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George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

17 Jul

For 20 years, the billionaire press told us "we can easily adapt to a warmer world".
Try telling that to people in Germany, Belgium and the western seaboard of North America.
And this is just one degree of heating.

The media did this, as surely as the fossil fuel companies.

Let's not forget those who told us there was little to worry about. People with massive media platforms, who helped push us towards catastrophe.
Matt Ridley
Bjorn Lomborg
Nigel Lawson
Christopher Booker
David Rose
Peter Hitchens ....
The roll of dishonour is long and grim

And, of course, their editors and proprietors.
And the so-called thinktanks shilling for the fossil fuel companies.
Doubtless they all believed they were being ever so clever. But if we recall their names at all, we'll remember them as traitors to humanity.

Read 10 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

16 Jul

So here are the key takeaways from #Rivercide.
1. We're rightly disgusted by the privatised water companies, cutting their costs by dumping raw sewage into our rivers.
But revolting and extreme as this is, it’s NOT the primary cause of river pollution in the UK.
Thread/

2. So what is? The answer will surprise many people.
Farming.
There are several reasons: soil erosion, fertilisers, pesticides etc.
But the most extreme cause is this: industrial livestock units.
The problem is simply stated: they produce too much dung for the land to absorb.

3. They gather nutrients from a large area and release them into a small one. Modern chicken farms, for example, channel soya from vast areas of Brazil and Argentina into huge numbers of birds in industrial units. The nutrients in their dung are spread on the surrounding land.

Read 18 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

15 Jul

All my working life, I’ve wanted to fight the forces trashing the living world. I’ve wanted to fight them in the most powerful medium, television. Instead, I’ve found myself fighting TV executives, who for 36 years have nixed almost every proposal I’ve made.

Doubtless unwittingly, they stand guard in front of the corporations and governments destroying our life support systems, ensuring that journalists can very seldom make the hard-hitting exposes required to hold them to account.

They appear to be terrified of the kind of kinetic, campaigning, investigative journalism I want to do. And their fear seems to make them furious. The treatments I’ve written seem to press a button, which makes them shout and swear and dismiss them out of hand.

Read 8 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

9 Jul

Every government seeks to remake the nation in its own image.

And what a cruel, reckless, dysfunctional nation they're turning this into.

Thread/

Their vision appears to be of a nation where no one does anything for the sake of any one else.
In which self-interest rules.
In which we become people

“… who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.”

In which we have boundless compassion for pets, but none whatsoever for asylum seekers.
In which, if you are poor, sick, disabled or homeless, you are treated as a nameless embarrassment, invited to shuffle off quietly and die.

Read 12 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

8 Jul

Climate crimes have perpetrators. They also have facilitators. The BBC is still facilitating misleading propaganda. That's the opposite of a public service.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

@RHarrabin

As usual, it's lions led by donkeys. The BBC has some excellent frontline workers, such as @RHarrabin and @BBCJustinR. But among senior decision-makers, there seems to be a disastrous combination of scientific illiteracy and the appeasement of powerful interests.

When you look at the way the BBC reports the livestock industry, you find that nothing has been learnt. In this case, it's not even both-sidesing the issue: livestock farmers and their lobbyists have a clear run. If the BBC were any keener on sheep, it would be illegal.

Read 5 tweets

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

7 Jul

To those now claiming that continuing to wear a mask in public places is a sign of mental illness:

I hope you don't get what I got for Christmas - a 14-week knock-out from C19.

I don't want to give that to anyone. You call it a syndrome. I call it concern for other people.

I'm OK now, but the illness was vicious and frightening. It was 14 weeks I'll not see again. For some people with Long Covid, it could be a lifetime. Do they really not care about the possibility that they might inflict that on someone else?

I'm trying to understand the people now bombarding me with mask-hate, and tbh I'm struggling. My best guess so far is that if you have no empathy, you can't understand why anyone else would, so you assume it's some kind of pathology.

Read 6 tweets

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