Dr Charlie Gardner

ExxonMobil scraps plans for $10 billion Texas plastics plant The company plans to reevaluate the complex down the line.

🧵1 / ExxonMobil just hit pause on a massive plastics project in Texas, blaming “market conditions” 👀
📉 Another sign that plastics are a bad investment — a market fraught with oversupply, debt, and declining demand.

Letter of Support for Professor Farhana Sultana As scholars within and beyond academia, we write in solidarity with academic freedom of expression with our colleague, Dr. Farhana Sultana, an internationally recognized scholar and tenured Full Profe...

This is an important petition on academic freedom, for a professor at Syracuse, NY, USA, who has been indefinitely suspended for a very mildly sarcastic four-word social media post relating to US politics.
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

This open invitation to the @nebriefing.bsky.social was published in the @financialtimes.com today. Please check whether your MP can make it here: www.nebriefing.org and if not ask them to!

We will be briefing on national security, tipping points, food security, nature and more.

" #Brazil 🇧🇷 and #Bolivia 🇧🇴experienced the most severe impacts, with Bolivia seeing 9 % of its intact forest burned in 2024. Pan-Amazon fire-driven forest degradation released 643 million tons of CO2 in 2024, a seven-fold increase from the previous two years"

Labour ministers met fossil fuel lobbyists 500 times in first year of power, analysis shows Lobbyists attended 48% more meetings than Tories, as Labour accused of giving them ‘backstage pass’

I wonder how often they met with climate scientists

🔥 The never-ending narrative…
This week, I’ve once again heard prominent climate researchers dismiss individual action as either irrelevant or a distraction instigated by the fossil fuel industry.

Here’s a 🧵 on why this argument frustrates me to no end and why I think it misses the bigger picture.

Carbon dioxide levels increase by record amount to new highs in 2024

End fossil fuels now or destroy the world.

That's the choice.

Report here:

wmo.int/news/media-c...

3/3

Wage war on nature to build new homes: that’s Labour’s offer, but it’s a con trick | George Monbiot The government’s new planning bill is tearing down environmental protections to benefit developers. This nation of nature lovers won’t stand for it, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Today's column is about the government's huge, unprecedented assault on nature ... and about the eerie, astonishing silence of the big nature groups. The RSPB, National Trust, Wildlife Trusts have 7.5m members between them. A vast force, completely unmobilised. 🧵
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Wage war on nature to build new homes: that’s Labour’s offer, but it’s a con trick | George Monbiot The government’s new planning bill is tearing down environmental protections to benefit developers. This nation of nature lovers won’t stand for it, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The planning and infrastructure bill is a "full-spectrum assault on nature protection"

So where are the conservation charities? Where is the resistance? Where is our 'nation of nature lovers'?

And since social norms are such a powerful influence on our behaviour, that makes each of us a powerful influence on the people we interact with

Our words and behaviour are hugely influential in normalising caring about climate & nature and acting in its defence

"People save more energy if they think others expect them to – showing that social norms are a powerful influence on our behaviour."

Record leap in CO2 fuels fears of accelerating global heating CO2 in air hit new high last year, with scientists concerned natural land and ocean carbon sinks are weakening

If nature's carbon sinks are failing already, and planetary feedbacks are underway, then 1.5C never was a 'safe level' of climate change

Record leap in CO2 fuels fears of accelerating global heating CO2 in air hit new high last year, with scientists concerned natural land and ocean carbon sinks are weakening

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations "surged" last year - a record yearly increase

It's bad enough that we're continuing to burn fossil fuels, but now the world's natural carbon sinks (like the forests going up in flames) are failing too

Fuck

Paul Marshall, the man who owns the right The multimillionaire controls a network of news channels, publications and think tanks that the left could only dream of. If Reform or the Tories win the next election, he will become the country’s mo...

I've spent *weeks* working on this special report for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social on GB News co-owner Paul Marshall – and the astonishing, unprecedented influence network he's built on the UK's right. There's never been anything like it before. www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-p...

Name a protest movement, anywhere or at any time, that has achieved its goals without being annoying and obstructive.
People like this enjoy the freedoms our political ancestors gained for them, while attacking the means by which they were achieved.

