Environmentalism

Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world.

This is just people leaving the peasant villages and going to live in greater density. Effectively, what happened to New England a century back. I see it in parts of Portugal. I’ve seen it up in Czechia.

It’s also an interesting counterpoint to that idea that we’re ripping up the natural world ever more when, in fact, we’re retreating from large land areas.

From the economists’ point of view at least. Road pricing per mile – and per time of travel – is efficient. It prices both the costs of the roads and also congestion etc. Bonzer.

There are, to be polite, certain civil liberties conncerns. And we might imagine that it would be used to price off the roads, not to efficiently price.

But, to the economist, Bonzer Idea. Then there’s that politics:

Sadiq Khan plotted £2-per-mile charge to drive in London

An insane number.

The UK taxes derv and petrol correctly right now. That 50p per litre is, in fact, probably too high. Yes, including all the climate change bumph, too high. When we include congestion then it might be just about right. -Ish.

OK. But we’re talking of something like 5 to 10 miles per litre. On which the correct tax charge is that 50p. Khan is muttering about £10 to £20, not that 50p.

Which brings us back to hte politics of this, not the economics. For all the joy at per mile being efficient what happens when the rate is set by a cunt?

Which is rather the problem with schemes cooked up by economists and implemented by politicians…..

Squeal like piggies:

When he was last president, Trump gutted more than 100 environmental rules and vowed to only leave a “little bit of the EPA” left “because you can’t destroy business”, prompting hundreds of agency staff to leave amid a firestorm of political interference and retaliation against civil servants. An even greater exodus is expected this time, with staff fearing they are frontline targets in what could be the biggest upheaval in the agency’s 50-year history.

“People are anxious and apprehensive, [and] we are preparing for the worst,” said Nicole Cantello, an EPA water specialist and president of AFGE Local 704, representing agency staff in the midwest.

“We’ve had a taste of what will happen and how we were targeted last time,” she said. “By the emails and texts I’m getting, a lot of people will leave. So many things could be thrown at us that it could destroy the EPA as we know it.”

Won’t that be nice?

#It’s even possible to think that the environment should be protected – as I do – and still insist that gutting the EPA is a great idea – as I do. Because protecting the environment this way is to be idiotic.

Left on their own, some deforested areas can rebound surprisingly fast with minimal help from humans, sequestering loads of atmospheric carbon as they grow.

New research from an international team of scientists, recently published in the journal Nature, finds that 830,000 square miles of deforested land in humid tropical regions — an area larger than Mexico — could regrow naturally if left on its own. Five countries — Brazil, Indonesia, China, Mexico, and Colombia — account for 52 percent of the estimated potential regrowth.

As with these reforesting projects in the UK. Stop doing something else with the land and the forest will grow back. Because the forest is the natural state of that land – it didn’t have humans planting it first time around now, did it?

One result of this is that the “never get the forests back” shit is, well, it’s shit. Much of the Amazon was clear cut before Whitey turned up and killed everyone with smallpox. All of New England was.

Secondly, those who would reforest now. OK, you do that with your land. And you can fuck off about having any of our money to do so. Because all you’ve got to do is keep the deer out and then sit there and watch.

Nae Subsidies!

Bentley has pushed back plans to go fully electric by five years as driver uptake of battery-powered cars continues to fall short of the industry’s hopes.

In an announcement on Thursday, bosses confirmed that the British marque will switch to an all-electric lineup by 2035 instead of 2030.

It comes months after Bentley delayed the launch of its first electric vehicle (EV) from 2025 to 2026. Originally envisaged as a grand tourer, it will also be a “luxury urban SUV”, the company said.

Frank-Steffen Walliser, Bentley’s chief executive, admitted that there was “not a lot of demand” among the company’s existing customers for electric models, amid a wider slowdown in EV sales across the industry this year.

The aim of a Bentley – as with a Rolls Royce – or, to be more accurate, one of the aims, was to produce a motor vehicle that didn’t sound like one. Inside you could hear that clock ticking. But with EVs that’s not so difficult to achieve. Sure, road noise and all that, but that’s easier than doing away with engine noise. So, two tonnes of steel and padding and fitting and…..not quite so necessary on an EV as compared to an ICE. One of those selling points for vast luxury cars has gone that is.

Sure, sure, Veblen Goods, the brand and all that. But that will only carry so much weight.

Making a big, quiet, high acceleration, car is now much easier than it was. So the distinction of a Bentley – other than that brand – has declined, no?

Now, however, the polar bears are back. In the last year, Jimmy’s Farm, the farm and wildlife park run by farmer, conservationist and TV presenter Jimmy Doherty, has taken in four. A further 12 bears live in three other British parks. Are these captive animals the best hope for a climate-challenged species whose wild population has dwindled to 26,000? Or should they not be here at all?

Dwindled, eh?

London, 27 February: 2023 marked 50 years of international cooperation to protect polar bears across the Arctic. Those efforts have been a conservation success story: from a population estimated at about 12,000 bears in the late 1960s, numbers have almost tripled, to just over 32,000 in 2023.

Ho hum.

At this moment the Defra secretary has a key decision waiting on his desk and what he does will be an indication of whether these grand statements have any substance. The multimillion-pound company British Sugar is asking for emergency authorisation to apply a banned bee-killing pesticide to this year’s sugar beet crop. Thiamethoxam, that chemical, is a neonicotinoid, a substance once touted by its manufacturers as a safe pesticide but found by researchers more than a decade ago to be so toxic that a teaspoon could kill one billion bees.

George Monbiot insists that neonicotinoids must be banned. Matt Ridley says that’s nonsense. Well, there we have it then, the proposed ban is bollocks, QED.

