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17 Mar, 4 tweets, 1 min read
At last! A crucial, missing piece of the climate jigsaw. For some time, I've been speculating that trawling is likely to release significant amounts of carbon from the seabed. But there was no data. Now there is, and it's even worse than I imagined.
time.com/5947430/bottom…
It was a remarkable gap in the science, and I find it surprising that no one has sought to fill it until now. Sometimes, even the biggest questions don't get asked.
It's yet another powerful argument against trawling. To protect habitats and wildlife, we urgently need to exclude this horrendously destructive practice from most of our seas. Now we know it imposes a major carbon cost as well.
I tweeted the Time article because, unlike most of the news pieces published about this today, *it included the link to the paper*.
Science journalists, please note: this should be standard practice in all articles about scientific findings.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot Profile picture
11 Mar
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…
Read 12 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
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 Profile picture
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 Profile picture
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 Profile picture
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 Profile picture
26 Feb
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.
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

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