I posted up a petition this afternoon by 38 Degrees against the water companies charging us all extra for them to clean up the mess they’ve made so that they can continue making bloated profits and enriching their senior executives and shareholders. I’ve now received an additional message asking me if I have a personal story about being affected by the water companies. I don’t but I’m posting it up on here in case any of my readers do and want to support them in this.
‘Dear David,
Thank you for adding your name to the petition No bonuses or dividends while you hike our bills to clean up the mess you made.
This is an automatic email to confirm that your action on a 38 Degrees campaign has been registered and let you know of follow up actions you could take to help the campaign succeed. You will only receive further 38 Degrees emails if you have opted in to do so.’
‘SHOCKING: WATER COMPANIES WANT YOU TO PAY MORE TO CLEAN UP THEIR MESS. [1]
Water companies have APOLOGISED for sewage spilling into our rivers and seas, and announced that they would FINALLY proceed with the upgrades we have been demanding – to the tune of £10 billion. [2]
But that’s not the whole story!
It was also revealed that we – their customers – will be footing the bill. [3] Then, to add insult to injury, these same companies are still planning to give out shareholder dividends of £14.7 billion from our increased bills at the same time. [4] It’s an outrage!
Thankfully, this has yet to be approved by Ofwat, the water regulator, and we have some time to show these companies how strongly the public is against these plans. If we get thousands of signatures on a petition demanding no bonuses for CEOs or dividends for shareholders, we can pressure them to put a stop to this unjust system – and take responsibility for cleaning up their mess once and for all.
So, David, if you think water companies should be footing this bill and not us – their customers – add your name to this petition today:click the button below and your name will be added automatically.
No bonuses or dividends while you hike our bills to clean up the mess you made.Why is this important?Although the announcement of investment in our sewer network is welcome – your customers cannot be expected to foot the bill.The lack of investment and funding since water companies went private is not the public’s fault and therefore the onus to fix this should not be on us. And we definitely shouldn’t be paying a penny more for as long as shareholders and executives are still getting bonuses and dividends.SignedThousands of your customers
Our pressure is working but we cannot take our foot off the pedal. Sign the petition below and demand water companies stop this bill hike if shareholders are still being paid.Click the button below and your name will be added automatically.
I’ve signed it, because I strongly believe that it’s outrageous that customers should be charged for cleaning up the mess solely so that the companies can keep their boosted profits for their shareholders and senior staff, and I hope you’ll sign too.
It’s a crisis over thirty years in the making. Since privatisation in 1989, private water companies in England* have underinvested in pollution prevention to boost profits.
They’ve built a debt mountain of £53bn, while giving shareholders £72bn!
Attempts to regulate them have failed. Under privatisation, it clearly pays to pollute.
Send the Government a clear message: stop privatisation, stop the sewage.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The UK’s most trusted utility company is publicly owned Scottish Water.
They’ve spent £72 more per household per year than English water companies. That’s equivalent to an extra £28 billion being invested in England’s water network!
Yesterday’s pollution plan from Government includes just £1.6bn extra investment. That’s tiny compared to what we could reinvest by stopping private dividends!
Sign the petition now to demand the Government stop the pollution crisis by taking our water companies into public ownership.
The more signatures added just after the Government’s lacklustre announcement, the clearer it’ll be to ALL parties that any “plan for water” must end privatisation.
22,000 people just like you have already signed. Thank you for amplifying their message: water belongs in public hands!
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team
*If you’re in Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland — where water is publicly owned or not-for-profit — please still sign this petition in solidarity! By fighting for public ownership of English water, you’ll force the press and politicians to confront the truth: privatisation fails our public services. That will make it harder for politicians to justify leaving other essential public services across Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in private hands.‘
I’ve signed it, because these scandals have been going on for nearly 40 years, ever since Thatcher privatised the water companies in the 1980s. The Tories set up a body to protect the waterways, but gave it less power than the previous regulatory authorities. And over the past few years there’s been one scandal after another of sewage or untreated chemicals or both being poured into England’s rivers and seas, all to boost the directors’ bonuses and the companies’ share values.
It’s another Thatcherite failure. It’s time the whole charade that private industry is automatically better was ended, and we moved back to a mixed economy.
BREAKING: Water companies released raw sewage into rivers OVER 800 TIMES A DAY last year.Our rivers and seas were polluted time and time again, because water companies, the Government, Ofwat and the Environment Agency are dragging their heels. [1] This is unacceptable.
