Aidan Semmens
  • home
  • about
  • books
  • poems
  • photos
    • landscapes
    • birdlife
    • slideshow
  • contact
  • molly bloom

Big Oil must be kept off the Amazon Reef

21/6/2017

0 Comments

 
We live in an age when it’s possible to fly from London to Sydney in less than 24 hours and you can talk in real time to people anywhere. Presenters of TV documentaries can start a sentence in Siberia and end it in the Sahara.

Communications technology has shrunk the world. You might be forgiven for thinking there was nothing on the planet still to be discovered.

What a joyful surprise, then, to learn only last year that a previously unknown coral reef, amost 700 miles long, had been found off the coast of South America.

Joyful, and in a curious way something of a relief too. As if the discovery of a reef in one part of the world could compensate for the death of another, 10,000 miles away.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been called “the canary in the coal mine” for global warming. Its reported death may be both symptom and further cause of ecological catastrophe on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, the newly discovered Amazon Reef appears to be thriving.

Corals live mostly in clear salt water with plenty of sunlight. This one has astonished marine biologists because the outflow from the Amazon makes its waters among the muddiest and least salty sea areas in the world.

Yet they have found there 73 species of fish, 60 types of sponge and a rich variety of other life. There are dolphins, turtles, manatees and species that haven’t yet been named.

The reef may have been unknown until recently, but its importance to the global ecosystem – and our knowledge of it – may be considerable. That Amazon outflow amounts to a fifth of all the water flowing into the world’s oceans.

Here then, is an amazing place. An environment and a habitat to cherish.

The last thing it needs is multinational oil companies diving in with their drills and rigs to rip it up, spoil and pollute it. One spill like BP’s 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster could do untold damage.

So who’s prospecting for oil on the Amazon Reef right now? BP and Total. They need to be stopped.


The horrifying bonfire of regulations



You don’t have to compare it with the £369million handed over to refurbish Buckingham Palace to see that £5m to rehouse the former residents of Grenfell Tower was an insult. Like chucking a 5p coin at a beggar.

But no cash handout could assuage the grief and anger following that most avoidable of horrors.

Grief and anger that have stoked an almost revolutionary mood in this most unrevolutionary of countries. 

The blackened ruin of that former high-rise slum casts a shadow far beyond the neighbouring well-heeled streets of Kensington.

The word “murder” may be tabloid hyperbole. “Manslaughter” may technically be a more accurate term. There may be doubt over exactly who is guilty, and of what, but there will be political as well as human and legal costs to pay.

A lot has been said and written about it already and a lot more will be. But I feel moved to share the words of my friend and former colleague Chris Storey:

“This is a third world fire, here, in Britain. Had this happened in a sweatshop in Calcutta, we’d have been shaking our heads and saying, ‘Isn’t life cheap in these corrupt and backward countries?’

“You announce a bonfire of regulations. And you get a bonfire.”

To put it another way, this is lack of health and safety gone mad. More dangerously – fatally – mad than any terrorist atrocity on these shores.

While the nation obsesses over terror attacks, it’s hard to imagine anything much more terrifying than to be trapped in a 27-storey inferno.

If it is a government’s duty to protect its citizens, it raises the question of what or who it must protect us from. And how.

0 Comments

America's top doc backs evidence-based policy

14/2/2015

0 Comments

 
Some interesting appointments have been made in America lately, and not all of them are bad.
Take Dr Vivek Murthy, who was sworn in just before Christmas as Surgeon General. Or, as the US media like to put it, “America’s top doc”.
For a start, he’s only 37, which seems very young for the holder of such a key post. Even if, in that weird way Americans have of organising things, he is technically an officer in the military.
Then there’s the fact that, like me, he was born in Huddersfield, which seems an unlikely start to such a career. But then he moved to Miami at age three, got a biomedical degree from Harvard and trained as a doctor at Yale, so you could say he’s pretty well schooled in the American way.
And he looks awfully smart, in an American way, in his sharp, pristine, gold-braided naval uniform.
The pro-gun lobby, who in the USA are used to getting their way, opposed his appointment. He’s not as keen as they are on people carrying firearms around – which seems a reasonable point of view for a top doc, if not necessarily for a top military man.
He did say he wouldn’t use the Surgeon Generalship as a “bully pulpit” from which to preach gun control. Which seems like unnecessary restraint, as well as an interesting form of words.
The fact that he found it necessary to say is in itself a shocking comment on the American addiction to weaponry.
And speaking of addiction…
Dr Murthy also has interesting views on cannabis. A substance which is arguably less addictive than gun-toting, and certainly a lot less lethal.
His latest pronouncement on the matter has predictably produced a chorus of cheers on one side and boos on the other.
He says the drug “can be helpful” for some medical conditions. Which is a simple truth that ought not to be controversial (see below).
While 23 states have already legalised cannabis for medical use – and four now allow recreational use – it remains classified at the highest level under US federal law. Up there with heroin and LSD and above cocaine and crystal meth, which are much more dangerous.
But the really interesting part of Dr Murthy’s statement could apply just as well to everything else the government – any government – takes a position on.
It was this: “I think we have to use data to drive policymaking”.
In other words, he thinks politicians should take notice of expert opinion.
That policy should be based on verifiable research, not gut feelings. On facts, not instant media approval ratings. On tested science, not vested interests.
What sort of fantasy world is the man living in?
The cynic in me says: “He’ll learn”. But how much better it would be if the politicians learned from him, rather than the other way around.
0 Comments
    Aidan Semmens, blogger

    the Semmens blog

    A roughly weekly slice on the world and its ways.

    Archives

    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015

    Categories

    All
    Bob Dylan
    Brexit
    Changing Times
    Choice
    Class
    Climate Change
    Economics
    Energy
    Environment
    France
    Health
    Historical Context
    Human Rights
    Language
    Media
    My Mother
    Nations
    NHS
    Nuclear Power
    Refugees
    Science
    Sport
    Statistics
    Surveillance
    The Future
    The Internet
    The Wild World
    Tintin
    Travel
    UK Politics
    US Politics

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.