Scotland oil refinery shutdown: gristly interesting.

Watching how this pans out should be a giggle. The staff of this refinery are going on strike for 48 hours. It is one of nine plants in the UK that refines crude oil, which it supplies to Scotland and the north of England.

You can’t just flick a switch and put a refinery on standby, shutdown is a length process so people who know estimate that fuel supplies may be interrupted for a month, fuel shortages may ensue. There have already been warnings not to panic-buy. Watching how this affects us maygive some clues (and to the dimwits in Government) and lessons to how we’d cope should something like a human flu pandemic strike. (Which is not a question of if, it’s when.) If queues develop at petrol stations, supermarkets find themselves short of food, scuffles break out over loaves of bread (I saw that happen in the last fuel strikes: Tesco, Bedford) then it’s an early warning flag that society as she currently is wrote is not resilient enough to withstand a shock that disrupts supply chains. I suspect our society is a lot more fragile than we would like to believe, and its real vulnerability is fuel supply. If a two-day strike disrupts production for a month, what happens if H5N1 (or one of its as yet unknown cousins) does a 1918 and puts 25% of the population in their beds and 5% in their graves. We are nation of media-driven hysterics now, how many will turn out to keep the home refineries burning in a pandemic?

We depend on oil a shitload for our just in time delivery lifestyles, and for the basics. This next month is going to be an interesting little study. I hope politicians with some vision are in the classroom.