It’s time for water company bosses to do their jobs and clean up their act. Bonuses paid to water company executives have surged, despite most failing to meet sewage pollution targets. [2] The average bonus was £100,000 for a period when foul water was pumped for nearly 3 million hours into England’s rivers and seas. [3]
Until these sewage spills stop, not a single penny in bonuses should be paid to the CEOs of these companies. Right now Ofwat are consulting on plans to do just that. [4] You can bet lobbyists for big water companies will be feeding into that consultation, trying to get them to weaken their plans. We can’t stand by and let that happen – we need to come together and drown them out.
So will you help protect our waterways from pollution, and sign the petition today calling on Ofwat to make sure their plans are as tough as possible? Use the button below to add your name in just one click – then make sure you share the petition with as many people as possible so we can drown out those who want to block these plans. We’ll hand it in before the consultation closes.
I’ve signed it, because this is a recurring, persistent problem. We’ve have similar reports and petitions before of the water companies fouling rivers and the sea in their local areas. And once again, the problem goes back to Thatcher. When the Tories privatised the water companies in the 1980s and set up the environmental protection agency or the rivers authority or whatever it was that was supposed to take on the job of guarding Britain’s watercourses from pollution, Private Eye reported that they deliberately weakened its power. People were also warning that the removal of EU legislation protecting waterways would also see companies dumping raw sewage into it. There was even a strip in the magazine, the Brexiteers, which showed a gammon couple first deny that it was going to happen, and then gleefully rushing into a sea polluted and brown with what Billy Connolly described as ‘jobbies’. They were glad because although it was turds, it was good, British turds.
Let’s clean up the environment and clean out politics: Tories out!
GB News, the self-proclaimed alternative to the ‘wet, woke BBC’, is in this fortnight’s Private Eye. The broadcaster apparently has overtaken Sky News in ratings, and has taken to pushing stupid, and potentially dangerous conspiracy theories. These include myths that the vaccine doesn’t work, or is responsible for deaths, and that there’s no need for the lockdown. Pretty much staples of the wider right-wing anti-vaxxer fringe. But one of these conspiracy theories comes very close to fascism. Mark Steyn has apparently told his viewers that the coronavirus vaccine is the cause of the falling birthrate in the west of the ‘Aryans’, who built civilisation. Firstly, as the 19th century linguist, who used the term ‘Aryan’ for what are now termed the Indo-European languages, George Muller, it’s a linguist not racial term. A dark-skinned Indian, who speaks Hini or one of the other languages descended from Sanskrit, or an Urdu-speaking Pakistani can both be fairly described as Aryans, because their languages are derived from that introduced by the Aryans, who invaded Indian c. 3000 BC. But both would be targeted by the Nazis over here because of their race. Muller stated quite clearly that conflating Aryan with race was dangerous, and it’s a pity more people didn’t listen to him otherwise the carnage of the Third Reich might have been avoided.
He’s right that the birthrates in the developed west are falling along with the sperm count of western men. This is alarming, as there have been predictions by respectable magazines and newspapers that if it continues, by 2050 half of western men will be considered clinically infertile. No-one really knows the cause of this, but it’s been suggested since the 1990s that a type of plastic, phthallates, may be responsible. Other causes are probably the industrial pollution responsible for the reproductive deformities in amphibians, which Alex Jones notoriously declared were ‘turning the frickin’ frogs gay’. These chemicals are believed to mimic female hormones, hence their damage to those animals. I’ve also seen claims that it’s all due to female hormones from the reproductive pill getting into the biosphere, but I haven’t seen any scientist make this claim. In my opinion, it comes from that part of the right which is anti-feminist and so pro-life as to condemn contraception as well as abortion. I also got the impression that all western men were affected, including Blacks and Asians, and not just Whites.
Steyn’s claims resemble the conspiracy theories that were going around the Black communities in America and possibly apartheid South Africa back in the 90s. These claimed that the government was putting chemicals in Coca-Cola to sterilise young Black men. That was totally wrong, though it was understandable given the persecution of Blacks in both those countries. Steyn’s is a first-world, White version of this. It comes very close to all the stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about the machinations of the Jews to enslave and destroy the White race, although as far as I know Steyn isn’t an anti-Semite.
