VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England. I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

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Exactly this! Plus various family members died young or lost limbs thanks to the fossil fuel industry. During my teenage years the local coking plant was replaced with some of the UK's first large scale wind turbines. It was better. Sod anyone who thinks solar or wind are an aesthetic problem.

Just seen my first bumblebee of the year! #Equinox

[stares at British 'populism']

The uk needs to: 1. Make shifting to solar and heat pumps for homes ans businesses a priority. 2. A programme of rail electrification. 3. Reduce speed limits. 4. Emergency cycle and bus lanes, and fill any gaps. 5. Revamp cycle2work scheme into govt backed interest free loans for cycle purchases

If you missed it, I’m part of a small collective trying to bring a radical bookshop shop to Newcastle. We haven’t had a good proper radical book shop since the 1980s. We think that should change! We launched our crowdfunder today, support if you can: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb... Pls share

As I - who coauthored two books and literally demonstrated *for* nuclear energy - have tried to explain several times, slashing regulations is NOT a good thing for nuclear power. Especially if done by an unpopular, laughably incompetent & blatantly corrupt administration! A reaction WILL follow.

The final report on last April's Spain/Portugal blackout is out. A few takeaways: - Lack of "inertia" due to too few fossil/nuclear generators - the thing anti-renewable pundits immediately blamed without evidence, then reporters breathlessly endlessly repeated - played essentially no role.

Don't always agree with George, but I am very much a free market anti-capitalist. You cannot have a free market without a robust state. One of the big failures of British politics has been the demise of the inspector class; people whose job it was to go around and check rules were being followed. /1

Went for a cuppa with my Dad in the new hotel on Whitehaven harbour at the weekend. Disappointed that no one tried to sell us any droids.

‘I used a comparison with Winston Churchill as a way to disparage someone while sitting next to a Fianna Fáil taoiseach.’

My Cllr got back to me a few days later. I'm still yet to hear from my MP... Not even a form fit of why the government generically values my life and those of others on the road. Silence.

Summer is an ideal time for heating engineers to install heat pumps (fewer boilers to fix). If the oil crisis subsides by winter, no regrets, you got a load more heat pumps. And if it doesn’t, you’ve reduced the need for subsidy and destroyed some oil demand. Seems… worth doing?

So, given you have a 6 month window before things get bad and you want to avoid basic oil subsidies if you can… … why not have a massive push on heat pumps to replace oil over the summer? Maybe boost the subsidy (to rural Scotland levels - £9k)?

They should stop in the first safe country they pass through

I simply refuse to believe this isn’t a Chris Morris sketch:

It's Spring! This is on a week tomorrow:

you ever sometimes think about how Frankenstein was a cautionary tale about instrumentalizing life by boiling it down to only its parts, and withholding love and the ability to learn in a safe environment, ultimately undermining personhood? I think about that sometimes.

REMINDER: One week to go before the Government's consultation on domestic burning closes. Don't miss the opportunity to have your say and complete your response before March 19! www.healthyair.org.uk/have-your-sa...

every quantitative measure is actually a stack of qualitative assumptions in a trenchcoat

Ireland's new fossil-fuelled #Petrotech data center will increase Ireland's **total** (everything, not just the power sector) emissions by ~1% Absolutely nuts. A 1% national increase - for what? Come on boosters, explain why this is worth it 🫠 www.linkedin.com/posts/bgamaz...

Yeah, sure, new books are great, but do you ever read old books? Have you ever read 'The Third Policeman' by Flann O’Brien? It's a brilliantly absurd story of a village police force and a brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle. drbslibrary.com/thirdpoliceman

As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

As an aside, this mindset is often described as "lean" because you skip the "waste" of low fidelity work. Buddy, no. Low fidelity is not the waste. Work in low fidelity is what prevents the high detail work from being waste. Lean is when cheap-as-free sketches are all you need to avoid that waste.

🚨 The House of Lords have STILL not passed abortion decriminalisation AND many are trying to repeal telemedicine that allows patients to end a pregnancy at home in peace and privacy. Please use this BPAS link to email, I promise it takes seconds! Please share 🙏 bpas-campaigns.org/time-to-act/...

