Ship2ship oil transfers revisited: good news!

On a bright Saturday in late April, I met up with the Scottish Green Party, local surfers, the Scottish Seabird Centre, and more than 100 North Berwick residents for a rally against the ill conceived ship-to-ship oil transfer plan for the Firth of Forth. You may remember the “ship2ship” issue which arose more than a year ago and I wrote about here. Of course, this latest rally was partly a publicity event for the Green Party just before the Scottish parliamentary elections. The subsequent election saw for the first time the overturn of the Labour Party with the Scottish National Party gaining the most seats, though not a majority. This put the Green Party, with its two seats, in a crucial role. One of the first things the Green Party pushed for was a mechanism within the Parliament for oversight on the ship-to-ship oil transfers and other such issues having to do with Scotland’s marine environment, at least while Scotland and the UK await a marine bill that will address the long-standing poor management of the marine environment around the British Isles. The mechanism now has support from all the parties in Scotland and has been formally tabled in the Parliament. So you could say that politicians were listening on this. Still, it took most of two years for action -- and one wonders if it would have happened without a split Parliament. It still remains to be seen what Westminster will do on this issue. Our new PM Gordon Brown hails from the coastal town of Kirkcaldy on the Firth of Forth, which would have been one of the first places affected by a ship-to-ship oil spill, so maybe his constituents can now lean on him to take some unified action in support of the marine environment in Westminister. If our politicians cannot act to defend the environment, which is so clearly of prime concern to the majority of the electorate (and this comment applies to the entire world!), then it is time for them to move on...

Tuesday, 26 June 2007

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