He is, however, an Islamophobe. About a decade ago he was a partner with late Reaganite bloviator Rush Limbaugh and his radio station out in New Hampshire. Much of the content Steyn put out on his blogs and columns on the internet were attacks on Islam, including some of the weirder rulings made by Iran’s late Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was one of those pushing the ‘Eurabia’ fear. This holds that Muslim birthrates are outstripping those of indigenous European Whites to such an extent that they will become the dominant race and religion and impose sharia law. A friend of mine told me he did some calculations, and that’s simply not going to happen. I don’t doubt that the Muslim population will expand immensely in the next decades, and this will present serious problems if the radicals and Islamists extend their influence over these communities, but it won’t lead to their population overtaking everyone else’s.
Steyn also tried to warn or scare people with the example of Feyenoord in the Netherlands. This is a majority Muslim town where some decades ago the Muslim dominated city council publicly invited the non-Muslim population to convert. I don’t know, but I think their attitude would be unremarkable, perhaps even ordinary in very pious, hardline Muslim countries like Pakistan, where non-Muslims can come under very intense pressure to convert. But obviously in the context of the non-Muslim, secular west, where religion is considered a matter for the individual’s private conscience, it’s totally unacceptable. The problem is, I don’t know how common such political moves by Muslim-controlled local authorities are. As far as I know, it only happened in Feyenoord, although I’m sure that non-Muslims living in solidly Muslim areas are under pressure to conform to their standards of behaviour.
Away from Steyn, the article describes how GB News, like Fox over in the US, threw in their lot with Donald Trump, talking him as US president until it became the ‘MAGA channel’. Their predictions of Trump’s eminent suitability for the Oval Office was definitely born out by the Orange Buffoons massive greed, incompetence and disastrous policies towards blue collar workers – more attacks on their rights, further decimation of their welfare provisions to enrich Trump’s friends and donors, and more outsourcing. As well as attempts to muzzle federal climate and environmental scientists for the benefit of the oil industry. And I could go on.
As for GB News’ attitudes over here, it’s solidly behind Farage and Brexit and resolutely against the welfare state and the NHS. If you’re a member of the working class, GB News is not your friend. But the stupid conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine threaten to do real harm. We’ve already seen instances where people have refused the vaccine, then caught the virus and died. And Steyn’s story about birthrates and ‘Aryans’ threatens to encourage real Nazis and Fascists, who’ll target not just Muslims but Jews.
This sketch was inspired by a comment left by one of this blog’s great readers about the cartoon of a bald Keir Starmer with his wig on a stand. They suggested that it would be funnier if about Boris Johnson and his unruly hair. It’s a great idea, and so here’s this piece which suggests that Johnson’s hair is an animal he’s trained to sit on his bald nut. Yes, it’s that old joke again! I think it’s also timely as mad rightist Mahyar Tousi has put up a piece about the vile Eton snob organising a conference to promote his legacy.
Which is what exactly?
Oh yes, mad, self-destructive nationalism, mass poverty, a wrecked economy and agriculture, the cavalier pollution of Britain’s Green and Pleasant Land, the privatisation of the NHS, the removal of democracy and its replacement by appointment by Conservative MPs and the further domination of politics by the privileged elite. Usually from Eton. Oh yes, and the substitution of lies and bluster for truth.
I had this email come through earlier this evening, urging me to contact my MP to ask her to attend tomorrow’s opposition day debate and vote against Truss’ proposal to bring back fracking.
‘David, we’ve got a chance to make sure MPs take a stand against fracking. How? There’s a vote set to take place about the Government’s ridiculous fracking plans on Wednesday in Parliament. [1]
We know the public are against it – it’s why you and 80,000 others signed the petition demanding the Government rethink their plans. And we also know multiple politicians have been speaking out against fracking, including Conservative MPs. [2] Now we need them to back their words up with action, and vote against fracking this week.
But they’ll only do that if they hear from us, their constituents, calling on them to show up tomorrow – and vote against fracking.
So, David, will you ask Karin Smyth to go along tomorrow and vote to stop fracking in its tracks?
Don’t worry if you’ve never emailed your MP before – here are a few suggestions on what you could say:
Make sure you ask them to go along to tomorrow’s opposition day debate on fracking.
Mention how harmful fracking is to the local community and environment – it can cause earthquakes, and increase air pollution and road traffic. [3]
Remind them that fracking was banned for good reasons in 2019, and science shows the process has not become safer yet. [4]
Tell your MP that the real solutions to the energy crisis are more renewable energy and home insulation. In contrast, fracking emits greenhouse gases that contribute to climate breakdown. [5]
So, will you email your MP now asking them to attend the vote tomorrow and stop fracking in England once and for all?
