I think it's bollocks to assign pollution from an industry to the people who consume that industries products. The pollution that comes from a factory farm or an airliner is the fault of the food and airline company, not the average person eating the end product or the passenger. If you want that pollution to go away, take a legislative stake to the heart of those industries rather than going "that's your fault, that is" and then leaving everyone to it.
There's a high minded element to this (focus on structural problems, not individual culpability) but equally there's a more intuitive approach, one that says: Yes, I am responsible for the pollution generated by driving my car - I am the one doing that - but I can hardly be blamed for the pollution someone else did just because they did it in the assumption it would give them something to sell me.
I'm not saying I'd be overjoyed to find that I can't gorge myself on cheap sausage rolls anymore, but the most insufferable nonsense in the world is this idea that you can do "something to help" with your own personal consumption choices, a task that (if you approach it seriously) quickly exceeds centrally planning the economy of Russia in terms of logical impossibility, put forward by a coalition of those who're overinvested in legacy industries, actual idiots, and those who'd rather be the personally most morally virtuous prick on a dead planet than just another guy on a live one where the government stepped in.
If we're going to outlaw meat or jet aviation, we're going to need a critical mass of people who would support it. We need a culture change where those things are broadly regarded as unacceptable. A democratic government won't impose that change from the top down, the electorate need to demand it from the bottom up; individual and collective action are two sides of the same coin.
That depends on how necessary the product is. It's easy enough to forgive you buying food which you need to eat to live, but flying is almost never genuinely necessary.
>>93030 France has just voted to ban short haul flights where railway links exist. (Though for all I know it'll die in their senate.) The idea that politicians can't act in a top down fashion is one I find hard to believe. Politicians impose top down change that nobody wants all the time, and I'm not sure there's been a manifesto in living memory that has accurately reflected what the public actually want. Our government's in a particularly lucky position: It's the party of the right. What're voters going to do if they ban non-essential flights tomorrow - vote Labour, who'll be under substantial internal pressure to adopt an even harsher policy, and who'll bleed a few votes to the Greens if they don't?
>>93031 Even when flying for completely unnecessary reasons, the airline industry is good at yield management. If you don't buy the seat they'll doubtless find someone else, and even if they don't they'll fly the plane empty if they have to since the plane still has to move to where it's going to be next. It really is something to be dealt with at the airline or government level, not the consumer level.
Someone ought to go out and do a report on how we could substitute the airline route network. Until France's vote I was quite worried that the main approach of governments would be taxing emissions properly so as to not interfere with the market too much, which sounds all well and good until you remember that the most hard to replace routes are usually more economically marginal - remote communities and such - while some of the least necessary flights come from those with the greatest ability to pay (the entire existence of private jets)
It would be much better to have a report that could rank each route by its necessity, alternative transport links, etc, to give a clear look at the prospects for shrinking the industry. Staring with routes that can immediately be scrapped, then moving on to routes that can be scrapped with some marginal changes to current transport policy (say, introducing more trains on a given route), then those that can be scrapped with a more co-ordinated view of things (say, building a high speed rail link), then those which can be scrapped with some difficulty (such as flights to the Scottish Islands), and then finally those which would be the least desirable to cancel (Which from my impression would be flights to remote pacific islands, perhaps not too relevant for British officials.)
Perhaps in a prior life I was a central planner...
out of interest can anyone show me what proposals the environment movement have for mitigating the loss of jobs and business which will result if their proposals are implemented
That's a bit like asking "can anyone show me what proposals the fire brigade have for mitigating the water damage from extinguishing my house fire". Whatever the answer is, you still need to put the fire out ASAP.
Climate change is expected to reduce global GDP by somewhere between 5% and 20%. Transitioning to an economy with net-zero emissions will cost about 2% of global GDP. Whether we invest in new industries, create make-work jobs or just put people on the dole is a matter for the government and really a secondary concern, because the impacts of climate change will be utterly catastrophic. We are absolutely confident that doing nothing or acting too late will be far more costly than acting quickly and aggressively to curtail our emissions.
>It would be much better to have a report that could rank each route by its necessity, alternative transport links, etc, to give a clear look at the prospects for shrinking the industry.
The problem with this is that you'd end up with data that suggests you should shut down some of the least impactful routes. Yes, oil rig workers can get a train to Aberdeen but the usual Jetstream and Embraers that fly them there use less fuel to get there than a 777 uses just taxiing out of terminal 5 to the far end of the runways (this is not an exaggeration!).
And obviously this approach would almost always suggest that nobody should be flying to Spain for their holidays, which personally I find little reason to disagree with but I don't think the average person (more importantly the average voter) will ever be convinced to take a train to Tenerife. There's also the question of what you do with cargo flights, or airlines that do pax and cargo combined - is that more efficient? If it is all you're doing is encouraging more airlines to use bigger airframes.
