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I warn you – this column contains filth | Stewart Lee
In the week we host Cop26, our outmoded sewage system is causing an even bigger stink
The majestic shores and tinkling streams of our island kingdom are engulfed by filth. I am self-constipating to stem the tide of sewage, reducing my own filth output by eliminating fibre and water from my diet, and eating only dairy products, and so should you if you are a true patriot. Laurence Fox has already switched to a diet consisting solely of shirred eggs, baked in his own individual porcelain ramekins, while his Reform UK co-face, Richard Tice, has vowed to eat only bar-snack pickled eggs from “a rightwing pub, with free speech and rightwing comedy, and only British food, and no vaccine passports, and no masks”, until the filth tide retreats.
But mass public self-induced constipation is not a long-term answer to decades of chronic underinvestment in filth infrastructure by privatised water companies. I am, however, already seeing massive personal savings on my toilet roll and Toilet Duck expenditure. In fact, my toilet is so rarely used now I am thinking of encouraging an actual duck to live in it, though gathering the eggs might be a challenge.
Continue reading...‘How can we grow new forests if we don’t have enough trees to plant?’
As nurseries run low on stock and labour shortages grow, industry warns Tory pledge cannot be kept
Pledges to plant trees fall from politicians’ lips like leaves in the autumn, especially during elections and climate summits. Yet ambitious government planting targets are likely to be missed because there are not enough trees or people to plant them, leading forestry figures have warned.
Booming demand means that nurseries are already running out of trees, barely weeks into the planting season, according to the Horticultural Trades Association. And a shortage of workers needed to grow, replant and nurture healthy trees has been made worse by Brexit and under-investment in workforce training, according to the Institute of Chartered Foresters (ICF).
Continue reading...The Colour of the Climate Crisis – in pictures
The Colour of the Climate Crisis is an exhibition by the environmental social initiative Do The Green Thing. It showcases the work of 24 Black and other artists of colour exploring the relationship between racial injustice and climate injustice.
The exhibition will launch on 31 October and run until 2 November at Pipe Factory in Glasgow, Scotland, with a selection of works to coincide with the start of the Cop26 global climate summit. The works will form a permanent digital display at www.thecolouroftheclimatecrisis.art. Further gallery exhibitions will take place in London and New York in 2022
Huge 2.8GW solar farm proposed for Tiwi Islands in new green hydrogen plan
A 2.8GW solar project has been proposed for the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory, along with green hydrogen hub for exports to Asia.
The post Huge 2.8GW solar farm proposed for Tiwi Islands in new green hydrogen plan appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Eco-anxiety over climate crisis suffered by all ages and classes
Poll finds most Britons believe global warming will have far greater effect on humanity than Covid-19
A clear majority of people believe that climate change will have a more significant effect on humanity than will Covid-19, which has already claimed about five million lives worldwide, according to a new poll conducted ahead of the Cop26 summit being held in Glasgow this weekend.
The survey, carried out as part of a study into “eco-anxiety” by the Global Future thinktank in conjunction with the University of York, also finds that concern about global warming is almost as common among older and working-class people as it is among those who are young or middle-class. Overall, 78% of people reported some level of eco-anxiety.
Continue reading...Mankind is not trapped in a deadly game with the Earth – there are ways out | David Wengrow
As the Cop26 climate summit gets under way, scientists and activists are in broad agreement that our prevailing cultural system has placed us, and our planet, on a course to disaster. They agree that it is time to change course. Yet, at this critical moment, we find ourselves paralysed, with new horizons closed off by a false prospectus of human possibilities based on mythological conceptions of history.
We need only look at the notion that underpins our idea of human development. In this story, our species originated in egalitarian bands of hunters and foragers, at one with their surroundings, only to somehow fall from grace into a state of inequality. In this “coming-of-age” fairytale, we humans began in innocence and then developed by way of a voyage of technological discovery – from foragers to farmers to fossil fuels – that enabled our “advancement”, but saw us relinquish our original freedoms. We became “civilised”, only to find ourselves locked in a tug of war with nature that now threatens the planet.
Continue reading...Reasons to be hopeful: the climate solutions available now
We have every tool we need to tackle the climate crisis. Here’s what some key sectors are doing
The climate emergency is the biggest threat to civilisation we have ever faced. But there is good news: we already have every tool we need to beat it. The challenge is not identifying the solutions, but rolling them out with great speed.
Some key sectors are already racing ahead, such as electric cars. They are already cheaper to own and run in many places – and when the purchase prices equal those of fossil-fueled vehicles in the next few years, a runaway tipping point will be reached.