I’ve had no problem doing this, not least because one of the proposed areas for fracking was part of Keynsham, a small town just southeast of Bristol near Bath. If you click on the link, you get to a general page that asks you for your address so you can contact your local MP, whoever he or she may be, and send them your message asking them to attend the debate. If you also want to halt the return of fracking, please feel free to use the link above to contact your local politico.
Before I go any further, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am very definitely not trying to sneer at, deride or stigmatise anyone’s sexual identity, sexual orientation or gender presentation. I also condemn wholeheartedly persecution and discrimination against anyone, simply because they are gay, trans or whatever.
However, I am greatly concerned that the expansion of trans identification is being driven by other, malign factors rather than the unfortunate feeling by some individuals that their biology does not match their true identity. In the case of trans identification, I am afraid this is being pushed for ideological reasons and for the benefit of the medical industry without due care for the young patients. I am terribly afraid that many young people are being misdiagnosed and put on a path to drug and hormone treatment and very possibly surgery, that they don’t need and that will lead them to damaged health. I am also afraid that trans identification has now become a social contagion, in which psychological vulnerable young people have convinced themselves they suffer from what used to be called gender dysphoria, in the same way eating disorders emerged and spread in the past. And I am also deeply concerned about the malign influence of Queer Theory in deliberately destabilising young people’s gender and sexual identities for reasons purely of political ideology.
Added to this are concerns about the possible effects of chemical pollutants, which is the subject of the video below. Odin’s Men is a YouTuber, who posts videos laughing at and criticising woke people on Tiktok, especially those with particularly remarkable appearances. But here’s he’s commenting on the finding by a Black American scientist, Tyrone Hayes, whose research has shown that mad conspiracy theorist Alex Jones had a point when he said he didn’t like them putting chemicals in the water that were turning the fricken frogs gay.
Dr Hayes was tasked by his employer, a biochemical company Synergen, to investigate the possible effects of their pesticide, Atrazine, on frogs. There seems to have been a ‘nod and a wink’ from his employers that, of course, he wouldn’t find any. But Hayes did. He found biological male frogs developing multiple ovaries. This occurred even in specially biologically engineered amphibians that had no female genetic inheritance. This occurred at the levels Atrazine was normally present in the environment. The video compares the denials of the biochemical industry with those of the tobacco companies decades ago that nicotine was addictive. Odin’s Men then goes further, talking about the plunging levels of testosterone in western men and speculating whether this is also caused by such pollution. And finally he wonders if the increase in LGBTQ+ identification among young people to near 40 per cent is also due to it.
Amphibians are in crisis all over the world because their skins are water permeable and so more vulnerable to soaking up and absorbing the pollutants in the environment. Scientists have produced research for at least a decade that frogs are developing reproductive anomalies and disorders tied to environmental pollution. And as far back as the 90s there was concern about the dropping fertility levels in western men. This has also been linked to falling testosterone levels and supposedly shrinking genitals. The chemicals supposedly responsible for this are phthallates, a form of plastic that’s supposedly in everything. This is extremely controversial, and back in the ’90s the Wessex Sceptics over here in Britain took time out from criticising crop circles and the National Lottery to try to debunk it. However the fall in western male fertility appears to be well-established, regardless of the right-wing nonsense that claims it’s all due to people eating soya products instead of meat. And certain fertilisers do impede normal sexual development. Back in the early- and mid-80s the Observer published an article condemning the sale of such a chemical to Pakistan and other developing countries. The fertiliser was banned in the west because of a number of harmful side-effects. One of these was irreversible sex changes in girls.
There is a difference between the effects of these chemicals and gay and trans identification. The chemicals are having a physical effect in feminising the test frogs and turning them intersex. As far as I am aware, though, sexual orientation and gender identification are mental matters. There are a number of theories about the origins of homosexuality. These range from evolutionary theory, in which same-sex desire has emerged in nature because it confers a positive advantage on the animal at a species level. For example, one theory claims that it has emerged in humans and primates as it would allow the dominant male to keep a harem of fertile females without competition from other males, who could still nevertheless serve him. Some scientists have said that it is genetic in origin or perhaps is caused by abnormal levels of testosterone in the womb. And then there was Freud and his idea that it was all caused by dysfunctional family relationships, which I believe has now been discredited. I can’t say I’m convinced by any of these theories, and it may be that gay and trans identity isn’t due to chemical pollution.
