Brands behaving badly
Brands that don’t care enough, if at all
The Conservative party
As a rule, I normally don’t bother. Anyone who is kind enough to read my weekly letter, is hopefully heartily sick of the antics of this government and doesn’t need reminders from me.
But this one genuinely does need our attention, so please forgive my rule breaking. It’s unlikely to be picked up by the national press and therefore won’t be condemned with the contempt and ferocity it deserves. It’s also worth a reminder of just how low this bunch of mutinous pirates, to steal another party leader’s opinion of the government this week, is prepared to go.
Government change is also essential if Britain wants to be a leader on climate change, technically and morally.
Courtesy of the conservative party
It looks identical to a postal vote form. The only difference is a marketing disclaimer, bottom left in the shadow. It confirms that all the information provided, in what appears to be a neutral form, casting your vote for the party of your choice, will in fact be used exclusively by the conservative party.
The pirates also appear to be vote riggers. This particular case has been reported to the electoral officers of St. Albans already.
I found a petition from 2019, which proposed postal voting should be stopped, the exceptions being for the elderly and disabled.
The petition was a result of the comments made by Judge Richard Mawrey, who sits in judgement on electoral fraud cases. He confirmed that ballot rigging was now a probability in some parts of Britain because of the extension to postal voting.
The Electoral Commission, appear to be in agreement, warning at the time, that it was concerned with 16 council areas including Birmingham, suggesting that some communities are particularly susceptible to electoral fraud.
The conservative government did respond to the original petition,
Electoral fraud is unacceptable in any form. The Government is committed to reforming the postal vote system to prevent fraud and ensure our elections are secure.
Is this another u-turn then?
Green discovery
Something green enough to generate hope rather than carbon
Industrial scale dumping of bicarbonate of soda in the ocean
Courtesy of Intelligent Living
The headline sounds problematic and a chemical no no. It is in fact the possible end to a beautiful virtuous circle, vital to help limit global warming.
Carbon capture technology to date has almost exclusively focused on removing CO2 from polluting sites before entering the atmosphere, coal-fired chimneys at steel plants, for instance.
Extracting CO2 from the earth’s atmosphere, a process known as direct air capture (DAC) has had far less attention because of the energy and materials needed. It has made DAC plants, like the experiments in Iceland, expensive to run. Currently, a tonne of CO2 costs hundreds of dollars to be removed from the air.
Courtesy of EurekAlert
Arup SenGupta at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has spent over three decades researching nearly every aspect of water science and technology. He is responsible for over 2 million people around the globe now drinking arsenic-safe water thanks to a reusable nanomaterial he invented.
His latest discovery has been to modify the existing amine solvents used in DAC processes by adding a copper solution. This has boosted the carbon capture potential two to three times. Better still, the new absorbent material, or sorbent is made from readily available low cost materials meaning an industrial sized process could be initiated right now.
The captured CO2 would then be added to seawater converting it to sodium bicarbonate or baking soda, which could be safely stored in the ocean. Baking soda is an alkali, which would offer some benefit and balance to the current acidification of the world’s oceans. One future view would see the installation of off-shore DAC plants, allowing countries without the right geology to undertake storage to also remove carbon from the atmosphere.
This elegantly simple chemical solution needs to rapidly scale and accelerate the current capture rate of 0.01 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 per year right now, to the 60 Mt needed per year by 2030.
This is where government intervention is now needed, forcing the energy companies to invest and comply.
As Myles Allen at Oxford University, dubbed the physicist behind net zero argues,
If it’s made a licensing condition of continuing to sell fossil fuels, it will happen on a scale that’s currently unimaginable.
It’s analogous to the water industry being responsible for removing and processing our sewage.
Be happy
An uplifting story to round off your week
The dinosaur tree
Courtesy of the Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney
The Wollemi Pine was first discovered in 1994, all 48 of them, growing in a remote canyon in the Blue Mountains, 150km west of Sydney, Australia. Originally first seen in the geological record from the Cretaceous period, the species is thought to have been extinct for 60 million years. Its ancient history explains why it’s called the dinosaur tree, sharing the earth with Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptors amongst others.
The tree was believed to have covered wide swathes of Australia in the distant past, so to discover it was still alive, caused huge excitement. It was regarded as the botanical discovery of the century. Humanity had been given a rare second chance to ensure the continued preservation and survival of an ancient species.
Seeds from the remaining trees were hard to come by, but it proved possible to grow new saplings from cuttings. Once a backup population had been established in Australia, the conservation team sent saplings to botanical gardens around the world including Kew Gardens in London. They also managed other replanting projects and continued to carefully guard the location of the canyon and those original survivors.
The site of the Wollemi tree canyon might have been kept a secret from the general public, but the pines started to go on sale, once propagation had proved successful. Saplings became Mother’s Day gifts and are also kept in gardens as permanent Christmas trees.