Search results for Environment:

King Charles went into hospital with a prostate issue. It was meant to be kept private but there must have been a leak.

There's a story here about how AI is going to be used to prevent 3 busses turning up at once, as compared to the old method where the union prevents any busses from turning up whatsoever. I also saw a story about an electric bus catching fire in London which is probably the only time anyone's seen a London bus with the heating on it winter

Another week and some more Jeffrey E ......

There was an article out about how the obesity crisis is now costing the UK £98bn. I'm not sure if that's just the cost of the groceries, have you seen the price of chocolate lately? Personally I like to follow the government's advice of always buying food that's locally sourced. By which I mean I source my microwave meals from the corner-shop.

The home office has put out an immigration themed advent calendar, many of the doors arrive wide open and it's seemingly impossible for anyone to close them.

Prince William was in the news, selling copies of the Big Issue. I'm guessing it's to raise awareness about homelessness, although they might also just be trialing the idea for Harry if he tries to come back to live in the UK. The BBC also had an article "Prince William Shocks mum on a charity walk" - I thought his mum was dead

I was the anniversary of Pearl Harbour, when the Japanese attacked the United States back in WW2. Although I have a Japanese neighbour and the way she drives, I'm wonderring if those planes crashing were all just an accident.

The poet Benjamin Zepheniah passed away so here's a ditty I scribbled.
Benjamin Zepheniah was a poet
He was ill and did not know it
The BBC was sad to show it
They were his biggest defender
Now they need a new contender
to write about left wing stuff in all its splendour
£100 says that a One Show presenter
invites on 3 candidates who are all minorities and transgender

Better than the wokery he used to put out on Melvin Bragg's show anyway.

This week I thought we'd take a deep dive into the world of electric vehicles because whilst people have lost interest in the coronavirus, the 'car owner virus' for electric vehicles seems to have infected a large swathe of the population and it too is being heavily pushed by the government and the BBC, plus it was also designed in America but manufactured largely in China.

Owning an electric car these days offers the buyer the sort of dinner party bragging rights that used to only be attained by going on a safari holiday or joining an exclusive golf club. Ironically golf clubs were probably most peoples' introduction to electric vehicles but the vehicles being put out by the likes of BMW are quite different from the electric golf cart although just like a golf course, people are still very concerned about the range. If you hear a golfing buddy claim he can just about drive 300, he's not talking about yards.

The range of electric vehicles is something that few people are even concerned with, until that one trip when they suddenly realise that they were lied to. The advertised range is with a completely empty car, not one with luggage and kids, or the climate control turned on, or a journey that isn't a flat straight line. Battery performance drops by a third in sub-zero temperatures and we can talk about fast charging but good luck when you discover you're third in line and it will take 2 hours to charge your volts-wagon until you're back on the road. For me though the platform killing fault is that these batteries, like the ones in your phone, only last around a thousand charging cycles except my iPhone battery costs about £100 whereas a car battery costs closer to £20k. The people that love electric cars live in a world where it is normal to buy a brand new car every 2-3 years, whereas most normal people are used to buying second hand cars and riding them into the ground. There are thousands of people being coerced into buying a car that is supposedly cheap and yet are going to be unable to either use them or replace them in a couple of years and I honestly don't think the ruling classes have any idea what they're going to face in a number of years when public resentment to this grand con comes to a boil. I was actually given a pamphlet about anger management the other day, and I lost it.

Let's just run with the idea though, if Spiderman bought a Tesla he'd quickly discover that with great power comes not great responsibility, but great electricity bills and these things are not cheap to run either. The cars charge a lot, and that's before you charge them a lot. You won't have a petrol bill but they do cost around £20 to 'fill up' (so to speak) when you plug them in and that charging infrastructure is going to cost you thousands to have installed at your house, most people will see that cost as part of a monthly loan repayment that more than cancels out the cost of visiting a petrol station once per week. We could talk about the lack of electricians to install the home charging infrastructure but that's the least of concerns, the UK doesn't have close to the sort of spare electrical capacity to replace 30m petrol cars with electric equivalents, most of which are expected to charge when much lauded solar power is producing nothing, because it's night. Generating capacity, like the quality of Radio 4, has been declining for years and we're already at the precipitous stage where the government is only managing to keep the lights on by granting emergency permissions for coal power stations to remain open for years beyond the legally binding net-zero targets.

I could talk about the batteries themselves and millions of children enslaved in the cobalt mines of the Congo. I read a report about the human trafficking and modern slavery industry is right now going through a transformation as it pivots from Asia towards Africa, where millions of people will be required to work in the next decade to sustain the move towards green energy but according to the car industry they're not responsible for the battery manufacturing, that's all outsourced, it's not their problem and the government is as liable to claim they're made out of rainbows, unicorn fur and whatever magical stuff it is that Keith Richards must be snorting in order to somehow remain alive.

