Monsters

+Three cheers for the Brussels-based Transport & Environment group which this week published its new report 'Clean and lean: Battery metals demand from electrifying passenger transport'.  This calls for a reduction in the size of new vehicles, in particular the new breed of behemoth electric SUVs. These have an enormous appetite for metal, and such relatively rare minerals like lithium for their batteries. I guess their owners think they’re doing the right thing for the planet, and it must be great imagining that tackling climate change requires new levels of outsized comfort and luxury. A win-win situation! No doubt the manufacturers have grasped the opportunity to increase their profit margins on such monsters—there’s more money to be made in big vehicles than titchy little cars. Like the pharmaceutical industry they will argue that they must make untrammelled profits in order to invest in new technologies. In the context of climate change this is cognitive dissonance at its worst. Listening to Prof. Sir Bob Watson, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this morning on the Today programme talking about the heatwave in southern Europe and elsewhere, it is clear that the target of limiting the global average temperature increase to 1.5C is easily going to be missed. (It has to be said this was obvious eight years ago when it was set.)  I hope that those countries suffering these intolerably high temperatures now take the lead. They must know such extremes will occur increasingly often. If our economic approach to climate change is not reordered soon, nature will reorder our economics.
 
+I was very impressed (not) with our head of MI6 (who I can’t name for obvious reasons) who has taken to the stage to tell the world that the Secret Service has already recruited some Russian spies and has issued an appeal for more to come forward. He said MI6 will treat them with all due discretion and secrecy. I can’t quite tell if this was a joke, a barb aimed at Putin or just a silly error of judgement. Why alert the enemy to what you’re up to? Surely you can leave that kind of thing at arm’s length to Bellingcat?