1. This week’s column is about something we badly want to believe, regardless of the evidence: that livestock farms are benign and harmonious. Why? Mostly, I think, because it chimes with books and cartoons we see as very young children. Also: a threadtheguardian.com/commentisfree/… 2. It discusses a film enjoying unexpected success in UK cinemas: Six Inches of Soil. In many ways, it’s a good film. But it tells us a story we want to hear, and in some respects is misleading and wrong. sixinchesofsoil.org

1. There’s a telling sequence in the Netflix docuseries Raël. A completely mad cult claims, without a jot of evidence, to have cloned a human. And the world’s media fall for it, hook, line and sinker. All it took to fool them was 2 people in white coats and some lab equipment.🧵 2. What do we learn from this?
A. That the media is as susceptible to evident BS as the members of the crazy cult.
B. That it has a massive diversity problem – and not just the one(s) you are probably thinking of.

Nowadays, when you discuss the far right, people insist “That’s not far right!”.
Folk who have plainly shifted to the far right claim to have “transcended left and right”. Or state that the terms have no meaning.
What’s going on?
Hold onto your seats, it’s a wild ride. 🧵 For the past few years there has been a concerted effort on the far right to reposition Nazism and fascism as left/socialist movements.
I know, I know, but bear with me, because this is now a widespread thing, and unsuspecting people have been fooled by it.

In the UK and around the world, environmental defenders are being attacked with ever more extreme laws. Who designs these laws? Corporate lobbyists. Who demands they are imposed? The billionaire media.
THIS IS NOT JUSTICE.
This week's column. 🧵
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… In the UK, you can now receive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – meaning peaceful civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter.
Ordinary criminals are being released from prison early, and the spaces filled with environmental defenders.

This is a shocking exposure of how the BBC has been captured and disciplined by government minders. It might explain why, almost every day, the BBC still lets corporate lobbyists from Tufton Street junktanks pose as independent, objective commentators.🧵prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/64… This is in direct contravention of the BBC’s own editorial guidelines. It breaches them day after day. Almost the only times when these corporate lobbyists are held to account is when guests challenge them about the way they hide their funding.

The UK government's criminalisation of rough sleeping, now passing through Parliament in the Criminal Justice Bill, is overseen by a Prime Minister who owns four luxury homes for his own use. One of them, in Kensington, is reserved for accommodating family guests.🧵 "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." Anatole France

I thought the flirtation with far right themes arose from naivity and audience capture. But now that Vandana Shiva, once a hero of the green left, is repeatedly reposting far right accounts, I wonder what the hell is going on. @drvandanashiva, please explain. 🧵 Anyone can see how the far right is cynically homing in on the farmers' protests, exploiting them in exactly the same way as they did in the 1920s. Anyone with knowledge of history knows how staggeringly dangerous this is.

1. This week’s column is about how the far right is successfully exploiting farmers’ protests across Europe and the US, to build its base. This is in no way to tar all the farmers' protests with this brush. But it’s an extremely dangerous moment.

🧵theguardian.com/commentisfree/… 2. The historian Robert Paxton points out that “It was in the countryside that both Mussolini and Hitler won their first mass following, and it was angry farmers who provided their first mass constituency.”

You would think this was a wild and improbable conspiracy theory. But every fact in this column is checked and verified.
How the Atlas Network’s dark-money junktanks steer policy around the world.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… What's so frustrating is that endless reams of nonsense are published about fictitious conspiracies involving the World Economic Forum etc, while the real stuff is scarcely mentioned.

A Happy New Year to you all.
It’s going to be a challenging one.
The ongoing massacre in Gaza
Accelerating environmental breakdown
Trump’s bid for the White House ….
Those of us who want a better world will have to work even harder than before.
🧵 1/9 And we'll need thick skins. When we object to environmental destruction or ill-treatment of human beings, we're often accused of being “snowflakes” or “melts”. In reality, you need endless courage and resilience to keep confronting assaults on humanity and the living planet. 2/9

This is 1930s-style fascism, with the added twist that Milei is a creature of the Atlas Network, a confederation of rightwing junktanks funded by some of the world's grimmest oligarchs and corporations. What they are getting in Argentina is what they want everywhere.
Be warned.

https://twitter.com/FedericoS15190/status/1737679124188270858

It's always the same story with fascism. It's a front for the interests of the very rich, shutting down opposition, deregulating their predatory activities, handing the control of state assets.