It's all just another part of the grand lie though. You've been lied to about the cost, the green credentials, the range, the lifespan, the economics, the ability of the grid to cope with them. But hey, it's all fine because the car can connect to your phone with an app, and it comes with additional features like as a self driving mode although the owners tend to more often talk about the built in virtual signals. Personally the tech puts me even more off, imagine missing a payment on a self driving car and then it drives itself back to the dealership until you pay a reactivation fee. Or it listens into your conversation and reports you to the police because you don't agree with what a left wing gender activist was trying to teach your child. My one hope is that, just with so many things, the tech industry make a mess of it all. I remember there was talk for a while that Apple has partnered with Tesla to make a new car, but they were having trouble installing windows.

Frosty the Snowflake
Was a bitter lefty soul
With an EU flag and a Waitrose bag
And obsessed with banning coal

Frosty the Snowflake
Was a fairytale they say
He was made of snow but the Guardian know
Say how he came to life one day

There must have been some magic
In that face-mask he still wore
for when he and his mate went to visit the Tate
he glued himself right to the floor

Oh, Frosty the Snowflake
Was alive as he could be
he campaigned for more tax and made regular attacks
at the lives of you and me

He went down to the streets of town
Right to the traffic cop;
who just stood right there as the public despaired
While Frosty hollered stop!

Frosty the Snowflake
had to fly to Martinique
but as he boarded the plane he was quick to explain
I'll be back again next week

Because Frosty the Snowflake
was not the same as you and I
he was a hypocrite ass who always flew first class
so the same rules don't apply.

In the News:

University Challenge host Bamber Gasgoine passed away. One of his many catchphrases back in the day was "starter for 10" which coincidentally is also what Dianne Abbot asks for when she visits a restaurant

Fashion news after Primark announced a bizarre pair-up with bakery chain Greggs, apparently they're going be be launching a limited edition range of clothes. Although in some ways that makes sense, the last time I ate pastry from there half of it ended up down by front anyway.

There's also the story about how the Queen may or may not be suffering from Covid, having caught it from Prince Charles, although that's hardly a surprise given that he spends his days living with an old bat.

For me the more interesting story was the one about smart meters and the ongoing slide into fuel poverty and economic destruction that will come about as part of the "net zero" addenda. For years this has been a largely benign benign movement where wind-farms would appear, your electricity bill would bump up £5/month and then of course there was the whole decision to pay the Chinese to dump plastic waste into the sea rather than bury it in the UK. And all the while the BBC has been very keen to promote Gretta Thunberg who sees herself as a modern Viking in so much as she's from Scandinavia and spends her time sailing about on a boat making people's lives miserable. For the most part this has also been tolerated because some British businesses have made billions out of it, being paid to close down small inefficient factories in the West, and then afterwards being paid a 2nd time by foreign governments to then open up far larger ones in the far East. That's not green or net zero, it's like me deciding to give up beer and wine but then drinking my way through cases of Malibu every week.

However, several years ago laws were passed to outlaw petrol cars and gas boilers and that deadline is only a decade or so away. The cars you buy in 2030 are being designed today, these plans are almost at the point of no return, although by the time you visit a car dealership or find out that it's illegal to repair your boiler, it will be too late to vote the politicians out because they'll all be long-since retired, with the exception of those promoted to the House of Lords where the public don’t et a chance to vote them out. The house of lords is ironically one of the few "houses" that will likely retain gas and oil, largely because I doubt they'll agree to a modernisation + renovation plan by the time the new rules come in. By the time they agree to a timeline to fix the crumbling palace of Westminster, Prince Andrew will be out of jail and Hilary Clinton will have given up running for office.

In the mean time though, an announcement was recently made that electricity companies would have the go-ahead to charge peak pricing for electricity, essentially opening the door to the concept of electricity rationing, and the coercion of the masses to an low-energy agenda that was coerced on them by pictures of polar bears and lies from those who get their bill paid for by the taxpayer anyway. Similarly, there's a suggestion that electric car batteries will be able to be flipped to feed the grid in emergencies, which will very quickly turn into “every evening around 7 o'clock” - shortening the lifespan of car batteries that cost about £20k to replace once they've been charged and discharged enough times. Of course those batteries are actually "free" if you're able to "charge" them back to the tax-payer (geddit?) although I've got a funny feeling that cabinet ministers will be using gas-guzzling Jaguars and Range Rovers long into the next decade on the spurious grounds of security concerns or possibly because Ian Blackford wants to drive a car that's powered by Scottish oil rather than an English power station.

