Harbinger of spring - Plum blossom
Not content with his abject failure to uphold humane values regarding Ukraine and Gaza / the West Bank, NATO, domestic security, Venezuela, Cuba and in his personal life, President Twerp is also doing his best to ensure misery for billions around the world through his huge favours to the fossil fuel industries, which they have paid for with their campaign donations. Climate experts - and all thinking people - are outraged at Twerp’s decision to end the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which had been crucial for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
“The Trump EPA is cynically pretending climate change isn’t a risk to Americans’ health and welfare,” said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the environmental advocacy nonprofit National Resources Defense Council. “This is the biggest attack ever on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis, and a devastating blow to millions of Americans facing growing risks of unnatural disasters.” (Guardian report). Well, not just Americans. Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops. This would lock the world into a new and hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed. (Guardian report, 11.2.26)
By the way, I settled on the name Twerp after working through many other possibilities - using the felon’s actual name has become an insult to the memory of the blameless Oxford dog called Trump from whom Parson Jack Russell bred his eponymous terriers. Twerp is not only accurate (see OED definition below) but the very sound is appropriately ridiculous -
An abject member of the so-called Reform party (reforming what exactly?) said on a recent Any Questions that there was no point UK cutting carbon emissions because ‘China is opening a new coal-fired power station every day’. This has been used by climate action deniers for years. They never point out that the US, under the Republicans, is an equally great danger to the climate - presumably because Twerp is their ideal strong-man ruler. I wonder if Reform’s tactics will change now that China, which always had a plan to reach net zero, has just achieved a significant landmark - reports last week indicated that its carbon emissions were flat or falling in 2025.
Photo: Brian Garman
We held our 111th weekly vigil in Barnstaple High Street last Wednesday. I read ‘Peace’, an intensely moving poem by Mohammed Moussa from his new book, The face before you: To write poetry on genocide (Leamington publishers). Before the five minute silence, John Wade, a Quaker, reminded us that ‘Silence is a statement. Make your silence speak’. Two days later, in a massive blow to the Home Office, three senior judges ruled that while Palestine Action uses criminality to promote its aims its activities had not crossed the very high bar to make it a terrorist organisation. The judges, however, ruled that the ban must remain until another hearing on 20 February on what happens next. The Labour government will probably be stupid and immoral enough to appeal the decision. Perhaps government ministers should educate themselves about what Israel has done and is doing to innocent Palestinians. An investigation by Al Jazeera Arabic has found that thermal and thermobaric munitions, also known as vacuum or aerosol bombs, have ‘evaporated’ Palestinians whose bodies have not been recoverable after Israeli attacks. Civil defence teams in Gaza have recorded 2,842 people whose deaths could only be identified through biological traces such as blood spray or small fragments of flesh, attributed to U.S.-manufactured weapons.
Photo: Saving our Libraries walk through Ilfracombe on Saturday.
My wife and I have been campaigning this week on local issue - here are the relevant flyers with info and QR codes.
Do get involved if you can.
The government’s public consultation on Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) in Devon has now commenced. It will run for 7 weeks finishing on 26th March. The link to the government website is here Local government reorganisation in Devon, Plymouth and Torbay - GOV.UK but I think it needs a little more explanation.
On the government website, the Reimagining Devon proposal supported by Norh Devon Council is the one described as:
South Hams District Council, Teignbridge Borough Council, West Devon Borough Council proposed 3 unitary councils. These would comprise the current areas of:
• Exeter and Northern Devon Unitary: East Devon, Exeter, Mid Devon, North Devon and Torridge
• Plymouth to remain unchanged
• Torbay and Southern Devon Unitary: South Hams, Teignbridge, Torbay and West Devon.
To finish, some more blossom, this time Cherry - such a heartening sight. Thank you for reading.