New night train from Salzburg to Sylt (a German island!)

The new night train from Salzburg to the German Island of Sylt has kicked off.

Sylt is way up near Denmark (top left), and Salzburg (bottom right) is where the hills are alive with the sound of music:

Anyone been to Sylt? I’d never heard of it before. It looks quite nice:

Photo: dronepicr

There’s a bridge to the island and it appears the train takes that bridge the whole way to “downtown Sylt”.

Cool as, bro.

This new night train isn’t run by the Austrians (surprise!) but by a private German company called RDC Deutschland.

It goes through Munich and Hamburg on the way—one in the evening and the other in the morning, depending on which way you’re travelling.

They have some crazy one-way prices of only €99 available for a whole private cabin!

Deal of the century.

Anyone remember the Biosphere 2 experiment? →

I have fairly vague memories of Biosphere 2, being in my early teens back then (the early 90s).

Here’s a pic to stir the brain cells:

Photograph: Philippe Plailly/Science Photo Library

And some deets:

“This is the story of the eccentric but charismatic commune leader John P Allen, who ran a collective ranch in New Mexico, where in the 70s he met the rebellious young billionaire Ed Bass, who offered to put some of his family oil money at Allen’s disposal to realise one of his most cherished visions: building a gigantic biodome-style enclosed ecosystem, rather like the one in Douglas Trumbull’s classic sci-fi movie Silent Running. Here, they could conduct a two-year experiment with a group of people living behind glass, tending to the crops and plants.

“The results of the Biosphere 2 experiment – Biosphere 1 being the Earth itself – would tell us about humanity’s ability to colonise planets using such a dome, and help to rebalance our relationship with the natural world back here on B1. To the fascination of the world’s press, the Biospherians trooped inside the gleaming glass-and-steel structure in 1991, like astronauts getting on board a spaceship. Inevitably, relations between them frayed. The air quality started to deteriorate. And they had not anticipated what might happen if one of them needed hospital treatment.”

<Cue Jaws music about now>

There’s a new documentary film out about the whole shebang: Spaceship Earth.

From the Guardian:

“If ever a documentary was in tune with the spirit of lockdown it is this very absorbing film about Biosphere 2—a colossal eco-experimental project in the Arizona desert in the early 90s, which had its roots in 60s counterculture and which I knew nothing about before this.

“My ignorance was so complete, in fact, that for the first few minutes of this film I kept suspecting some kind of docu-spoof. But it’s all real, right up to the disclosure of a horribly familiar villain right at the end, whose identity it would be unsporting to reveal.”

Haven’t seen it yet but it looks intriguing!

My guesses for the villain are either Monsanto or the US government.

Here’s the trailer:

YIKES.

“Yet the real Lord of the Flies meltdown happened afterwards. As a result, Bass called in the Wall Street bankers to evict the hippies and the free-thinkers from the Biosphere management, as part of a mission to repurpose it as a profitably “environmentalist” tourist attraction.”

“The Biosphere 2 project now looks like reality TV, or maybe a conceptual art happening. Its quixotic extravagance is rather amazing.”

Ok, I might be wrong. The villain is probably Wall Street or rich mofos.

The film seems to be available for streaming on Amazon or—if you’d rather avoid the taint of rich mofos—this Australian site, which appears to have a one month no-strings-attached free offer.

Wild bison to return to the UK for the first time in 6000 years! →

From the Guardian:

“Wild bison are to return to the UK for the first time in 6,000 years, with the release of a small herd in Kent planned for spring 2022.

“The £1m project to reintroduce the animals will help secure the future of an endangered species. But they will also naturally regenerate a former pine wood plantation by killing off trees. This creates a healthy mix of woodland, scrub and glades, boosting insect, bird and plant life.

“During the initial release, one male and three females will be set free. Natural breeding will increase the size of the herd, with one calf per year the norm for each female. The bison will come from the Netherlands or Poland, where releases have been successful and safe.”

Here’s a bunch of bison in Poland:

Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

In the same vein, I’ve written before about Knepp Wildland in West Sussex here and Isabella Tree’s book, Wilding, here. I’ll betcha they’re itching to introduce bison at Knepp too!