The one ray of sunlight I see is that I recently spoke to a friend in Sussex, who lives in the country, and says that the smart meter they installed in his house does nothing other than provide a number because the smart things it can do like real-time reporting and price adjustments rely on a mobile phone signal, of which there is none where he lives. Perhaps they should have installed his electricity meter at the end the garden up a ladder with an arm in the air. I do fine it hilarious that multiple governments have spent fortunes pushing to gain control over the minutia of people lives and shut off their boiler or kettles from hundreds of miles away, and yet it may all eventually be undermined by those same governments' incompetence and, frankly lack of interest, in offering a decent phone signal if you’re the sort of nasty person that lives in the countryside and probably voted for Brexit.

Shock as the Canadian Prime Minister was re-elected. It’s Tru(deau)
In America, there was farce after the police arrested someone at the J6 cally for having a bunch of hidden firearms on him, but police admitted that they’d made a mistake and forgotten that he was carrying guns because he was actually an undercover federal officer. Proving once and for all that you can’t make this stuff.
In personal news I’ve started writing a book about the things I should be doing, it’s my ough-to-biography

But the big story this week has been the shortages at the petrol pump as well as other section of the food supply chain, which has been blamed on Brexit, largely because they can’t blame President Trump for things these days so that’s their fallback position for everything, like someone ordering sweet and sour chicken because they can’t be bothered to read the menu, or facts in this case. Does your car need a new clutch? blame Brexit. You can’t remember where you put misplaced your phone? Brexit. Your boiler needs fixed? Blame Brexit. Actually, that last one is actually partially true because it was Theresa May who signed everyone up to eradicate gas heaters by 2050 along with petrol-driven cars and pretty much everything else that’s been invented since the day that James Watt decided he didn’t fancy walking all the way from Stockton to Darlington

There are two problems at hand with regards to today’s shortages. The first of these is a shortage of lorry drivers. That has got nothing to do with Brexit and is a truly global problem right now, Europe is similarly crippled by supply chain issues and in America right now there’s a shortage of school buses which may one day be turned into a tv-movie starring Minnie Driver as a Bus driver. Who would have thought that paying people generous stay-at-home pandemic payments might mean they don’t want to go back to working a low-wage job ever again. What's the difference between a bench and the minimum wage? A bench can support a family. There is no shortage of drivers but there certainly is a global shortage of people willing to go back to working long hours and be paid next to nothing for doing so. Perhaps George Osbourne could help out by adding Lorry Driver to his long list of jobs

The second part of the shortages though is entirely British-made. There is a shortage of industrial CO2 because almost all of it is made at at 2 fertilizer plants that were recently forced to close due to the government’s decision to make natural gas expensive and close industry with zero regards to the knock-on consequences. When I say the government’s decision I mean governments, plural, because everyone for the last 20 years has signed up to close down power stations and move all the factories to China. All so that the carbon emissions happen in someone else’s country and they can claim they’ve met their completely arbitrary target for the UK. If you move an iron foundry from Britain to China global carbon emissions do not go down one iota. I’m left uncertain who is stupider, people queueing up at a petrol station in a Tesla , or the left wing people invited onto the news to claim that a queue of 50 cars outside a BP garage is what Nigel Farage meant hen he promised to put an end to freedom of movement. Life is all about context though, take the expression, “Jesus loves you” - Great to here at a church service, no such a good thing to hear if you’re in a Mexican prison.

This week let’s compare and contrast two different protests.
In Kabul, there was a women's’ rights protest, they are demanding the right to have an education and a job and the government responded with tear gas and weaponry but I guess is not terribly surprising, the White House after all left behind a bountiful collection of equipment for the new government to brutalize the crowds with. There was a video this last week of the Taliban flying around in a a captured US helicopter and I’m not sure if the US Air Force still paints glamour models on the side of it’s warplane, if so then they'll have to get out a paintbrush to edit them. it wouldn’t surprise me if one day we saw lady in a veil painted onto the lady on the side if a captured F16. All things considered, the situation is deeply unpleasant, especially for the Russian & Chinese arms dealers who’ve undoubtedly missed out on a lot of sales opportunities.

What is the reaction to all this in Islington? Workers and feminists of the world unite, perhaps a march down Whitehall or a demand that the UN or the EU step in? Well there was a protest in London this last week over that most British of topics, the weather. Extinction Rebellion are blocking the entrance to the science museum over the decision to let the oil company Shell sponsor an exhibit. There is of course a sense of irony in that these same people normally spend their time pleading with the public to listen to the science and trust the science and yet are now actively preventing access to the science.

