Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
Is this legal?
This level of cringe ought not to be, outside of specialist establishments.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
I'm not saying we should keep emissions, I'm saying we are never going to have a 100% clean production method. The carbon capture we have at the moment, at it's best, captures around 40% of CO2. The only way to get to reduce the amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere to a point where we can give ourselves the time to manage the consequences of what we have already done is by reducing production and consumption. and the only way to do that is to understand that the states and individuals that overconsume and hoard wealth can no longer to afford to do that.
No, any reduction in consumption or production is going to be fiddling while the planet burns. Its a bad joke, not a serious suggestion.
We don't need massive carbon capture and we don't need to reduce consumption or production, we need 100% clean production methods. Which we are working on and investing in.
Develop 100% clean production techniques and we can have as much production and consumption as we like - and so can the rest of the planet.
And while you may dream of cutting other people's size of their pie, the rest of the planet will not voluntarily cut their own size of the pie. Quite the opposite, the rest of the planet is singularly focused on growing their pie.
What the rest of the world will do is adopt 100% clean production techniques that we develop and adopt too.
Indeed 100% clean technologies can help grow the pie. Extracting oil and gas is expensive, if we can tap freely available, renewable, natural resources like wind and sunshine to get our power instead of importing expensive consumable commodities, then we can invest to grow while helping the planet.
You are not serious about the planet.
I'm not serious? You seem to be suggesting that developing 100% clean production lines is just around the corner, and we are nowhere near them. That moving our entire infrastructure to energy produced through clean methods can and will happen soon and using 100% clean methods themselves. Part of the problem we face is that to get to a clean tech future we do need to do some extractivism now - and we can't offset that yet. Globally, instead of trying to manage our emissions at the point we realised they were a problem to give us time to deal with the problem, we kept burning more and more fossil fuels. Because the logic of growth growth growth and tech will save us meant that it would be a problem solved in the future so it doesn't matter what we do now. But that hasn't happened and we are barrelling towards catastrophe.
When do you expect this catastrophe to arrive and what will it look like.
This, from the Guardian no less, seems to me to get it about right:
Last words from the article: We need to ask ourselves: “What if there just is no solution to that on any sort of meaningful scale?” and act accordingly.
Very pro Ukraine and somewhat pro Palestine in my case. Which I guess is about right, even though I think it's complicated and the questions somewhat simplistic.
In my travels around south and west London I have seen a decent smattering of Lab posters, lots of Libdem one's and not a single Tory one. At the weekend I whilst out cycling I came across a brave little band of Tory canvassers being roundly berated on one street - rather loudly too. Ominous.
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/what-if-there-just-is-no-solution-how-we-are-all-in-denial-about-the-climate-crisis
Last words from the article:
We need to ask ourselves: “What if there just is no solution to that on any sort of meaningful scale?” and act accordingly.