It’s the exact same process: bring in keystone species to kick off long-lost ecological processes and food chains:

“Bison kill selected trees by eating their bark or rubbing against them to remove their thick winter fur. This creates a feast of dead wood for insects, which provide food for birds. Tree felling also creates sunny clearings where native plants can thrive. The trust expects nightingales and turtle doves to be among the beneficiaries of the bison’s “ecosystem engineering”.

These are big fullas:

The European bison is the continent’s largest land mammal and bulls can weigh as much as a tonne. “They’re enormous,” said Stan Smith of Kent Wildlife Trust. “But what is amazing is how they blend into their background and they’re quite docile really.”

What’s more, they are quite partial to picnics:

Photograph: Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images

Don’t forget that—despite the advertising campaign of rolling hills, old stone fences and good ole’ picture-postcard countryside, Britain finds itself well dug in to an ecological cul-de-sac:

“Populations of the UK’s most important wildlife have plummeted by an average of 60% since 1970. Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, despite the best efforts of conservationists.”

Get those bison right in there.

Adani I don't love you

Adani are the fuckers building the Carmichael coal mine in Australia.

But they’re actually an Indian company.

It turns out they’re also fuckers in India (from Stop Adani):

“Local communities in Jharkhand state, eastern India have launched a legal challenge against Adani’s proposed Godda coal plant — where Adani wants to burn Queensland coal from its Carmichael mine.

“The Godda coal plant will displace thousands of Indigenous Adivasi people, and drain 36 billion litres of water from the sacred Ganges river every year in order to produce dirty, overpriced power for Bangladesh.

“The legal case is challenging Adani for using "coercion, fraud [and] undue influence" to illegally exclude thousands of people affected by the development from a required social impact assessment, and for the forced takeover of land by the State Government on behalf of Adani.”

Also:

“Local people resisting Adani’s Godda power plant have had their land stolen, their crops destroyed, and been beaten by police. In their words, the Adivasi people are ‘being displaced by the world’s most ridiculous power project’.”

If you feel like joining the fray, you can petition yourself crazy here.

More thoughts on spontaneously fruiting electricity →

In yesterday’s post, we saw that the sudden freeing up of 13% of New Zealand’s electricity supply will lead to questions as to what the heck to do with it all.

Some further deets and thunking:

First, the South Island of New Zealand is not short of electricity, so if new uses are not found for it down there, it has to be sent towards the North Island. (Yes, I know, very creative names for the two main islands. The maori names are much more poetic.)

However, the infrastructure for this scale of electricity transportation doesn’t currently exist and would need to be built. Plans are underfoot already.

There are also possibilities for switching fossil fuel burning to renewable electricity in the South:

“Meridian Energy spokeswoman Claire Shaw said it was "well-documented" the dairy industry used coal boilers in the South Island to dry milk into milk powder.

“Those boilers could be replaced with electric boilers to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"Earlier this year Synlait commissioned its first electrode boiler at its Dunsandel site," she notes.”

This idea to use this newly available electricity to replace fossil fuel burning is a clear winner. If New Zealand did this well, it could probably get pretty close to 100% renewable electricity. It’s already up at around 80%.

Second, my snarkiness about the Finance minister yesterday was exaggerated; he did also have better ideas for the future than just “building data centres”:

“…the prospect of New Zealand using renewable energy to derive hydrogen from water, which could then be exported to power fuel cells.”

Excuse my facetiousness, Grant.

Third, on the electric car front I brought up yesterday, obviously I’m not the only one to have thunked it:

“The uptake of electric vehicles, which require far fewer components than conventional cars, is changing the economics of car manufacturing, for example, raising the prospect that car assembly could come back to New Zealand.

“Perhaps the region that schooled Burt Munro, the creator of the "world's fastest Indian", and Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, the entrepreneur that got New Zealand into the space industry could pull another rabbit out of the hat.

Almost gives you warm fuzzies, that does.

What to do when an aluminium smelter shuts and electricity spontaneously grows on trees →

Big big news in Kiwiland:

“The news that Rio Tinto is set to wind down the Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter means change for New Zealand's electricity sector.

“The smelter makes up 13 percent of the country's electricity consumption, so when its contract with Meridian Energy is up in August 2021, the impact will be widely felt.”

Basically, in a year’s time, New Zealand will suddenly have a massive amount of electricity sitting there, twiddling its thumbs.