This is the same style of deeply annoying yet not terribly effective protesting the Fathers For Justice types did a few years ago, I’m waiting for one of them to dress up as Issac Newton and scale the side of the science museum with a banner about how the public don’t understand the ‘gravity’ of the situation, geddit? Instead we’re left with a bunch of left wing student activists and bored housewives throwing paint on buildings, blocking roads and using spurious environmental reasons to attack things they don’t like anyway, like the thought of working class people going on a beach holiday to Spain. Fast food is another target of their wrath and I saw someone on the news complaining about the carbon cost of how McDonalds ships meat from industrial plantations in Latin America - this presumably implies that they’re getting their avocados not from Waitrose but from an allotment in Surrey. It’s very easy to suggest banning gas heating but not all of us have the luxury of spending January at our second home in Tuscany. There is a sense of “do as I say not as I do” that is only really bettered by being told to take personal responsibility by Boris Johnson, father of seven.

But logic and reason play no part in this and it never has. Many in the environmental movement would look at the struggle of Rosa Parks and see it not as a civil rights issue but about someone trying to use a bus that uses petrol, the sort of thing should be banned anyway and replaced with a lane. Perhaps the deafening silence over the human rights abuses in Afghanistan specifically and Asia generally, is due to a solemn respect for people who are following Greta Thunberg’s advice and actively dragging their country back to a pre-industrial way of life. Subsistence agriculture, no air travel, no consumer goods and shanty towns made from recycled materials.

There are people in the UK making lucrative careers out of suing the government over green issues like whether or not schools should serve meat or whether fixing the roads constitutes a hate crime against the planet. I’m waiting until they try to ban Santa Claus because he hands out coal to the naughty kids. It’s all a good example of how those who complain most about society are generally the people that contribute the least to it. I just wish that when it came to Extinction Rebellion they’d get on with the first part of their mission statement

This week some Russian hackers launched a cyberattack on a major US oil pipeline, demanding millions of dollars in the process. I can imagine that the idea came about when the Kremlin asked if they had any new ideas in the pipeline and a light bulb clicked above their head, possibly followed by a click behind their head as the FSB operative held up a pistol and told them to get on with it. Either way, motorists in the US South East are paying the sort of eye-watering petrol prices that haven’t been seen since, Britain about 20 years ago. $4/gallon, that’s still cheaper than orange juice, although the one positive to come out of it is the hilarious videos online of people dangerously trying to stockpile fuel by filling up carrier bags with petrol, presumably leaving their insurance company with lots of burning questions. One curious byproduct of the outage is that they finally caught and arrested that man who went crazy with a firearm in Times Square a few weeks back, after his car ran out of petrol in Florida. Say what you will about electric cars, if he’d been driving a Nissan Leaf then he’d only have gotten as far as New Jersey. Anyway, now that the pipeline company has paid the ransom in full, it pretty much means open season for this sort of thing, there’s a very good reason you’re not supposed to negotiate with terrorists. It did however make me think of the old joke about what was the difference between Amy Winehouse and Exxon Mobil? One like pipelines, the other likes pipes and lines.

The other story this week is about somewhere else in the world with no oil and that would be Israel, the one country in the Middle East to not have any massive oil or gas reserves, opting for being the land of milk and honey instead. Anyway, attacks by Hamas have kicked off a major retaliation, so far I’m reading 110 dead in Gaza, 7 dead in Israel. 100 for 7 then, you could also call it 24/7, round the clock fighting. There are some pictures online that look like instagram-worthy sunsets until you realise that it’s actually nighttime with a lot of fire and explosions on the horizon and we’re now at the stage where Hamas is calling for a ceasefire while Israel is instead opting to call up 9000 reservists to prepare for a possible ground invasion. I’d like to imagine that the recruitment posters for the army are like the old WW1 Kitchener one, but with with Benjamin Netanyahu pointing and saying saying he needs jew. Can anything be done, should anything be done? The usual idiots are out in force online, apparently peace will only come about when the British consumer starts boycotting Marks & Spencers for selling Israeli oranges or some such nonsense. I’m more along the line of both sides being as bad as each other but Israel has the right to defend itself and neither side want a 2 state solution anyway, they both openly advocate for a one state solution where they are the state. In the meantime, let’s close with a joke, what do you say when you meet someone in Jerusalem? “Israeli nice to meet you”

There are a couple of good things to come out of the Covid pandemic: there's no pressure to go to the gym, we know that China can unfortunately manufacture things that last longer than 6 months, and most importantly, Greta Thunberg hasn't been getting any media attention, although I guess that when airplanes are grounded it's pretty hard to fly around the world spreading your hypocrisy. But the environment is out there still, at least that's what I hear, I've not left the house much these past few months. This week I thought I'd look at two examples in the news of what the green agenda has left us with, and they're both pretty scary. It's like when you ask where the George Orwell memorial is Google tells you you're living in it. That kind of scary.

