Rivers of Sh*t: Boris Johnson couldn’t be bothered to think about the details of his Brexit, and now the UK is suffering shortages of materials including those used to clean sewage. So partially-cleaned and harmful crap is going directly into our rivers.
Thursday, February 23 was a bad day for Environment Secretary Therese Coffey.
Not only did she suggest that we all eat turnips as a replacement for vegetables (and tomatoes) that are currently running short in supermarkets – causing a shortage of turnips as well, but she tried to pass the stink over the pumping of sewage into the UK’s waterways off as Labour’s fault:
Jim McMahon – On a scale of 1 to 10… how does she rate her own government's record on ending the Tory sewage scandal?
Therese Coffey – It was the Labour government that failed to deal with the urban wastewater issues..
It’s possible that everything Coffey said about Labour was true – that party, in office, should have re-nationalised the water companies when it had the chance – but didn’t.
But the current issue, of raw sewage being pumped into rivers and the sea, is entirely of the current Tory government’s creation.
Coffey knows that – or should. It is pathetic that she should try to pull the wool over our eyes in such a blatant manner.
On a related matter:
Some of the highest PFAS concentrations ever recorded in environmental samples⊠these being present in our UK waters is of huge concern. @Feargal_Sharkey@friends_earth
Toxic substances from chemicals firm site found polluting protected river https://t.co/pV0Pm4n9bI
PFAS stands for perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, a family of thousands of human-made substances known as âforever chemicalsâ because they are extremely persistent and will not break down in the environment for thousands of years.
I suppose Coffey would blame this spread of toxic chemicals into a protected river, in 2023, on the Labour government of 1997-2010 as well?
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Boris Johnson’s Britain: “one of the most effluent nations in the world” as Dr Louise Raw put it when she tweeted this image.
How can the Tory government claim to be taking “urgent” action to curb river pollution when its targets are 13 and 28 years away?
Are we all expected to put up with being hip-deep in human waste in the meantime?
According to Environment Secretary George “Useless” Eustice, he’s taking “urgent” action to cut the “most damaging” overflows into rivers and the sea by 75 per cent – by 2035, with all discharges cut by 80 per cent by 2050.
If that’s “urgent” action, I’d hate to think what “Useless” describes as inconsequential!
Eustice said the government was investing ÂŁ7 billion until 2025 to upgrade sewage infrastructure but admitted water bills will rise by about ÂŁ12 a year to cover costs beyond that.
Didn’t the Thatcher Tory government of the 1980s, in its push to privatise water, say that bills would be cheaper and private firms would upgrade infrastructure using their profits? Yes, it did.
So why are we paying for it, in money provided by the government and directly through our own bills?
Some background: last autumn, the Tory government gave polluters the green light to dump risky sewage that has not been properly cleaned into rivers and the sea, after it turned out that Brexit had closed the UK’s borders to chemicals that are used to treat effluent.
The Conservatives followed this up by defeating Lords Amendment 45 to the then Environment Bill, which would have placed a legal duty on water companies in England and Wales âto make improvements to their sewerage systems and demonstrate progressive reductions in the harm caused by discharges of untreated sewage.â
One Conservative, This Writer’s MP Fay Jones, said the amendment would have forced taxpayers to stump up ÂŁ600 billion to “dig up” and modernise the UK’s sewer system, that has remained unchanged since Victorian times (apparently).
She then blocked responses that requested a breakdown of the figures. Considering her party is now saying ÂŁ7 billion will cover the work, with an increase in bills to fund further costs, I think it’s fair to say that she overinflated the figures somewhat.
Mind you, she’s not the only one who seems to have – inadvertently? – misled the public. On October 25 last year, The Big Issue published a tweet, and an article, reporting that the water companies were saying they did not know how much sewage they were dumping into England’s rivers because the technology did not exist to monitor it.
But new data released on Thursday showed that in 2021, there were more than 372,000 spill events from from storm overflows, which release untreated sewage and rainwater into the environment to ease pressure on the system.
The Environment Agency said it has made water companies fit monitors to their storm overflows in order to capture information on how they are performing. 2021 was the second year the organisation published figures so it seems the firms were being economical with the facts.
And the facts are that we are being forced to live in our own effluent – along with muck imported from the Netherlands, due to EU restrictions on what can be dumped there – while water companies that are mostly owned by foreign governments coin it in.
