… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Category: politics

  • The climate credentials of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet :: Keir Starmer

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    While Keir Starmer is leader of the UK Labour Party and therefore notionally supposedly opposed to Rushi Sunak’s cabinet and government, he’s a Tory pretending to be a Socialist, a red Tory.

    https://youtu.be/DDEdFxUZ01s

    Keir Starmer has abandoned every one of his Socialist ‘pledges’ on taking over the Labour Party. Included in these pledges is

    3. Climate justice

    Put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do. There is no issue more important to our future than the climate emergency. A Clean Air Act to tackle pollution locally. Demand international action on climate rights.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/23/keir-starmer-denies-abandoning-labour-leadership-pledges

    … He denied that the 10 promises he made during the 2020 race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn had been abandoned and insisted they remained “important statements of value and principle”.

    However, Starmer refused to confirm that he stood by several of them, including public ownership of utilities and rail services and the abolition of university tuition fees.

    He has been repeatedly criticised by some on the left of the party who accuse him of shifting away from the platform he stood on three years ago.

    Challenged on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme over whether voters could trust him to deliver the five new national missions, Starmer said the pledges made during his Labour leadership bid “haven’t all been abandoned by any stretch of the imagination”.

    He said: “What I’ve had to do is obviously adapt some of them to the circumstances we find ourselves in. Since I ran for leader, we’ve had Covid. Since I ran for leader, we’ve had the conflict in Ukraine. Since I ran for leader, we’ve had a government that’s done huge damage to our economy.” …

    On climate commitments specifically,

    9 Jun 2023 Labour postpones £28bn green plan as it seeks to be trusted on public finances

    … Labour has scaled back plans to borrow £28bn a year to invest in green jobs and industry as the party’s leadership looks to review its spending in an attempt to prove its fiscal credibility.

    The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, delayed plans for a green prosperity fund to start in the first year of a Labour government, saying it would “ramp up” by the middle of a first parliament.

    She said the decision had to be taken as a result of the poor economic backdrop and rising interest rates, after Liz Truss’s short premiership crashed the markets last autumn. …

    18 Jun 2023 Keir Starmer to ‘throw everything’ at plan to get UK to net zero

    … Keir Starmer will pledge to “throw everything” at net zero and the overhaul of the UK’s energy system and industries, promising new jobs in “the race of our lifetime” to a low-carbon future.

    The Labour leader will seek to regain the initiative on his plan for green growth on Monday, having rowed back earlier this month on a pledge to invest £28bn in a green industrial strategy, a figure that will not now be reached until the second half of a Labour parliament, as well as damaging rows with trade unions over the future of the North Sea.

    Announcing a package of policies designed to decarbonise the energy system and industry, Starmer will say: “We’re going to throw everything at this: planning reform, procurement, long-term finance, R&D, a strategic plan for skills and supply chains … Pulling together for a simple, unifying priority: British power for British jobs.” …

    This is when the Tories started accusing Labour of pursuing Just Stop Oil policies. “Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, accused the Labour leader of being “the political wing” of Just Stop Oil.” There’s also actually a suggestion of terrorism in Grant Shapp’s comment … that phrase.

    His team also rebuffed suggestions of a U-turn on the North Sea oil ban. Rescinding permission for projects that have cleared all regulatory hurdles before the general election would be costly and legally complex, so the party’s proposed ban on new oilfields will not cover projects that have achieved all three levels of consent, for exploration, development and production.

    It is unlikely that many of the more than 100 North Sea licences the government is mulling would fall into that category, though one of the biggest – the Rosebank oil and gas field – could clear the final regulatory hurdles soon.

    It’s not possible to get to Net Zero if Rosebank is permitted. Just like everything else, Keir Starmer and the Labour party can’t be trusted on the climate.

    Which is why he gets heckled by climate protestors

  • The climate credentials of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet :: Rishi Sunak

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    Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil's You May Find Yourself... art auction. Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch appear.
    Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch appear.

    Zac Goldsmith resigned as Rishi Sunak’s Minister of State for Overseas Territories, Commonwealth, Energy, Climate and Environment on 30 June 2023 claiming that UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was uninterested in the environment. This has made reviewing Sunak’s climate credentials relatively easy because there are many news articles doing it for me ;)

    Goldsmith says Sunak is apathetic about the environment. It’s hard to disagree by Helena Horton.

    There are many similar articles basically saying the same:

    He blocked spending on climate and nature when he was Chancellor.

    “… Sunak refused to sign a foreword to the Dasgupta report, a review of the value of biodiversity. This review, by the respected professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, was welcomed across the board …”

    “He was given a major opportunity to stand on the world stage as the UK’s new prime minister at the UN’s Cop27 climate summit last year, but he flip-flopped on attending, and only flew out to Egypt at the last minute, giving the audience a policy-free speech about how his children care about the environment.”

    Authorised the Cumbria coalmine creating more climate destroying pollution.