First of all to the United Arab Emirates. It's a fairly quirky place with crazy mega-projects and I always thought that if I was designing something there I'd make sure I had a small child on the design team to make sure it was eccentric looking enough and needlessly tall to the point of absurdity. But they can do it because they're a country where a passport and the American Express Platinum Card are synonymous. It's quite easy to spend money when you're sitting on top of that much oil and gas. However, Mae West once said "too much a good thing is wonderful" and the UAE really wants more and more energy (carbon friendly energy!) and so therefore this week saw the UAE start up the Arab world's first nuclear plant at Barakah, just next to the border with Saudi Arabia, a country already embroiled in conflicts with Yemen and Iran. It's probably worth noting that if you look up the UAE in an illustrated book of countries, the country right beforehand is Ukraine alongside the iconic B&W photographs of Chernobyl. This is the sort of management viewpoint akin to when the BBC put Jimmy Savile in charge of a kids tv show with the thinking of "what could possibly go wrong?".

The next power station that doesn't burn oil or gas is in China. It's the 3-gorges dam that is one of the largest things ever constructed by man, if you don't include the EU constitution or the US national debt. It's the world's largest power station and as a point of comparison, take the £16bn Sizewell C reactor: the 3 gorges dam is 6 or 7 times that in terms of output. Dam indeed. Nonetheless there's a lot of talk online including pictures and leaked information from defectors to the west suggesting that shoddy construction and an especially bad flood season make it quite possible that it could collapse, killing millions in the process and causing the sort of economic damage that make President Trump's proposed Covid sanctions look like a tap on the wrist. On the other hand, the deaths of million and final destruction of the economy is hardly out of the ordinary for a country that's communist and I have to sympathise with the engineers who had to interpret the instruction manual all written in Chinese, we've all been there I suppose.

It's 2020, a new year, and a lot of people have a new years resolution to stop drinking for January but it seems that the country of Australia have massively misunderstood what the term 'Dry January' means as a tinderbox of dry undergrowth has contributed to some of the worst wildfires in recent history. Looking over the headline claims there's death, hundreds of millions of dollars of damage, vast clouds of smoke visible from space and scenes resembling something out of Mad Max. Certainly this was probably not what people were expecting last year at Edgbaston when they chanted and gloated about Australia retaining the Ashes in 2020.

But of course the real crux of this story inevitable turns to whether this tragedy was man-made and I saw someone on the internet commenting that if that's how hot and arid the weather is in January, imagine how bad it could be in the summer, completely ignoring of course the this IS the summer in the southern hemisphere. Probably one of the few good thing about this particular disaster is that it's about a month's journey by sea to get to Australia so it's unlikely that we'll see Greta Thunberg sailing out there. Nonetheless, I think it's important to add that this fire was very much man made. A hundred years ago, people used to actively manage the forest, the aboriginal people recognised that you needed to start small fires to burn away the undergrowth, otherwise you'd create a nationwide tinderbox that burnt faster and fiercer than the chicken phall that my old curry house in Durham used to make. A dish that ironically was best put out with a pint of Fosters or Castlemaine XXXX.

What we do know for sure is there's a lot more urban development and stuff to burn down than the last time Australia last had a fire like this, and thus the damage (in terms of dollars) will be higher by definition, because there's more nowadays to physically destroy and not because of climate change. Probably the saddest part to the story is that if a huge rainstorm were to gather and douse the flames in the next few days, it would be declared unusual, perhaps "unseasonal" and get the climate protestors more excited than the time that failed presidential candidate Al Gore decided to go on tour promoting a conspiracy theory that actually had nothing to do Russia. Lesson there for you Hilary.

This week the French President met with the British Prime Minister and faced a number of domestic issues and so it was with little surprise that many news outlets decided to show all the investigative integrity of Fred West's gardener and instead they focused on a vacuous tweet he made about the fires currently raging in the Amazon.

The comment in question was about a number of admittedly under-reported fires in Brazil, although the press didn't seem to mind when the Olympics were being held in Rio and the stadium had that massive torch blazing for weeks. Yes the fires are bad though they're not actually that unique in the world right now. They're apparently costing a football pitch per minute, which would admittedly explain Brazil's decline in recent football tournaments, going out in the quarter finals to Belgium 2-1 last year. But they're also a lot less damaging than the mining and oil industry that the french seem happy to interact and invest with.

Most curious to me was Emmanuel Macron's description of the forest as the world's lungs, which made me wonder if his solution was to treat them like french lungs and grow tobacco or establish a factory in the region manufacturing those odd cigarillos things they have in France. Like I said, it would be perhaps better to focus on real environmental issues like the Chinese dumping plastic into the sea but that would involve politics and hard work, rather than pointing fingers. It's sort of like when doctors talk about fast food and act as if the fat and carbohydrate are the dangerous parts, when everyone knows the real danger lies in the potential knife wounds or drug overdose when you're hanging out "wiz yo mates innit" down by the local railway station.