Tiwai Point’s electricity essentially comes from the Lake Manapouri Hydroelectric Station, which was built especially for it back in the late 60s.

This is gorgeous Lake Manapouri, by the way:

Photo from greatsouth.nz

What’s interesting is that protests against the building of this hydroelectric station were one of the things that kicked off New Zealand’s environmental movement!

Of course, now that it’s there, it’s a “renewable energy asset”, which environmentalists love.

Ironic.

The question is going to become: What to do with this surplus energy?

An obvious solution would be to use it to build electric cars and/or batteries. Or power electric cars imported from overseas. Or build wind turbines or solar panels.

Pretty much: Use it to build a renewable future.

Instead, the Minister of Finance came out and suggested constructing Data Centres to run on the excess electricity.

That’s forward thinking for you.

Hopefully the thinking will get a bit more forward than that over the next twelve months. The greenies should be all over this one.

A green wave in France

The Green Party kicked some ass in the French local elections last week. From the Guardian:

“Lyon, Strasbourg and Bordeaux; Besançon, Poitiers and Tours: the list of powerful cities that turned green, after France’s municipal elections last weekend, was long and impressive. Marseille has been a conservative fiefdom for decades. But a leftwing alliance propelled Michèle Rubirola, the candidate of Europe Ecology – France’s Green party – to the mayoralty. These were totemic victories, turning the once-peripheral Green party into a significant player in urban France.”

This is no sudden came-out-of-nowhere surprise. The Greens already showed off their super-spinach powers in last year’s European elections. Not to mention:

“It seems certain that the politics of Covid-19 played a part in generating green momentum in France. The origins of the pandemic, and its effect on globalised supply chains, has led to a renewed focus across Europe on food security, local produce and environmental standards. A forced re-evaluation of urban living has led to new government money for greener forms of transport and a focus on home-working. Cities such as Bordeaux and Lyon can now be expected to be at the forefront of innovation and experiment in designing greener, cleaner cities for the future.”

This left-leaning wave has not left dear Mr Macron indifferent as his centrist party crumbles at the edges:

“The French president, Emmanuel Macron – whose own party endured a poor election night – has quickly made new environmental commitments in the wake of the results. Mr Macron has promised to provide an extra €15bn to smooth a transition to a low-carbon economy and to implement some of the demands of the citizens’ assembly he convened on the climate emergency. In negotiating bailouts with France’s stricken car and aviation industries, he has demanded stiffer electrification and emissions reduction targets.”

Progress seems to be accelerating. Good work Greenies!

Heart. Filled. With. Joy.

Retro French night train ads

Some cool-as ads for French night trains back in the days.

“Be a clown, sleep on a train”:

The caption on the next one is “The Little Lady”. Not entirely sure what’s going on here. I smell hanky-panky. Feel free to send me your guess or enlighten me:

Waking up on the Côte d’Azur is not the worst thing that could happen to you in France:

Not sure if this last one is a French night train or something like the Orient Express, but Jesus Save Me I would time travel to take this baby:

I got these images from a Back On Track email. Back On Track is a pressure group pushing for better cross-border European train services.

You can join their mailing list here. It brings hope.

Attacking the enablers rather than the target itself

As noted in previous posts here and here, one way to stop a planetary destruction projet is by kicking out its legs.

By this I mean removing some necessary piece in the enabler-company Jenga, causing the whole tower to collapse.

With those Adani bastards in Australia, the main thrust has been to scare insurance companies away from their coal mine project.

Now there’s a new point of attack (via Stop Adani): Banks!

“Adani’s Abbot Point coal port on the Queensland coast is poised to ship Carmichael mine coal to Adani’s power stations in India. This port faces a $1 billion debt bill over the next two years, and it is looking to refinance that debt right now.

“Thanks to the concerted efforts of the thousands of people and hundreds of organisations powering the #StopAdani campaign, 37 major banks have ruled out funding the climate-destroying Carmichael coal project.

“The associated Abbot Point port was recently forced to postpone a debt refinancing and had to repay $100 million to its lenders. 

“Recently it was reported in the Australian Financial Review that one of the banks that has previously arranged a bond issue for Abbot Point, Investec, was refusing to have anything further to do with the coal port!”

