from Untitled: The Abortion Pastels

http://www.webofstories.com/play/17620

http://www.marlboroughfineart.com/exhibition-Paula-Rego-Balzac-and-other-stories-256322.html

DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM
DUM DUMB DUM DUMB

The drums of war are having fun …
It is so dumb to suffer this doom
For so many times throughout history
Thucydides hated it, the Romans grasped for it
It’s only they had more style in faking the greatness
Of their dumb empire when they conquered Carthage
More recently known as Lebanon with its blisters and horror and worries…

DOOM DOOM DOOM ACHOOUM !
DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB !

There is a fear there in hurting others
Fear of starvation and an infantile kick –
I’m gonna conquer everyone, I’m gonna be better
And false modesty is just a way of saying that you are really better
And more powerful than the enemy
But the perverse thing – when one comes to think of this century –
Is selling the arms to Carthaginians then persuading them to attack others
Just out of fear and spite and false feeling of might
An old trick a dope dealer would teach you in the street, age ten
Can never sell things and buy wisdom at the same time,
At the same time the drums of war (or is it just a bad economy deal and panic ?)

The drums beat
DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB
SCUM SCUM SCUM SCUM
DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM

Bloody soldiers and corpses enter everyone’s room
I was so crushed when NATO bombed my home town
I could barely get my own mother out of that place
And I believed – fool that I was! – that I would never speak a word of English again
My shrink had told me : distance yourself from
Yourself and don’t be so DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB
Like the rest of this scum
Doomed to walk in this ancient town and see that
Those who clone new human beings will soon destroy them
And those who pay taxes will buy the axes and will
Destroy the road to Carthage – Flaubert wrote Salammbo
And the Ridiculous Theater staged it, then the actor died
And a president had a try, the Greeks tried to teach the Romans how
To think – whatever they learnt from the Persians,
The Persians settled along the West Coast in the U.S. and started paying
Their taxes, oh how they were DUMB DUMB DUMB shook by their Doom looking for a crumb!
The Byzantium crushed to ashes, the Ottoman heroes fearing the Kurds!

DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB – forget about the
DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM – the formula is easy:

Go and learn your history lesson – a happy transit will
Calm your passion, dry your tears and drown your fears,
A reminder for the small ones: on the top of the theater board
An ancient alphabet spells the letters : THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!
(the director is Greek – has something to teach us : go home and
turn your TV on : instead of the stars up there over that ancient Iraqi land
you might spot the bombs made of depleted (impoverished Uranium)
and nobody knows how they got there nor what to do with them after all

DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM
DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB

the drums of war Are having fun.

Nina Zivancevic

Royal poet, your dream of Arthur, Merlin and Taliesin

is a fantasy island, Conservatism in fancy dress

more agreeable to the EDL than the lefty bohemian,

Dark Age tabloid propaganda no different from today’s.

Why, one of the poor, revere a family so avaricious

as to own the globe in the name of commonweal

– six billion acres, a sixth of Planet Earth’s surface –

and who’d value a penny coin above humanity?

Why, vegan and pacifist, defend these holocausters

of the natural kingdom and of ‘uncivilised’ peoples?

Why, accomplished artist, fetishize a man who’s world-famous

for being unable to do anything but wave?

He is not regal,

nor is his court.

Wake up and see Arthur, Merlin and Taliesin

come back as Prince Charles, Paul Daniels and Andrew Motion.

Text: Niall McDevitt

Graphic: Mike Lesser