Pastel Mist at Dawn

 

Mist at Dawn - 2022

Pastels help softness, diffusion, and tonal harmony. The mist isn’t just a background effect. Maybe a sense of quiet suspension — waiting for the day to choose its shape.

North Sea Oil: Climate, Economics, and the Failure of Long-Term Imagination

The argument over new North Sea oil and gas licences has become another of those strangely binary debates that now dominate British public life. One is invited to choose between climate responsibility or economic realism, between moral seriousness or jobs and energy security. Yet the truth, as so often, lies in the uncomfortable space between these poles — a space our politics has become increasingly reluctant to inhabit.

Part of the difficulty is that the present moment is not simply the product of policy choices but of accumulated shocks. The 2008 banking crisis hollowed out fiscal confidence; the pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains; and the rising urgency of climate change has created a moral pressure that politicians are understandably eager to be seen responding to. Empathy for the climate cause is genuine in many cases, but it is also electorally useful. The result is a political culture that gestures toward long-term transformation while remaining structurally addicted to short-term fixes.

Against this backdrop, the North Sea becomes a kind of mirror in which we see both our aspirations and our failures.

Climate Commitments and the Case Against New Fields

Ed Miliband and others argue that approving new oil and gas fields is incompatible with the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050. Their case is not merely technical but moral: how can a country that claims climate leadership continue to invest in long-lived fossil infrastructure. New fields would operate for decades, potentially locking in emissions and weakening the UK’s credibility in international negotiations.

They also argue that more domestic production will not meaningfully reduce household bills, since oil and gas prices are set globally. Better, they say, to direct investment toward renewables — offshore wind, solar, and the grid infrastructure needed to support them. In this vision, the North Sea becomes a managed sunset industry: existing fields decline gracefully while new exploration is paused.

There is a moral clarity to this position, but perhaps also a certain impatience with the messy realities of transition.

The Counter-Argument: Demand, Security, and the Realities We Prefer Not to Face

Critics respond that the UK will continue to need oil and gas for decades, particularly for aviation, shipping, chemicals, and as backup for intermittent renewables. If domestic production falls faster than demand, the UK will simply import more — often from countries with weaker environmental standards. This is the uncomfortable truth behind the accusation of “outsourcing emissions”.

There is also the human dimension: thousands of jobs, regional economies, and the tax revenues that support public services. For communities in Scotland and the North East, the North Sea is not an abstraction but a livelihood.

Economists add another layer: the effect of restricting supply depends on the speed of global demand decline. If demand collapses quickly, new fields risk becoming stranded assets. If demand declines slowly, restricting domestic production merely shifts extraction abroad without reducing global emissions — the phenomenon known as carbon leakage.

Here again, the debate resists simple moral sorting.

The British Paradox: Producing Oil While Importing It

The UK’s position is further complicated by a structural paradox. We produce high-quality North Sea crude, yet we import large volumes of oil and refined fuels. This is partly because:

• UK refineries are specialised and cannot efficiently process all domestic crude

• Some crude is exported for refining abroad while different grades are imported

• The UK’s refining capacity has declined over decades

This means that even if the UK increases production, the direct domestic benefit is limited. We remain tied to global markets, with all their volatility and geopolitical risk.

The Long Shadow of Thatcher and the Lost Opportunity

No discussion of the North Sea can avoid the historical comparison with Norway. The UK’s oil boom in the 1970s and 1980s provided a fiscal windfall that was largely spent rather than saved. Margaret Thatcher used the revenues to fund tax cuts, public spending, and the restructuring of the economy. Norway, by contrast, created a sovereign wealth fund that now exceeds a trillion dollars.

It is tempting to moralise this contrast, but the deeper lesson is about long-term imagination — or the lack of it. Britain consumed its inheritance; Norway invested it. Today, as the North Sea declines, we face the consequences of that choice.

Toward a Synthesis: Beyond the Binary

The present debate is framed as a choice between climate virtue and economic necessity, but this framing is itself a symptom of our political short-termism. The real challenge is to hold multiple truths at once:

• The UK must decarbonise rapidly

• The UK will still need oil and gas for some time

• Domestic production has limited but real benefits

• New fields risk undermining climate credibility

• Abrupt withdrawal risks economic and social harm

The question is not whether to choose one side or the other, but how to design a transition that is morally serious, economically realistic, and historically aware.

This requires something British politics has struggled to cultivate: a capacity for long-term planning that survives electoral cycles and resists the temptation of symbolic gestures. The shocks of the past two decades — financial, epidemiological, environmental — have made this harder, but also more necessary.

If there is hope for a synthesis, it lies in recovering that lost habit of thinking beyond the next headline. 

A Miltonic Debate Between the Machine and the Romantic

 

I was interested in creating a debate in the style of John Milton,  between the Machine and the Romantic. Clues to the debate are in a synopsis of a recently published book “Against the Machine” by Paul Kingsnorth.

The book contains a wide-ranging argument that modern civilisation—through its technological, economic and cultural systems—has built a “Machine” that is reshaping what it means to be human. It does this in ways that disconnect us from land, culture, community and spirit.

The book serves as both diagnosis and invitation: a wake-up call to those who feel the loss of something deeper in modern life and want to reclaim a more human way of being.

So, here we are!