Like Covid-19 however, it only takes one slimy bank to get through the defences for the shitshow to continue:

“However, there are several banks which we know have already loaned money or arranged bonds for Abbot Point port that may be willing to do it again. Abbot Point is an essential link in the chain that forms the Adani Carmichael coal export project. The coal extracted from the mine will be transported along the Carmichael rail line, and put onto ships at Abbot Point port.”

If you feel like joining the cause, you can spend approximately 53 seconds to complete a pre-filled email submission to Adani’s existing creditors.

Thanks for your support!

BookFace is just an advertising company and you are the target

BookFace is losing advertisers by the truckload due to the Stop Hate For Profit movement.

Here’s a list of nearly a thousand advertisers who have pulled the plug, temporarily at least.

Climate groups have a double whammy of reasons to get the hell out of the swamp. Here’s 350.org’s take:

Never forget that BookFace is just an advertising company selling the world’s shit for dough.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, BookFace’s share price nosedived ten per cent when Stop Hate For Profit starting kicking up a fuss (around the 25th-26th June).

You’ll all be relieved to know that the share price has now made back its losses.

Before pretending that we’re all innocent and BookFace is the devil, take a look at Zuckerberg’s plot that shows how the humans of planet Earth engage more with (read: “end up seeing more ads due to”) borderline stuff:

Facebook has to decide where that line is drawn and how much engagement is lost (read: “cash lost”) by moving it to the left.

Update on Facebook's climate change denial loophole shenanigans

Remember last week’s post (via HEATED) about squirrelly Facebook’s decision to let climate change deniers spread lies if they’re in the mood?

Some shit has been hitting some fans.

Lots of powerful peeps signed this letter. One of its paragraphs:

“Facebook knows how to take action against misinformation. When COVID-19 denial took hold on the platform, it was forcibly shut down because Facebook understood that the spread of COVID-19 misinformation could cause imminent physical harm to the health and well-being of Facebook users. Climate denial and misinformation are also deadly. By allowing climate misinformation to go unchecked, Facebook is actively putting the health and well-being of our nation’s most vulnerable low-income communities and communities of color at risk.”

Media Matters for America also went for the flame-throwing approach:

“It should give Facebook huge pause that fringe arguments and career climate deniers embraced only by right-wing media see the social media platform as the clear vector for their content.

“The realities of extreme weather, coupled with the efforts of climate activists, scientists, and journalists, have helped to raise public awareness of the climate crisis. Facebook’s loophole threatens to undo much of this progress by giving a well-organized and well-funded denial machine free rein to propagandize and misinform about the climate crisis during a time of much-needed action.”

There’s plenty giving BookFace huge pause at the moment.

And a real sniff of “facts winning over bollocks” flooding back into the online world, right here, right now.

This warm fuzzy feeling was brought to you by Fatboy Slim.

Enough bollocks: International flight emissions need to be included in national totals →

As I briefly mentioned yesterday, international aviation CO2 emissions are not counted in national totals.

Basically, they’re free emissions that no-one takes responsibility for.

But they still exist, and they still warm the planet.

From the Guardian:

“International flights taking off from the UK must be taken into account in the government’s calculations on reaching net zero emissions as part of a “green” recovery for the airline industry, a transport thinktank has urged.

“The government has given loan bailouts to airlines totalling £1.5bn since the coronavirus outbreak, with no environmental conditions attached.”

No environmental conditions!

Worse:

“Ryanair is the latest company to secure a £600m loan from the scheme, despite its chief executive, Michael O’Leary’s outspoken condemnation of such bailouts across Europe as uncompetitive state aid. British Airways secured a £300m loan and EasyJet received £600m.”

The day those Ryanair fuckers go bankrupt will be celebrated in my household like a national holiday.

Back to reality:

“The government should ensure international aviation and shipping emissions are including within the net zero target,” said Greg Archer, the UK director of Transport and Environment. “The aviation industry is currently relying on buying cheap, unreliable offsets for its emissions. This is no solution to avoiding a climate catastrophe.”

This is not rocket science.

What country will be the first brave enough to say, “We will take ownership of all outgoing flight CO2 emissions”?

How about you, New Zealand?

Austria swapping out planes for trains →

From CNN:

“Austria's flagship airline is replacing one of its flights with a more frequent train service, in order to meet the environmental criteria of its recent government bailout.”

