All posts tagged: removals

From mayoral elections to Rwanda removals, Sunak won’t let the truth jeopardise his mission | Stewart Lee

From mayoral elections to Rwanda removals, Sunak won’t let the truth jeopardise his mission | Stewart Lee

In the psychedelic 60s stop-frame animation children’s television series Trumpton, all the characters have identifying proper names – the fireman Captain Flack, the state stormtrooper Police Constable Potter, and the mysterious dungeon-dwelling economist Gideon Pencils Osborne. The mayor of Trumpton, however, was known only as The Mayor, and neither his actual name nor his political affiliations were ever revealed, though he smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many rightwing meetings. All over the land last week, Tory mayors dreamed of similar anonymity, hoping that if no one knew anything about them, and their campaign literature didn’t reveal they belonged to the Tory party, people might at least vote for them by accident, thinking they were someone else. “Oh! Andy Street was the West Midlands’ Tory mayor candidate? I thought I was voting for the glamorous, and now deceased, Welsh wrestler Adrian Street. I liked it when he pulled out Jimmy Savile’s hair in 1971.” At the time of filing this week’s so-called “funny” column, I don’t know the results of Thursday’s mayoral elections, …

Climate startup CUR8 raises .5M from GV for its market-making platform for carbon removals

Climate startup CUR8 raises $6.5M from GV for its market-making platform for carbon removals

The IPCC, has said the world needs to remove 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by 2050 in order to avoid a climate cataclysm. And, yes, there are now multiple methods for carbon removal today such as planting more trees (afforestation), sucking CO2 out of the sky (direct air capture), and spreading CO2-absorbing rock on agricultural soil (‘enhanced weathering’). But it’s widely accepted that none of these methods alone will solve the carbon problem, and that the carbon removals industry is a nascent one, and often full of scams and chaotic messaging, to put it mildly. Indeed, it was recently revealed that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets offered by the biggest certifier were worthless and could in fact worsen the problem. Research into Verra, the world’s ‘leading’ carbon standard for the $2bn voluntary offsets market, found more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits were likely to be “phantom credits”. It’s examples like this that deter companies from investing in carbon removals solutions as part of their net zero …