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Leigh Phillips Profile picture
Leigh Phillips
@Leigh_Phillips
Journalist, geologist & science writer (incl. Nature, New Scientist, Guardian, Telegraph). Co-author People’s Republic of Walmart. Author of Austerity Ecology.
Oct 20, 2024 • 35 tweets • 6 min read
A brief thread on the British Columbia election.

I often come across this sentiment—that NDP shifted to the centre under Premier Horgan and even more so under Eby—from Greens with a capital G and with a little G.

But this gets the analysis of class and markets dead wrong… I was happy to back the party, but I do have a number of criticisms of the BC NDP. Generally though, my critiques relate to how the NDP’s become too beholden to the MANGO class (media, academia, NGOs), ie people like Torrance, at the expense of the industrial working class.
Jun 21, 2024 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Really quite devastating presentation on polling from @davidshor on messaging over climate in the US at the Breakthrough Institute’s dialogue in San Francisco. Worst messages tested: electric cars, Green New Deal, frontline communities, ‘Big Oil lied’, climate pollution Image Talking about electric cars especially deadly for Democrats. Women in particular frightened of battery running out. (Interesting gendered spin on range anxiety I hadn’t thought about before). (Silver lining: “hybrids” as a message is v popular) Image
Apr 22, 2024 • 59 tweets • 19 min read
Happy Earth Day! Here in one place: all the left critiques of eco-austerity, degrowth, anti-nuclearism, etc I can find.

This school of thought has been described as ‘left ecomodernism’, but despite some affinities with ecomodernism, it’s really just classic democratic socialism Image Hopefully folks (including those writing curricula) find this Earth Day reading useful. Some are long-form & heavy, others short & light. At the end, I’ve listed key books associated with/influencing this school of thought. If I’ve missed key texts, please add them to the list.
Feb 17, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
The very welcoming welcome sign at the entrance to an arts festival near my place warns patrons not to engage in cultural appropriation.

“Zero tolerance for any white people making or eating tacos or banh mi’s”
Image
Image “Espresso for Italians only, please. In the beer garden, we also ask that only Czechs and Germans drink the Pilsner.”
Dec 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
12k likes for a 200k account devoted to social justice.

The majority of those marching for peace neither support nor deny the Oct 7 atrocities, but atrocity denial can’t be dismissed as the extremely-online fringe.

A short 🧵 Image Meanwhile, Douglas Murray is cheered on by The Other Team every time he denies the bodycount of the Gaza Health Ministry, dismissing it as Hamas propaganda, even though in past conflicts independent counts (including Israeli counts) have tended to confirm the ministry’s numbers. Image
Jun 29, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
This “report” is pure conspiracism, confabulating a vast new right-wing (and far-right) nuclear “lobby” bankrolled by industry.

The reality is that most contemporary nuclear advocates come from the left & climate activism, & quite deliberately don’t take a penny from industry If anything, it’s the other way round: the nuclear industry until recently has largely been scared of its own tail, more focussed on decommissioning and had grimly accepted what it thought was a society-wide consensus that nuclear was a dead end.
Dec 5, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
In an otherwise interesting history of the petrochemical industry by Adam Hanieh, this statement jumped out at me.

Whatever one thinks about plastics policy, plastics are absolutely not the first novel polymers thrown up by nature and which the rest of nature is unused to. It’s actually kind of fascinating how quickly plastispheric ecosystems have emerged (and the consequent advent of plastisphere ecologists).

Of course, whether this is good or bad for humans and the ecosystem services that support us is another matter...

nature.com/articles/s4157…
Oct 18, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Fab piece from @EricLevitz on the faulty theory of change of tomato-soup-throwing “keep it in the ground” climate activists and the guilty billionaire oil-heiress philanthropists who back them, and how it equates to a carbon tax without the revenue: nymag.com/intelligencer/… The left critique of carbon taxes (and other c-pricing) was always about the inequity of such flat taxes, even with dividends to shave off the rough edges.
Oct 14, 2022 • 80 tweets • 20 min read
Unfortunate article in The Nation, the venerable US lefty mag, that appears not to have been fact-checked, so let’s do that fact-checking, shall we?

There are 10 main claims made by author Paul Hockenos, so it’ll take a bit of a chonky🧵. But here goes:

thenation.com/article/world/… CLAIM 1: The Ukraine war and fighting in and around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has weaponized its reactors. Image
Aug 10, 2022 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
One of the odder things in recent years is to see how the left has passed from having many miners in its ranks fighting for better wages and conditions to a left with few miners but many activists who are *anti-mining*, a position the older left would find unrecognizable.

A🧵: Miners, and coal miners in particular, played a central role in the construction of the left in the 19th century and through the 20th century in Belgium, Germany, Poland, Japan, Canada, Chile, pretty much wherever you want to look.
Jul 12, 2022 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
Gah, what a mess.

At the risk of poking a bear here, a quick Twitter🧵 (from a white guy, admittedly) on indigenous knowledge and science, and how to approach this better than, well, Twitter.

One of my favourite historical episodes is the Franklin Expedition and the (re)discovery of the location of the lost ships the Terror and the Erebus. It’s a story at the crossroads of exploration, science, colonialism, racism, and capitalism…
Jul 11, 2022 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Useful thread on contingency plans in DE and EU (2017 Gas Supply Regulation) as well as solidarity mechanisms in the event of extended cut-off of NG to DE.

Pascal mentions coal plants may need to be restarted. This is plainly grim for climate targets.
Jun 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
We have to drop the idea that climate change was imposed on society by evil-doers; it is instead a byproduct of mass material advancement (ie the postwar institutionalization of trade unions and the welfare state). There is a reason the Anthropocene begins in the 1950s, not 1750s To unpick the problem, personal responsibility environmentalism would have to roll back 3/4 of a century of broadly social democratic advance. (Source: International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme igbp.net/globalchange/g… ) Image
Sep 28, 2021 • 49 tweets • 9 min read
Andreas Malm’s call for activists to use violence to force upon democratic society his preferred set of climate policies regardless of the majority’s wishes demonstrates a wildly anti-democratic, authoritarian impulse that the rest of the left should reject without qualification. ImageImage Imagine for a second the response if the political right called for abortion clinics, gay bars or the offices of those calling for more liberal immigration to be blown up.