Mailwatch(ed) Forum

I didn't know that, but I'd be surprised if energy producers weren't the biggest polluters. That seems a bit like saying "you know who causes animals to be killed for meat? Slaughtermen!"

The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Wed Sep 13, 2023 5:44 pm Also that is a very flawed study.

Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, the world’s leading authority on big oil’s role in the escalating climate emergency

Flawed, very flawed? Do please expand on that ...

With regards to that study it's very similar to a study that the Guardian promoted saying that 71% of carbon emissions are to blame on just a few companies, the Guardian and other outlets misrepresentated that figure. Simply blaming Climate Change on all these companies is a cop out that ignores the fact that Climate Change is an us problem.

This study here breaks down how much each sector emits

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by ... -come-from

Yes. It's a nuanced problem. You can't blame China uniquely for their emissions when they're making shit that we can't get enough of on TEMU, for example. And, yes, ESSO are bastards, but that reminds me, I must fill up my SUV next time I drive half a mile to Tesco.

The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Wed Sep 13, 2023 9:51 pm With regards to that study it's very similar to a study that the Guardian promoted saying that 71% of carbon emissions are to blame on just a few companies, the Guardian and other outlets misrepresentated that figure. Simply blaming Climate Change on all these companies is a cop out that ignores the fact that Climate Change is an us problem.

This study here breaks down how much each sector emits

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by ... -come-from

I do rather like Our World In Data and some similarly dry, factual sources. However, I don't see any contradiction with the Guardian's article; it is not a dataset which contradicts or invalidates the other, neither does it get Indescribably-Big-Oil out of the dock.

They have known for decades the impact of their product, and they have chosen to fund disinformation rather than renewables. These people are not providing a public service.

A ladybird has just arrived on my desk. Yes, it is September.

Joining "Just Stop Oil" or at least having some kind of targeted but tangential engagement must look pretty compelling tonight.

A few pricks jumping on trains are now balanced by a government full of pricks jumping all over the 2030 ambitions and the 2050 legal commitments. There's the fulcrum upon which the "debate" rests.

Doing something amplifies the very real concerns of any scientist who is not rolling in oil cash. Doing nothing merely enables the latter knoberati.

The Berlin Marathon takes place tomorrow. It is nigh on impossible to get a flight in to town and has been for days. The 50.000 runners will only dump about half a million plastic cups on to the streets, as the globally-wired helicopters whirr overhead.

Our Just Stop Oil movement, the Klima Kleber ( trans: superglue yourself to the road for the sake of the climate), are miffed and have vowed to disrupt it. Our newish conservative mayor, in his deliciously cut Jermyn Street shirt, has deployed Herr Plod en masse.

It's already getting ugly.

The Marathon course passes but a few hundred meters from us and the Klima Kleber - also known as the Last Generation - tried a dry run this afternoon. Plod pulled them in to church - A FUCKING CHURCH! - to check their ID and then let them on their way. Tooled up lawyers jumped in to spring them on the basis that being who you are is allowed under the constitution.

The LG then made their way at a snail's pace to Potsdamer Straße and then proceeded to glue themselves to the busy junction where I get our fruit, veg and herbs, and where sex workers take their clients into a four-storey sex supermarket for a couple of lines and a blow job. Needless to say, a police presence in the area is not summat we are used to. Nurse Ratchet, my physiotherapist, was out walking the hounds and was filmed giving the aggressive officers dogs' abuse. I like her, always have.

Upshot: The press are losing their minds, the cops are calling for army back up, and the city is pleading with runners not to batter any activists live on global telly. "There is a record to broken", I kid you not.

We have broken enough records this year, ta very much, so I just wish the activists every ounce of success. If I was agile enough, I would be with them.

How does policing work? Sounds like the Police are a bit close to the Mayor?

The police forces are operated on a state-by-state basis with certain elements, (the SEK commando anti-terrorist troops), being deployed at a federal level. Individual states can call for back up on a need-to basis, which is why we see cops from shitty little towns taking selfies on their phones and spraying passers-by before the 01 May festivities move up a notch.

