Liam Kavanagh

Polls show ~half of Britons think we are bound for collapse. We should talk about this much, much more, not less. Why? Change happens in two stages: 1. A majority knows change is necessary 2. A majority knows that a majority knows change is necessary. We're stuck at stage 1.

Starmer should immediately & unequivocally ban access to British airspace to US warplanes. The UK must not be accomplice to a US President who is threatening more war crimes. Period.

Does it matter when scientists are fully honest about climate? Hell yes. *Mobilising Silent Majorities* — shows why outspoken scientists are key to real societal mobilisation. 🧵 Watch @CarolineLucas and @liamckavanagh in conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=h5bY4t…

Tuesday! Hope to see you there 👇

The IEA’s “Sheltering from Oil Shocks” pamphlet reads like a Degrowth manual

Love this!

Help us make hope normal again. Join the Green Party now.

The Kennedy Center was named after my uncle, President John F Kennedy. It was named in his honor. He was a man who was interested in the arts, interested in culture, interested in education, language, history. He brought the arts into the White House, and he and my Aunt Jackie amplified the arts, celebrated the arts, stood up for the arts and artists. It is beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not. Next thing perhaps he will want to rename JFK Airport, rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial. The Trump Jefferson Memorial. The Trump Smithsonian. The list goes on. Can we not see what is happening here? C’mon, my fellow Americans! Wake up! This is not dignified. This is not funny. This is way beneath the stature of the job. It’s downright weird. It’s obsessive in a weird way. Just when you think somone can’t stoop any lower, down they go…

I think I'm just going to respond to this by being a better person.

Was the guest of the Norwegia govt sovereign wealth fund, interested in the pricing of climate risk. At dinner I explained the unpriceability of packages that entail absorption: "How would you price your willingness to drink from this glass of wine with the assumption that it can contain a lethal dosage of poison with unknown probability, under the constraint that you MUST keep taking such bets." Actually, the problem is worse. You and I have a finite shelf life, humanity doesn't.

I don’t love the fact that US voters think Donald Trump is their best option, but that’s not actually his fault, or voters’. He might have been the wrong choice but voters wanted a different choice for decades and they finally got one. Lets focus on providing a different different choice. Until then Trump and co have the iniative.

If Musk's charges about illegal aliens voting were true, how many $ would he need to pay one single person to provide evidence that they could easily vote illegally? 10 mill? Still a huge bargain for Republicans. Musk is smart enough to figure that out. No evidence because there was none to find.

/1 Quick thread on a lot of the “what should we do” conversations taking place right now:

£ 736 is the "true cost" of Milliband's Net zero proposal to each Briton per year. (approx) £ 300 Billion/68 million Britons = 4411 per person. £ 4411/6 years = £ 736/per year £ 1 B of public expenditure is £ 14 per briton or £ 22 per taxpayer. About the cost of a main and a pint at a pub. buff.ly/4g7DIHa

Make Europe Great Again abbreviates to MEGA. MEGA > MAGA Its time for Europe to prepare to go its own road and lead, and I think we will see this being charted more seriously in European new media. Both Unherd and Brave New Europe are worth looking at.

Good: Today's critical CoP letter insists (deep in the text) that enforcement mechanisms are needed. Bad: Saying "the global policy framework is scientifically rigorous and economically sound and complete" By positioning themselves as critics and asserting such nonsense I suspect the net effect is to further complecency. Anderson and Peters (2016) called negative emissions included in those frameworks a "get-out-of-jail-free card". Nothing has changed. Other critiques abound: nature.com/articles/d4158…

Re CoP & Climate Chaos: Discussion that stays at diplomatic levels doesn't speak to our conundrum. Only when we stop pretending things are under control, and help a majority, including the most powerful privileged people on the planet, realise that systemic breakdown will find them, will progress happen.

CoP was never fit for purpose. @GreenRupertRead and I have argued for some time that even Paris was not a genuine breakthrough. Trump's election should make this unarguable. World climate policy breakthrough will happen when there is popular pressure for it, and not before. CoP cannot achieve that. From last year desmog.com/2023/11/30/thi…

Are "Wokists" becoming the new hippies: the easy target that people who want to remain respectable, while proposing something left of center, must take aim at?

It will take a while but yes, all the college educated people elites subtly but heavily asserting their own moral superiority was what Trump ran against. The mood is likely to turn soon very heavily against all that kind of tone.