Leigh Phillips 🇨🇦
@Leigh_Phillips
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Journalist, geologist & science writer (incl. Nature, New Scientist, Guardian, Telegraph). Co-author People’s Republic of Walmart. Author of Austerity Ecology.
Truro, Cornwall
Joined May 2009
I have a piece in The Atlantic today on “my favorite mass extinction event” in which I look at how humanism, aka anthropocentrism, is *unavoidable* in our relations with the rest of nature. Even when we try not to be anthropocentric, we’re doing an anthropocentrism.
Extinction is a destructive force, but it also increases biodiversity. Humans need to acknowledge that awkward truth if we want to survive, @Leigh_Phillips writes.
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Staggering piece of reportage, data viz & photography from a team at Bloomberg on the ruin that is Gaza. 42 million tonnes of rubble. As an historian specializing in *post-WW2 reconstruction* puts it: “Gaza is something never seen before in the history of urbanism.”
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You know how DuPont dumped perfluorooctanoic acid in West Virginia landfills, knowing in-house it was highly carcinogenic and caused congenital deformities, and Todd Haynes & Mark Ruffalo made a movie about it? . How is what Greenpeace has done with Golden Rice any different?
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Unfortunate article in The Nation, the venerable US lefty mag, that appears not to have been fact-checked, so let’s do that fact-checking, shall we?. There are 10 main claims made by author Paul Hockenos, so it’ll take a bit of a chonky🧵. But here goes: .
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The pro-hang-glider “left” is clearly not just fringe. It keeps happening. Something is very, very broken here. It undermines peace protests, isolates the anti-occupation Israeli left & anti-Hamas Palestinian left, & threatens everything the left is trying to do far beyond I/P.
Last night the Oakland City Council voted on a resolution to call for a ceasefire. A city council member tried to insert language condemning Hamas. This was the reaction…
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It grinds everyone’s gears when universities cynically, knowingly offer bullsh*t master’s programs with zero career opportunities while loading students up with galactic debt burdens, purely to juice their revenues. It’s a low-down dirty scam. But this takes the biscuit.
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Cruise ships are not at all my cup of tea, but if you can decarbonize them, what is the problem? Why is your granny’s vacation not worth decarbonizing but whatever *you* do on holiday is? Strikes me as trying to impose your aesthetic preferences on others.
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Body count from Hwaesong battery factory fire now up from 17 to 23. Which is 23 more than those killed from radiation exposure from the Fukushima nuclear accident. So logically, Greenpeace, Germany and co will now be pushing for the closure of all battery factories. Right?.
CCTV footage (from 🇰🇷 National Fire Agency) shows how a massive fire ripped through Aricell’s lithium battery factory in Hwaseong, South Korea, on June 24 after an initial battery explosion. 17 🇨🇳 workers, 5 South Koreans and 1 Laotian were killed in the blaze; 8 others were
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Degrowthers: “We don’t advocate austerity; we want communal luxury!”. Also degrowthers: “Personal washing machines and dishwashers will be banned. Remember when you were in a student dormitory and you had to share laundry facilities? Communal luxury will be like that.”
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Stop viewing Greenpeace as a noble NGO fighting injustice. It’s a multinational enterprise no different to DuPont trading in deadly PFOA in service of profit. Greenpeace just trades in fear, uncertainty & doubt—no less deadly—in service of donations.
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Really quite devastating presentation on polling from @davidshor on messaging over climate in the US at the Breakthrough Institute’s dialogue in San Francisco. Worst messages tested: electric cars, Green New Deal, frontline communities, ‘Big Oil lied’, climate pollution
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Some jaw-dropping noble-savage racism here. Same thing happens when First Nations engage in forestry, mining, mfg or energy projects. As the great @AshleyAFrawley puts it: “They love to think of us as magical D&D forest druids,” not fellow humans living in the modern world.
Waaah waaah indigenous people actually took sovereignty seriously instead of creating a museum exhibit of pre contact life for white people to pity them waaah waaaah
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Golden Rice is a crop genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene, what makes carrots orange, and a precursor of vitamin A. Licences are distributed for free and no royalties are collected.
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Teachers’ unions around the world should encourage every single one of their members to hold special classes next week about free speech, exhibiting the Mohammed cartoons in question, both in solidarity with the teacher beheaded in Paris, and to show they cannot be intimidated.