    Sunak and his twat Grant Shapps have repeatedly attacked the Labour Party claiming that “eco-zealots” from Just Stop Oil are “writing Keir Starmer’s energy policy”. Sunak is using the Daily Mail’s eco-zealots taunt and attacking Just Stop Oil’s position as unreasonable.

    Since Zac Goldsmith’s resignation Sunak boasted That Oil Funded Think Tank ‘Helped Us Draft’ Crackdown on Climate Protests and wrote an article in Murdoch’s Sun newspaper on 3 July 2023 attacking Just Stop Oil. Let’s take a look at that article.

    People want an end to eco-zealot’s disruption – I’ll ensure we do stop it. Firstly Sunak is aligning himself closely with the climate-change denier and climate destroyer Rupert Murdoch. It’s likely that someone at Murdoch’s Sun wrote this article and Sunak has agreed to have it attributed to him.

    Sunak claims that Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion attempt to “bypass and undermine” democracy through their tactics and that instead “policy should be decided by those who were elected to do so”.

    We don’t permit governments to destroy us and our planet – our very existence – through the ballot box. They don’t have the right to destroy this planet through the ballot box.

    [ED: Fekk I forgot: Sunak has never been elected Prime Minister anyway and has no mandate to do anything.]

    Sunak also doesn’t represent us the electors – he represents the fossil fuel industry and the ultra-rich (may well be the same few people). He’s admitted as much by saying that big oil helped frame the anti-protest laws.

    Sunak doesn’t actually mention his daughters in the Sun article which also lead me to suspect that it was not actually written by him or his staff. Mentioning his daughters is the “I couldn’t be such a cnut, I’ve got young children” sop. He is such a cnut.

  • Climate activists disrupt Keir Starmer speech

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    I said very recently that I’ll be reviewing Rishi Sunak’s cabinet’s climate credentials. I’d better look at the shadow cabinet’s too and pull my finger out X

  • The Capitalists have destroyed the planet. We need to unite, depose them and move on.

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    Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
    Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.

    The Capitalists have destroyed the planet. The big oil companies knew decades ago that they were destroying the planet and that they will be killing people but continued regardless. World governments have known for decades that the oil companies are destroying the planet and did very little much too late. Temperature records are getting broken on a daily basis. Even today Rishi Sunak’s UK government is refusing to stop oil and gas exploration.

    We need to discard these Capitalists who are destroying our planet and replace them with people who can be trusted to take climate action. If you care for the future, you need to express yourself and depose the Capitalist facilitators of Climate destruction.

  • ‘Terrifying’: Tuesday Was Hottest Day Ever, Breaking Record Set Just 24 Hours Earlier

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    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    “Not a milestone we should be celebrating,” said one climate scientist. “It’s a death sentence for people and ecosystems.”

    Data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction shows that the average global temperature reached 17.01°C, or 62.62°F, on Monday—making it the hottest day ever recorded.

    The record lasted just 24 hours.

    On Tuesday, the global average temperature peaked at a new all-time high of 17.18°C as regions worldwide—from Asia to Africa to the U.S. South—reeled from dangerous heatwaves.

    As Bloombergreported, “The heat this summer has already put millions of people around the world at risk.”

    “China is experiencing a scorching new heat wave less than two weeks after temperatures broke records in Beijing,” the outlet noted. “Extreme heat in India last month has been linked to deaths in some of its poorest regions. Last week saw a dangerous heat dome cover Texas and northern Mexico, while the U.K. baked in its hottest June on record.”

    https://twitter.com/ProfBillMcGuire/status/1676518953579847680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1676518953579847680%7Ctwgr%5E4f7325df03b8582b5f4425382d0ee174680ed4e8%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fhottest-day-ever-tuesday

    Earth’s hottest day came after the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) declared the onset of El Niño conditions, which are marked by warming surface waters in the Pacific.

    “The onset of El Niño will greatly increase the likelihood of breaking temperature records and triggering more extreme heat in many parts of the world and in the ocean,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement Tuesday. “The declaration of an El Niño by WMO is the signal to governments around the world to mobilize preparations to limit the impacts on our health, our ecosystems, and our economies.”

    “Early warnings and anticipatory action of extreme weather events associated with this major climate phenomenon are vital to save lives and livelihoods,” he added.

    Record temperatures and intensifying extreme weather, including an unprecedented wildfire season in Canada, come as world leaders are facing urgent calls to rein in fossil fuels—the primary driver of the global climate emergency—at the upcoming COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s top oil producers.

    “People around the world are already enduring climate impacts, from heatwaves, wildfires, and air pollution to floods and extreme storms,” Jeni Miller, executive director of the California-based Global Climate and Health Alliance, toldThe Guardian on Tuesday. “Global warming is also exacerbating crop losses and the spread of infectious diseases, as well as migration.”

    “Governments must prepare to deliver a commitment at COP28 to phase out all fossil fuels, and a just transition to renewable energy for all,” Miller said.

    Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Britain’s Imperial College London, toldReuters that the hottest global temperature ever recorded is “not a milestone we should be celebrating.”

    “It’s a death sentence for people and ecosystems,” Otto added.

    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).