“The company will no longer fly between capital city Vienna and Salzburg, operating a rail service instead.”

Why why why?

“As part of its recent €600 million government aid package, the airline is required to cut its domestic emissions by 50% by 2050 and to end flights where there is a direct train connection to the airport that takes "considerably less than three hours."

Super Duper! (That’s German for “Super Duper”, by the way.)

And this is no minor teensy-weensy change:

“From July 20, there will be up to 31 direct train services a day between the Vienna International Airport and Salzburg's central station, up from three rail connections per day, the airline said.”

From three to thirty-one trains per day!

Epic.

The elephant in the room: What Austrian Airlines chooses to do with the to-be-liberated airport slots. Replacing domestic services with slots to far away places would simply transfer CO2-emissions from “counted locally” to “Haha, let’s not count them!”

Yep: International flight CO2 emissions are simply not counted in any country’s totals at the moment.

There is plenty of pressure to change this business-as-usual madness though.

Would you like a heatwave with your sauna?

From the Washington Post:

“Much of the world remains consumed with the deadly novel coronavirus. The United States, crippled by the pandemic, is in the throes of a divisive presidential campaign and protests over racial inequality. But at the top of the globe, the Arctic is enduring its own summer of discontent.

“Wildfires are raging amid ­record-breaking temperatures. Permafrost is thawing, infrastructure is crumbling and sea ice is dramatically vanishing.”

How hot? This hot:

Take it from Vlad:

“Vladimir Romanovsky, a researcher at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, said the pace, severity and extent of the changes are surprising even to many researchers who study the region for a living. Predictions for how quickly the Arctic would warm that once seemed extreme “underestimate what is going on in reality,” he said. The temperatures occurring in the High Arctic during the past 15 years were not predicted to occur for 70 more years, he said.”

There are plenty of fossil-fuel funded fuckers out there continuing to pretend that scientists are exaggerating the future shitshow.

This despite nearly every article these days being like, “The Scientists Underestimated How Fast The Scary Movie Would Hit Our Screens”.

Australian coal towns to renew(able) themselves →

From Al Jazeera:

“Times are changing in Australian coal towns as renewable energy replaces jobs in the coal mining industry.”

Here’s two minutes of the lowdown from Wollongong (Al Jazeera):

Good to see that even some coal towns are smelling the fresh-air future that is Australia (in my dreams, at least).

Pity those Adani bastards are still going strong.

The UK is becoming a sneaky renewables champion →

From the Guardian:

“Renewable energy made up almost half of Britain’s electricity generation in the first three months of the year, with a surge in wind power helping to set a new record for clean energy.

The government’s official data has revealed that renewable energy made up 47% of the UK’s electricity generation in the first three months of the year, smashing the previous quarterly record of 39% set last year.

Those crafty Brits!

“The “substantial increase” in the UK’s total renewable energy output was chiefly driven by a growth in electricity generated by solar panels and wind farms which climbed by more than a third over the last year, according to the government’s energy analysts.”

And:

“Offshore wind farms powered the largest increase in renewable energy in the first quarter of the year, climbing by 53% compared with the previous year, while onshore wind generation grew by a fifth.”

“Rebecca Williams, of Renewable UK, said the renewable energy industry’s records were bound to be broken again in the years ahead as the government worked on “a massive expansion of renewables as part of the UK’s green economic recovery”.

Count me impressed.

A European Silk Road →

Think big.

Really really really big. (You may have to think even bigger and use Chrome or something else to translate the whole article from German to your happy language). Here’s an excerpt:

“…The economists are calling for the establishment of an “ultra-rapid train” that will connect major European cities with an average speed of 250 to 350 kilometers per hour. One route should run via Lisbon, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen to Helsinki. The Paris-Berlin route would be halved to around four hours by the express train, the economists write.

“There will be a total of four such European express train routes. Thanks to its geographical location in the heart of Europe, Germany would particularly benefit from the establishment of such a network. Even fast train journeys to the outermost edge of Europe, for example to southern Italy or the Baltic States, would be possible.

“The move from plane to train would reduce Co2 emissions by four to five percentage points, according to the analysis. As more freight traffic could be handled by rail at the same time, this would further reduce emissions from road traffic.”

This is more an exercise in moving the goalposts than engaging with reality, methinks.

