Popular Mobilisation?

Congratulations on a job well done.
"Plane Stupid" activists manage a high profile inconvenience and some high security embarrassment. Is this the Popular Mobilisation that Ed Milliband called for as the only way to secure change? It is. But he will, no doubt, wriggle away from it as fast as he can.

The nuclear industry , despite admitting that it has neither the expertise nor the money to make itself safe, has proclaimed itself "sexy".
Hmmm. Don't fancy yours much.

New Balls Please

In our ongoing quest to make a bollocks of our entire planet, we have unwittingly de-bollocked the biosphere by pouring as much gender-bending chemistry over everything as our enterprise can muster.
This global castration is a profitable affair and currently has the full support of the UK government.

The new McFly (Manchester Climate Fortnightly) is available for your perusal, here

After 500 years of demonstrating their manifest superiority over the natives, Europeans doing business in South America turn to the wisdom of pre-Columbian societies to dig themselves out of the hole that their superiority has so cleverly dug.

Meat continues to be murder, one way or another.

Every cloud has a silver lining, apparently

Throbgoblins International tried over the weekend to get themselves listed on a comics website, with the object of furthering the old world domination plan - which has gone a bit flat of late. We were ineligible, as it happens, because of the (frankly) embarrassing traffic levels that we :"enjoy". Were we to quadruple our traffic we would qualify. We are getting it ALL wrong. C'est la vie. Fortunately none of us here have the good sense to be disheartened by this state of affairs and will plough on regardless. The sense of futility will no doubt reach critical mass at some point and we shall run colourfully amock at the Trafford Centre with a potato gun.

Seasonal variation

Ooh look - it's snowing. Everything must be alright again. Hoorah!

Thanks to Janet Alty for this link to the Righteous Mothers

Nothing to fear

The government sneaks through extra measures to allow random apparatchicks to rifle through your sock drawer and pass choice nuggets on at their own discretion. They also backed away from the promised reversal of the laughable ban on protest within earshot of parliament

There is a fair wind and some good shit.

Running on empty

The Eu agrees to not bother on car emissions until it suits the car industry

The Brazilian government agrees to destroy the rainforest at a slower rate

Meanwhile an invasive creature with a tactic of constructing interlinked super-colonies, whilst exploiting other creatures and over-running the environment, makes a nuisance of itself. It's lasius neglectus - superants!
It seems a bit rich for humans to take exception to such a strategy. We make so much of it, ourselves

George Monbiot whistles in the wind

Another senseless re-up

Fashion victims

Consumers will pick up the bill for the green energy revolution. I suppose it will make a change from picking up the bill for the beach houses of speculators or the yachts of oligarchs - or even the long lunches of share-holders.
Personally I find most people's houses unbearably hot in winter, and most people's energy consumption really quite bafflingly high. If you want to sit around in your underwear eating ice-cream in the dead of winter whilst watching a 12 foot home cinema and tumble-drying your thongs, then yes -you will have to pay for it. Tough.
The vulnerable must be protected - that should go without saying -and capital should be policed for abuses, but the days of cheap energy are over. Get over it.
How did people imagine it was going to happen? Magic?
These are cultural as well as practical and political problems

Speaking of winter in the north of England; A few inches of snow and the world grinds to a halt around here. We are now so completely encased in the mental and technological bubble of our fabricated lives that the fiction we inhabit is bolloxed by entirely predictable seasonal variation. God help us when the real weather hits.

Here's an entirely predictable seasonal repost;



Thanks once again to Andrew Revkin at DotEarth at the New York Times for his support.

Long-game

Neither Frank nor Ernest were invited to Poland this week.

Greenhouse gases will probably linger forever, but we are planning massive new coal burning power stations long before the technology (to make them anything but catastrophic) is either available or even proven feasable. Slow learners

We have established that free-market fundamentalism can't find its arse with both hands, but we are still leaving CO2 trading in the hands of free-market fundamentalism. Slow learners.

Maybe we should vote with our feet.