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Yes, people should just enjoy higher standards of living so they eat well and don’t suffer from vitamin A deficiency and don’t even need Golden Rice. But between now and that glorious day, Golden Rice is harm reduction.
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We’ve got 6-8 years before all those awesome earnest young people who became climate activists in the past few years turn entirely cynical and retreat from the issue after they find the world does not actually end as this sort of exaggerated, evidence-free collapse-porn predicts.
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How you know Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Ende Gelände etc don’t really care about global warming & that it’s just pantomime:. They did nothing to protest this climate vandalism, Germany’s destruction of Grafenrheinfeld nuclear plant cooling towers
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Greenpeace *knows* what the scientific consensus about genetic techniques in agriculture tells us: GMOs are safe, and little different to how humans have been breeding crops for millennia. The consensus is as robust as the consensus about anthropogenic global warming.
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I mean, Neil Young is not wrong when he says unscientific, vaccine misinformation is life threatening, but, um, he’s also the dude who wrote an entire album devoted to stopping GMOs called The Monsanto Years, that disseminated unscientific, life threatening misinformation.
Spotify is removing Neil Young’s catalogue from its service after the artist published —then took down — an open letter with an ultimatum: deal with the vaccine misinformation coming from Joe Rogan’s podcast, or lose his music . More:
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This charming degrowther who wants us to do away with fridges and stoves (and elsewhere calls on us to replace washing machines with communal washing) is not some fringe loon, but a PhD candidate in climate adaptation at Delft University of Technology.
When it comes to preparing & consuming food, communal kitchens would eliminate the need to have refrigerators, stoves, ovens, & other kitchen appliances in each home. They would reduce the consumption of materials & energy, & also food waste, by a lot. 6/.
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This is quite spicy: a South African dept of energy representative at COP26 asks a German diplomat why his country is offering African countries cash to shut down coal plants and give up a reliable grid when they won’t do it themselves. He won’t answer.
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The month humanity reaches a population of 8 billion—a remarkable achievement in our flourishing that should be cause for celebration the world over—the NYT publishes a grotesque piece of eco misanthropy puffing up the Voluntary Human Extinction movement.
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If Bernie freaking Sanders, who has repeatedly condemned Netanyahu’s bombing campaign, now counts as a genocidaire, as an analog of Adolf Eichmann, then plainly that word has become untethered from any real meaning. These people are unhinged.
@SenSanders It's actually not that shocking given their senator has been supporting genocide of Palestinians.
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But, like PFOA (previously used to make Teflon) for DuPont, fear of GMOs just prints money for Greenpeace. It’s their biggest seller! . And what does the death of 100,000 children a year from vitamin A deficiency matter, so long as the money printing machine continues to go brrr?.
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You get the impression from the eco-socialists and degrowthers that humanity wouldn’t face the threat of climate change or biodiversity loss if it weren’t for capitalism (or rather, if it weren’t for capitalist modernity). But I see no evidence to suggest this is the case.
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12k likes for a 200k account devoted to social justice. The majority of those marching for peace neither support nor deny the Oct 7 atrocities, but atrocity denial can’t be dismissed as the extremely-online fringe. A short 🧵
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Most of my adult life until recently, I’ve lived in places with no washer or dryer, and had to use laundromats. It’s an enormous hassle and time suck, not convivial or luxurious. When I finally had a place with my own laundry, it was life-changing. I don’t ever want to go back.
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French climate campaigners sabotage a cement factory due to its CO2 emissions. (Extensive destruction of machinery and equipment; this was no light dressing of tomato soup). One might ask how will we build public housing without cement, or indeed the foundations for wind farms?.
Yesterday 200 people invaded and disabled the Lafarge cement plant of La Malle in Bouc-Bel-Air in the Bouches-du-Rhône.
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THE FACTS: Nuclear reactors are not nuclear bombs and cannot be turned into them.
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Saying “Palestine is gonna be eviscerated and we’re gonna turn it into a parking lot shortly” receives no demand for censure, but a call for ceasefire and condemnation of the killing of civilians on both sides does?.
That Rashida Tlaib is facing a pathetic censure attempt but Rep. Max Miller faced zero pushback from his colleagues over this deranged comment tells you everything you need to know about the motives here.
