People keep talking about e-bikes, e-trikes, e-scooters, and other power-assisted mobility like they are toys, shortcuts, or something to sneer at. But for a lot of people they are freedom machines. They turn impossible trips into possible ones. They turn pain into manageability, distance into
Agreed. And we don’t even need to imagine it. The daily reality in places like Utrecht, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, Helsinki ❄️, and many other cities shows what is possible and how much people enjoy it and demand more.
Other cities can do this.
What’s the problem with everyone in Westminster spending all their time only talking and thinking about Peter Mandelson?
Well…
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
Hosting a @nebriefing.bsky.social screening of the People's Emergency Briefing film? Our workshop covers the psychological context, tools for handling difficult group moments & much more.
Host a screening bit.ly/4suzOP7
Book the workshop bit.ly/4bAapxA
In summary: all of our institutions are fully captured by the people who actively participated in all of this stuff, and they are not going to decide that our increasingly fucked state is their fault, and then fire each other and themselves. Which leaves a very, very narrow set of options.
It’s worth putting this in its broader historical context, I think. This is the end of the Starmer Is Great era (late 2021-2026) when everyone agreed to pretend Sir Keir et al were very intelligent, principled people with smart plans, whom the public would like and want. That stuff is dead, now.
13/ What can you do?
- Read the @climate-risk.bsky.social report on why this is a security blind spot, and share it!
- Write to your political representatives. This belongs at the top of climate risk agendas, not a footnote.
- Talk about it. Awareness is shockingly low.
12/ This is now a high-likelihood, high-impact risk.
#AMOC collapse would devastate European agriculture, shift tropical monsoons, raise Atlantic sea levels by up to a metre, and destabilise food systems globally.
Yet it's barely mentioned in national security planning. That has to change!
Globe showing the Atlantic Ocean with arrows depicting the AMOC circulation: warm surface currents (pink/red) flowing northward from the tropics toward the Arctic, and cold deep return currents (blue/purple) flowing southward. The background shows sea surface temperature trends, with a prominent blue cold patch, the "cold blob", south of Greenland, contrasting with warming (orange/red) across the rest of the ocean.
1/ There's a system of ocean currents in the Atlantic that shapes Europe's #climate, drives monsoons, and keeps sea levels stable along the US coast.
In the last 5 years, the scientific evidence that it could collapse has shifted dramatically.
Most people have no idea. 🧵
Help Sakher, don't let him be forgotten while the site is trying it's best to make that happen for every Palestinian.
Flier. 'Help a young dad heal'. The text summarises their medical challenges. There are photos of Naser and two young children
Just want to keep trying for Amal and Naser. They can barely get online. He's in need of medication in order to stay out of ICU. She's pregnant and malnourished. It's really hard to get them the attention they need. 😞
gofund.me/ada35961
And on the basis of this -- a pure policy disagreement about which he was demonstrably, wildly wrong -- Roberts dreamed up "major questions doctrine" & thereby rendered US law one big game of Calvinball.
You just can't exaggerate how low, how scummy, how dumb, how fraudulent it all was.
All right, this piece has triggered me so I have to yell a bit (though this is bluesky, so I realize I'm just preaching at the choir):
So, I see Harvard is raising money for "Viewpoint Diversity Professorships." To help seed this effort I'm starting a thread on some suggestions for new chairs. Please do join the fun and chime in with your own ideas. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
How to stop fascism and the far right.
In a nutshell: offer voters a non-establishment eco-left alternative that *genuinely* stands for people and planet.
It's not complicated.
The billionaire sex pests pushing generative AI keep spinning up badly remembered science fiction scenarios of apocalypse, as both advertisement ("we are literally creating a god... it might be too powerful!") and as a way of shifting the conversation from its actual real world harms it already does
Flying_Rodent @flying_rod..• 17/04/2023 X The Times are today reporting Sir Keir didn't know about this stuff because he's basically a bonnet ornament: a balloon on a stick, a stuffed suit the PR ghouls actually running the show can shove in front of a camera. PR ghouls who are presumably completely unconnected to Peter. Flying_Rodent @flying... • 17/04/2023 One of Britain's most infamously crooked political bullshit artists saying Yes, inflammatory drivel is great, l am in favour of filling the bandwidth with nasty smears. TIMES RADIO Times Radio @TimesRadio • 5m "They get the Tory-supporting papers to throw mud and to do all this sort of stuff. The Labour Party doesn't have that advantage." Peter Mandelson tells #TimesRadio he would have signed off on Labour's attack ads.
2023, here
Peter *would have* signed off on those attack ads, you see. Not Peter did sign off on them, or Peter suggested them himself and everyone just automatically obeyed.
A HUGE, narrative-breaking moment for the UK car market
New EVs are now cheaper than petrol cars on average, says Autotrader
Last yr CCC said price parity was due by 2028 – and it's already here
And EVs are already MUCH cheaper to run than petrol
People are getting some long term health conditions up to 2 years earlier than they would if we were breathing clean air.
That's people losing up to 2 years pain free, 2 years with energy, able to do all the things that matter to them.
share.google/t61ru2BTF1Il...
🧵 1/3
What’s annoying me here is that it is clearly looking down on and contemptuous of people who say they live in an increasingly cruel country with horrible politics, that is being led into a bleak future by bad people who act with impunity, as if this is obviously wrong. But it is not wrong, is it?
O'Brien grew up in Leicester, in what she calls a working-class family. (She defined this in the Marxist sense, meaning anybody who works for a wage, unlike the "asset class" and what she calls the billionaire "Epstein class".) She had always been progressive. But while studying for her master's degree at Bristol University, she started going to Black Lives Matter protests on College Green and felt inspired by the collective energy she saw there. She already had a TikTok following from sharing "random content", but her audience rapidly grew as her posts got more political. Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel's response in Gaza, was a "catalytic moment" for her. "I had been talking about immigration issues before, like Marxism, like philosophy," she said. "Then it all just became the war." O'Brien's content, and that of a growing number of left-wing female influencers like her, is in some ways a mirror image of the content made by male influencers. While the toxic, often hard-right politics of the manosphere has been exhaustively documented, the new generation of female influencers are similarly radical - they are just on the other side of the political spectrum. On the internet, women and men have never been more alienated from each other.
I mean, okay, but how do we expect young people brought up to Be Kind and respect each other to respond, when it’s graphically demonstrated the world’s most rich and powerful people are a clique of fascist sex offenders promoting racism, hatred and genocide? Are they meant to shrug and say, Oh dear.
Would we say that the British government’s active participation and ferocious defence of the destruction of the Gaza Strip - the most publicly visible and demonstrated mass slaughter in history - is best described as “apathy”? I would not say that two governments were ambivalent about it. Would you?
Do we think people are not going to get upset when their government makes it crystal clear everything the political class has ever said about justice and human right was horseshit, and that all of that goes out the window when America declares the world’s first good and admirable genocide.
Children in school today are increasingly likely to see the consequences of AMOC collapse but there still isn't even a mention of #ClimateChange in the primary curriculum in England. The dereliction of duty to prepare young people for the future is unforgettable.