But stranger things have happened.

Also I: Jesus frick that automatic translation to English is spectacular.

Also II:

“The 18250 km route would cost around 1.1 trillion euros.”

Cheap as chips!

Ensure they cannot insure

From the association trying to stop Adani’s coal mine from ever seeing the light of day:

“Adani planned to ship the first coal from their climate-wrecking mega-mine in 2014. We’re now halfway through 2020 and not one lump of coal has left the Galilee Basin. 

“Why? Because time and time again, you joined with hundreds of thousands of others and said NO to Adani trashing the rights of the Wangan and Jagalingou people, guzzling our precious water, wrecking the Reef, and robbing us all of a safe climate.” 

The current point of attack is insurance companies:

“Adani need insurance to protect themselves from the risks of constructing and operating their destructive coal project. 

“And Adani’s coal project is incredibly risky. Our success pushing 70 companies to choose people and the climate over coal has forced Adani to build their mine in the slowest, riskiest, and most expensive way possible. 

“Our movement’s mission now is to stop the mine by stopping Adani’s insurance. And we’re already building incredible momentum. In just the last fortnight, you pushed FOUR insurers to pull the plug after their connection to Adani’s toxic mega coal mine was exposed in the media.

“After just a few short months of pressure, you pushed Adani’s insurance broker, Marsh, to be the only insurance broker IN THE WORLD to have anything that resembles a climate policy, leaving the door wide open for them to rule out Adani.”

More here on how you can help.   

Today's big scandal and a little investigation of my own →

As jointly reported by Popular Information and by Heated:

“Last year, Facebook partnered with an organization, Science Feedback, that would bring in teams of Ph.D. climate scientists to evaluate the accuracy of viral content. It was an important expansion of the company's third-party fact-checking program.” 

So far, so good. Good work Facebook.

Then, this happened:

“Now Facebook has reportedly decided to allow its staffers to overrule the climate scientists and make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it "opinion." 

Opinion?!

If I write on Facebook that jumping off the top of the Empire State Building is a “good idea” and “won’t kill you”, would it be right for Facebook to leave it up because it was only my “opinion”?

Mull on that one for a bit.

So, how did it come to this? Here is how the story begins:

“A column published in the Washington Examiner in August 2019 claimed that "climate models" were a "failure" that predicted exponentially more warming of the earth than has occurred. The piece, co-authored by notorious climate science denier Pat Michaels, was quickly shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook. 

“There was just one issue: It wasn't true.”

Science Feedback scientists, for Facebook, got to fact-check it:

“Five scientists reviewed the Washington Examiner article for Science Feedback. The scientists identified a number of problems with the piece: "false factual assertions, cherry-picking datasets that support their point, failing to account for uncertainties in those datasets, and failing to assess the performance of climate models in an objective and rigorous manner." The article was rated "false" by Science Feedback and logged in Facebook's system.” 

Again, so far, so good.

Then, this happened:

“An organization affiliated with Michaels, the CO2 Coalition, wrote Zuckerberg and complained about Science Feedback's rating. Among other things, the coalition claims that Science Feedback's analysis amounted to "simple differences of opinion." The coalition asked Zuckerberg to "remove Facebook’s censorship, labeling, and restrictions on this article." 

“Amazingly, it worked. In September, Facebook removed the false rating, overruling the judgment of Science Feedback. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook found that the misinformation about climate models was an "opinion" and, therefore, not eligible for fact-checking.”

There’s that weaselly “opinion” word again.

In a surprise to no sentient human:

“Now, the CO2 Coalition has announced its intention to exploit this loophole to spread climate misinformation on Facebook.” 

Caleb Rossiter, the executive director the CO2 Coalition:

“Rossiter said Facebook was increasingly important because "the mainstream media" is no longer willing to amplify the group's opinions. But the reason the “mainstream media” is not willing to amplify the group’s opinions is that they’re not opinions at all. They’re falsehoods."

It’s always helpful to put a face to a muppet:

Here’s my two cents’ worth of investigative journalism to round this one off.

I’m sitting here thinking, “Who funds this dumbass CO2 coalition”?

One group is the Mercer Family Foundation.

Who the fuck are they?

Basically, they’re a fund to funnel millions into Conservative causes.

