There’s no point trying to make plans around the whims of Trump. The PM instead needs to turn to Europe
To Elon Musk, I say this! To perform one Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, might be considered a misfortune. To perform two Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, begins to look like carelessness.
I didn’t write that joke. I have cannibalised it from one by the gay Irish Victorian Oscar Wilde, a typical diversity hire who would have achieved nothing had his work not been promoted by the famously woke 19th-century British establishment. Luckily, Wilde was dead long before he had the opportunity to emigrate to the US and take an air traffic controller job from a more deserving straight white male, where his gayness would have caused planes to crash.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
02/09/2025 - 04:00
Heading off the environmental crisis and growing the economy are not at odds. They are two sides of a coin – as our politicians should realise
If you care about the world we are handing on to future generations, the news on Thursday morning was dramatic. This January was the warmest on record; temperatures in 18 of the past 19 months have exceeded pre-industrial averages by 1.5C. There can be no comfort that the epoch-changing climate crisis is 20 or even 10 years away. It is already upon us.
Temperatures should have been moderated this winter by cooler air over the Pacific; it did not happen. Scientists are bewildered and scared. James Hansen, doyen of climate crisis research, believes that, unless this pace of deterioration is reversed, warm ocean waters flowing from the southern to the northern hemisphere will be trapped as vast sea currents cease. Sea levels will rise to impose a civilisational threat. It is a global imperative to dial down the rate of carbon emissions.
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02/09/2025 - 02:00
Keir Starmer’s rhetoric against green campaigners appears to have taken a playground turn
Before the last election, in what was billed as his “most personal interview yet”, Keir Starmer said: “I’m not in the habit of bandying insults around”. It was once part of his appeal, or meant to be, that his speech was polite, even to the point of colourless, in contrast to the ugly gibberish streaming out of Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss. When the Tories went low, Starmer went sorrowful headteacher. “I don’t think Boris Johnson is a bad man,” he said in one speech, “I think he is a trivial man.”
His favourite word, these days, is “nimbys”. Starmer uses it so freely he’s personally breathed new life into the original acronym (“not in my back yard”), revealing along the way its largely unexplored potential to create national disharmony. Why restrict such a genius jibe to arguments about ring roads and executive homes? Last week’s headlines about his plan for nuclear power expansion – typically, “Starmer to ‘push past nimbyism’ in pledge to expand nuclear power sites” – are only the latest in which Starmer demonstrates how any opposition to any scheme with environmental consequences can be represented, by a skilled litigator like himself, as nimbyism: purely selfish, irrational and against the common good. Unlike the visionary tech overlords such as Google, Meta and Amazon, which Starmer invited, in the same speech, to profit, with their data centres, from the UK nimbys’ certain defeat. His government’s pro-nuclear press release featured praise from similarly patriotic, non-nimby-infested corporations, such as EDF and Microsoft.
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02/09/2025 - 02:00
Leading climate group warns of damage to green agenda if giant project goes ahead
Keir Starmer will do huge damage to the global fight against climate change if he gives in to political pressure and allows the development of a giant new oilfield in the North Sea, according to an analysis by the country’s leading environmental institute.
Chaired by Nicholas Stern, the Grantham Institute on Climate Change will fire a warning shot to ministers not to give the green light to the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, after suggestions that the Treasury is now in favour of allowing drilling to maximise economic growth.
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02/08/2025 - 21:44
David Crisafulli says infrastructure to be replaced after floods needs ‘greater ability’ to withstand natural disasters
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Queensland’s premier has vowed to rebuild “more resilient” infrastructure after devastating floods in the state’s north, as Queenslanders were warned not to panic-buy while they are cut off.
David Crisafulli said his government was here “for the long haul” of recovery, in an update on the state’s flooding on Sunday.
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02/08/2025 - 18:00
Sometimes a branch grows so low and bushy that it blocks access to my room. I diligently cut it back
More summer essentials
In the late 1970s when my parents built the house I still live in, there was no forest. The property was a disused cow pasture, full of scrappy grass and weeds. My parents began planting trees before they began the house build, and now – in my lifespan, 47 years – it has grown into a forest. When I was a child we called my parent’s plantings “the garden”, implying a place managed by us. Cultivated, civilised. Somewhere along the way we renamed it “the forest”. A self-managed ecosystem we occasionally impinged upon – cutting back, cleaning up debris – but only when it made incursions into our actual house.
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02/08/2025 - 14:00
The party’s agenda is about energy security, lower bills, economic growth and good jobs
Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and secretary of state for energy security and net zero
During four years in opposition and in the seven months since this government came to office, we have been clear: smart climate policy means not only protecting future generations from the biggest existential threat we face, but fighting to make working people better off today, growing our economy and confronting the economic injustices we face.
In a world where climate policy is being questioned, this government’s message to those in the Tory and Reform parties who say that we should go backwards on climate is simple: you are wrong, and this government is going to speed up, not slow down, the clean energy transition, because that is how to grow our economy and fight for working people through our Plan for Change.
Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and secretary of state for energy security and net zero
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02/08/2025 - 13:00
Inquiry uncovered health problems in neighborhood near Monterrey-area plant that processes US hazardous waste
Mexican environmental regulators say they have discovered 30,000 tons of improperly stored material with “hazardous characteristics” in the yard of a Mexican plant that is recycling toxic waste shipped from the US.
The authorities ordered “urgent measures” to get the materials into proper storage as part of inspections they are conducting in response to an investigation from the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, which raised questions about contamination around the plant, located in the Monterrey metro area.
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02/08/2025 - 12:00
On 10 January, as fires raged across Los Angeles, local portrait artist Asher Bingham made an offer via an Instagram reel: “ To anyone that has lost a home in the #LAfires I will draw [it] for free.” She had already drawn the house of a close friend that had burned down; by offering her services more widely, she hoped to help others grieve for what they’d lost. She wasn’t prepared for the response. So many people sent in photos – 1,300 and counting – that she had to recruit volunteers to keep up with demand. For Bingham, it’s all about the small details: wind chimes, potted plants. “Anywhere I can see people put love into their home, I draw it,” she says. “I’m trying to recreate a memory that only lives in their minds of the beautiful time they lived there.”
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02/08/2025 - 11:00
Scotland’s botanic gardens suffer ‘unimaginable’ loss of rare specimens
For more than a century, whenever winter came to Scotland, they stood tall against the wind and rain and snow. But last month, battered by Storm Éowyn, hundreds of rare and historic trees in the living collection of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh were lost.
The charity has four sites in Scotland. Its tallest tree in Edinburgh, a 166-year-old Himalayan cedar, fell during Éowyn’s gusts of up to 80mph, while Benmore Botanic Garden on the west coast has suffered “unimaginable” devastation.
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