Tax won't work either, not when most british airlines have overseas hangars and bases already - you'd have to convince every country to match your penalties and that would have been hard even when we were in the EU. Taxing jet fuel (currently tax free) might help a little, but only in as much as we'd just tanker up in cheaper countries, making for less economical takeoffs as you'd want as much as you could carry to bring back over.
There's already a built in cost incentive to build or buy more and more economical engines, obviously. But I would say a way to encourage that development further would be the least worst approach a government could take right now. Whether it be tax relief based on how efficient your fleet on average is, or a boost to the aerospace engineering sector or what, I don't really know. But even then the cost of building and upgrading aircraft is hardly environmentally cheap.
>>93044 Is that really such a problem? The real-world trade-off is surely that you either scrap the Jetstream to Aberdeen now and wait a bit to kill the LHR-JFK 777s, or you scrap neither. The same with bigger airframes in some circumstances - while obviously it varies by distance and other factors, in some situations you'll surely get less emissions per passenger doing low frequency flights with a big plane than high frequency flights with a smaller plane, even if customer preference currently forces airlines to go for frequency.
Now that we're out of Europe there's surely got to be more we can do to regulate airlines operating into and out of Britain? I assume there's still a pile of bilateral treaties with fun acronyms that say we can't do this or that, but surely we're getting away from the sort of situation where every airline can just buzz everything through an Irish subsidiary if they don't like our rules? What barrier is there to going back (if we so wished) to the sort of regulated environment of the 1960s where if an airline wants to operate a route to Britain it'll need the approval of 3 ministries and still never start service because the deputy undersecretary to agriculture vetoed their right to use airspace over British farms? That would surely resolve any issues with tax avoidance and so on at a stroke. (Making the bold assumption that none of the ministers are crooks in the pocket of our national carrier.)
Unless we hit something like electric planes, regulate, or just stop constructing and upgrading airports to lock capacity at current levels I'm not sure how you avoid Jevons paradox, where more efficient engines just make more and more flights viable until you're back where you started. I'm all for supporting their development all the same (we're probably always going to need some aeroplanes, might as well make them the most efficient ones possible) but I feel like something more forceful is needed to counteract "what the market wants".
>>93042 >create make work jobs or just put people on the dole
And where is the finance from that coming from? I'm not suggesting climate change doesn't need radical change but there doesn't seem to be a workable economic route map.
My belief is there isn't one and basically we are utterly boned
I just don't see, for example, the millions of people employed by the airline and aircraft industries finding work in renewable industries. Some yes but a large proportion will be left unemployed if the reduction in flights necessary to combat climate change happens.
I'll say it again, either we short circuit the global economy or accept global economic catastrophe - either way we are boned and does explain the relative lack of action on climate change
Not him, but a huge amount of air industry jobs are entry level or minimum wage. Even the bloke responsible for calculating or planning your plane's weight and balance is probably paid less than a McDonald's employee, if they're using a third party handling agent.
And quite frankly, what you described has already happened. Swissport laid off about 70% of ground staff in 2020. There are already pilots delivering your Tesco shop because they got cut loose from their airline. I'm the last person who wants to see the industry die but I don't think it would have the impact you assume it would.
>>93058 Good points but I was using the airline/aircraft industries as an example.
Factor in the restrictions necessary to reduce climate change, ie personal vehicles, shipping vast amounts of unnecessary shit from china, getting people to accept changes many would see as a reduction in life style, the whole picture in other words = to me us boned.
I hope I'm wrong and that's why I've asked a few times for links to serious studies showing a route map for change without economic melt down. To me the changes required at the pace required are not economically feasible. Simple statements put forward by some such as 'we need to fix the climate first and worry about the economy later' ignore the fact that screwing the economy is just as dangerous to the global population as climate change.
To use a crude example and using the third world as shit tends to effect the third world more than any others - if a third world farmer is starving to death the mechanism of why is largely irrelevant - be it he has been forced off his land by rising sea levels or the market for his product has gone, the poor sod is still staring to death
An MP accused of threatening to release naked videos of a woman who had been meeting her boyfriend has claimed she was concerned the woman was breaking lockdown rules, a court has been told.
Claudia Webbe, the MP for Leicester East, allegedly made silent calls to Michelle Merritt before threatening to throw acid at her. She was jealous of Merritt’s friendship with her boyfriend, Lester Thomas, a Chelsea football club scout, Westminster magistrates’ court was told. She told the court that Thomas had been her boyfriend since 2017 and although she was unaware that he had previously dated Merritt, 59, she was not jealous of their continuing friendship. Webbe denies calling Merritt “a slag”, threatening her with acid and saying she would send naked photographs and videos to her daughters during a Mother’s Day call in March 2019.
“I have never sworn in my life, I don’t use expletives, I would never treat women like that,” she said. “I spent my lifetime campaigning for the rights of women, for challenging this type of behaviour and this is not something that is in my character.”
