“Environmentalists”

From the people who turned your Mustang into a Prius and made it so your dishwasher does not actually wash dishes comes a new villain, not quite straight from central casting, in the imaginary war on the planet: dogs.

“We are all too aware of the negative effects of cats,” Australian academics Bill Bateman and Lauren Gilson write at The Conversation, “both owned and feral, on wildlife…. Our pet dogs seem to get a free pass.”

With all the charm of Almira Gulch and the subtlety of Michael Vick, Bateman and Gilson argue that man’s best friend really sits, and rolls over, as mankind’s great enemy.

It’s over. Just Stop Oil is “hanging up the hi-vis” and will cease its campaign of direct action by the end of April. But after three years of throwing orange paint at things, why is the group throwing in the towel now?

Of course, it doesn’t help that the vanguard of JSO activists — including the organisation’s leader, Roger Hallam — are currently in prison. The plan was that their high-profile stunts would inspire enough acts of civil disobedience to gum up the court system and challenge the authorities, but the hoped-for scale of resistance never materialised.

The resilience of our national infrastructure has withered as governments have chased environmental fads.

Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, was shut down and plunged into darkness on Friday. Over 1,000 flights were cancelled and the plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers were thrown into disarray. And it was all because of a fire at an electrical substation three miles away in nearby Hayes. Heathrow relied upon this substation to power most of its critical services. Without it, nothing worked.

A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.

It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people – including world leaders – at the conference in November.

The state government touts the highway’s “sustainable” credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this January, Klaus Schwab’s wife, Hilde Schwab, opened the annual meeting with the assertion that Antarctica is melting.

“Antarctica, which holds 91% of the world’s glaciers, faces catastrophic ice loss, contributing to rising sea levels,” she claimed.

That statement is simply not true. According to a recent study, Antarctica gained 661 billion tons of ice during 2009-2019. “The Antarctic continent,” in fact, “has not warmed in the last seven decades.” A December 2024 study, in addition, concluded that “iceberg calving, the detachment of ice blocks from ice sheets and glaciers… a primary process in mass loss from ice shelf systems in Antarctica and a major source of uncertainty in future projections of sea level rise” is not necessarily a consequence of climate change, not even when we’re talking about “extreme calving events”.

The sleepy town of Mandan, North Dakota, with a population of just 25,000, might seem an unlikely backdrop for a titanic legal battle. Yet, within its unprepossessing courthouse, a zealous oil billionaire is taking on Greenpeace. It’s Trump-supporting Goliath versus tree-loving David, in a case that could have far-reaching implications for both climate activism and free speech worldwide.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has found members of the RCMP made “grossly offensive, racist and dehumanizing” remarks about Indigenous women who were arrested in 2021 during a blockade of Coastal GasLink pipeline construction.

Justice Michael Tammen said in a ruling delivered in Smithers, B.C., on Tuesday that his findings of state misconduct don’t warrant a stay of proceedings against the women, but they and another protester will get a reduction in their sentences for criminal contempt as an “appropriate” remedy.

Tammen said audio recordings captured police laughing and comparing the women protesters to “orcs” from The Lord of the Rings.

... No remedy for the Orcs?