Everything that makes campaigning against fossil fuels difficult is 10x harder when it comes to opposing #LivestockFarming.
Yet, alongside fossil fuels, it's one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. We shouldn't shy away.
This week's column.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… I highlight the @UNFAO's crucial and disgraceful role as a major cog in the meat misinformation machine.
And I introduce the concept of Guillotine Syndrome: you might marginally improve the process, but it's still decapitation.

1. I’m very grateful for the response to my appearance on Question Time, but also puzzled. I felt that in all cases I was simply stating the bleeding obvious.
Is this now so rare in public life that it becomes an event when someone does it?
The grim truth seems to be: yes. 🧵 2. It seems to me that almost all public discussion in the UK now falls into one of two categories:
A. Deliberate lying, obfuscation or distraction, whose purpose is to disguise plutocratic power, and to present its interests as the interests of all.

We should never underestimate the extent to which the BBC changed this country by giving endless airtime to Nigel Farage, other far right extremists and the Tufton Street junktanks, while shutting out progressive voices. 🧵 You might wonder what its game is: after all, they all profess to hate the BBC and want to defund it. But I've seen this organisation change beyond recognition since I stopped working for it, 36 years ago.

Wow. There are no trains running south from Bristol. Not their fault - there's flooding. But instead of replacement buses, @GWRHelp has given us taxi chits. Just one problem: hardly any taxi drivers want to do the distance. There's a queue of 1000 people and no movement. It's as if they've never faced disruptions before.
Even by UK rail standards, this is crazy. People have been standing for hours in the cold.

1. This is a thread about waste plant and animal fats, which for 20 years have been promoted as the magic potions that would solve all our transport problems. It doesn’t matter how often this story gets debunked: unlike these commodities, it appears to be endlessly recyclable. 2. In 2004, biodiesel was sold to us, by the EC among others, on the grounds that it could be made from used cooking oil. We could all enjoy guilt-free driving! Yes, it *could* be. But, as I estimated that year, it could supply only 1/380th of demand. monbiot.com/2004/11/23/fee…

1. This paper in Nature should spell an end to the nonsense spread by @AllanRSavory et al: that livestock grazing can cause a net removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. It shows that soil carbon cannot compensate for livestock’s own emissions. 🧵nature.com/articles/s4146… 2. It should also spell the end of claims for “climate friendly beef” and of the industry selling carbon credits in ranchland (you might as well buy them from a coal mine). The whole edifice is built on false claims: bullshit in (literally and metaphorically), bullshit out.

1. This is the only radiator in our house. We haven't turned it on yet, or used any other heating source. Yet we are always warm. Why? Because this house (which we rent) was built almost to passive house standards. Our bodies/cooking/appliances are sufficient to heat it. 🧵 2. Every new home should be built this way. It’s not rocket science. It just takes a little more care, and strong regulatory standards. Yet the government still allows houses to be built that will need to be extensively refurbished to meet its own environmental targets.

1. In this week’s column I rashly attempt to work out how much it would cost to restore a functioning public sector and put the country right. It’s a very rudimentary effort: a proper job would take months and a wide pool of expertise. But ... 🧵
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… 2. On my very rough estimates, to prevent the collapse of public services, buildings and infrastructure and avert state failure, public spending would need to increase by between £65 billion and £100 billion a year for 20 years.
That’s the legacy of 44 years of neoliberalism.

1. I’ve been asked by a couple of people to respond to @csmaje's claim on Twitter that my figures on likely electricity demand for precision fermentation are wrong. So here’s a short thread. 2. Here are the workings I provided in the book. The manuscript was reviewed by some of the leading scientists in the field, and I had my arithmetic independently checked.

What is the UK's underlying problem? It's an endemic disease that withstands all changes of government, a disease we scarcely know how to name.
Clientelism: the exchange of favours on a massive scale.
This week's column, plus short 🧵: theguardian.com/commentisfree/… It explains not only the HS2 fiasco, but also the astonishing contradictions of austerity: hobbling essential public services and slashing holes in economic safety nets while lavishing money on roadbuilding, the arms industry and tax breaks for the very rich.