This week in Southern Europe, the wave of political populism gave way to the wave of heat, a heat wave, as temperatures crept high enough that the trees are beckoning dogs over to them. Yes, the mercury in the thermometers would be rising to the top, if the EU hadn't banned the use of mercury thermometers years ago. Remember that supposedly silly scene in the 4th Indiana Jones movie where he climbs into a lead-lined fridge, well that seems like a sensible idea now, it's probably quite cold in that fridge.

In France they recorded their highest recorded temperature - 45.9C (115F) and authorities have warned people not to venture outside at mid-day, a rule that the Spanish government has seemingly had in place since records began. That new heat record was measured in the southern village of Gallargues-le-Montueux which is actually quite close to Nimes, although I can imagine that the French deliberately made the recording in that village in order to make fun of British newscasters struggling to pronounce it. Perhaps they can retaliate by recording a world-beating rainfall record in an unassuming Welsh valley. Go on Jean-Paul, give it your best shot!

And of course, queue a line of politicians saying that this is all mankind's doing, including many who would single out the men in "mankind" There's even the occasionally utterly shameless ones who jumped on an airplane and flew there to make their point. They're usually the same sort of people who travel first class to Venice to warn people that the city is sinking, that's kind of the whole point of Venice really. Mind you, the weather does seem a lot hotter than it was back in January so maybe there's something in it after all.

This week started with the sad news that a fire had almost led to the destruction of Notre Dame, and certainly Quasimodo will have to spend the next couple of years living on the Phantom of the Opera's sofa. The atrocity drove to people around the world pledging hundreds of millions of Euros to rebuild and President Macron says it may be rebuilt in just a couple of years, presumably because there's an election in 2022 and he'd like to reopen the cathedral as a last act of office before he's kicked out for being about as unpopular as Henry V was back in 1415. Mind you, the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona has been under construction since 1882 and it's still not finished, although the wine is somehow even cheaper in Spain than it is in France (if such a thing is even legal) so that's maybe got something to do with the pace of things. This being the internet of course, the conspiracy theorists showed up faster than the fire brigade to deliver a torrent of not water but crazy ideas about how the government decided to start the fire in order to distract from President Macron's unpopularity although officials said since stated that the fire was almost certainly caused by a short circuit. Hang on a minute, wasn't the robot in the movie Short Circuit originally part of a secret military programme? Maybe those conspiracy theories have something to them.

The other news this week was the climate change protest in London in which many hundreds of people assembled in order to make demands, such as the demand that the BBC wildly overstate the attendance of the protest. For the most part, the marge was a jolly good time if you didn't have a job to attend that day, which most of the rich Islington mummies frankly didn't. The actual demands of course are fairly ludicrous and only achievable if we decided to ban modern agriculture, travelling abroad and making products that contain metal, especially aluminium which uses more energy to make a single soda can than a hair dryer would if you left it running for half an hour. The other issue of course is that China and India have about as much chance of signing up to any climate deal as MPs have to signing up to Theresa's tardy piece of parliamentary paperwork. I genuinely think that if the two asian superpowers ever went to war with each other, there would be an evironmentalist on Radio 4 brought in to give a spiel on how the deaths of half a billion people was ultimately a positive step forward for the environment. Did I say environmentalist? I mean to simply say "mentalist"

It's once again tropical storm season with Hurricane Florence crashing into America's east coast like Mel Gibson in the parking lot outside a liquor store. In addition to the loss of life and the economic impact of the storm, the property damage alone is estimated to be $170bn and you have to remember that that's just the initial quote the repairman gave. So bear that in mind when you look at the pictures of mobile homes and trailers which have been for whatever reason, remained firmly in place throughout the storm rather than moved out of harms way as the name would imply.

Anyway, just to add insult to injury, the people who live there will have to wait a few weeks to have electricity restored, only to finally turn on the television and have adverts for the November mid-term elections rammed down their faces for several more weeks. It's like hearing that a friend of yours has been moved out of intensive care only to discover he's been moved to the mortuary.

Talking of mortuaries though, the 2 Salisbury Russian spies have been back on the news following an interview in which they denied poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal. I should add that the Skripals aren't actually dead, people forget that they survived, but I guess I'd keep my head down too if I were an former Russian double agent and Vladimir Putin was trying to kill me. Anyway, they decided to take a break from whatever spies do, spreading fake news, using Facebook to dismantle Western democracy, to do an interview for Russia Today - a news channel which is to unbiased objective journalism what Pot Noodles are to haute cuisine. Anyway, in the interview the two Russians deny everything and claim to have visited Salisbury on a whim, all the way from Russia, to see it's 123m cathedral spire. Well, when Thomas Becket was killed outside Canterbury cathedral in 1170, I'm sure Henry II had a similar excuse and it worked for him.

