Bent As A Nine Bob Note?

At last, a climate related link to the dismal tale of graft that has engulfed the two-faced pocket-liners that we entrust with our collective well being. Apparently they're a sorry shower of bent bastards. Imagine my surprise.
Oh - did I mention incompetent?

The circle is broken, etc...

From John Hart's B.C. - There's a lot more (metaphorical) truth in this than any of us would care to admit

At least the handle is one of us.

The
steady
drum-beat
of
increasingly
bad
news

with a syncopated back-beat

The title of course refers to the old joke; An axe wielding lumberjack sets about hacking down a forest. One tree turns to another and says... "At least the handle's one of us!"
Cold comfort

Conditionality

The expected punch lime was unfortunately a victim of structural adjustment.

This was sparked off by watching this video (which I must admit I abandoned half way when the flying saucers appeared) and reading this interview with Uncle Noam.

Safeguarding our way of life

The instinct of crisis hit government classes throughout time and across continents seems to be to keep the people down and dumb. This seems to be a default position of power and it is no surprise to see it exercised against green dissidents, despite the fact that their concerns are widely shared within the establishment itself.
So, as the Andes gets ready for structural readjustment, the food supply dries up and the North Atlantic gets ready to tip us all over into more interesting times, we are encouraged to distract ourselves with boffin-magic and unreachable stars

Meanwhile we dump our shite out of sight and out of our minds,

Glaxo, baby

GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty seeks to rebrand the Pharma giant with a raft of humanising proposals

Throbgoblins International let out a round of applause, a gasp of disbelief and a burp of rather tart cynicism.

Trading Places

The carbon market, being as bolloxed as every other market, has screwed the price of carbon into the ground. One result of this is that the contribution to emissions reductions made by Germany's world-beating renewables industry is offset by the ease with which less scrupulous players can get their hands on the newly liberated excess permits - thus enabling carbon spewers to party like there's no tomorrow.

We're old hands at this

Wrong Track

Of course the real news is the ongoing brutalising of the people of Gaza by the Israeli army, but I shall stick to my brief.



UK train operators push rail travel out of the range of many by magically manipulating......TIME ITSELF!!!... and shutting loads of offices

Elsewhere, The future is put on hold, Ukraine has its gas cut off and engineers come up with a cement that is carbon negative.

A jury of one peer

First I must apologise for the lack of any discernable humour in today's cartoon. In the early stages I had high hopes for it, but sometimes one's most promising pets dissappoint one. I may have miscast Ms Ebola Congleton as today's lead. Frank would have had more fun. Never mind. The arrow may have missed its target, but the point and the barb remain.

The attorney General - the duly appointed, cabinet-ranking, partisan politician Baroness Scotland - is making plans to withdraw the protection of legal precedent from climate protestors who break the law in their stirling efforts to avert catastrophe. Suggestions that this is motivated by the Government's need to pretend it's all hunky-dory untill after the election are, of course, cynical in the extreme. Nothing to do with Heathrow and Gatwick and Kingsnorth etc etc. No ambitions were engaged in the making of these decisions.

Meanwhile... Ugmug's methane jaccuzi goes into overdrive.

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.

Virgin Suicides

As the available sites to despoil grow ever thinner on the ground, developers seek out environmentally sensitive areas to crap on. The beautiful island of Crete still has places left to profitably ruin, and the Virgin islands is also being targeted by those keen to wreck what little we have left. Richard Branson (he who would have us burn all available food in order to keep his airline and space-fantasy enterprises in profit) is funding a team of barristers to help save the island of Beef (oh yes) from development, so it doesn't obscure his view of heaven - which he can see from his porch. Mr Branson seems like a real curate's egg of a man.
The reefs and wonders around Branson's (and everybody else's) shores are rapidly turning to acid and will soon be sadly free of tuna.


This horrible tale (found on DotEarth) speaks for itself. It's not on the grand scale of the horrors of Mumbai, but is just as depressing in its own small way.


Throbgoblins International are no Tories, but it seems clear that the corrupt, stalinist scare-mongering, public flogging that has befallen Damian Green can't be defended at any level. It's Bush-ite.


Sellafield sweeteners and reckless public endangerment

It's BUY NOTHING DAY - so BUY NOTHING.

Visionary Genius

George W Bush is busying himself making the World safe for dengue fever and nuclear waste by dismantling environmental safeguards as fast as his little brain will carry him. Why wait for the end of the world when you can buck-wheats it today, at your own convenience?


Mutant malarial cockroaches riding enormous rats?

For a more positive view of what can be done, DotEarth has abundant links

("Buck-wheats" is a"Things to do in Denver when you're dead" reference - meaning a deliberately agonising execution.)

Rip-Snorter

Coke heads are destroying the planet. Yes. We know.

Our habit of tarmacing over the planet and decorating the ensuing car park with imported shrubbery is, apparently, not such a fabulous idea. And now we find we were expected to use cash from carbon auctions for green purposes! How could we know? What are we - psychic?

A Retrospective Emergency Engineering Procedure?

Data from models and measurements confirms yet again the reality of Anthropogenic Global Warming at both poles. Like global dimming - caused by our prudent spew of dust and other industrial phlegm into the atmosphere - the recovering ozone hole also seems to be masking our view of the gathering storm.

Hearts of Gold

Environmental criminals are making fortunes from everything from Tiger testicles to clear logging. The question of how to stop this has vexed much and many bigger brains than mine, but It's a sad (and probably accurate) testament to our motivation as a species that the only realistic solution that a lot of people can offer is to pay people NOT to lay waste to the planet.
Its something of a Kray twins approach to conservation. "Hmm - nice rainforest you got 'ere. squire. 'Shame if somefin' woz to 'appen to it, eh? Nah -fer a small remittance..."
As long as the "protection" is effective, I suppose we can't be too fussy, at this stage in the game.

I'm afraid I've mislaid the link here...

His master's voice

The entire planet's financial well-being hung by the one thread of lending increasingly unsustainable amounts of debt into existence. Should the planet's nutritional well-being be hung on the single hook of oil dependent, genetically modified monocultures copyrighted by the Transnationals? The GM debate rolls on.
As the range of insects and diseases spread, and those of most animals decline with a changing climate, the possibilities for a domino effect toppling any single strategy seem quite large.

The good news is that the dirty coal bandwagon has been slowed by an EU vote.

We're not in Kansas anymore, toto...

As if the life of a penguin wasn't shaky enough - climate change is interfering with their familiar ocean-currents and driving them thousands of miles off course, to cast them up starving and battered on the beaches of Brasil.

In a desperate bid to secure re-election our glorious leader has resurrected the prince of darkness to spin the world back into it's right mind, and created a department for energy and climate. This sounds useful and is just in time to address the godawful and unstable state of the nuclear energy industry, the impending nationwide water shortages caused by rainfall shortfalls and river depletion, and the heir to the throne's misquoted pokes at the oil-based food lobby.

Meanwhile our betters are planning wide scale snoops into our e-mail and text lives - presumably part of a wider plan to follow our imperial masters down the road to torture and dissappearances - and the genuinely moving cult of the ghost-bike continues to spread.