Fracking is a bad option
I am concerned at your editorial suggesting both nuclear and fracking may be alternatives, though unpalatable ones, to forms of fossil fuel-generated power (4 April). The horrors and costs of nuclear aside, fracking is not a sensible option, as it has been shown that gas generation is more greenhouse-gas intensive than the burning of coal.
A lot of energy is expended by extracting gas by fracking, the wells leak insidious greenhouse gases and tonnes of water, and fracking fluids are required in the extraction process that can leak into the environment and pollute water sources. The transportation of gas involves the burning of even more fossil fuels; this is aside from the actual gas generation process itself.
Fracking and gas generation of electricity represent the burning of fossil fuels at a time when we should be urgently cutting back on their use. We need to invest in sustainable, secure and independent energy supplies and more actively encourage reductions in our use of fossil fuels.
Seona Gunn
Deans Marsh, Victoria, Australia
• I wonder how many readers were disappointed and puzzled by the very obvious playing down by the Guardian Weekly of the latest IPCC report on global warming issues (4 April)? Relegated to just two-thirds of a page and a brief editorial, and was absent from the signpost headlines on page one. The now rather tedious Pistorius court case was deemed more significant and given far more prominent attention.
What is happening to the Guardian Weekly's editorial priorities when this most important update on the potentially catastrophic threat we are all now facing is given such short shrift?
Robert Norton
Sydney, Australia
• With the effects of climate change already being felt across the globe, the best the Guardian can suggest is nuclear and fracking? Now there really is no hope!
Hilary Cadman
Bellingen, NSW, Australia
China's threat to Russia
In 2011, I spent a month visiting China to see the world's most populous nation on the march. I had an interesting discussion with a fluently English-speaking graduate student at Shanghai University. We talked about China's meteoric rise as an economic superpower.
He was very upbeat and told me that China's rise has been peaceful. When I asked him what did he think about China's relations with Russia, which was a communist country before, he told me they are very good and getting better. China is already Russia's biggest trading partner. Then he told me that despite its one-child policy, China is an overpopulated country and needs land to expand, and Russia should sell its vast and largely underpopulated areas in the far east in the same way it sold Alaska to the US in the 19th century. I told him it seems to be good idea, provided Russia agrees to it. He replied it is inevitable as Russia, with a population of only 140 million, simply doesn't have the manpower to develop the world's largest landmass.
The student pointed out that in the 19th century, China was forced to cede vast territories to Russia. China has not forgotten this humiliation. By annexing Crimea, Putin has created a precedent for a powerful China to reclaim its vast far eastern territories (21 March).
The European Union can sit back and let Putin go down in its folly. As Napoleon remarked: "Don't interrupt the enemy when he is making a false move."
Mahmood Elahi
Ottawa, Canada
The safety of statins
Medical experts clash over statin safety (28 March) provides a valuable public service, and calls for further discussion. Should anti-cholesterol drugs should be used at all?
If cholesterol is toxic to the walls of blood vessels, why does it attack only arteries? And why does it attack the hardest-working arteries (those in the heart) most of all? Veins are attacked only when they are put in the arterial system. I once did an autopsy on a 50-year-old diabetic woman, two of whose leg veins were moved, one year earlier, to her coronary arterial system. The walls of both veins were markedly increased in thickness, leading to her death.
These findings are consistent with the "wear-and-tear" hypothesis of arterial disease, and unrelated to cholesterol. They have serious implications for the way we live, and should lead to shorter working weeks, especially for manual labourers and all who are stressed by work.
As transplantation of veins into the heart was frequent, there must have been many similar autopsy findings. In 40 years I have seen none. On the other hand, soon after the American nutritionist Ancel Keys alleged in 1953 that dietary cholesterol was producing coronary heart disease, anti-cholesterol drugs, of which the statins are the most recent, appeared.
Promotion of anti-cholesterol drugs has been successful. The use of statins makes big bucks for big companies. Is it surprising that, in capitalist society, the theory that makes money for big companies is accepted, while the theory that could benefit workers is ignored? Is this one of Marx's "contradictions of capitalism"?
Ken Ranney
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Chandler remembered
While reading John Banville's interesting account of his attempt to carry on the Raymond Chandler tradition (11 April), I was reminded of the day when Chandler appeared to be attempting suicide. I worked for 11 years for Hamish Hamilton at 90 Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury, and one morning about 1957, Jamie Hamilton said he had been woken in the night by Chandler, calling from California. Such a call was most unusual in those days and Hamilton was alarmed because it appeared that Chandler was making a sentimental goodbye.
Hamilton decided to contact the nearest police station to Chandler's home, explained the situation and suggested they send someone to Chandler's apartment. A few hours later the message came through that Chandler had been discovered standing in the shower with a gun in his hand. Thanks to this intervention, Chandler survived.
A few months later, he came to London and we gave a party for him in the office. He appeared in a suit of electric blue, a brilliant white shirt and a tie no Englishman would have been seen dead wearing. With him was a woman who appeared to be playing the role of nurse and companion, as he was obviously fragile. He charmed the guests, all of whom were delighted to meet the famous creator of Philip Marlowe, who moved around the room with a glass of whisky in his hand from which he was drinking deeply and which his companion was assiduously refilling.
This worried me. I shared my concern with his companion. She replied," Not to worry, honey. It's cold tea and he don't know the difference."
Ken Wilder
Bowral, NSW, Australia
A breath of fresh air?
Linda Woodhead, professor of the sociology of religion at Lancaster University, is right (A breath of fresh air, 21 March). This pope so far has done nothing but use cheap gestures.
Has he agreed to opening the Vatican's books on sexual abuse, so that victims can at last see exposure of the crimes committed against them? What about handing over paedophile priests to the law? What about putting the Vatican's artworks up for auction and using the money to build houses in the poorest parts of the poorest countries? What about standing up for equal respect for people who differ physically?
It takes my breath away to hear Jon O'Brien, chief executive for Catholics for Choice in the US, say "he has brought about real change". Driving a Ford Focus? Wearing black boots instead of red shoes? This constitutes "real" change?
The suffering of people everywhere because of the church's ruling on abortion, gay rights and female priests has not been alleviated one tiny bit by this pope's trivial exercising of his personal preferences.
Susan Grimsdell
Auckland, New Zealand
Briefly
• The Italian court's decision (28 March) to grant "short-term private interests" an injunction against a law to safeguard Venice's heritage reflects the damage caused by out-of-control corporate interests. The only democratic measure with the capacity to stand up to democracy's denigration is a constitutional provision that empowers citizens to say "enough already", as Swiss voters did in February.
André Carrel
Terrace, British Columbia, Canada
• In his 2010 memoir of the Bush years, Tony Blair melodramatically cast himself as a martyr to hoi polloi – shades of St Sebastian – albeit in "armour which the arrows simply bounced off" (4 April). And he visualised himself "float[ing] above the demonic rabble", ie the demos, those who bravely tried to forestall his martial ambitions. He aimed "to achieve a kind of weightlessness" – and that he did.
R M Fransson
Denver, Colorado, US
• Diane Francis is welcome to return to her native US any time she likes, but not to take Canada with her, as she seems to want to do (28 March).
Bruce Inksetter
Gatineau, Quebec, Canada
• Middle Earth does not meet Middle English (4 April). In translating Beowulf, written as early as the seventh century, Tolkien would have met Anglo-Saxon. Middle English was the language of Chaucer, used a half-millennium later. Alison Flood's calling Beowulf an 11th-century poem makes it a very late edition.
Kenneth Rower
Newbury, Vermont
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