Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

LOL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57_YsQ&t=1085s

The Green Party is blocking green energy in Britain?

Damn who would have thought the Texas Republican Party, completely in the pocket of big oil, is much more in favor of green energy than the fucking Green Party of Britain. What good are these people?

I've mentioned it before but Texas is accelerating very quickly and I think close to overtaking California.

An awful lot of the energy transition is building things (or letting them be built) and increasingly for profit. That's possibly a challenge for many people and groups who've traditionally "owned" environmentalism as an issue.

[Gups]

I think people are unaware of just how varied/divided the green movement is. There are pragmatists whose overriding focus is climate change and mitigating it, there are conservationiss who want tpreserve teh countrysie, there are red greens who see the climate crisis as a great oportunity to secure equality/end capitalism, green capitalists who see clean, abundant energy as a project best delivered by the private sector, anti-materialists etc etc.

[Josquius]

In Switzerland they keep the two main flavours separate and have a left wing green party and a liberal green party. Another reason we need to become a democracy.

But yes. That the English Greens are a complete mess is known. A theoretical world gone mad situation where they have a majority would be a disaster. Though a few more MPs for them would be a good thing.

[Sheilbh]

I think people are unaware of just how varied/divided the green movement is. There are pragmatists whose overriding focus is climate change and mitigating it, there are conservationiss who want tpreserve teh countrysie, there are red greens who see the climate crisis as a great oportunity to secure equality/end capitalism, green capitalists who see clean, abundant energy as a project best delivered by the private sector, anti-materialists etc etc.

Yeah and I think those tensions will come out more as they grow - but public opinion still thinks they're the best party on the environment which I think is a mixed bag.

I have a friend who is involved in Green politics and she says their manifesto is a disaster waiting to happen if they ever take off in the polls. I think they have a "living document" principle so instead of a new manifesto each election, unless conference votes to remove a policy it stays. That means there's some stuff that's been in there since the 70s and reflects 70s environmentalism but would be pretty problematic now - I think she mentioned some odd stuff on population control, for example.

[HVC]

Looks like Farage got a milkshake to the face.

[Tamas]

Looks like Farage got a milkshake to the face.

Bravo!

[garbon]

I wonder if Galloway is sad that Farage now has all the press.

[Sheilbh]

Looks like Farage got a milkshake to the face.

Second time now.

Also lots of questions about why he'll win a seat having lost all of his previous seven attempts and just moving on from questions about the seat he's trying to win. All of which, I suspect, are why he initially wasn't running before he was repeatedly challenged on why he was doing events/media if he wasn't even a candidate.

[Josquius]

Yep. The great British tradition of milkshaking farage.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/reform-general-election-2024-nigel-farage-clacton-essex-b1162035.html

I note something in the article e though.

Addressing supporters at the rally, Mr Farage said the Tories should "pay a big price" for betraying the promises of Brexit.   

Err... Wut? I mean. There's the promises of keeping our rights and being like Switzerland or Norway but somehow I don't think he means those and instead implies it somehow wasn't hard and shit enough? .

Also notice in this constituency this years green candidate was 2017s Labour candidate.

[Jacob]

The Revolution Cannot Fail, It Can Only Be Failed

His argument is likely something along the lines of: "If Brexit didn't deliver all the things Farage promised, it's not because Brexit is shit but because Conservatives failed to Brexit hard enough."

[Valmy]

I've mentioned it before but Texas is accelerating very quickly and I think close to overtaking California.

An awful lot of the energy transition is building things (or letting them be built) and increasingly for profit. That's possibly a challenge for many people and groups who've traditionally "owned" environmentalism as an issue.

Well yes if one were to design a location perfectly suited for wind and solar energy it would very much resemble Texas' geography. And for all of the right wing handwringing about how all green energy is a con created by...um...evil green woke forces or whatever. For all of their insistence green energy is not ready for prime time and forced upon us. For all of their fear mongering...green energy is just really profitable and far less risky than building coal plants.

So when there is money to be made the Republicans are not going to stand in the way (well ok some more ideological fanatics have tried but unsuccessfully so far). So therefore green energy is exploding here despite the government being theoretically opposed to it.

And this was all by design, by the way, it was the goal of engineers working in this sector for decades to make it cheaper and better than other resources. And this has been a thing since the energy crisis of the 1970s and global warming becoming something people took notice of.

So it kind of boggles my mind that a Green Party would be so out of touch with issues in environmentalism going back 50 years that they have given so little thought to their position on green energy. What have they been doing these past 50 years? Just ignoring all these issues?