Continue reading...Macron and Johnson’s preening rivalry keeps lobster pot boiling
While the French and British leaders make political capital out of fishers, the row threatens to spill into crucial Cop26
To publicly accuse a long-time friend and ally of lacking credibility and breaking his word whenever its suits him is disobliging at the best of times. To do so on the eve of a watershed global summit, Cop26, which your “friend” is hosting and where trust is vital, looks like a verbal act of war.
Whether the accuser, Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, deliberately sought to escalate his confrontation with Boris Johnson over fishing licences is unclear. He probably did. He knows his words are potentially deeply damaging as Britain struggles to achieve a breakthrough in Glasgow. But Johnson has become his bete noire.
For him, Johnson is an opportunist, a rightwing nationalist-populist, an anti-European – in short, an unscrupulous, unprincipled bounder. The problem with this latest iteration of perfidious Albion, an abiding theme in French politics, is that, in significant ways, Macron himself is not so very different.
Resilience: the one word progressives need in the face of Trump, Covid and more | Robert Reich
The climate crisis, the economy, Biden’s struggle to enact his spending agenda. The list goes on. The lesson? Be strong
I often tell my students that if they strive to achieve full and meaningful lives, they should expect failures and disappointments. We learn to walk by falling down again and again. We learn to ride a bicycle by crashing into things. We learn to make good friends by being disappointed in friendship. Failure and disappointment are prerequisites to growth.
The real test of character comes after failures and disappointments. It is resilience: how easily you take failures, what you learn from them, how you bounce back.
Continue reading...COP26: 'Moment of truth' as world meets for climate summit
JCB signs green hydrogen deal worth billions
South Australia shortlists seven renewable hydrogen projects for massive export hub
South Australia shortlists seven projects that could deliver 1.5 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen to its proposed new hub.
The post South Australia shortlists seven renewable hydrogen projects for massive export hub appeared first on RenewEconomy.
New Zealand’s updated NDC promises deeper emissions cuts, offset buying
Can COP26 really save the planet?
Climate change: What's it like living in a place where it's 50C?
Crimes Against Nature: $2 million whales, wartime Britain and the economics of saving the planet | Jeff Sparrow
We can respond to environmental crisis with good planning, Jeff Sparrow writes in an extract from his book
In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher diagnoses the dominance of a ‘business ontology’, a mentality that can only conceive of human activities insofar as they’re profitable.
For instance, researchers associated with the International Monetary Fund recently noted that whales – especially great whales – capture from the atmosphere considerable amounts of carbon, which they store in their huge bodies and take down to the ocean floor when they die. A single great whale can thus sequester 33 tons of carbon dioxide – a not-insignificant quantity, given that a tree only absorbs 22kg annually. Whales also feed populations of phytoplankton with their waste, and, globally, those phytoplankton capture some 37bn metric tons of carbon dioxide, four times the emissions sequestered by the jungles of the Amazon.
Continue reading...Australia has trashed the Paris agreement and exposed itself as the worst kind of climate hypocrite | Thom Woodroofe
The Morrison government has shown that it quite simply does not do what it says on the world stage
Six years ago, I was one of hundreds of official delegates that stood in a makeshift UN plenary hall at Le Bourget when the Paris agreement was adopted after years of negotiations.
It was then, and may well remain, the most significant thing I have ever been part of in my life.
Continue reading...‘It’s the protests which are giving me hope’: activists descend on Glasgow
Campaigners from around the world are uniting to disrupt the Cop26 conference and put pressure on political leaders
Thousands of protesters from around the world arrived in Glasgow on Saturday to demand urgent action on the escalating ecological emergency before the two-week Cop26 climate conference.
Campaigners from scores of environmental justice, indigenous and civil society groups are converging on Scotland’s biggest city to forge alliances and pressure political leaders.
Continue reading...Chances of Cop26 success six out of 10, says Boris Johnson – video
Boris Johnson has said in a TV interview that he believes the chances of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow concluding with the right commitments from world leaders to tackle the climate emergency are still only six out of 10
Continue reading...50 years, 25 Cops: the slow-motion movement to save the planet
How Guardian journalists reported on the long, twisting road to global action on the climate crisis
From the earliest global environment conference in the 1970s, through the Rio Earth Summit and 25 subsequent Cops, Guardian journalists have reported on every twist and turn of these gargantuan gatherings, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of delegates over the years.
One of the success stories of the conference [is] the little blue and white bicycles parked outside the main buildings used by the UN delegates, UN staff and the press, who have particularly taken to them, sign out a key which fits a lock of any machine. By lunchtime yesterday every key was taken.
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