You join me in the middle of another climate anxiety freakout, the beginning having begun several years ago and the end expected roughly forty minutes after my death. As deadly heatwaves clobber half of Europe, I’ve relocated my climate panic from background hum to front, centre and screaming in my face.
Read More
David Graeber has a theory that hundreds of millions of people are stuck in pointless, dead-end, bullshit jobs; jobs that exist only because we created them, jobs that add nothing, do nothing, give nothing of value to the world. What I’m saying is, this book appeals to me on a midichlorian level.
Read More
After 11 months of dithering, three nights of barely any sleep, and one day of sweating with guilt in a showroom, I finally bought an electric car. Here’s how it’s been:
Public charging, it turns out, is a piece of piss.
Read More
The New Corporation takes on the myth of goodhearted corporations, the ones that pretend to give even half a shit about the disposable fleshpods that make up their customer base. The ones that care about the social problems they’ve very definitely caused. It’s horseshit, of course.
Read More
Most humans on earth are aware of how Big Bidness stomps all over humanity’s face in search of its next shabby cash-grab. Joel Bakan’s The Corporation helps explain why: Corporations are, in human terms, amoral, antisocial psychopaths. That is a million percent my jam.
Read More
Having graduated from the Bond Villain School of Bastards and Bastardry, Nestlé, the world’s biggest food and drinks company, apparently set out to also be the world’s biggest contributor to infant mortality, aggressively marketing its baby milk substitute in countries where the water used to make it was so filthy it killed babies…
Read More
Mainstream representations of the environmentalist movement would have you believe it’s as middle class as The Guardian and white as all fuck. And while it’s true Greenpeace is, for example, as middle class as The Guardian and white as all fuck, they are not the whole of the environmentalism movement…
Read More
Among the million things we need to do to avert climate breakdown, kicking the arse out of plastic is one of the most urgent. Plastic comes from dirty-bad oil, gas and coal, using about 4.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and about 6% of coal-fired electricity in its production. We’re bringing on the sixth mass extinction for the sake of shrink-wrapped broccoli.
Read More
In my withered, Covid-infested state I find myself doing less and less for the big battles we need to win: Yer climate breakdown, yer rise of fascism, yer eating the rich. But recently I’ve discovered a critical area of climate activism that requires even less effort than doing very little: Doing nothing at all! By which I mean I’m buying less shit.
Read More
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC – issued its latest report this week, pointing out how monumentally fucked we are because we like cars, burgers and mass extinctions. It makes for grim reading – but only if you actually read it. Here are nine ways you can avoid giving it any thought at all!
Read More
Desperate to avoid petrol I hired an electric car for the purposes of hard science. I requisitioned a Renault Zoe for a few days, rented a lab coat and three pens for its pocket, bought a clipboard outright and began the grand experiment. The key tests were how well the battery lasted with my commute and the business of social work, how quickly it drained when parked overnight, how big a pain in the arse public charge points are, and how often I’d have to use the buggers.
Read More
Back in the arse-end of 2019 I finally ditched my car, having decided humanity was marginally more important than an easy commute. But then Covid hit. And hit me right in the face. Almost two years later I’m still having trouble walking, still working fully from home and only just starting full time hours. I need a car. Which means I need an electric car, which means a lot of expense…
Read More