[Valmy]

Maybe they were just like "wind and solar will never happen despite all these governments and people working on it year after year, so no need to ever give it much thought."

And it is 2024, Wind and Solar have been a serious economic force for more than 20 years now. It isn't like they just suddenly popped up on the scene.

I think what is especially frustrating is we spent so much time and effort getting these things profitable so capitalists and business people wouldn't stand in the way of climate change efforts only for that to now be a justification for green activists to stand in the way of climate change efforts. It reminds me of that incident in 2009 when the offshore wind farms in Massachusetts were being protested by environmental activists because they would ruin the view from Martha's Vineyard. I mean WTF? What good are you people? We cannot even count on environmentalists when we want to help save the environment because they are just too insane.

[Gups]

Green party opposition tends to be to large solar farms and tends to be local. They are tapping into a fair bit of local opposition because some of these schemes really are massive in terms of the amount of countryside/farmland they take up. There are legitimate biodiversity questions too.

[Valmy]

Green party opposition tends to be to large solar farms and tends to be local. They are tapping into a fair bit of local opposition because some of these schemes really are massive in terms of the amount of countryside/farmland they take up. There are legitimate biodiversity questions too.

Ok but they are not bulldozing the land and paving it to make those solar farms. They can be decommissioned with few long term impacts.

But what is worse for biodiversity? Climate change or having a solar farm there for a few decades?

And again these are all well known issues that go back to the 1970s. Maybe the Green Party should have worked out their positions and solutions to these issues decades ago? Was actually fucking thinking about environmental issues and working out solutions not activities they wanted to waste time doing? Fuckers.

They just had no goddamn idea solar farms needed land to exist on. Well guess what? So do coal mines and coal plants. What is worse?

I just hate these useless motherfuckers so much. They would happily see everything burn to the ground than support one non-perfect solution.

[Sheilbh]

Of, fair enough. But even then, I think it's a pretty small minority of Indians (although a small minority can mean millions).

Fair - and I am just going from things like the Bose statue, the Savarkar movie and also what I've read of their being a real culture war sort of thing over Indian history. But you're right it'll be a small minority actually engaging in it.

And frankly, partition was a disaster, rushed without any proper consideration for implementation. Labour, Congress and Jinnah can share the blame for that.

And Mountbatten.

It is one of the "great men" things though because I do always wonder if it would have happened in the way it did without Jinnah and Nehru.

Also notice in this constituency this years green candidate was 2017s Labour candidate.

A great example of what went wrong for Labour 2015-19

Err... Wut? I mean. There's the promises of keeping our rights and being like Switzerland or Norway but somehow I don't think he means those and instead implies it somehow wasn't hard and shit enough? .

I think he was talking about immigration - and net migration is four times higher than it was before Brexit. But that is because of the choices the government made and how the post-Brexit immigration system was written. It is working as designed.

The Revolution Cannot Fail, It Can Only Be Failed

Exactly this.

His argument is likely something along the lines of: "If Brexit didn't deliver all the things Farage promised, it's not because Brexit is shit but because Conservatives failed to Brexit hard enough."

Which there is truth to. Brexit isn't an agenda or a government it's a decision on a single issue and what it would mean/look like would always be shaped by subsequent governments.

Given they're likely to win 400+ seats it's most likely to be shaped by a Labour government which will disappoint Farage even more

Green party opposition tends to be to large solar farms and tends to be local. They are tapping into a fair bit of local opposition because some of these schemes really are massive in terms of the amount of countryside/farmland they take up. There are legitimate biodiversity questions too.

Yeah and as you say the Greens are a very broad church. There are Green-Tory swing voters (I expect that's what Charles would be if he had a vote) - but then, as in Brighton, there are also the watermelons and mangoes. I think those tensions will grow as they pick up more votes and seats in rural Tory heartlands as well as university towns. I think they'll have a set of voters that looks increasingly like Kennedy's Lib Dems. I think their NIMBY side will also grow as they get more rural Tory voters.

My experience  is that there's an awful lot of people arguing "the only way to end the climate crisis is to end capitalism" who are mainly interested in the last bit of that (but I live near Goldsmith's)

And again these are all well known issues that go back to the 1970s. Maybe the Green Party should have worked out their positions and solutions to these issues decades ago? Was actually fucking thinking about environmental issues and working out solutions not activities they wanted to waste time doing? Fuckers.

The Greens have always been weird though and had strange often contradictory strands.

They just had no goddamn idea solar farms needed land to exist on. Well guess what? So do coal mines and coal plants. What is worse?

Oh they're very anti-coal which isn't really a big thing here anymore. They don't want to make choices.