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George Monbiot

11 Mar, 12 tweets, 4 min read

1. I will lose friends over this thread. But I feel it would be dishonest not to say what follows.
It seems to me that we need to distinguish between two different issues, that are often confused:

A. Whether the UK is better off in the EU.

B. Whether the EU is a good thing.

2. The answer to A, as we’re discovering the hard way, is clearly Yes.

I’ve gradually come to believe that the answer to B is No.

3. If we take the field I know best, the EU has some good environmental rules. But its overall impact on the living world is catastrophic. This is just the latest of its many assaults: subsidised piracy, that has so far resisted all attempts at redress theguardian.com/environment/20…

4. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, by far the biggest item in its budget, is one of the most destructive forces on Earth. The perverse incentives it creates have destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of prime habitat. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

5. The same goes for its biofuel incentives, which have wrecked forests from Indonesia to Estonia. It ignored all warnings. Trying to change these policies involves battling through almost impenetrable layers of bureaucracy and resistance. transportenvironment.org/news/biofuels-…

6. The problem seems to be that governments can hide behind the European Council and European Commission. On behalf of corporate lobbyists, they quietly push through policies they would never dare to propose at home.

7. The effects of this fatal flaw are not confined to environmental issues. There were similar issues with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, for example. Behind a veil of secrecy and obfuscation, the EC tried to impose it against massive popular resistance.

@NFUtweets

8. The UK had a baleful influence on EU policy, using the diffusion of responsibility to do things which would have brought us out on the streets at home. Its sinking of the Soil Framework Directive, in response to @NFUtweets demands, is a good example. theguardian.com/environment/ge…

9. While the EU was good for us, we made it even worse than it would have been in our absence. Brexit clearly damages the UK's interests, but it slightly lessens the harm the EU does to the world.

10. As the EU’s post-war role in securing peace fades in importance beside its current role in driving the collapse of the Earth’s living systems, I believe the balance tilts against it. I now think it does more harm than good.

11. Strangely, these arguments against the EU were scarcely ever made by the Leave campaign. The reason seems to be that it had an entirely different agenda, which had nothing to do with either the national or the global interest. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

12. Several people have responded to this thread by saying "so the answer is to reform the EU". But the examples I've given suggest to me that it's unreformable. The corporate lobbyists are dug in too deep. Look at the new CAP round: nothing learnt, nothing improved.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

5 Mar

Please remember, as corrupt Covid contracts hit the headlines again, that it the BBC didn't mention the issue for *a full 5 months* after the Good Law Project and others exposed it. Except on a few rare occasions, it has marginalised the story ever since.

This is arguably the biggest corruption scandal of modern times. Yet the BBC has flunked repeated opportunities to give it the attention it deserves.
Sometimes I feel our national broadcaster does more to suppress the news than to reveal it.

Those of us with much smaller resources than the BBC has at its disposal - openDemocracy, the Guardian, Byline Times - were able to give this issue the coverage it deserved. So it's not a question of capacity. It's a question of will.

Read 4 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

5 Mar

If there is one crucial environmental metric, it's the amount of land we use to produce our food.
Farming is the greatest cause of loss of terrestrial habitats and biodiversity. Livestock farming - because it needs so much land - is the major driver.
ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

This is also the environmental issue most obscured by myth-making, wishful thinking and junk science. A lot of people really don't want to know that the meat and dairy they eat is devastating the planet. The industry feeds us reassuring falsehoods.
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1145314…

We know that air is important.
We know that water is important.
But for some reason we overlook the other crucial element: land.
The more of it we take for farming, the less of it there is for the rest of the living world.

Read 14 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

3 Mar

1. We’ve all had a glimpse of mortality in this pandemic, and a premonition, while housebound by lockdown, of old age. These warnings remind us to use life well. In the words of the immortal Bard (Eminem), you only get one shot. So let’s not allow our lives to be ruled by lies.

2. I don’t mean only the lies we are told, though there are plenty of them, but also the lies we tell ourselves: the false assurances that might get us through the day, but that prevent us from connecting with what is real and worthwhile.

3. Let’s begin by admitting that we are in a bad place. A very bad place. Climate and ecological breakdown are happening at terrifying speed. Our own mortality is shadowed by a much greater one: the closure of the conditions that support life on Earth.

Read 17 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

1 Mar

1. Why do we collaborate in our own destruction? One of the answers, I think, is our determined commitment to irrelevance. We face massive, unprecedented challenges, but when you tune in to the most popular radio shows, you hear people talking all day about … nothing.

2. As climate and ecological breakdown happen at stupendous speed and scale, as democracy is hollowed out, as a handful of oligarchs accumulate massive economic and political power, we ensure that our heads are filled with meaningless noise.

3. If alien spaceships started incinerating our cities, and we turned on the radio, we'd be told “so the hot topic today is: what’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you while eating a kebab?”.

Read 10 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

26 Feb

@sciencemuseum

I’ve now withdrawn from the event I was doing at the @sciencemuseum, after discovering that it is still taking sponsorship money from the oil companies BP and Equinor. Such companies use these deals to sustain their social licence to operate – ie to destroy the living planet.

When I accepted the museum’s invitation, I naively imagined those days were over. I mean, what respectable organisation still takes money from this planetary death machine? I love the Science Museum, but it’s hard to express how disappointed I feel.

@Cult_Unstained

Please support @Cult_Unstained in their efforts to break this chain of destruction and the greenwash and normalisation of fossil fuel companies that organisations like the Science Museum enable. cultureunstained.org/oil-sponsorshi…

Read 5 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

26 Feb

1. In the southern Cambrian Mountains, in central Wales, there’s a Terrestrial Dead Zone of around 300 km². It’s composed of degraded blanket mires, entirely dominated by a coarse grass called Molinia, in which other lifeforms, such as birds and insects, are scarcely to be found.

2. It seems to have been pushed past its tipping point in the 20th Century, into a new stable state. The most likely cause, according to the scientists who have studied it, was a switch from cattle to sheep grazing, and an increase in the stocking rate.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

3. Flips like this are called hysteresis. Although, in some places, there has been no grazing for 30 or 40 years, the land has not recovered. Once any complex system undergoes hysteresis, the effort required to reverse it is much greater than the effort required to cause it.

Read 14 tweets

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