But why? Why them? Why Robert Mercer?

He was a computer scientist, then a hedge fund manager, then some other interesting stuff we’ll get to in a moment.

But what turned him against climate change and facts and shit? Was it a natural progression from simply being right-leaning? Because computer scientists are not typically known for immense stupidity when faced with truth-based ideas. So where does the kool aid bubble up from here?

It’s fascinating to me. There’s nothing clear in his Wikipedia biography that particularly motivates his anti-environment stance, apart from its apparent consistency with todays Conservative movement.

Side notes of interest: this was the guy that was the biggest investor in Cambridge Analytica at one point.

Via Cambridge Analytica he donated data analytics to Nigel Farange to help the Brexit vote win.

Cambridge Analytica was the group that illegally harvested millions of Facebook accounts for useful data.

That didn’t end well.

Mercer also funds Breitbart News. (which doesn’t get a hyperlink, sorry not sorry)

Icky, sticky.

Mercer was the single biggest donor in the 2016 US presidential race.

His favourite colour is orange.

Suffice to say, not really my kinda guy.

Note to readers: As I wrote all this down, my face felt like I’d just eaten a lemon.

It’s all a bit like documenting a grisly murder, making lists like these.

You’re always waiting for the upside, like, “He likes ice-cream, he’s not so bad, really!”

Never comes.

Today’s take-out message: Be less like this guy.

Wicked Wednesday: Bear with me →

Welcome back to Wicked Wednesday, the day where very good (wicked!) or very bad (wicked) things happen.

Last Wicked Wednesday, I talked about Yellowstone’s 24-year old grizzly bear who recently popped up from her winter chillout with four new cubs.

Yay!

Thomas D Mangelsen / mangelsen.com

As a reminder:

“The population of grizzlies in the Yellowstone region was given protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1975 after their numbers dipped to less than 150, and scientists feared they could disappear altogether. But their recovery, thanks to habitat protection, crackdowns on poaching and a ban on hunting, is considered one of the greatest conservation triumphs in US history. Today, at least 700 grizzlies inhabit the region and, luring tourists, they have paid tangible economic dividends.”

Thankfully, America has now come to its senses on this warm fuzzy bear protection nonsense. Its current government has decided to reveal its (very secret) wicked side.

“The Trump administration is finalizing rules that will allow hunters in Alaska’s national preserves to shoot bears and wolves, and their cubs and pups, while they are in their dens.

“The National Park Service is reversing regulations written by the Barack Obama administration, which banned some of the much-criticized practices for hunting the predators, including luring bears with food like doughnuts.”

What kind of sick loser fuck of a hunter needs to use donuts to kill bears?

Also, what kind of pathetic lowlife excuse-for-a-man kills bear cubs anyway?

I have many similar questions but they’re all equally potty-mouthed and, probably, unnecessary.

“Jesse Prentice-Dunn, policy director for the Center for Western Priorities, called the rule change “amazingly cruel” and said it was “just the latest in a string of efforts to reduce protections for America’s wildlife at the behest of oil companies and trophy hunters”.

“Look sweetie, I killed a baby bear!”

So, who’s trying to defend this move?

“The Alaska senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican, said the revision was needed “not only as a matter of principle, but as a matter of states’ rights”. A tribal consortium, the Tanana Chiefs Conference, said the Obama rule was implemented without adequate tribal consultation, in disregard to rural Alaska’s dependence on wild food resources, threatening “centuries-long sustainable management practices”.

What on Earth is sustainable about killing bear cubs and pups?

Sustainable, my ass!

If I have this straight, in order to survive in the Alaskan wild, you take that donut you paid for at Dunkin Donuts, and rather than eat it to survive, you use it to lure and kill a bear cub.

To survive.

As we say in New Zealand: “Yeah, nah”.

Lest any of you get the idea that this is an isolated incident from a generally benevolent government:

“Trump’s Department of the Interior has consistently sought to expand access to public lands to hunters and fossil fuel companies. Last month, it proposed expanding public hunting and fishing access by more than 2.3m acres on 97 national wildlife refuges and nine national fish hatcheries.”

After digesting this fibre-free stupidity, let me suggest a donut—and a bottle of vodka—for dessert.

[Cover photo: Tony Campbell/BBC/Shutterstock]