Gas prices jumped again this morning and are on track to double - a stark reminder of our exposure to fossil fuel volatility. The real solution isn’t more drilling, but moving away from combustion: electrify, use renewable power, and boost energy efficiency.

It's a simple way of putting it, but I hope the fact that one group of data centres powering one shitty, evil chatbot for one crappy little social media site undoing most or all of Tesla's entire global climate benefits puts in perspective how WILDLY bloated genAI is as software

By me: Today marks 10 years since the assassination of Indigenous environmentalist Berta Cáceres, a rare leader whose death marked a before and after for many including me. Despite some justice, the extractive economic model and its criminal modus operandi continues apace. drilled.media/news/berta

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work. This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public. Please spread the word. 🧵 1/4

As ever, I don't imagine myself representative of anyone but me. But if I'd had a vote in Gorton I'd have agonised, then done whatever felt most likely to stop Goodwin. After Starmer and Mahmoud's responses I now feel quite motivated to vote *against* Labour?

A reminder of what some of these asylum policies are: - giving refugees only 2.5 years of leave, meaning the Home Office has to review their status every 30 months - quadrupling the time to settlement from 5 years to 20 years - no automatic way to be reunited with close family members

New meta-analysis of 26 published studies concludes that AVs will lead people to use cars a lot more — which would thicken congestion and worsen pollution (even if AVs are electric). "AV deployment is anticipated to lead to an overall increase in Vehicle Miles Traveled." doi.org/10.1016/j.tb...

Sharing this paper because it seems pretty relevant this morning: politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

the epidemic of men launching podcasts about nothing has gotten out of control to combat this I am launching a podcast WITH A WOMAN (veteran climate journalist Tracy Wholf) to talk about stuff that actually matters (the planet being destroyed by the worst people alive) Find subscribe links here:

just quite maddening that Osborne's legacy is currently "hey that guy who helped the Tories get back into power then was chancellor for a while until Brexit, and now he has 300 jobs lol" and not "look, everything the light touches was fucked up by George Osborne in some way between 2010 and 2016"

shotgun not me but think there's scope here for a proper, lengthy, meaty feature looking at every single policy area in Britain that's currently fucked specifically because of a decision George Osborne took, reckon you could make it an actual mag cover, his fingerprints are everywhere

and that’s why Liverpool has the world’s second oldest underground railway, baby!

I can't imagine a better demonstration of the advantages of the Single Transferable Vote.

Great coverage of Kyan Shlipak's recent #ScienceAdvances study on the health impacts of U.S. residential wood burning, by @drgaryfuller.bsky.social, for the @theguardian.com @science.org

Never forget, when you’re being asked to prove that safe bike-lanes or pedestrian crossings across currently unsafe conditions are ‘needed,’ it's hard to justify a bridge by the number of people swimming across a raging river.

Today programme is platforming right wing bigots again.

I do agree with this suggestion, and sort of always have, but from planning history, it's one step down from what, IMO, is the key issue - land law. Land law in the England and Wales is feudal and based on rights. In 1947, the Town and Country Planning Act did the largest nationalisation of the...

1940 Irish language scif-fi book Manannán by Máiréad Ní Ghráda It is the first Mecha Robot outside of Japan and mention of a Gravity assist in fiction. It was never republished or translated.

Lots of govt tech policy has been somewhat inexplicable this last year. The role of TBI is well known and something we all took for granted, and while ofc Palantir's relationship with the UK public services pre-dates this administration, there are some big Qs to be answered about Global Counsel

If you liked Guy Martin's House without bills, you'll like the latest @aecb.bsky.social webinar with Will South talking about his home retrofit project in Brighton This goes into a lot more detail of what it entails to do a whole house retrofit

The extractive nature of LLMs can be seen in their exploitation of not only open content, but also in their damage to open infrastructures.

The grim tragedy of inclusive communities of WI women disbanded due to the destructive power of transphobia promoted so widely and unquestioningly by broadcast and print media. Organisations like the WI have been undermined and attacked under a banner of divisive hate directed at trans people.

I prefer to think of Bank Run Ridley here less as a dangerous lunatic than as a one man argument you should let go of your imposter syndrome.

the problem with ticking "reply to that email" off your to do list is that the buggers reply