I have no idea what the army could possibly have to do with all this.

Two sides of a coin...


How did our Berlin correspondent find it?

Boiler wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 4:51 pm How did our Berlin correspondent find it?

I watched it on a YouTube feed with a fag and a coffee. Much like many others, I guess.

Half a dozen or so LG protesters were briskly and heavy-handedly slapped down, but the orange paint was there for all to see. The pillars on the Brandenburger Gate are still looking like Trump, too.

The whole shebang is the lead story on every outlet. They have made their point.

Government’s given the green light for a Norwegian company to develop the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea. Tiny minded Tory people with tiny visions who don’t give a fig if the world burns. There’s not enough hours in the day to despise them.

Well, this is helpful

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/ ... ance-costs

But it is not only owners of Model Ys – which with a starting price of about £45,000 was the bestselling electric car in the UK last year – who are finding that, like the government, insurers are wobbling about the cost of net zero.

Alex Gerlis, who bought a Smart EQ Forfour last year, had insurance from John Lewis Finance but, before the mid-August renewal date, it advised him it would not be able to offer a renewal because it was not insuring electric cars (see below).

It comes as all motorists face soaring insurance costs, with prices said to be at an all-time high. A recent cost of living bulletin from the Office for National Statistics revealed that the price of car insurance – which for many Britons is one of their biggest household bills – is up by 52.9% in the last 12 months.

The insurance for my (absent) ICE car has gone up by about 20%.

The European September values are starting to roll in.

Not surprisingly, they are moving from the remarkable in to the insane territory. North or south, +4° is the new norm against the long-term averages

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -september

Meanwhile, I still can't be arsed with the autumn, so I will be at the open air pool tomorrow afternoon.

Indeed - 1st of October and until 7pm tonight I was sitting outside in a t-shirt at my godson's home helping him build his Lego Captain America, followed by Baby Rocket's Ship. Didn't even feel the need for a warming cuppa.

It's his sixth birthday on Tuesday: what on Earth will things be like when he gets to my age? It troubles me.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... nergy-head

The prospects of the world staying within the 1.5C limit on global heating have brightened owing to the “staggering” growth of renewable energy and green investment in the past two years, the chief of the world’s energy watchdog has said.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, and the world’s foremost energy economist, said much more needed to be done but that the rapid uptake of solar power and electric vehicles were encouraging.

“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” he said in an interview. “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.”

“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” he said in an interview. “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.”

But Birol also noted that greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector were “still stubbornly high”, and that the extreme weather seen around the world this year had shown the climate was already changing “at frightening speed”.

The IEA, in a report entitled Net Zero Roadmap, published on Tuesday morning, also called on developed countries with 2050 net zero targets, including the UK, to bring them forward by several years.

The report found “almost all countries must move forward their targeted net zero dates”, which for most developed countries are 2050. Some developed countries have earlier dates, such as Germany with 2045 and Austria and Iceland with 2040 and for many developing countries they are much later, 2060 in the case of China and 2070 for India.

Cop28, the UN climate summit to be held in Dubai this November and December, offered a key opportunity for countries to set out tougher emissions-cutting plans, Birol said.

EU to take back control from threats by a rogue polluter state.

Well I never.

https://insidecroydon.com/2023/09/19/po ... s-vandals/

A secret Facebook group where members celebrate criminal vandalism carried out against ULEZ cameras is being run by the Tory Mayor of Croydon. By STEVEN DOWNES

The Tory Government’s policing minister, Chris Philp, the MP for Croydon South, is a member of a social media group in which criminal acts, damage and vandalism to public property are celebrated on a near-daily basis.

Philp, a member of the King’s Privy Council for the past year, has confirmed that he has failed to post anything on the private Facebook page to condemn the criminality and, when he was contacted about his membership of “Croydon say no to ULEZ expansion”, he could only offer as an excuse: “I cannot be held responsible for what other people post on Facebook groups which I do not administer"