1. Trump’s preposterous claim that a “savage Venezuelan prison gang” has “taken over Times Square” is a reminder that people like him actually know nothing about the world, because they never step out of their suites and chauffered cars, offices and private planes.🧵 2. The ruling class doesn’t do its own shopping, or wander around town, or use public transport, or walk into an ordinary café or bar, or join a queue or wait for anything.

This is an important issue, constantly misunderstood. So here's a short thread about "marginality" and capital.
1. Land that's "marginal" for agriculture is often central for wildlife - and for the people who live there. ....🧵

https://twitter.com/TheMorganics/status/1849212965985128552

2. There are not 6.4m ha of "marginal" land in the UK on which machinery can work. The “margin” is always in the eye of the beholder. But in this case it doesn’t actually exist.

1. Abuse and harassment are never acceptable. But this is not the first time I’ve seen an emphasis on abuse and harassment shielding bad science. This is a short thread on how it works.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… 2. It happened with climate science deniers a lot. In the 2000s, they would claim to have received abuse and threats, and almost invariably get national news coverage. Sometimes they would produce no evidence of such threats. They were just taken at their word.

This story is one of the most disturbing I've ever covered. It's about how the views of a deeply weird ideological sect affected science, medicine and the media, with devastating impacts on patients. Please read and pass on. This horror has to stop. theguardian.com/commentisfree/… I see my own profession, the media, as being as culpable as any. How did we allow a bizarre sect, with a phenomenally cruel and brutal agenda, to set the prevailing view of this and other issues?
And it was right across the board: just about every major outlet in the UK.

When you dig into the hidden detail of the government's carbon capture and storage programme, the sheer scale of fiscal and environmental irresponsibility is hard to comprehend. We could be on the hook for £50 billion, with zero benefit. My column. 🧵 theguardian.com/commentisfree/… It turns out that Labour has simply copy and pasted Tory policy, without any modifications. But the purpose of Tory policy was to provide huge, ongoing and open-ended contracts for the fossil fuel industry, not to cut emissions.
It will *raise* greenhouse gas emissions.

1. Could we stop saying "natural gas"? It sounds almost wholesome, but it's one of the most potent drivers of climate breakdown. The term is
a. meaningless
b. fails to properly to distinguish it from other sources.
The obvious alternative is "fossil gas" or fossil methane".
🧵 2. Yes, I know the term was coined to provide a contrast with syn gas/town gas, but extracting gas from geological strata is neither more nor less “natural” than cooking it up. As Raymond Williams noted, “nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language”.

This is absolute madness. Carbon capture and storage has failed time and again. Labour has slashed reliable green programmes, to pour vast sums of our money into a complete crock. The only possible explanation is lobbying by fossil fuel companies.🧵 theguardian.com/environment/20… Here's the reality of carbon capture and storage, after 50 years of practice: a bonanza for oil companies, but useless as a mitigation measure. desmog.com/2023/09/25/fos…

1. A fortnight ago, I wrote about the scandal of our Internal Drainage Boards, which are supposed to stop flooding, but are unaccountable, self-serving, feudal bodies that do more harm than good. Now a disturbing email has landed in my inbox. 🧵theguardian.com/commentisfree/… 2. It was sent to the Internal Drainage Boards by Innes Thomson, head of the Association of Drainage Authorities, that supposedly oversees the IDBs. Here’s the text:

It's worth reminding people who opposed the C19 lockdowns in the UK how much worse things would have been without them. The NHS was overwhelmed, people were dying at horrendous rates. Lockdown came too late but, even so, saved many lives. 🧵theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/s… We could have done it another way, like Taiwan’s brilliant test, trace, quarantine, support system. Taiwan lost only 7 people to C19 in the first year of the pandemic, with no lockdowns. Just 7! But thanks to our useless government, none of the necessary measures were in place.

1. I’m sorry to return to this question, but I think it hints at everything that's wrong with our media and public conversations.
*When did you last hear a critique of capitalism on the BBC?*
A thread/ 2. This is the system that dominates every aspect of our lives. Yet it seems to be off-limits at the BBC, and almost all other media. Seldom mentioned, never investigated, never criticised and never even properly explained. The same goes for our dominant ideology: neoliberalism.

