georgemonbiot

Across the UK, fossil fuel companies’ broken promises have left scarred and polluted landscapes, and no one held accountable

When you’re in a hole, keep digging. This is the strategy of opencast miners across the world: our past debts and future liabilities can one day be discharged if only we’re allowed to dig a little deeper and extract a little more. And public authorities keep falling for it.

The UK’s biggest opencast coalmine, Ffos-y-Fran in south Wales, was granted permission in 2005 on the grounds that it would rehabilitate a hill, on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil, which had been made dangerous by the shafts and spoil heaps left by deep mining. It wasn’t called a coalmine, but a “land reclamation scheme”. If the reclaimers happened to stumble across 11m tonnes of coal while improving the land by digging a 400-hectare (1,000-acre) pit, 200 metres deep, who could blame them for taking it?

The solution is not more fields but better, more compact, cruelty-free and pollution-free factories

No issue is more important, and none so shrouded in myth and wishful thinking. The way we feed ourselves is the key determinant of whether we survive this century, as no other sector is as damaging . Yet we can scarcely begin to discuss it objectively, thanks to the power of comforting illusions.

Food has the extraordinary property of turning even the most progressive people into reactionaries. People who might accept any number of social and political changes can respond with fury if you propose our diets should shift. Stranger still, there’s a gulf between ultraconservative beliefs about how we should eat and the behaviour of people who hold such beliefs. I have heard people cite a rule formulated by the food writer Michael Pollan – “Don’t eat anything your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food” – while eating a diet (Thai one day, Mexican the next, Mediterranean the day after) whose range of ingredients no one’s great-great-great-grandmother would recognise, and living much the better for it.

Victoria was sentenced to 21 months but has served 15 years. Even the politician who introduced indefinite detention now says he regrets it

There are those of us who exist in a more or less free society. And there are those who, while also living within the borders of the United Kingdom, exist in a police state. If the rest of us knew these people existed and what was being done to them in our name, we would scarcely believe it.

No one, including Victoria Carter (an assumed name), would deny that her crimes warranted a significant prison sentence. She had come from a terrible place: a father who beat her up, an alcoholic mother whose friends sexually abused her, extreme poverty as all the money was spent on drink. As a young teenager, she ran away from home, after which she had more than 10 placements in foster care and care homes. She responded with anger, violence and self-destruction.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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Draconian new powers allow the police to shut down every form of effective protest. It’s a green light for even greater abuses

The more unequal a society becomes, the more oppressive its laws must be. This, I think, explains new acts that would not be out of place in a police state. So vague and broad are the powers granted to the police under last year’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and this year’s Public Order Act that it is no longer clear where their abuse begins and ends.

At two o’clock on the morning of the coronation, the Metropolitan police, using the Police Act, arrested three people in Soho for carrying rape alarms. The police claimed they were acting on intelligence that rape alarms might be used to frighten the horses that would later be parading elsewhere.

Voters are finally furious about water pollution, but tackling it means unpicking a complex web of assaults from source to sea

I can’t help feeling a small surge of gratitude every time an environmental issue breaks the surface. That the state of England’s rivers seems at last to have become an election issue feels slightly miraculous, after so many years in which campaigners have swum against the political flow.

In wards across the country, people who are furious about the pollution of their rivers and coasts seem prepared to vote accordingly in Thursday’s local elections. The Labour party has at last smelled blood in the water. Keir Starmer has promised “real action on this scandal”, but the action doesn’t yet extend even to renationalising the water companies, though this policy would be overwhelmingly popular.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

I understand the argument that our escalating climate crisis justifies direct action, but I can’t urge anyone to do things I wouldn't do myself

There’s a fundamental principle that should apply to every conflict. Don’t urge others to do what you are not prepared to do yourself. How many wars would be fought if the presidents or prime ministers who declared them were obliged to lead their troops into battle?

I can see why How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the book by Andreas Malm which has inspired a new film with the same title, has captured imaginations. It offers a lively and persuasive retelling of the history of popular protest, showing how violence and sabotage have been essential components of most large and successful transformations, many of which have been mischaracterised by modern campaigners as entirely peaceful.

Why does a wealthy, powerful nation struggle so badly while a small, much poorer one succeeds?

One of the world’s greatest environmental heroes doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Though he has done more to protect the living planet than almost anyone alive, his name is scarcely known. It’s partly because he’s quiet and self-effacing and partly because of a general ignorance about Central America that so few of us have heard of Alvaro Umaña.