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If you’re doubting the sincerity of the world leaders who are meeting to talk – and I stress, talk – about fighting climate change and the destruction of our eco-system at COP26, you’re not the only one:
They flew there in their jet aeroplanes and will fly out in them . It is just a jolly at the tax payers expense . Perhaps #Johnson should return to London by rail , show some commitment! When is the next one planned ?
These leaders – certainly Boris Johnson and his crony Alok Sharma who is hosting the conference – did their level best to keep the coppers rolling in for their big business funders during the (ongoing, let’s not forget) Covid-19 crisis – at the cost of our lives.
They scheduled two hugely important summits back-to-back – in cities thousands of miles apart. And they are travelling between those places in hugely-polluting aircraft and enormous gas-guzzling motorcades.
They are likely to put the onus to take action against climate change on the majority of the population, even though the 1% – the billionaires – who fund them are responsible for as much of the damage as a full half of the 99% – the rest of the population.
They are likely to ignore the fact that the 99% have no choice when it comes to climate change. We have to use the facilities provided to us by the 1% who control them, and if those facilities are provided using resources that trigger climate change, we can’t do anything about it.
And they are likely to blame us when nothing changes.
Meanwhile, they are unlikely to impose strong demands on the 1% that will actually stave off our impending eco-doom. Such demands would require their funders – remember, the businesspeople causing the problem pay money to the politicians – to forgo some of their massive profits in order to restructure their enterprises to cause less pollution.
And that might mean they couldn’t build their own – hugely polluting – spaceships!
Knowing all this, if This Writer were you, I would take everything these people say at COP(OUT)26 with a massive spoonful of salt.
And remind yourself that nothing is ever going to change when we are led by people of such weapons-grade hypocrisy.
Here’s an angry public figure: Feargal Sharkey was the singer of The Undertones and The Assembly before having a career as a solo performer – and he is now an environmental campaigner against the pollution of British rivers. He knows his stuff.
104 days after been fined ÂŁ90m for dumping sewage into the environment and less than 12 hours after Gov voted to protect water companies and not our rivers, @SouthernWater were dumping sewage at 60, yes 60, different locations along the south coast of England.#COP26 hypocrisy pic.twitter.com/y1KCVPYoTP
The Tory government had previously given polluters the green light to dump risky sewage that has not been properly cleaned into rivers and the sea, after it turned out that Brexit had closed the UK’s borders to chemicals that are used to treat effluent.
The Environment Agency said companies struggling to get hold of the chemicals would be allowed to “discharge effluent without meeting the conditions” of their permits, which normally require water to be treated by a multi-step process.
Companies should “resume use of chemicals to treat effluent as soon as is practicable”, the agency said.
But now it seems the government has reneged on this demand. According to Evolve Politics,
Lords Amendment 45 to the Environment Bill would have placed a legal duty on water companies in England and Wales âto make improvements to their sewerage systems and demonstrate progressive reductions in the harm caused by discharges of untreated sewage.â
Treating raw sewage costs money â and many have speculated that privatised water companies are simply dumping it into our waterways in order to make bigger profits.
Despite the horrendous environmental impact of the disgusting practice, shortly before the vote, the Conservative Environment Secretary George Eustace recommended to his fellow MPs that they should reject it.
And, owing largely to the governmentâs 80 seat majority, the amendment was indeed defeated â by a margin of 268 MPs to 204.
There has been a lot of speculation about the Tories’ reasons for blocking the amendment. For example:
I think this is an instance of "Party first; constituents never" đ„ Until we have MPs supporting the people who voted for them, as opposed to 'party politics' (irrespective of which party!!) we will never have a true representation in government. AKA: our system is fucked! đ±
Others have suggested the possibility that MPs have shares in the polluting companies and hope to make a fortune on the cash saved by not cleaning the water before dumping it.
Whatever the reason, the optics (as they are known) are terrible, right before the big COP26 climate change summit.
Boris Johnson is on record as having said he wants the UK to be the “cleanest, greenest” country; instead, he’s sending his lieutenant, Alok Sharma, to host the climate conference in one of the world’s major water polluters.
If either of them try to claim the moral high ground on the environment, the hypocrisy will sink them – hopefully, beneath a wave of their own effluent.
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Did you know that just 100 corporations are responsible for 71 per cent of the pollutants that cause global warming?