But it now seems beyond question that toxic chemicals are being released into the environment which are damaging the ecosystem and which may be affecting humans. And you don’t have to be a mad conspiracist theorist like Jones to be worried about that.
Just to lighten this post up a bit, someone took Alex Jones’ notorious rant about gay frogs and turned it into a rave video on YouTube. Here it is from Placeboing’s channel.
One of the major stories this week has been that the Conservatives have voted to allow the water companies to dump raw sewage into our rivers and seas. This is, as Mike has pointed out, threatening to bring back cholera, and no doubt many other lethal Victorian diseases. Mike and the good peeps on Twitter have put up a list of the various Tory thugs, who passed this noxious motion, and the excuses have started already. Mike’s local MP, Fay Jones, was telling everyone that the amendment would cost the taxpayer £600 billion or so to replace the Victorian sewage infrastructure. But it wouldn’t. It would cost the government that, who might have to raise taxes as a result. But it shouldn’t be raised from them. The cost would have to be borne by the privatised water companies. I remember when the water companies were privatised under Thatcher the head of the local company down here in Bristol, Hooper, was all in favour and declared that it would allow them to raise more money for investment. So if any expense is involved, it should come from their profits, shareholder dividends and customers, not the British taxpayer. Jones also complained that people attacking the government’s actions over sewage obscured the brilliant work they were already doing reducing discharge from storm overflows. But there’s precious little evidence of this, either. So once again, the Tories are lying.
This was after David Davies started crying that he was being abused and subjected to online hate, because Catrin Maby had asked him an awkward question about allowing untreated effluent into our watercourses. It’s deeply distasteful coming after the murder of David Amess, a murder that seems to be an act of premeditated Islamist terror rather than caused by online hate. So once again, we have the Tories wrecking peoples’ health but claiming they are somehow the innocent victims, while presenting precisely no evidence to support their assertion.
But as nasty as all this is, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
When Brexit was first being mooted critics warned that once Britain was out of the EU and their environmental regulations no longer applied, the Tories would allow this and other abuses to happen. It was even shown in a short-lived cartoon strip in Private Eye. This was ‘The Ukippers’, and featured a fiercely patriotic couple who believed that everything would be absolutely brilliant once we have left the EU. One edition showed the two celebrating the new, higher environmental standards we were promised after Brexit by running into the sea for a swim. The two were undeterred by the fact that the water was foul and brown, and filled with what Billy Connolly used to describe as ‘jobbies’. Despite the foul state of the water around them, the pair were still convinced that it was much cleaner than it had been under the EU. It’s an attitude I’m afraid will probably come true at some point, as Tory voters repeat the lie that somehow it’s all cleaner, which I’m sure that Boris and his cronies will tell at some point.
In fact the Tories have a history of allowing pollution into the water. It started in the 1980s the moment Thatcher – or was John Major? – decided to privatise it. I can remember reading articles in Private Eye, once again, about how the Tories were passing legislation to strip the National Rivers Authority of its powers to prosecute the newly privatised water companies for pollution. I’ve got a feeling similar legislation to reduce its powers even further has also been passed. And there have also been a series of scandals, also covered by Private Eye, in which various water companies were caught violating environmental regulations with the dumping of sewage or chemicals into rivers.
This latest attack on the British environment was predicted, because the Tories have been doing it for decades.
This week the UN issued a report stating that climate change was now ‘Code Red’ for humanity, and that irreversible damage had been done to the environment. So the right-wing press immediately got their best and brightest to dispute this. Thus Jeremy Vine had on his show Mike Parry, who I believe is one of Murdoch’s minions. He’s a former hack on the Scum, the Depress and now a host on TalkRadio. Which is owned by Dirty Rupe, that walking affront to responsible, civilised journalism. And it ain’t just me that says this. When he took over one of the leading Ozzie newspapers in the 1970s, its journos went on strike complaining that they didn’t want to see the paper they worked for and loved turned into a laughing stock. And when Murdoch took over an American paper later in the decade, the hacks did the same there. The subplot of Superman 4, in which the staff at the Daily Planet protest at being taken over by a right-wing publisher of yellow journalism, seems to have been inspired by these real events. Facing him was the awesome Ash Sarkar, the main woman in Novara Media. And she handed Parry his ample rear end.