After Merritt contacted police an officer told Webbe not to call Merritt again. Webbe said that she contacted Merritt in April last year to ask why she was continuing to meet Thomas. In a recording of the call, Webbe shouted: “Why are you still butting in and getting with Lester? Why, why?” Webbe continued screaming: “Get out of my relationship. I’ve seen all of your posts, I’ve seen all of your naked pictures, I’ve seen all of your relationship with Lester. Get out of my relationship. Otherwise, I will tell all of your family and I will show them all of your pictures.”
Webbe told the court that Thomas believes Covid is a hoax and was visiting Merritt because, he said, she “needed” him. “The conversation between Lester and I became heated,” she said. “I attempted to call Michelle twice on this day to understand why she had repeatedly breached lockdown with Lester.” The MP denied threatening to disclose intimate photographs of Merritt. She said: “This was a comment directed at Lester because he had been physically violent.”
>>94737 I'm both happy she's been outed as an utterly nutterly, and disappointed about how this will reflect on Labour. But then maybe it should, she's a stain.
>An MP who threatened to throw acid at her partner's female friend and send naked photos of her to her family has been found guilty of harassment.
>Claudia Webbe, 56, also made threatening phone calls to Michelle Merritt because she claimed "we were in a national crisis and lockdown had to be adhered to strictly".
>>94849 >Some of the phone calls had their number withheld but some did not as Webbe had dialled "121" before Ms Merritt's number instead of "141", which withholds the caller's number.
What a fucking clown.
It'll be interesting to see how Labour fuck this up next. They should never have parachuted her in just because she was Corbyn's crony, particularly as the replacement for Keith Vaz after all the sordid shit he got up to. If there is a by-election I'm expecting Galloway to throw his hat into the ring.
Here is Jeremy Corbyn, the day after it was reported in court about the threats with acid and of releasing naked pictures, calling for solidarity with Claudia Webbe for what she's going through.
>>94866 It's good to see him with his pal, Russell-Moyle. The same member who (allegedly) released the unredacted internal report into antisemitism in the Labour party containing the names and personal details of whistle-blowers. The same one who threatened to 'rout out' the Tories in his constituency, remarking that he knew where they live.
Webbe was present at a Labour photo-call on Friday against fire and rehire practices. It's interesting to see which politicians have been cropped out when MPs have posted this on social media; some have used the full picture, some have cropped it so Corbyn isn't in the frame but Webbe is and others have cut both of them out.
>>94926 Yes. Although I've no idea why they let a nutcase like Webbe attend in the first place, nevermind letting her stand in a fairly prominent position.
>>94927 Yeah, I suppose. I really don't understand that her being there. MPs are too polite to tell her to sod off? That makes the most sense, if there's something Labour are lacking it's earnest bastards. Earnest wimps and disingenous bastards, but nothing in-between. And who brought their bloody dog to work? I hate this. And now I'm not even thinking about what a villainous practice fire and rehire is, damn it all.
>>94928 It was probably a loose dog that they daren't try to move on in case they ended up damaging the mugs they'd had specially made for the pictures.
>>94930 It's touched upon earlier in the thread; it's a batshit mix of saying she's never said a swear word in her life, she wasn't harassing her and was instead concerned that she wasn't following lockdown properly and she campaigns for women's rights so she'd never treat another woman like that.
This is quite off-topic, but I'd rather stick pins in my knob than talk about Labour's innards again. However, do some women just hate other women? I've noticed something whereby very, very minor things will make some women decide another woman is an irredeemable bastard in an instant and there'll be no coming back from it. It's so subtle it's more like body like horses asserting dominance with a flick of their ears than anything I'd call communicating.
Pic unrelated, but it's the only image of a woman I have.
>>94932 You know how some poor people utterly despise other poor people? Also, rich people hate other rich people sometimes as well. And I, as a man, can direct you to numerous men whom I hate. I think women have an innate tendency to be nice to men, so we all think they're lovely, but in reality they are foul, despicable bitches.
>>94936 I remember there being loads of noise, particularly in the Graun, about online misogyny when Ruby was on Bake Off but every single person I saw that complained about her was female.
>>94936 Most violence against men is perpetrated by men
Most stolen chips are seagulls stealing from other seagulls
Most dogs are shagged by other dogs rather than gs users
Lesbian relationships have the highest rates of domestic violence
It appears the same thread had some things about people who were critical of using social media. Clearly that has nothing to do with bisexuality either.
I don't really know how else to read this, honestly.
It seems more likely here that she's actually just gay, and The Metro have shockingly got that wrong and labelled her as bi. The tweet makes a thousand times more sense if she's a full lezzer.
That makes sense. And I really can't be bothered to dig any further into the six-year-old drama over the sexuality of some-woman-who-was-on-bake-off-once.
Why are we talking about this? Don't answer that.
>>94947 They're redoing the vote on Owen Paterson, so maybe they'll try it for Claudia Webbe as well. Although I can fully see the Conservatives voting to keep her in, just for the bants.