That was the finding of the Carbon Majors report in 2017. And here are the names of the firms doing the damage (as it seems unlikely that many – or indeed any – of them will have gone out of business in the last four years). They are:
China (Coal)
Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco)
Gazprom OAO
National Iranian Oil Co
ExxonMobil Corp
Coal India
Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex)
Russia (Coal)
Royal Dutch Shell PLC
China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC)
BP PLC
Chevron Corp
Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA)
Abu Dhabi National Oil Co
Poland Coal
Peabody Energy Corp
Sonatrach SPA
Kuwait Petroleum Corp
Total SA
BHP Billiton Ltd
ConocoPhillips
Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras)
Lukoil OAO
Rio Tinto
Nigerian National Petroleum Corp
Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas)
Rosneft OAO
Arch Coal Inc
Iraq National Oil Co
Eni SPA
Anglo American
Surgutneftegas OAO
Alpha Natural Resources Inc
Qatar Petroleum Corp
PT Pertamina
Kazakhstan Coal
Statoil ASA
National Oil Corporation of Libya
Consol Energy Inc
Ukraine Coal
RWE AG
Oil & Natural Gas Corp Ltd
Glencore PLC
TurkmenGaz
Sasol Ltd
Repsol SA
Anadarko Petroleum Corp
Egyptian General Petroleum Corp
Petroleum Development Oman LLC
Czech Republic Coal
China Petrochemical Corp (Sinopec)
China National Offshore Oil Corp Ltc (CNOOC)
Ecopetrol SA
Singareni Collieries Company
Occidental Petroleum Corp
Sonangol EP
Tatneft OAO
North Korea Coal
Bumi Resources
Suncor Energy Inc
Petoro AS
Devon Energy Corp
Natural Resource Partners LP
Marathon Oil Corp
Vistra Energy
Encana Corp
Canadian Natural Resources Ltd
Hess Corp
Exxaro Resources Ltd
YPF SA
Apache Corp
Murray Coal
Alliance Resource Partners LP
Syrian Petroleum Co
Novatek OAO
NACCO Industries Inc
KazMunayGas
Adaro Energy PT
Petroleos del Ecuador
Inpex Corp
Kiewit Mining Group
AP Moller (Maersk)
Banpu Public Co Ltd
EOG Resources Inc
Husky Energy Inc
Kideco Jaya Agung PT
Bahrain Petroleum Co (BAPCO)
Westmoreland Coal Co
Cloud Peak Energy Inc
Chesapeake Energy Corp
Drummond Co
Teck Resources Ltd
Turkmennebit
OMV AG
Noble Energy Inc
Murphy Oil Corp
Berau Coal Energy Tbk PT
Bukit Asam (Persero) Tbk PT
Indika Energy Tbk PT
Southwestern Energy Co
These are the firms whose bosses need to be persuaded to rethink their business plans – and they won’t do that unless public opinion is mobilised against them.
That’s where you come in.
If you have any concerns about climate change at all, you need to get in touch with these firms and express your unhappiness with what they are doing. Call for them to reconsider their approach and to re-model their businesses to conform with a greener agenda.
I appreciate that many of these companies are not based in the United Kingdom. This is an international issue. They don’t just pollute their own countries; they pollute the whole world because we are all feeling the consequences of their irresponsibility.
That said, I would appreciate it if you would share this article with your friends – including those who live outside the UK. The more people take action – from as many countries as possible – the more likely these moguls are to pay attention.
I will try to look up contact details for these firms and add them to this article as they become available. If anybody can help with that, please do.
We cannot rely on our government(s) to do the right thing. The UK’s government is currently pushing legislation through Parliament to criminalise those protesting against the destruction of the planet. It is also providing tax relief to those reponsible for that destruction.
Government representatives and members of the party of government in the UK are lining up to pretend that there’s really no problem at all, and that the polluters should be allowed to carry on stinking up our homes in any way they please. Perhaps these people have shares in the companies concerned.
Remember:Â There is no planet B. Where are you going to go when the billionaires have poisoned the Earth so badly that you can no longer live on it?
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Pollution: did your home suffer flooding last year? Here’s the reason. And I bet you haven’t done anything about it, have you?
A landmark United Nations report has demonstrated that the planet where we live – Earth – has suffered irreversible damage to its ecosystem because of pollution by big business moguls.
But it does not propose any punishments for those people that would deter them, so they will keep right on with it.
Here in the UK, a group of right-wing politicians has rebranded itself specifically to fight against efforts to clean up industry, we’re told.