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Maybe one day, Mark Ruffalo and Todd Haynes can make a movie about the many villainies of Greenpeace, and the moral turpitude of an NGO turning into a self-licking ice-cream cone. In the meantime, cancel that donation to Greenpeace. Would you donate to DuPont?.
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Working people shouldn't be allowed to have nice things? . (I would go private if I got burned as hard as kent_grandad too.) Up the union ✊🏻
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Most pro-union, picket-line-walking, pro-working class president of my lifetime; delivered a sharp break with 40 years of neoliberalism through ecomodern, energy-abundant pro-nuclear industrial policy; & ended the forever war. Far, far better than anything I had hoped from him.
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This “report” is pure conspiracism, confabulating a vast new right-wing (and far-right) nuclear “lobby” bankrolled by industry. The reality is that most contemporary nuclear advocates come from the left & climate activism, & quite deliberately don’t take a penny from industry.
Nuclear power itself will deliver virtually nothing to the climate emergency’s resolution. The current enormous political lobby for nuclear energy leads to a diversion of attention and capital from urgent and effective climate measures and threatens to delay urgent climate.
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Exit polls from EU elections suggest, as predicted, a huge swing to the far right. Less noticed (but still connected) is the implosion of Greens. French Greens saw their worst performance in 30 yrs. In 2019 German Greens were 2nd place. In 2024 the hard-right AfD is 2nd. Mini 🧵:
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Jacobin, no! Enough with the Fukushima-water fearmongering! It contains 190 becquerels of tritium per litre, well below the WHO limit of *10,000* becquerels for drinking water. If you drank 30 litres of it (8 gallons), you’d still only receive the radiation = to eating a banana.
Twelve years after the Fukushima disaster, Japanese authorities have started pumping wastewater from the plant into the ocean. They insist there’s no danger to public health, but Japan’s neighbors are up in arms about the controversial plan.
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Best messages ever tested: Save on energy bills/lowering energy costs; kitchen-sink costs; creating good stable jobs; investments in transit, infra, manufacturing; R&D for clean energy.
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Austria: “We are gonna sue the pants off the EU for classifying nuclear [5.1-6.4 avg gCO2eq/kWh] as clean energy”. Also Austria: “Oh hey, yeah, we’re also gonna re-open a coal plant [912-1095 avg gCO2eq/kWh]. NBD.”.
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Moreover, for >2 decades, France has robbed Peter to pay Paul, forcing EDF to redistribute ~€40B in revenues, largely from low-carbon nuclear electricity, to he.p pay for wind and solar development.
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There is a very authoritarian strain of leftist who has in recent years embraced the notion that if the actor that is attempting to prevent the spread of ideas is not the state, then this does not count as censorship. They believe that only the state censors.
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Talking about electric cars especially deadly for Democrats. Women in particular frightened of battery running out. (Interesting gendered spin on range anxiety I hadn’t thought about before). (Silver lining: “hybrids” as a message is v popular)
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I prefer my feudalism to be intersectional.
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My piece on why climate change would actually have been worse had the 20th Century been socialist, as industrial modernity would presumably have spread to the whole world (and this would be A Good Thing) 🌶🌶🌶.
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The Guardian has a piece today fluffing the degrowth mooncalves. Mostly what you’d expect, but this tidbit is curious: they still want growth in the Global South but only sustainable growth, a phenomenon they are calling “delinking”. I have a few thoughts…
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The torrent of full-on antisemitic attacks on Naomi Klein from other “leftists” for the sin of saying “Uhh, since when are we in favour of decapitating children?” really is something to behold.
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They do both use the word ‘nuclear’ in their name, but nuclear plants ≠ nuclear weapons any more than they equal nuclear medicine. Relatedly, cotton socks are not the same as cotton t-shirts. Don’t try to pull a sock over your head.
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Very best of luck to her. This is the future of the climate movement, a movement that recognizes that modernity is the solution, not the enemy.
Today I am launching the campaign #DearGreenpeace with @letsreplanet which asks @Greenpeace to drop their opposition to nuclear energy & support young people in securing their future. Sign my petition Why nuclear gives me hope for a better future.🧵
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The selling point of socialism with respect to climate change is not that it would have avoided global warming, but that upon discovery of the problem, could coordinate to technology switch faster and more equitably through planning than markets can.
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Even if you divided all the wealth in the world up evenly amongst 8 billion people, there is not yet enough wealth for everyone to live a good life—the life of, say, a middle-class Norwegian. Poverty eradication *requires* growth. (No matter how much weight the obese lose).