Parry had tried to counter her by stating that as the majority’s of today’s carbon dioxide emissions come from China, who were also about to open several more coal power stations, it was absolutely useless Britain trying to do anything to stop greenhouse gas production. Sarkar responded by stating that we could pass laws banning British corporations from investing in fossil fuel and polluting industries in China. She also pointed out that historically, Britain was responsible for a vast amount of carbon dioxide emissions. Her co-host, Michael Walker, produces the stats to support her case. Historically, Britain is responsible for 22 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced. America and China both are responsible for 29 per cent, but India, despite its growing economy and vast population, only 3 per cent. Walker acknowledges that Parry is correct about the Chinese opening new fossil fuel power stations and that it’s a problem that needs to be tackled. But he also makes the excellent point that industrialising nations are right to be outraged at western demands to cut their carbon emissions, when the west has benefited so much from its own industrialisation that produced much of it.
Here’s the video. I’m afraid it’s a bit long, at over 21 minutes, and I haven’t watch more than a few minutes of it, but it is very informative and does expose the poverty of the right’s arguments.
Mind you, at least Parry was able to marshal some good, intelligent arguments, unlike Sky News Australia. I found a video from them which was so stupid I actually felt less intelligent after watching it. And I only watched it for a few minutes. The host, another right-wing blowhard, got their pet climate expert on to poor scorn on the left’s desire to cut carbon emissions. Because carbon dioxide is plant food, and if we cut carbon emissions, they’ll all die off. How stupid, they sneered.
Er, no. No-one is talking about totally removing carbon dioxide from the planet’s atmosphere. What they are talking about is getting rid of the excess carbon dioxide, or halting its production, which is responsible for rising temperatures across the globe and the consequent damage to the environment. But Murdoch and the right doesn’t want people knowing about this. It’s why the Koch brothers, who own a vast amount of the American oil industry, spent much of their money buying up and closing down independent climate and environmental research laboratories, which were then replaced by their own pet scientists and astroturf organisations. It’s why Donald Trump passed a tranche of legislation preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from publishing anything actually showing the damage being done to the environment. This is all being done for corporate profit, not for the benefit of ordinary folks, who will be left with the legacy of horrendously polluted countryside. Thanks to the oil industry, much of the Louisiana swamplands, for example, is seriously contaminated.
My guess is that the right will only start taking climate change seriously when their parts of the world, like the Cotswolds in Britain and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s part of BANES, becoming howling dustbowls and the dunes start advancing on Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea and Knightsbridge. Douglas Murphy in his book, Last Futures, a history of brutalist architecture, states that in the 1970s the scientists behind the report Limits to Growth ran computer models to predict the future. And with only two exception, they all predicted that if current trends continued, civilisation would collapse and humanity be all but extinct by the end of this century. The report’s been criticised for the simplicity of its models and the technology used, but its seems that much of it still stands up. He also states that when the environment eventually breaks down, the rich will retreat into specially engineered artificial biodomes, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves in the wilderness outside.
Great. The rest of the world becomes a Mad Max battleground while the rich retire inside something like the Eden Project, hoping that nobody like Sean Connery comes inside to wreck their utopia like the plot of Zardoz.
I’ve blogged about this before, but for those seeking genuine information on the climate crisis, books are available. I came across one in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham. It covered the whole world, and I think it was one of the set texts by the Open University. For younger readers, last month’s Postscript catalogue contained one published by Dorling Kindersly, Dan Hooke’s ClimateEmergencyAtlas. The blurb for this stated that Hooke
offers a clear explanation of the science behind climate change, with concise text supported by numerous diagrams. World maps show the environmental impact of different countries, detailing issues such as their population growth, consumption and deforestation, as well as how they have been affected by the rise in global temperatures. A final section describes the actions being taken in response to the crisis, and the part individuals can play.
The catalogue says it’s suitable for ages 10+. It’s normal price was £12.99, but they were offering at £6.99. I don’t know if it’s still available.
Ignore Murdoch, the Koch brothers and right-wing politicians like Trump, Blair. and as it looks like now, Starmer. It’s people like Hooke, the Open University, Ash Sarkar and the other peeps at Novara Media and, indeed, just about every respectable climate and environmental scientist on the planet, who are actually an unashamedly telling the truth.
Murdoch is publishing disinformation and lies. It’s now more than ever important to listen to the Left and mainstream science, and stop the profiteering from trashing the planet.
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