“The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought.” Must read piece by Noah McCormack with too many quotaboe lines to select one! thebaffler.com/salvos/we-us...

Burning trees is not a climate solution

Who's Funding the War on Trans Inclusion? “The stated goal of strategic litigation is rarely to win every case. It’s to make the target behaviour—in this case, implementing trans-inclusive policies—expensive, risky, and exhausting”

Two Tier Keir latest:

Unless there's an unbreakably valid safety reason why not, all button-operated pedestrian crossings should activate the lights in pedestrians' favour instantly when pressed.

Very good thread about data centers and electricity

Tesla is a cult.

The Taoiseach is telling world leaders at COP30 that they need to speak honestly to the public about climate change. Meanwhile his government is sitting on the land use review because he has no intention of telling farmers about the scale of change needed share.google/7UFl4nDNHxip...

[Excellent thread #keeper!]

I reckon the most interesting subset of discourse here is when presumed [good] factors are actually either actually bad, or there to downplay or dismiss the bad even if the amount of good is way smaller than the bad. A short thread to explain: on "training for electrification" + "demand response"

'One of the main arguments against such large rail projects is the cost, which is undoubtedly high. However, as a society, we need to consider the costs of not doing these projects and the benefits that we are missing out on'

"The [climate] dilemma we face is simple: *genuinely* respond to the scientific reality of our predicament or endure the consequences of this profound moral failure for centuries to come." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

[File under: #Chutzpah!] "Taoiseach warns of danger that action on climate crisis is ‘weakening’" www.irishtimes.com/environment/...

"Will the 🇮🇪Government use its financial and political capital now to secure a cleaner, cheaper, fairer future, or will it keep betting that Europe won’t enforce its own climate law? If the latter, then we’ll not only have lost time and money, but also the opportunity to build a sustainable country."

But unless we distribute power more fairly, and *build institutions* that *keep doing so*, eventually the system *will* go haywire again. (Note: More #egalitarian society is no guarantee of #sustainability, but I believe it is a necessary precondition.) See: jmkorhonen.net/2025/10/30/w...

Posting again just to underline the fact that the X algorithm is VERY CLEARLY DESIGNED to feed far right material to new users… It is straight up a propaganda tool and decent people need to LEAVE it.

So much of the centrist approach to politics has devolved into "How do we trick people into supporting us like the right has done?" where talking sincerely about policies that might help ordinary people's lives is for naïve schmucks who don't understand the glorious theatre of it all

My piece on how populist political NIMBYism stymies renewable energy is in today’s @irishexaminer.bsky.social www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

Private equity ruins everything.

the idea that psychology's privileged position in policymaking reflects a structural/ideological preference for individual explanation has been my main pub bore rant for decades!!reflected esp. more recently in the uncritical and wholesale embrace of "behavioural science/economics" in policymaking

The US has abdicated any role in fighting the most urgent threat to human welfare in history, so other countries need to step up and figure out how to do it without us.

i’ve said this before but lemme say it again. it makes absolutely 0 sense to talk about “misuse” of llms because there is no clear use or purpose for llms to begin with. genAI is a purposeless tech floating around looking for uptake 1/

The #ClimateCrisis doesn't wait, nor doesn’t care about accounting tricks! Yet today, national governments took aim at the #2040Target, choosing short-term political convenience over scientific integrity, environmental safety, and societal responsibility👎 Read on for more👉 eeb.org/2040-climate...

Thanks to @postcarboninstitute for republishing our piece on resilience org: Minority influence: how can degrowth step up? - resilience https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-10-30/minority-influence-how-can-degrowth-step-up/ #degrowth #prospectsfordegrowth

Boy Mamdani's race is really a vivid reminder that anti-Islamic bigotry is 100% accepted in US public discourse. People don't even bother dog whistling, it's just right out in the open.

Carrie Everson, US inventor, patented processes for extracting valuable minerals from ore using froth flotation. The Mining Journal noted in 1916 that "as a metallurgist she was a quarter of a century in advance of her profession". d. #OTD 3 Nov 1914 #WomenInSTEM en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_...