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This is getting crazy: recognizing the centrality of industrial workers, in particular in energy, transport and construction, to the clean transition is now… white supremacy? These people have completely lost the plot.
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So we have learnt that to save the planet, we must have no pets, no children, no books, no planes, no cruise ships, no meat (even synthetic meat), no cars, no mining, but don’t worry, there’ll still be bikes and buses (somehow provisioned without mining).
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First, let’s remember that if a missile hit, say, a hydro dam or an ammonia storage facility—both essential in any decarbonized economy, incl. a 100% renewables energy system—there would be profound human devastation.
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Yeah, don’t eradicate smallpox. Totally fucking dumb. Oh wait, we did mess with nature in this way, and it turns out dominating nature is AWESOME!.
Messing with nature is totally fucking dumb.
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The most deadly electricity-system-related disaster of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam (and 61 other dams), killing 26,000-240,000 people.
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As usual, the Luddite degrowth mindset cannot conceive of policies to deliver cleanly powered AI in order to bring us the potentially staggering benefits of AI without the emissions. Healthcare is also (currently) v carbon-intensive. Must healthcare expansion also be stopped?.
Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools. Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.
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Probably a good idea to cancel that donation to Greenpeace.
Greenpeace and its allies just won a court case in the Philippines blocking Golden Rice from reaching millions of vitamin A-deficient young children. If this isn't a crime against humanity, I don't know what is. Avoidable deaths could total 100,000s. More:
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Just got stopped by a pair of young Greenpeace fundraisers (“chuggers” in UK-speak). I apologized and said I can’t give them any $$$ as I back nuclear power. They both instantly said it was weird Greenpeace is against nuclear. “Outside of work, I totally support it,” said one.
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Degrowthers think “engage with” is a synonym for “agree with”. We *have* read your stuff. We just disagree it. Also “old-school productivism” is just… socialism. Socialists have opposed neo-malthusianism since Marx & Engels no less than racism, nationalism, censorship etc.
It would be less so if @Jacobin ever engaged with degrowth scholarship and arguments, as many leftists do, but they are too old-school productivist left to ever do that. Just pure ideological blinkers, getting more and more desperate. 🤦♀️.
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Varoufakis compares Hamas to the ANC’s armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) which also “killed innocent civilians”. This completely misreads history: MK almost exclusively attacked police, military & govt targets, & always tried to avoid harming civilians.
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Degrowthers: “Why does everyone always accuse of us supporting austerity? It’s not true! It’ll be unicorns and puppies and ice cream after the degrowth revolution!”. Also degrowthers in the face of actual real-world mass impoverishing energy crisis and industrial shutdown: “Yay!”
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I’ve written a review essay critiquing “Nuclear is Not the Solution”, a new book put out by Verso from anti-nuclear campaigner MV Ramana. The book’s a Gish gallop of weak arguments, false claims and jaw-dropping misunderstanding, but it’s still—unintentionally—quite useful… 🧵.
A new book opposing nuclear energy unintentionally highlights how 1970s opposition was a dead end for the Left. By examining contemporary arguments, it becomes clear that this historic stance has hindered climate progress and energy reliability.
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Most of this isn’t really about fixing climate change; instead it’s an aristocratic contempt for ordinary people and their bad taste. Cf ‘Basket of deplorables’.
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While the Banqiao hydroelectric disaster was the product of a typhoon and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, any country at war could decide to bomb a dam at any time to produce the same result. Should we forswear hydroelectric then?.
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Are we not supposed to decarbonize data centres? Or do you think there should just not be data centres? I’m which case, why are you still tweeting if you don’t think there should be data centres?.
This is an apocalyptic climate story. Microsoft wants to build nonexistent Small Modular Reactors, not to reduce emissions, provide people power, or anything other than to provide energy for their increasingly unsustainable data centers & AI. Disgraceful.
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Turns out Belgium has quietly been a climate hero for years thanks to its nuclear rollout in the 70s/80s. Which is, errr, why the *Green Party* energy minister @TinneVdS is now overseeing a phaseout of nuclear, which will be replaced by… natural gas. Good work, team!.