🧵This country has a deep history of resisting & rejecting oppression. It isn’t often taught or acknowledged.

We need to know. We need to learn from our elders, ancestors, & political forebears. Now.

A thread about that. I will inevitably miss many examples; pls reply or QT with additions.

The Guardian: "'Dismal' health of world's forests is threat to humanity, report warns. Financial institutions pouring money into land clearance and undermining efforts to stop destruction, says Climate Focus. Jonathan Watts, 14th Oct."

$5.9bn = the amount spent annually on protecting and restoring forests

$409bn = the amount of subsidies going to agriculture industries destroying forests

Anyone else see the problem here?

"Decarbonisation will be too disruptive, we shouldn't bother"

"Climate activists are too disruptive, they should be locked up"

Meanwhile...

I hadn't seen that yale360 article but have been looking for just such an analysis - thanks

We are being sold a false story that nature is the enemy. That newts, bats, snails and spiders are somehow responsible for the so-called housing crisis and a blocker to economic growth. This is a deliberate lie - using a cynically chosen group of species that could be found in a witches cauldron.

‘Dismal’ health of world’s forests is threat to humanity, report warns Financial institutions pouring money into land clearance and undermining efforts to stop destruction, says Climate Focus

Just astonishing how much focus there is on planting trees to hopefully create new forests for the future

And all the while the plunder and destruction of our actual, existing forests just carries on worsening

This is horrific news

Towns may have to be abandoned due to floods with millions more homes in Great Britain at risk Every constituency projected to be at greater risk, with many areas likely to be uninsurable, Guardian investigation finds

Maybe we should stop listening to those who say decarbonisation will be too disruptive and expensive

And start listening to the experts warning that inaction will be much, much worse

Hamburg referendum backs more ambitious climate action, 2040 net-zero target

"Hamburg voters have backed a citizen-led referendum that obliges Germany’s second largest city to step up climate action and reach climate neutrality by 2040, five years earlier than previously planned."

#ClimateAction

www.cleanenergywire.org/news/hamburg...

Norfolk’s vanishing coast and the limits of protection Norfolk’s crumbling coastline exposes the human cost of climate change – and the painful limits of what councils can do

The Shoreline Management Plan sets out which of Norfolk's coastal communities will be defended and which will be surrendered to the sea. Few realise what that really means.

Read how the residents of Hemsby are starting to find out ⤵️

@eastangliabylines.co.uk @owensennitt.bsky.social

Kent police apologise to protester threatened with arrest for holding Palestine flag Force agrees to pay damages to Laura Murton, 43, who also had sign saying ‘Israel is committing genocide’

A protester who was threatened with arrest under the Terrorism Act for holding a Palestine flag and signs saying “free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide” has received an apology from police, including for “unlawful false imprisonment”.

And damages.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Climate investment is growth opportunity of 21st century, says economist Lord Stern says fossil-fuelled growth is futile as the damage it causes ends in economic self-destruction

Climate action is the only economic growth story of 21st century, says leading economist Lord Stern

- Fossil-fuelled growth is futile as the damage it causes ends in economic self-destruction

#climatecrisis
Story by me
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Bleaching, Melting, Slowing: New Global Tipping Points report tracks growing risks of Earth system tipping points. It highlights mounting risks, from melting glaciers, ice fields to slowing ocean currents, ice sheets & rainforests under pressure.
www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/late...

Sunak admits think tank helped write anti-protest laws The PM confirmed Policy Exchange helped draft laws targeting climate activists, as first revealed by openDemocracy

Very much so - they wrote the legislation!

www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-mone...

‘It’s a road to destruction’: climate defenders facing surge in reprisals, says UN expert Mary Lawlor, UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders, accuses US, UK and other governments of paying lip service to climate goals while criminalizing activists

“Governments are repressing human rights defenders and the current trajectory is incompatible with the realization of human rights for all. It’s just a road to destruction … I think states are behaving in a criminal fashion”

More than 45 charities, campaigners and trade unions have signed our open letter urging UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband to back an ambitious outcome on just transition at the UN Climate Summit #COP30.