Conor Pope argues that an air-travel tax would be unfair. We would like to remind him that the vast majority of people on Earth will never take a flight. It is a wealthy minority (read: us) who pollute, while others around the world bear the consequences. So we ask: is that fair, Conor?

"[Opposition to aviation taxes] is not to downplay the existential crisis we face, or to deny the urgent need for more climate action." - Conor Pope @irishtimes.com Of course, he then *fails to offer a single alternative suggestion* to mitigate aviation emissions.😱 www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

When you hear about "regulations" you should translate that to "protections." Regulations protect the public and environment from businesses harming them. Health, safety, fairness all "get in the way of" giant companies squeezing profit out of the public. A functioning democracy has regulations.

Fintan O’Toole: Simon Harris is deliberately spreading disinformation on immigration

Happy Birthday to the European Convention on Human Rights, which has helped to protect #OurRightsAndFreedoms for 75 years. Here are more than 200 examples, from across the continent👇 🔗 www.coe.int/ECHR There are thousands more. #ECHR #ECHR75 @coe.int @echr.coe.int

Climate talks kick off in Brazil next week, and EU Ministers meet today to crunch the numbers. We need a loophole-free domestic 90% target, and fudging the numbers will come back to haunt us. www.rte.ie/news/2025/11...

Partly because so many formerly leftwing parties have turned to the right, there's a lot of confusion about what right and left mean in politics. I hope this helps: The right defends economic power. The left resists economic power.

Hello from the first ever #Copenhagen 🇩🇰 to #Hamburg 🇩🇪 #DSB #EuroCity #Talgo service 🥳🎉. The trainset is brand new, rather stylish and there’s, almost, level boarding throughout. No #DiningCar though, but I spotted a ☕️ vending machine. And I’m in seat 61 😉. @seatsixtyone.bsky.social @talgo.com

BTW those protests were deliberately stoked by the publisher. BUT the game also caused a very real diplomatic crisis in #Finland. THAT is what #finlandization was in practice. A thread, to help understand why most Finns are critical of oblivious foreigners pushing the same for, say, #Ukraine.

Cruelty is the point.

My view aligns with Malm & @wimcarton.bsky.social that the central struggle of the climate movement still remains the abolition of fossil fuels, but the deeper into the crisis we go the more we gave to struggle on many fronts including adaptation and antifacism.

“Which products in Germany 🇩🇪 get 19% tax: - oat milk - baby diapers - soy schnitzel Which get 7%: - cow milk - meat - frogs legs Which get no taxes at all: - Jet fuel - shipping diesel - international flight tickets [Germany’s] tax system is totally absurd and should be reformed!”

"Opening the conference, @iiasa.ac.at director general Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber shared his personal view that '1.5C is dead, 2C is in agony and 3C is looming'." www.carbonbrief.org/overshoot-ex...

The fossil fuels line has to go down It is not bad that line goes up But other line is not go down

ChatGPT cited a paper of mine which I did not know existed, so I asked it for the link to it. Unfortunately that link to the Nature website just gave a "Page not found". So sad.

One for #EPAIreland and #CCACIrelabd to take up?

#RTÉ #MorningIreland giving free airtime to #Ryanair yet again. Waited for critical discussion of climate impacts. Waited in vain, as usual.

The 2025 State of the Climate Report is out and as a MUST READ before COP30 gets underway. Check out these first 2 sentences: "We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet’s vital signs are flashing red. " doi.org/10.1093/bios...

Sunday Times: "Harris's comments were supported by the Taoiseach and Paschal Donohoe, the finance minister. However, senior gardai are understood to be concerned by the rhetoric coming from the government on immigration because of the challenges in policing rising tensions over the issue."

Every far-right riot and protest that was tolerated, every racist dog whistle from public reps, every bit of hate and misinformation allowed to spread by social media companies, all led to this moment in Drogheda last night where someone felt emboldened enough to try to burn children alive.