Humanity is on the verge of ‘shattering Earth’s natural limits’, say experts in biodiversity warning

OK, perhaps not amusing. But:

Human activity has pushed the world into the danger zone in seven out of eight newly demarcated indicators of planetary safety and justice, according to a groundbreaking analysis of the Earth’s wellbeing.

The amusement is. None of these 8 markers are actually of minerals, metals, elements, running out. When 20 and 30 years ago that was all assumed to be that rigid limit upon human expansion.

And that is amusing, isn’t it? What definitely was going to kill us all in our beds now isn’t even mentioned at all. Which gives us how much of a guide to what’s now definitely going to kill us all in our beds?

The real complaint this bird has is that men want to go do something to solve a problem:

When it comes to some of the tech oligarchs, I suspect the sheer modesty of the solutions – that we should consume less, which means we can produce less, and make this energy transition to a renewable-powered world – is not the kind of gee-whiz rocket science they love. (Though solar and wind technologies are pretty amazing, particularly if you know how rapidly their design has improved, their cost has plummeted and their implementation has spread.) It is in many ways a social solution in which lots of us adjust how we live and how we power our devices, not a grand centralized invention that is super profitable for a few.

How very feminine, eh? She’s also remarkably unobservant:

But overall billionaires and the very rich are part of the problem, with their outsized power and the dismal ways most of them use it. And their climate impact is obscene – the richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%.

Significant journo living in California? There’s absolutely no way at all that you’re not part of the global 1%, Honey.

Fossil fuels could soon become significantly cheaper and more abundant as governments accelerate the transition to clean energy towards the end of the decade, according to the International Energy Agency.

This still works, see?

Reduced demand as everyone uses windmills, prices down……

The East Anglia network report states that it would not be possible to build a system of underground cables by 2030 due to the time involved in digging and installation. It would be possible to erect a sufficient number of pylons by this time.

However, under a 2034 time frame an underground cable system would come in £600 million cheaper than using pylons, it says.

The study was published by the National Energy System Operator, which was previously part of the National Grid but since the start of this month has become a separate government-owned body charged with accelerating Labour’s “clean power mission”.

What’s the cost of the pylons by 2034? That is, how much of the price difference is in the completion date and how much is in the tech itself? Now, pure gues on my part but that’s where I’d think the fiddle is.

Ed Miliband unlocks billions to build giant dams across Britain
Loch Ness faces monster hydro scheme after Energy Secretary offers developers support for projects

Try to build a reservoir so that London has drinking water and you get 30 years of “Nyet!”.

Farmer and author James Rebanks: ‘I hate the word rewilding – it’s been weaponised’

Upland sheep farmers exist only because of subsidy. The first act of reqilding would be to stop the subsidy to upland sheep farmers so as to rewild the uplands. You’ve only got to listen to Monbiot on the subject for 30 seconds to grasp that.

Whether any of that is the right thing to do or not is another matter. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Europe beats the US for walkable, livable cities, study shows
Cities such as Zurich and Dublin found to have key services accessible within 15 minutes for more than 95% of residents

Cities built before cars are more compact than those built after cars.

Now test Milton Keynes for walkability.

Sand on picturesque Cornwall beach being ‘mined and sold for profit’

Isn’t that disgusting. For profit, eh? Sadly, there are far too many people for whom that would be the end of the story. It’s for profit, is it? Then ban it!

As it actually happens, they’re dredging to keep the harbour open …..

Labour’s pledge to cut consumer energy bills by £300 was an election campaign centrepiece. Yet the promise began to unravel this week even as it was launching Great British Energy – its flagship project aimed at achieving lower bills.

During the election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, repeatedly said their controversial plan to decarbonise UK electricity by 2030 would reduce household bills by £300.

But when challenged in the Commons on Friday and in interviews, both men refused to repeat the pledge. Miliband admitted that any reduction might take years to deliver.

Replacing cheaper generation with more expensive generation and having to upgrade the system to do it to boot. It’s unlikely to produce consumer savings now, is it?

The Olympic men’s triathlon has been postponed for “health reasons” after 3.30am tests of the River Seine found unacceptable levels of pollution on parts of the course.

A race for which Team GB’s Alex Yee was the favourite has now been scheduled to take place on Wednesday at 10.45am local time (9.45am in the UK) immediately after the women’s race at 8am, for which Great Britain’s Beth Potter and Georgia Taylor-Brown also have big medal chances.

The heavy rain in Paris on Friday night and Saturday morning, which drenched the Opening Ceremony, has a direct impact also on the water quality on Seine and a series of nighttime tests found unacceptable readings on parts of the course.

Just to point out, most of the water and sewage stuff in France is private companies and has been for a century. Paris isn’t, Paris is state run and owned.

Burrowing owls living in a housing development in Florida. Which is indeed fun.

For there’s a kiddies’ novel by, erm….name won’t come to me…..exactly about burrowing owls on a development in Florida. Rather a fun novel in fact.

They tested for levels of two polluting nutrients, nitrate and phosphate,

Farm run off is going to be used as a reason why hte water companies aren’t dealing with sewage.

Lies in other words.

Prof Sir Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, has warned that river sewage is becoming a serious public health concern, and that bathers and other recreational river users could become seriously ill by ingesting bacteria.

Ah, yes

In short, the Greens have drifted to the very far left of British politics and swallowed all the necessary delusions while doing so. It is all a little ironic, given that the roots of the Green movement lie in fin-de-siècle proto-fascism, the blood-and-soil notions of purity that so commended themselves to Adolf Hitler and became, in the end, a stirring Nazi slogan. I suppose one might argue, then, that at least the Greens are remaining true to one plank of the ideology that was most definitely present when the movement was created. Not every vestige has quite been jettisoned.