The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that
the warming we’ve experienced to date has made changes to many of our planetary support systems that are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.
The oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Mountain and polar glaciers will continue melting for decades or centuries.
It predicts a rise in sea levels that will threaten millions of people living in coastal areas with flooding by the year 2100.
But the behaviour of some UK members of Parliament shows that the people who can stop this vandalism of paradise simply don’t care.
They never wanted poor people to have fresh air and clean water anyway.
It seems the former European Research Group (ERG) of far-right Tory MPs (including Jacob Rees-Mogg, if memory serves) has undergone a metamorphosis.
After briefly becoming the Covid Recovery Group, an Orwellian perversion of the words by an organisation that wanted to do as little to fight the virus as possible, it now appears to have become the Climate Action Group – determined to prevent government from halting climate change.
As Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK states,
The plan is to argue that climate science is wrong, and we canât afford it anyway.
Destroying the economy and national health is not enough, the aim is to trash the planet as well.
He continues:
We have due warning that the right wing are lining up to demand the right to take us to oblivion.
This one is the fight for survival, and we have to win it.
It will be a particularly hard fight, when one notes that the IPCC report does not even suggest penalties for polluters.
Given that the damage they have done is said to be irreversible – that is, there is no going back – it seems to me that those responsible should receive irreversible punishments.
I would suggest that they be removed from their jobs and banned from any executive positions in any firm globally, that their life savings should be confiscated and used to fund initiatives to de-pollute the planet, and that they should face imprisonment for varying terms, depending on the harm that has been done on their watch.
I would also suggest that their firms should be ordered to pay fines for the damage they cause – on an ongoing basis, so each year they would have to fund measures to roll back this damage, according to the amount of damage done. If the firms were to be dissolved, then all of their assets should be taken for this purpose.
Nothing like that has been suggested but it is what is needed. And it won’t happen unless you demand it.
Ah, but you’re afraid of taking part in this, aren’t you?
I only have to look at the response to This Site’s article yesterday to see the evidence of that.
I warned that people are “switching off – not just their TVs and radios, but their minds. They can’t face it. They want somebody else to come along and make it better.
“But nobody will. What these people are really doing is handing the planet over to people like Alok Sharma” who will allow the polluters to carry on polluting if they think they can make a farthing out of it.
I stated: “If you run away and hide from it because you’re afraid that bad things will happen to you in the short term, then just you remember – always – that you are making sure that bad things will happen to you in the long term.
“And that future is accelerating towards you at a terrifying pace.”
And I asked: “Are you really such a craven coward? If you do nothing, then you are contributing to it. You are supporting it. You are saying you want it.”
At the time of writing, that article has been read just 246 times. It is the least-read piece I have written this month.
And that’s because people like you simply don’t want to have to get their hands dirty, fighting to live in a clean world.
Well, as I implied yesterday: if you don’t do anything for it, you won’t get it – and that will be because you don’t want it.
If you do want to live in a clean world, you could start by writing to your MP, to Alok Sharma (as he is hosting the climate summit COP-26 in November) and possibly even to our daft prime minister Boris Johnson.
You could say that you have read the findings of the IPCC report and are horrified, that you don’t believe any businessperson will stop the pollution that is poisoning the planet – and therefore all of us – without sanctions.
And you could put forward the penalties I have proposed, above, as starting-points.
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Hypocrite: Boris Johnson on the boarding ramp of the plane he took from London to Cornwall, talking about creating a “greener” world after causing five times as much pollution as if he had just taken the train.
Once again, Boris Johnson humiliates everybody in the UK before the leaders of the world.
He said he will ask fellow G7 leaders to contribute to creating a “greener” world – but travelled to the meeting at which he’ll do it in an aeroplane. The short flight from London to Cornwall created almost five times more greenhouse gas emissions than the equivalent train journey would have, according to the government’s own emission figures.
Shadow Environment Secretary Luke Pollard said the stunt was “plane stupid” and This Writer agrees with him.
I stated in a tweet: “Typical doubletalk from Boris Johnson – claiming to be building a greener Britain while undermining it.”
Others were less charitable:
Do you really think that Boris Johnson who flew in a jet from London to Cornwall which is around 250 miles and than tweets from the aircrafts doorway that he's building a greener Britain is sincere? He just the windup artist for the 1%. #G7https://t.co/pnjLHMlmNI
— John Smith (son of Harry Leslie Smith) (@Harryslaststand) June 9, 2021
“The windup artist for the One Per Cent”? It’s a good point.