This might be about to change. He stars in a fascinating film, now released in the Netherlands and negotiating global sales, called Paved Paradise (disclosure: I was also interviewed). It’s the first feature-length documentary I’ve watched that engages intelligently with the most critical environmental issue: land use. By contrast with popular but misguided films such as Kiss the Ground or The Biggest Little Farm, it recognises that sprawling extractive land uses are a lethal threat to the living world. It makes the case that, unless we count the hectares and decide together how best they should be used, we will lose the struggle to defend the habitable planet.

In prioritising oil and gas over renewables, ministers are doing the bidding of the polluters. And we’ll all pay the price

Money for the criminals, prison for the heroes: this, in brief, is the government’s climate policy. If something is damaging to the public interest, it’s likely to be rewarded and subsidised. If it’s beneficial, it will find itself in a hostile environment.

This government represents the denouement of the Pollution Paradox: as dirty money has the greatest incentive to invest in politics, it comes to run the whole system. Across these 13 years of misrule, we have seen the perversities of Conservative government multiply and intensify.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

England’s water woes have a solution. But trying to move vast volumes of water from west to east is not it

It’s a classic end-of-pipe solution. Rather than addressing the problem at source, it piles one problem upon another. Yet, like so many disastrous schemes, it is now developing a momentum of its own. The political capital being invested in this project threatens to make it the next HS2.

The south-east of England is permanently threatened by water shortages. A shocking lack of planning and investment by the water companies, alongside their gross failure to reduce demand and conserve supplies, ensure that as drought looms again the stupidest of all solutions begins to look attractive. Rather than properly managing its supplies, Thames Water wants to pipe huge volumes across the country from another catchment: the Severn.

Gordon Brown, Condoleezza Rice and Alastair Campbell are as responsible for an illegal war as the Russian leader’s ‘henchmen’ they condemn

It goes beyond hypocrisy. It’s an assault on memory. Gordon Brown, calling for a special tribunal to punish the Russian government, correctly states that an act of aggression – invading another nation – was identified by the Nuremberg tribunal as “the supreme international crime”. It is, he wrote in the Guardian, not just Vladimir Putin who should be prosecuted, but also his “henchmen”. These include members of the Russian and perhaps Belarusian national security councils, and a range of political and military leaders. All should be held to account for this “manifestly illegal war”, he wrote on his website.

Condoleezza Rice, who was George W Bush’s national security adviser, was asked of Russia’s aggression on Fox News, “when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime?” She replied: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.”

In an age of distortion, public figures have powerful tools and a responsibility. This is an object lesson in how that can go wrong

In 2014, the Guardian asked me to nominate my hero of the year. To some people’s surprise, I chose Russell Brand. I loved the way he energised young people who had been alienated from politics. I claimed, perhaps hyperbolically, he was “the best thing that has happened to the left in years” (in my defence, there wasn’t, at the time, much competition).

Today, I can scarcely believe it’s the same man. I’ve watched 50 of his recent videos, with growing incredulity. He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

I live in one of Britain’s many ‘dental deserts’, where those who can’t afford to go private face pain and misery

Every child in the UK is entitled to free treatment by a nonexistent dentist. Some people on benefits, pregnant women and those who have recently given birth also have free and full access to an imaginary service. Your rights are guaranteed, up to the point at which you seek to exercise them.

For a government that wants to destroy public services, NHS dentistry provides a useful template. Rather than inciting public fury by announcing a change of policy, you stoutly proclaim your undying commitment to the service while starving it of funds until it collapses. Then people grumble and unwisely grind their teeth, but they don’t rise up. The state of our mouths reflects the state of the nation.

It’s not ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ if campaigners cannot explain their motivations to a jury

To tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”: this is the oath defendants in an English court must take. But when David Nixon sought to do so, he was sent to jail.

Nixon, who had taken part in an Insulate Britain protest blocking a junction in the City of London, was on trial for causing a public nuisance, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. He sought to explain his motivation to the jury. But the judge, Silas Reid, had instructed the defendants not to mention their reasons for taking action: namely climate breakdown, fuel poverty and the need for better insulation. When Nixon disregarded this instruction, Reid handed him an eight-week jail sentence for contempt of court.

Learning the full extent of the environmental damage caused by wood-burning stoves led Guardian columnist George Monbiot to issue a public mea culpa – and help ignite a raging debate

In 2008, the Guardian columnist George Monbiot installed not one but three wood-burning stoves in his home. It was part of a plan to move away from fossil fuels, support local sustainable suppliers of firewood and live a greener life. It was a costly error. As he recounted in a recent column, he began to regret his decision straight away. “Even fossil fuels, terrible as their impact is, are less damaging than the public health disaster to which I contributed.”