With virtually no hydro resources, Belgium reduced emissions intensity by 60% due to nuclear rollout; went from well above to well below AVG emissions, maintaining below AVG prices. Emissions have stayed below AVG, as gas displaced coal.Prices have stayed below AVG until recently
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If one opposes the far-right Israeli govt attacks on and pogroms of Palestinian civilians, one must also oppose Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians. Meanwhile, Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s occupation fights military targets, not civilians. It’s Putin that targets civilians.
So…it turns out that many people’s support for Ukraine isn’t based on a belief in the universal right to resist occupation and annexation.
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One of the odder things in recent years is to see how the left has passed from having many miners in its ranks fighting for better wages and conditions to a left with few miners but many activists who are *anti-mining*, a position the older left would find unrecognizable. A🧵:.
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Good that the Cultural Revolution is featured (if v briefly) in a pop, non-arthouse show. Progressives should read up on this groupthink madness, as well as its occurence in the Moscow Show Trials, Khmer Rouge Year Zero, etc, so as to guard against groupthink whenever it arises.
I don't know if I expected to see such an agonisingly realistic recreation of a Cultural Revolution struggle session, on Netflix of all places.
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Since when is Jason Hickel, a humanities scholar, a scientist? . The degrowth activists are exploiting Nature’s brand to snatch an imprimatur of science, then perform an appeal to their own authority as “scientists”, which itself is a logical fallacy and an act of scientism.
Nothing illustrates the pundits - science relationship better than scientists publishing a comment on Nature, and pundits rebutting it with a 8-word tweet 🙄
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Oh the butthurt that will be experienced by these people when we completely solve climate change by mid-century without actually having to overthrow industrial modernity.
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This 1976 essay against the partisans of degrowth by (gay, socialist) civil rights giant Bayard Rustin could have been written this morning:.
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Yet another reason why labor needs to steal the climate file away from environmentalist justice folks: labor consistently backs tech & infra that rapidly reduces emissions while ensuring a just transition, while environmentalists are consistently just the worst environmentalists.
Three major environmental groups just filed a motion to stop California from relicensing its last nuclear power plant. The groups say Diablo Canyon, which provides ~10% of the state's electricity, is "unnecessary" for California's energy supply.
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I loved/hated Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. Mainly for these sort of lacunae, ignoring the role played by the left in delivering the better world we have and how many things have regressed since the 70s in OECD nations. (Chart by @BrankoMilan. I only added the graffiti)
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One of the deadliest industrial accidents ever, the 2020 Beirut ammonium nitrate (for fertilizer) port storage facility explosion killed >220 and left 300,000 homeless.
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In any case, even if a missile targetted a nuclear plant, as nuclear writer Jeremy Gordon describes in more detail in his own thread, used fuel is not dayglo green goop like in The Simpsons, but solid metal.
. in both these storage scenarios remember that used fuel is solid metal and ceramic from the get-go. It is not flammable or soluble in water. That hypothetical 'IF a missile hits it' lacks a way for this stuff to vaporize, which has never happened before.
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And of course beyond whoever it was in AOC’s office that orchestrated this self-sabotage, the green left more broadly continues to double down on toxic messaging of degrowth communism, compulsory global veganism, anti-aviation etc.
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We can do both, Bernie. We can have public healthcare *and* science. We can end homelessness *and* explore the cosmos. We can have unionized, family-supporting jobs for all *and* colonies on Mars. Haven’t we always said we want bread, but we want roses too?.
Space travel is an exciting idea, but right now we need to focus on Earth and create a progressive tax system so that children don't go hungry, people are not homeless and all Americans have healthcare. The level of inequality in America is obscene and a threat to our democracy.
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“The worst scenario imaginable would be if we found a new source of clean and infinite energy, for example nuclear fusion. It would be a total catastrophe.”. This was precisely why the anti-nuclear movement originally got going, except against fission.
"Le pire scénario possible : c'est de trouver une énergie nouvelle propre et infinie, par exemple la fusion nucléaire. ".Aurélien Barreau - Militant écolo et astrophysicien. Pour ceux qui pensent que les sciences dures vaccinent contre la bêtise.
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A general could order an attack on such a depot at any time. By Hockenos’ logic, we should ban fertilizer.
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One of the best ways for Germany and the rest of Europe to give the finger to Putin is to keep its remaining nukes on and restart the ones its shuttered.
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THE FACTS: Germany is not the only country to have legislated winding down nuclear. Until Macron, France also had a strategy to mothball its plants, to slash generation from 75% of the mix to 50% by 2025. Some of the country’s best performing reactors were shuttered as a result.