The news has been a bit quiet this week in the world of politics although former cricketer Imran Khan won an election and will be in charge of Pakistan if such a thing were in any way possible. But this is the age of celebrity of course where sportsmen become politicians, tv reality show host Donald Trump became the US President and the UK has a prime minister who frankly wouldn't look out of place on Countdown's Dictionary Corner, managing to somehow still misspell things and insist that her answer to the 8-letter conundrum is her version of "Brexit"

Anyway, let's talk about a few fires going on around the world. Alas none of them are the much-talked-about-never-delivered "Bonfire of the Quangoes"

First to Japan where it hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit (which is just over 41 degrees Celsius for those still obsessed about remaining in the customs union). Apparently 40 people have died in the sweltering temperatures. I'm going to be honest, I don't see how that's a record, I'm sure August 6 1945 was a lot hotter and there were certainly more casualties.

Next to Greece where a wildfire killed over 80 people. Authorities are still unsure the cause of the blaze with many German bankers suspecting it was an insurance job to get the money for the Greek debt. Greek fire was first mentioned by Thucydides and Boris Johnson has gotten his old job back at the Telegraph so if you're after arcane classical Greece references to Westminster than head over that way.

California also has some out of control fire too no doubt caused by a dropped cigarette butt and I'm not pointing fingers but Smokey Bear, he's called "smokey" and he lives in the woods. Also very hot though is the US economy. More than 10 years since the last recession so just make sure that if you have your money hidden away then be careful because cash is flammable, gold melts easily and computers don't do well in a fire.

It's snow joking matter, the UK's been so cold that pickpockets have been keeping their hands in their pockets and the counter-terrorism police have considered extending their remit to combat both ISIS as well as just regular Ice.

It's been a while since the UK last had a winter, nearly a year in fact and as usual their's the shots of slow moving motorways, roving reporters wandering deserted small town high streets and my favourite, the shot of hundreds of children sledging and hanging out at the park. It's never explained why the school run was was impassible, leading to the closure of schools, yet the road down to the nearest big snowy hill was apparently clear. In the mean time however, lots of trains have been cancelled although Southern Rail customers have been told that trains will run the usual timetable, by which I mean that you may as well roll a dice if you want to know whether your train will be there. And Scotland was forced to issue a red weather warning which is obviously worse than an orange weather warning but it's still probably preferable to a yellow ice warning.

The snow has also given the news agencies something to talk about other than Brexit. There were a series of speeches this week with very little in the way of new information and it's telling that most people were less interested in Jeremy Corbyn's opinion on the customs union than they were in a few inches of snow landing in his North Islington constituency. Northern Ireland remains a point of contention with the EU attempting to force a situation where a no-deal outcome would involve North Ireland somehow retaining all EU rules and oversight, effectively coming under the sovereignty of Brussels rather than London. A policy presumably borrowed from Nicola Sturgeon. Theresa May decided to borrow an idea too, suggesting "5 tests" purposely designed to fail - an idea borrowed from Gordon Brown and the Euro debate. That's where we are, British leadership relying on borrowed ideas from one of the worst prime ministers in the past half a century.

Not content with the damage it’s already done to the ExxonMobil share price, the Caribbean has another three storms moving in; the latest one (Hurricane Irma) has pretty much wiped out Barbuda and Hurricanes Jose and Katia are forming out at sea. I suppose hurricanes come in 3 or 4s like busses, although if I was a cyclist I’d frankly rather take my chances with hurricane Irma than take on a Bendy Bus.

The names of these storms by the way are preassigned and go up alphabetically, earlier in July we already had a tropical storm called Don which most people didn’t hear about, what with the fact that there’s another Don hogging the headlines in Washington. If we get as far as ‘V’ then we’re apparently scheduled to get Hurricane Vince which I thought was what the LibDem leader calls himself down the snooker hall when me meets up with Nick Clegg for a drink.

Unfortunately for the Labour Party though, there’s not Hurricane Theresa or Hurricane Jacob Reese-Mogg so Jeremy Corbyn will have to rely on rhetoric, policy debate, persuasion and rational arguments to attack the government. Unfortunately for the Labour Party members, Jeremy instead decided to spend the weekend thinking about whether or not to go vegan. I always think “show me a bloke who’s a vegan and I’ll show a bloke wanting to sleep with a vegan” but maybe I’m overly cynical and Puy Lentils are indeed what it takes to give him some inspiration about a Brexit strategy. Perhaps he’ll try acupuncture next and get the idea for a needle exchange to help heroin addicts

I decided to stay inside and draw today because it’s raining outside but for real rain we have to go to the US because everything is as they say “bigger in Texas” with the possible exceptions of tax rates and tolerance for firearm legislation. This week Hurricane Harvey has been doing far more damage to Houston than North Korea could ever hope to. It’s a real shame that Kim Jong Un didn’t just dress up like Blofeld and put out a videos claiming that he was responsible and that they’d developed a weather machine, he’s already got that Bond villain vibe going on.

