Ignoring American attempts to derail this thread, and back to UK Politics - Attila the Stockbroker on FarceBook this morning, finger right on the button as usual…

”The planet is burning and Sunak is issuing new oil and gas licences, ripping up commitments and sending a message to the world that the U.K. doesn’t give a monkey’s. He’s doing it because he thinks it will glean the Tories working class votes. And his excuse is that these new fields will use ‘carbon capture’ technology.

Now I may be wrong, but I seem to remember this phrase from the latter days of the miners’ campaign, when it was posited as a way of keeping pits open while minimising carbon emissions.

Back then of course it was dismissed out of hand, because closing pits and wrecking communities was a Tory ideological class war decision which had nothing to do with climate change concerns - the coal was simply imported from elsewhere.

If it had been implemented then there would have been less carbon in the atmosphere and fewer mining communities destroyed - but destroying mining communities was the Tories’ Thatcherite aim. Back then, they were ‘the enemy within’, and obliterating them was part of a strategy to cut off the head of the trade union movement and destroy organised labour once and for all.

But in this new era, when the right wing tabloids have, incredibly, managed to persuade some of those very same communities to switch sides by blaming ‘immigrants’ for the crimes committed by the Tories, feeding xenophobia and stoking division, re-opening oil and gas fields and granting new mining licences is seen as a strategy to win votes.

And, as before, the climate crisis doesn’t even enter the equation. It’s all just a cynical electioneering strategy.

Close down communities for ideological and electoral reasons, offer them false hope on the same basis. A cynical crime against the planet.”