He tells Hannah Moore how the weight of scientific evidence now shows that they contribute to the country’s worsening outdoor air pollution. Incredibly, though only 8% of households in the UK have a wood-burning stove, they release more small particulates – the most dangerous pollutants – than all the vehicles on the road.

The party should be focused on this terrible government. Instead it is fighting costly legal battles, settling scores from the Corbyn years

You might imagine that nothing could prevent a Labour victory at the next election. The Conservatives could scarcely have done more to alienate voters and destroy public trust. Everyone knows that in this ridiculous first-past-the-post system, the only party in a position to replace them is Labour. Many will vote accordingly.

But there is one major obstacle: the Labour party. It seems determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. How? By pursuing a civil lawsuit alleging breach of contract against five close associates of Jeremy Corbyn, whom it accuses of leaking a highly sensitive report.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Bird flu is a mass killer, and mink farms are perfect for infection and transmission. They are a grave threat and must be banned

If you wanted to kill as many people as possible, deniably and with no criminal consequences, what would you do? You’d do well to start with a bird flu. Bird flus are responsible for all the known flu pandemics: the great influenza that started more than a century ago, “Asian flu”, “Hong Kong flu” and “Russian flu”, which killed tens of millions between them. They also cause many of the annual outbreaks that slaughter hundreds of thousands of people.

Once you have found a suitable variant, two further components are required to weaponise it. The first is an amplifier. The best amplifier is a giant shed or factory in which thousands of birds are packed. These birds should be genetically homogenous, so that your viral strain can travel freely between them. Intensive poultry farms would serve very well. Before long, a low-pathogenic strain should mutate in these circumstances into a highly pathogenic variety.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Our insatiable appetite for meat is destroying the planet. But the alternative is looking (and tasting) better by the day

Do you hate the idea of animal-free meat? Many people do. Unsurprisingly, livestock farmers are often furiously opposed. More surprisingly, so are some vegans: “Why can’t people eat tofu and lentils, like me?” Well, the new products – plant-based, microbial and cell-cultured meat and dairy – are not aimed at vegans, but at the far greater number who like the taste and texture of animals. Many others instinctively recoil from the idea of food that seems familiar, but isn’t.

So here’s a question for all the sceptics. What do you intend to do about the soaring global demand for animal products, and its devastating impacts?

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

As rich people plough money into ventilation to protect themselves, those with long Covid are treated as an embarrassment

You could see Covid-19 as an empathy test. Who was prepared to suffer disruption and inconvenience for the sake of others, and who was not? The answer was often surprising. I can think, for instance, of five prominent environmentalists who denounced lockdowns, vaccines and even masks as intolerable intrusions on our liberties, while proposing no meaningful measures to prevent transmission of the virus. Four of them became active spreaders of disinformation.

If environmentalism means anything, it’s that our damaging gratifications should take second place to the interests of others. Yet these people immediately failed the test, placing their own convenience above the health and lives of others.

In relationships, controlling and coercive behaviour is now a criminal offence. In British politics, it is glorified

Don’t let them talk to you about freedom. This government is stripping out fundamental liberties with the speed and determination you would expect in the aftermath of a military coup. Knowing that their days in office are numbered, the Conservatives seem to be snuffing out democracy as quickly as they can.

Even before the latest amendment, the public order bill was the most repressive legislation of the modern era, potentially criminalising all meaningful protest. If Rishi Sunak’s new proposal is passed, protests can be stopped before they begin on the grounds that they might be “disruptive”. Disruptive protest was redefined by last year’s Police Act to include noise. Now the definition is being further extended to incorporate “slow marching”. This Minority Report amendment puts us on the wrong side of the law before we even raise our hands in objection.

During my time at a local hospital, I witnessed the devastation of 13 years of government underfunding of emergency care

You have to see it to believe it. A few days after Christmas, I hit my head on a scaffolding bolt. There was lots of blood and pain down the right side of my face and into my neck. I thought I could live with it, but the following day I noticed a black floater in my right eye. When, after several hours, it had failed to clear, I phoned 111. They told me to travel immediately to the emergency department at my local hospital. They booked me in for 9pm, my expected arrival time.

I naively imagined I would be seen then. But when I arrived, there were 16 ambulances waiting to offload their patients. The waiting room was a vision of hell. All the chairs were occupied. Sick people leaned against the walls. Many of the patients, from babies to the extremely aged, looked dangerously unwell. And yet, for all of us, the wait went on and on.