But back to the storm, the last Houston that went underwater was Whitney and that ended pretty badly. There’s been 51” of rain and that’s settled to leave more than 8 feet of flooding in some places. As a result there’s been people killed, billions in property damage, a curfew put in place and two reservoirs are close to bursting. More worrying though, President Trump has come close to losing control over the news agenda, I imagine he was set to make a big announcement to rile up the left but even he can’t influence the weather. Or the house republicans either to be honest.

Amusingly I saw an online activist pointing out that Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Harvey were all supposedly 100-year flood events yet they’d all happened within a decade. Uh oh, must be man made climate change. Except that those are 3 completely separate areas, that’s how risk-frequency modelling works, and the previous ‘worst ever’ hurricane in the Houston area was the 1900 storm, about a hundred years ago. Offering up a radically different theory, some folk have claimed that the rain is biblical punishment from above for electing a homosexual mayor. I suppose that if electing LGBT politicians screws with the weather then it would at least explain why Scotland has such awful weather, oh no wait Kezia Dugdale just resigned. I’m visiting Glasgow this weekend so I suppose I better put away that umbrella and pack some shorts.

One of the problems with making promises is that you tend to be held to account, so this week we saw a promise about getting rid of petrol and diesel cars by the tear 2040. That’s 23 years from now when a lot of the politicians will be retired, deceased, rotting in a club in St James’ or simply arguing about how many more leadership elections it will take to oust Jeremy Corbyn. Given how electric cars have been coming along though it’s all fairly silly really, there’s an expression that the stone age didn’t end because we ran out stone. Volvo’s already planning a complete switch without needing arbitrary legislation to make them do it and BMW just announced plans for the new electric Mini, which will be build in the UK, #DespiteBrexit

And that brings us onto the other news story of the week, the Labour Party’s Europe policy, or lack thereof. Either way it’s a viewpoint with about as much coherence as bad Game of Thrones fan fiction. They say they want to leave the Customs Union, but still keep it on the table and Corbyn has ruled in and ruled out Single Market membership while Dianne Abbott and John McDonald went on record saying it will still definitely possibly probably maybe be an option. As far as this Schrodinger’s Cat of a manifesto debate goes, it’s probably also questionable who out of the shadow front bench could even define the actual difference between the Customs Union and Single Market.

But for now it’s the weekend people so go out and enjoy the sun! According to a report just out this week, drinking cuts your diabetes risk, so why not open a case of red wine, or possibly some scotch just to be on the safe side. I just my local loan shark walking down the street with a blood stained cricket bat so I guess even he’s off to enjoy some time in the park.

There was utterly shocking news this week when a politician actually did something he’d promised to when running for office. Nick Clegg said it was madness and that he should have done the exact opposite of what he promised like you’re supposed to. Just look at David Cameron – he promised a referendum to get Britain out of the EU and when he managed to accidentally deliver on Brexit he resigned in shame and left politics.

Agree with Paris or not (and we’ll get to that later) President Trump is entitled to do whatever he wants, largely because President Obama signed up in the first place by making sure that it was clearly defined as an executive decision that didn’t need approval by the congress or senate or anyone else. And Mr Trump has a mandate to sign whatever he wants because he won the electoral college and those who mention the popular vote should maybe fix that by looking to scrap it rather than going on Facebook like a teenager angry at the result of the X-Factor. This is like when people tried to fix Boko Haram by going on Facebook, and sure Nigeria is still signed up to the Paris Treaty but the kidnappings are still a thing and Trump is more of a Twitter person anyway. Seriously though, the electoral collage is a ridiculous and antiquated system, even more so than the US’s insistence on clinging onto chequebooks and thinking that putting Nicolas Cage in a movie will draw in a crowd.

Back to the Paris Accords though, it was a crummy treaty anyway. According to the UN’s own numbers, following through with it would cost $100 trillion and achieve less than 1% of the emissions cuts the UN claims are supposedly needed anyway. That’s before we get to the questions of why CO2 levels were 10 times higher during the last ice age, why temperatures have been rising on Mars where they don’t have any humans producing CO2 or why the US taxpayer should be paying for new power stations in South East Asia, rather than China or India. If you thing climate change is real and man made and fixable then there are far better ways to go about it like putting money into geoengineering or building thorium reactors. At the very least please don’t try to goad President Trump – a man who famously collects towers – by naming your treaty after Paris, the city famous for having one of the best towers there is.