If the world is to reach “jet zero” emissions, how many of the flights that ordinary people take will be cancelled?
And how many flights taken by the super-rich, and by politicians like Johnson, will also be cancelled?
I’m willing to bet that the answers to those two questions are as follows: Many – and none.
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Police: it seems they are expanding their powers unilaterally, so they can harass you even before you have given them any reason to.
It seems Boris Johnson’s fascist government has decided to accelerate its attack on your right to protest by putting planned restrictions on your freedom into action before legislation has passed through Parliament.
How else are we to understand the raid at G7 activist Rob Higgs’s Cornwall home, workplace and the business where he keeps his boat, last Thursday (May 13)?
Rob, who is a theatre maker and co-founder of climate action group Ocean Rebellion, said of the raids: âThey searched the premises without any warrants, interviewing all my neighbours and tenants, asking about me, what I do and telling people at the boatyard that I am a âperson of interestâ.
He told CornwallLive: âThe policeâs quote was, âWeâre just letting you know that we will not in any way stop peaceful protest but we can arrest you at any time that we believe you might be considering disrupting the G7 Summitâ, which wouldnât be legal as normally youâve got to break a law to be arrested, unless what theyâre hinting at is conspiracy charges.
He added: âItâs because Iâm a co-founder of Ocean Rebellion, which is an entirely peaceful, legal organisation trying to raise awareness of the oceans.
âWe basically make photo shoots and small pop-up theatrical performances that gets good media and global coverage about ocean degradation and how the seas are dying. Weâre trying to raise awareness of that and push legislation from the UN to reverse the ocean degradation.
âFor the last few months the G7 police have been asking what our plans are and made contact early on saying theyâd like to facilitate a peaceful protest. We said âthanks but generally you stop it whenever we tell you what weâre doing.â
âWeâve got a dedicated police liaison officer already who has been in discussion with them for months now trying to get them to tell us what we can and canât do and where we can and canât go, and we will design all our actions around that to stay within the legal frameworks. I donât want to break any laws.
âThey have refused to let us know, specifically on the water, where the exclusion zones are. They come back to our police liaison officer asking what weâre planning and we tell them we canât say until they tell us where we can do it!â
Mr Higgs is filing an official complaint to the police and had also taken it up with the Cabinet Office.
What a bizarre situation – it seems the police are being deliberately obstructive of these campaigners’ attempt to mount legal protest, in order to have a reason to arrest them!
I think it would be hard to make a conspiracy charge stick when this group has a police liaison officer who has been trying to plan legal activities but has been foiled by the police’s refusal to co-operate in any way.
But it seems clear in any event that the police are being used as political tools – sent to harass this organisation in order to frustrate its efforts.
And what is the terrible, terrorist act that Ocean Rebellion wants to do?
It wants to raise awareness of the fatal effects of climate change and pollution on sea life – effects that will eventually impact on human beings like you and me in possibly catastrophic ways.
Bang goes Boris Johnson’s attempt to claim environmental credibility.
I can’t wait to hear him try to justify it but I bet he won’t even acknowledge that it has happened.
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Microplastic ocean: thanks to big business, our seas are full of this crap.
Yes, you and I are probably full of microplastics and there is 10 times as much of the stuff in the Atlantic as previously believed.
And that’s only measuring three widely-used types of plastic!
The danger to human beings is extremely worrying; the University of Arizona examined 47 human tissue samples and found microplastics in all of them.
It isn’t yet known whether this stuff is just a nuisance or a danger to life and limb.
My instinct is to believe the worst; no doubt the instinct of the government – and its sponsors in big business – will be to discount it.
Of course, at least 21 million tonnes of this crap in the Atlantic Ocean alone – and the knowledge that it has permeated every part of the world – is terrifying enough.
It will have to go.
The question now is, who’s big enough to do the job?
The big firms that created the problem by selling it to us in the first place?
I doubt it. These layabouts are best described as overgrown babies who never got used to potty training; they make a big mess and expect someone else to come along and clean it up while they’re playing in it.
Trouble is, nobody else has the resources needed. Perhaps they need some encouragement to get involved.
If I wanted to be provocative, I’d suggest scooping a load of that crap out of the ocean and posting it to the worst offenders with a note saying it’s time they learned to wipe up behind themselves.
If you wanted to be provocative, you might give it a go…
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