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CLAIM 1: The Ukraine war and fighting in and around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has weaponized its reactors.
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… The message “Green New Deal” now *isn’t* associated with government investment to spur on good jobs and economic development; instead it became associated with bans on burgers and flying, and in particular provoked a fear of making energy expensive.
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A profound piece. What a line! “Side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.” . *This* is the slogan the Left should be taking up and painting on our placards, not the performative radicalism of “By any means necessary”.
New piece from me, written with love for everyone in grief right now. It has a simple message:. "Side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.". Moral consistency ≠ Moral equivalency. 💔.
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Rescue crews recovered ~250 bodies from the Supernova festival in southern Israel. Terrorists sprayed gunfire randomly, shooting those fleeing. Worse than the Bataclan massacre in Paris. And “leftists” are holding rallies in solidarity with these monsters.
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And across the pond, the climate justice movement just keeps on scoring these same own goals. Big Oil and Gas couldn’t ask for a better opposition. /FIN.
Just Stop Oil has to be a false-flag operation by Shell or Exxon. You couldn’t ask for a better way to make voters aggressively dismissive of climate action.
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These redirected funds should have, amongst other things, gone towards maintenance. It is really not surprising that financially sabotaged plants starved of upkeep cash run into trouble.
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After 6-10 yrs in a pool of water cooling down, it is encased in steel and concrete containers. It’s not flammable or water-soluble. It cannot be vaporized or explode.
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The reality is that Germany’s shuttering of nuclear instead of adding renewables and more nuclear to its existing, low-carbon nuclear fleet is what has prevented it from weaning itself from the Russian teat.
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THE FACTS: Germany has not dragged its heels at all, and instead will have spent over half a trillion euros (€520bn) on its Energiewende (energy turn). Meanwhile, France spent 424 bn francs, or ~€107 bn on its Messmer Plan, public-sector buildout of its nuclear fleet.
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Censoring anti-vax nutters is an affront to free speech, will only strengthen their sense of victimhood and so undermine vaccination rates, & accidentally censor pro-vax content (‘the algorithm’ already regularly mistakes pro-vax content for its opposite)
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There’s an awesome deep dive on all these shenanigans by nuclear engineer and top-moustache-haver @energybants on an ep of the (absolutely vital) @decouple podcast from June:
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The stronger the anti-occupation Israeli left & Palestinian anti-Hamas left, the greater the likelihood of the just peace emerging that the Western left wants to see. Every time a western Hamasnik pops up, they instead strengthen the enemies of this heroic, brave I/P left.
Tal Mitnick, an 18-year-old from Tel-Aviv, just refused to enlist in the Israeli army to protest the war in Gaza and the occupation. He was sentenced to 30 days in prison. He's a hero and also the sweetest kid. @TalMitnick @Mesarvot_
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Bold degrowth campaign slogans: “Vote for us! We promise you less! You think you don’t earn enough to pay the bills? You’re wrong! You have too many treats already, fatty! Lower your expectations! Don’t demand higher wages! You’ll only spend them on plastic trinkets and baubles!”.
The first four copies of LESS a journal of #degrowth, radical sufficiency and decolonisation are available to download for free here @degrowthUK @jasonhickel @timparrique @g_kallis @R_Degrowth
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I’m a big fan of AOC, and her thinking on energy/climate has evolved significantly since then, even moving toward a pro-nuclear position. But the Green New Deal FAQ was a disastrous error, resulting from speaking mainly to NGOs instead of labor. Glad she’s course corrected.
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I really, REALLY hate the recent fashion in parts of the climate left to use the word ‘treats’ to describe consumer items. It is thoroughly elitist, not egalitarian, to think everyone else is a trained simpleton poodle while you alone are enlightened enough to resist ‘treats’.
@gdmorejon I cannot stand how you people constantly use the word ‘treats’ to describe every consumer item you think is some grave environmental sin and want banned, as if every other person in society other than you is a dog, who has been trained to wag their tail in return for some kibble.
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You can’t run a grid on just wind & solar as the wind doesn’t always blow & the sun doesn’t always shine. If you’re lucky with geography & enjoy a bounty of hydroelectric, you *can* have a 100% renewable grid (like where I live, British Columbia, as well as in Quebec and Norway).
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