1. You might not have heard of it, but the system supposed to protect us in England and Wales from #floods is an absolute disgrace: a network of old boys' clubs completely unaccountable to the public. No wonder it fails so badly.
My column + thread.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… 2. The Internal Drainage Boards model dates from the 13th Century, and remains feudal in character. They’re cabals of landowners, unaccountable to the public, beholden neither to government nor to local authorities, who tend to operate in their own interests.

1. Whenever I write about new fermentation technologies, that could greatly reduce the environmental impacts of our diets as well as the exploitation of animals, I run into the same set of objections. In this thread, I’ll take them one by one.🧵 2. A. “I don’t want to eat food from factories”.
Well that’s unfortunate, because almost everything you eat has passed through at least one factory before it reaches you. Even your fruit and veg are likely to have been through a grading and packing plant. Cont/

1. How and why did the racist riots happen, and what do they tell us about where we might be heading? This thread concerns one part of the answer, the formation of what the historian Arno Meyer called a “crisis stratum” of disillusioned young men. 🧵 2. He was writing about the rise of fascism 100 years ago, but there are some disturbing parallels. Of course, there are also some major differences: for example, we are not recovering from a devastating war. How has it happened without that catalyst?

There is no such thing as a migrant crime wave. It's a myth spread by racist agitators. 🧵 brennancenter.org/our-work/analy… In fact, immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent and property crime:
antoniocasella.eu/nume/Adelman_2…

A shocking report about how big environmental NGOs have helped greenwash the most damaging of all food products - beef. They've collaborated with brutal conglomerates to spread disinformation. As I know to my cost, in taking on beef, you take on everyone. vox.com/future-perfect… These organisations need to take a long hard look at themselves:
@WWF
@nature_org
@EnvDefenseFund

1. What we are seeing all over social media now is flat denial of the very existence of the far right. Far right agitators claim to be simple “patriots”, defending their country. Which is just what far right agitators have said for the past century.🧵 2. They also claim that 20th Century Nazism and fascism were not far right at all, but leftwing movements. On what grounds? That “Nazi” is a contraction of National Socialist. I wonder how many other Nazi claims they take at face value?

Where in the #KingsSpeech is the promised end to new oil and gas licences?
Instead, there's a bill "to support sustainable aviation fuel". But there is no such thing as sustainable aviation fuel, and no prospect of it materialising, unless you rewrite the laws of physics.🧵 Perhaps, like the last government's Rwanda bill, the sustainable aviation fuel bill will legislate the nature of reality, asserting that such a thing exists when it does not.

One of the penalties of changing your mind about a topic is that it provokes a certain kind of glitter-eyed fanatic, who will see you thenceforth as the devil incarnate. From that day on, in my experience, they will devote a large part of their lives to hounding you. 🧵 Because I’ve changed my mind quite often, I’m now cyberstalked by a pack of these obsessives, some of whom have been scribbling furiously about me for over 20 years. They lace together every thoughtcrime I’ve committed, to construct a narrative of pure evil.

1. This is a thread about a new form of political organising, which proved spectacularly successful in this election, and that other constituencies would do well to adopt. It’s a means of navigating our unfair, unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system. 🧵 2. It’s the People’s Primary model developed by some very smart folk in my own constituency, South Devon. They set up the @SDevonPrimary. This article explains how it works. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

#IDthought 6: At every general election, we are faced with a binary choice. With one cross, we are deemed to have signalled our agreement everything in a party’s manifesto and everything else – if it wins – it can ram through Parliament over the next five years. 🧵 It’s not that different from the cross or thumbprint with which indigenous people were asked to sign treaties with European colonists, which in some cases they were unable to read. It arises from the same mode and style of governance.

#IDthought 5: Until the neoliberal era, inequality declined for some 60 years. From the 1980s onwards, it returned with a vengeance. Since 1989, America’s super-rich have grown about $21 trillion richer. The poorest 50 per cent, by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer.🧵 Why? Because trade unions were crushed. Because tax rates for the very rich were slashed. Because any regulation that big business viewed as constricting was loosened or eliminated. And, perhaps most importantly, because *rents* were allowed to soar.