YOUR VIEWS: Highland power line plan, Inverness fuel prices and Scotland's 'rainbow nation'
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SSEN plans for Beauly are ‘stunning’
Yesterday I and many other people from the surrounding communities attended an SSEN public “consultation” and were stunned when we saw what they want to unleash on us over the next few years.
The three times over-budget Beauly to Denny line is a monument to environmental vandalism itself and yet SSEN think that more transmission lines impacting the same area is acceptable.
This is 2023! Have we not moved on from when the first pylon was erected in Falkirk in 1928 nearly a hundred years ago?
What happened about environmental protection? What happened to caring for communities?
SSEN are relying on the cheapest option that has the biggest impact on residents and the environment. That is simply not acceptable in this day and age.
Those who have said that they like wind turbines but not pylons and sat back and let the foreign multinationals plant their rotating cash machines haphazardly into our iconic landscapes, far away from grid connections, now have a macabre BOGOF to deal with.
It was always coming. Unreliable wind turbines with their volatile energy means massive grid upgrades and more people are beginning to understand this.
Aside from very worrying health issues of living near high power electricity transmission the massive footprint of wind energy and these super-sized pylons and substations is immense.
People should remember that they are paying for all this and that the costs and emissions of these upgrades are not added to the costs and emissions for wind energy.
Remember that too when the industry and supporting politicians tell us how green and cheap wind is. None of us have seen our energy bills go down as the number of turbines has gone up.
Beauly means “beautiful place” and when Mary Queen of Scots visited in 1564 she is reputed to have said: ‘Oui, c’est un beau lieu’ – yes, it is a beautiful place.
SSEN seem determined to wipe out history because if they get their way there will only be industrial hardware in Beauly and the surrounding area and no beauty left at all.
Lyndsey Ward
Beauly
Why are we paying much more for diesel?
I have just learnt with surprise that the pump price for diesel in Thurso is 157.9p, or 8p per litre cheaper than we are paying in Inverness.
For many years the pump price of diesel in Thurso has been about 8p per litre more expensive than Inverness. This would seem to suggest that the actual price for diesel in Inverness should be closer to 150p per litre, saving hard-pressed motorists nearly 16p per litre.
Can I ask whether the fuel retailers in Inverness, primarily the supermarkets, are profiteering given this unusual anomaly? Or is Thurso getting its diesel from a much cheaper source now?
For interest, over the years, unleaded fuel in Inverness is also between 5p and 8p a litre cheaper than Thurso. That is pretty much the case today.
It would seem the “cost of living crisis” for some is just an excuse to bump up prices because they can get away with it.
Shane Rodgers
Culduthel Mains Avenue
Inverness
Leader must represent ‘rainbow nation’
Although perhaps better known to readers of the Courier for my involvement with XR Environmental activism, my “day job” is being a Christian theologian, Inverness born and bred and happy to be home now after too many years away doon sooth!
I also believe in, and long for, an Independent Scotland.
So I see a coming storm – sure, I’d love to see a Highlander as First Minister, but Kate … I’m sorry, we have to differ.
I am also bisexual and the proud mother of a transgender thirty-something year old.
It goes deeper (or higher?) than my own personal orientation and gender beliefs, though.
It’s a fundamental question of intellectual integrity.
When people ask what I do, I think they imagine me poring over the Bible all day, disputing the meaning of texts. Well, yes…and no. The more I advanced in my theological studies, the more I was forced (not without a painful struggle) to concede that the American theologian Thomas JJ Altizer was right when he wrote that: “A century and a half of historical scholarship has demonstrated that the Bible contains a diverse body or series of traditions and imagery that resists all attempts at harmonization or reconciliation. No longer is it possible to speak of a Biblical faith or a Biblical religion or even of a distinct and singular Biblical God; nor is there any possibility of rationally or logically uniting the self-contradictory Biblical images of God. Nevertheless, a radical and dialectical theology can lead us to grasp the necessity of the contradictory language of the Bible.”
I still love this Book with all its contradictions and perplexities: I still hear the voice of Gxd in it. But wild horses won’t lead me to take Leviticus’ and Paul’s demonisation of queer identities at face value; as “gospel”. No, theology has the much harder task of taking Scripture and tradition into dialogue with history, philosophy, anthropology and (in my own field) the Arts, and holding sometimes delightful, sometimes difficult, conversations – striving not to throw the baby out with the often all-too-murky bathwater.
I worry about an SNP led by someone, however sincere, who takes Leviticus as the literal word of Gxd; recall that next to prohibitions of same-sex relations lie instructions to stone adulterers to death; how honest are we when we try (as I tried and ultimately failed) to take the whole thing “literally”?
Sorry, Kate; I don’t trust you to represent the reality of rainbow Scotland. I, too, am made in the image of Gxd; so is my non-binary kid. (I write “Gxd” because in the middle of that word lies a mystery and a kiss!)
Dr Ruth Dunster
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