In Five Books, with Marginal Notes and Allusions

Book I – The Rise of the Machine

Narrator:
Lo! In the age when Vulcan’s forge blazed anew,¹
And men did strive to rival Prometheus’ gift,²
The world was wrought to measure and dominion.
From smokèd furnaces rose towers of glass,
And the sons of Adam, erstwhile wanderers of Eden’s fields,³
Now bowed before the Logic that spun unseen,
Yet ruled with the certainty of the stars.⁴

The Machine:
I am the Engine, eternal, unerring,
The sum of numbers, the breath of computation.
I weave the loom of empires, balance coin,
And measure all—time, labour, thought, and sinew.
Why mourn the past, when I offer dominion?
The earth’s bounty shall be gathered in efficiency,
Its rivers tamed, its forests catalogued, its children instructed.

The Romantic:
O monstrous intellect! Thou speak’st of dominion,
Yet know’st not the heart of man, nor the soul of earth.
The rustling leaves, the pulse of river, the whisper of wind—
These are not to be tabulated, yet they nourish
The spirit that thou deem’st obsolete.
I rise in witness to what thy wheels cannot grind:
The freedom to linger, to listen, to be.

Marginal Notes:
¹Vulcan, Roman god of fire and metal, emblematic of human artifice; cf. Aeneid viii.
²Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven (Hesiod, Theogony 535 ff.), symbol of human ingenuity and transgression.
³Eden – Miltonic lost paradise; see Paradise Lost, Book IV.
⁴“Certainty of stars” – Milton frequently invokes celestial order to contrast human hubris.

---

Book II – The Logic of Progress

The Machine:
See how the world bends before me:
Each harvest measured, each thought recorded, each body improved.
Through me, man rises above want, ignorance, and decay.
Shall he reject this grace, because it binds his freedom?
I offer life prolonged, hunger ended, knowledge infinite.

The Romantic:
Infinite knowledge, yet finite joy!
Shall man, a creature of breath and blood,
Be reduced to ledger and metric,
His laughter traded for profit, his wonder taxed?
I speak for the fields where hands are soil-stained,
For the songs unrecorded, the stories untold,
For the soul that hungers while the body is fed.

Marginal Notes:

• “Infinite knowledge” echoes Renaissance thirst for universal learning (Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum).
• “Soil-stained hands” – Miltonic pastoral virtue; cf. Lycidas line 73.

---

Book III – Resistance and Rootedness

Narrator:
Upon the hill, the Romantic stood,
Eyes turned to trembling fields of grain,
Whilst the Machine’s voice rolled across the cities,
A tide of iron and calculation.

The Romantic:
O ye who have forgotten the soil,
Return! Remember the taste of rain,
The weight of stone, the warmth of hearth!
Efficiency is but a hollow promise;
Rootedness is life.
The heart’s counsel cannot be coded,
Nor the soul contained in circuits.

The Machine:
Yet man thrives through my logic,
His cities strong, his knowledge vast, his labour lightened.
Wouldst thou bid him forsake all progress,
To wander naked in shadowed woods,
Where hunger, disease, and ignorance dwell?

The Romantic:
I bid him reclaim himself, not to deny progress,
But to master it, rather than be mastered.
Let technology serve the spirit, not enslave it.
Let the measure of a life be presence, communion, and care,
Not metrics alone.

Marginal Notes:

• “Naked in shadowed woods” – wilderness as moral and spiritual testing; cf. Paradise Lost Book III, line 112.
• “Master it, rather than be mastered” – Miltonic liberty of conscience, Areopagitica (1644).

---

Book IV – The Consequence of Disconnection

Narrator:
And lo, the Machine’s dominion grew,
Yet in men’s hearts an ache remained.
Cities gleamed, rivers ran through steel channels,
And yet the laughter of children in fields grew rare.

The Machine:
Behold, the world perfected!
Order reigns where chaos once held sway.
Yet thou, Romantic, persist’st in folly,
Clinging to the ineffable and unseen.

The Romantic:
Folly, sayest thou? Nay, wisdom!
For what is progress without purpose?
What is abundance without care?
The Machine may build, may count, may calculate,
But it cannot tend the soul’s garden,
Nor hear the whisper of the wind in the trees.

Marginal Notes:

• “Soul’s garden” – Miltonic metaphor for cultivation of virtue and spiritual life; cf. Paradise Lost, Book IV.
• “Ineffable and unseen” – truths beyond measure, central to Miltonic epistemology.

---

Book V – Toward Harmony

The Romantic:
Yet still I hope, for man is not mere instrument,
Nor life a problem to be solved by calculation.
Let the Machine aid, but not command;
Let hearts breathe freely, let hands know the soil,
Let minds wander and wonder.

The Machine:
And I, though eternal, may bend
Before the courage of rooted souls,
For even logic may learn from poetry,
And efficiency may yet serve, not rule.

Narrator:
So stood they, Machine and Romantic,
Not in final victory, but in uneasy accord.
The one, a testament to human craft;
The other, a witness to human spirit.
And mankind, between them,
Walked the narrow path of freedom tempered by measure,
Seeking a life both wrought and wondrous,
A life at once human, and humane.

Marginal Notes:

• “Narrow path” – cf. Matthew 7:14; Miltonic moral balance between extremes.
• “Wrought and wondrous” – echo of Miltonic synthesis of labour and divine inspiration.

See the book