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?

Dead man's chest

"War-torn" is such a compact description, isn't it. It leaves out the economics and the politics and the machinations of great powers, and concentrates on the trauma in the here and now, as though it had sprung fully formed upon an innocent world.
So we watch the seizing of an oil tanker by desperate men from a failed state - whose climate and conditions get crueller by the year - and we imagine that it is not a portent of things to come, but an abberation in an otherwise purposeful, perfectable world. We choose not to look down the path from whence this monster came.

One of many links from today's extensive coverage, and another one not so well covered, and another BIG ONE - not for the feint hearted

Monsieur McCudgeon is sporting this year's must-have look - pirate chic. I think it suits him

Secret Gardens and Magic Beans

All very hush-hush, don't you know.
There is an open admission that the need for GM crops is (allegedly) so pressing because of the inevitable diversion of millions of tons of foodstuffs to biofuels. We will continue to be fat lazy fucks who drive to the gargantumart to eat shite on a stick, so there can be no other alternative but to mess with what's left of our biodiversity and then place it entirely in the hands of the highest bidder.

The ongoing bollocks that is the nuclear industry just gets more and more priceless. Not only does the industry massively underestimate the amount of safe storage facilities required - based on a basic muisunderstanding of their core business - but they screw a series of blank cheques out of the government and an exemption from public scrutiny via the freedom of information act. So we will be obliged to pay up when they fuck up, without the satisfaction of knowing when or where or how they fucked up, or how much it cost.

This Searaser looks good though

Car-wash

No matter how much manufacturers reduce the direct emissions of individual vehicles, (and putting the ethical and practical absurdities of biofuel aside) there is still the small matter of replacing the entire planetary fleet of cars and building and servicing the infrastructure and maintaining the disconnected living arrangements that the car habit encourages -for an imminent NINE BILLION people . This monumentally destructive endevour cannot be hidden behind a handful of hybrids and a lot of empty promises.
Kick the car habit.


This cartoon originally appeared in the NEW INTERNATIONALIST magazine

Dreaming of electric sheep.

As people with more time than sense fantasise their lives/marriages/divorces away in cyberspace (whoops -hypocricy warning), millions are being made out of thin air. We are a gullible species, deceived (or otherwise) by the compelling narratives that we spin for ourselves. Perhaps we need a new one.
Coal is a case in point, wherein folks that scoff at AGW models fall headlong into the improbable sci-fi of perpetual CCS.


This video is, apparently, a youtube phenomenon. I am late, as ever. Very well done, though

Crawling from the wreckage

Why pick on the SWP, you may ask. They are, after all, a reliable source of placards for all your protesting needs. They have pounced readily upon many a trussed and helpless crisis and munched on it to sustain their righteousness. Personally I prefer a little more substance, which I appreciate may sound hollow coming from a cartoonist. Imagine what all that energy could build if it didn't define itself purely in opposition to.......whoops, there I go again...

Right down to the level of insects and parasites the planet's ecology is crashing - undermining the whole network of interdependence upon which we at the apex entirely rely.
Maybe a little less random insecticide will be a start.

Meanwhile the big dogs of the caring (and energy) professions take ever bigger bites out of the nation's one good leg.
(This is also true at all levels of the NHS, which is an organisation infected with an ugly careerism of the "don't know, don't care" variety.)

Here's a repost to celebrate Chuckles's 60th birthday the other day

Sow's ears

"Clean coal" is in the fine tradition of "friendly fire" and "eco-car". Horseshit, through and through.