Hidden in the detail of the UK’s carbon capture and storage scheme are unlimited financial liabilities and huge environmental costs. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th October 2024 This will be Keir Starmer’s HS2: a hugely expensive scheme that will either be abandoned, scaled back or require massive extra funding to continue, after […]
corporate power
There’s a new asset class being traded between corporations. It’s called children in care. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18 May 2024 I’m a patron of a small local charity that helps struggling children to rebuild trust and connection. It’s called Sirona Therapeutic Horsemanship, and it works by bringing them together with rescued […]
Thanks to neoliberalism, government in the UK feels like one long trick played on the people. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 10th May 2024. The news should have stopped us in our tracks. Astonishingly, however, it was scarcely reported here. The latest map of mental wellbeing published by the Global Mind Project reveals […]
Why do so many people obsess about false conspiracies, but ignore the real ones? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th May 2024 I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe that groups of people conspire secretly against our interests to line their pockets, cover their backs or achieve political goals. By this definition I […]
How do HS2 and other white elephants get commissioned? It’s clientelism – the subtle form of corruption. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th September 2023 In 2010, when a high-speed rail line from London to the north – HS2 – was proposed by the outgoing Labour government, I wrote an article arguing that […]
Why do we put up with daily assaults on our health? It has everything to do with corporate power. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 22nd September 2023 There are some things we rightly find intolerable, such as the possession of poorly trained, aggressive dogs. There are other things, whose impacts are many thousands […]
The remarkable story behind the disciplining of a major charity shows how power really works. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th September 2023 Economic power seldom needs to discipline those who might challenge it. Most of the time, they do it to themselves. However extreme the ideologies promoted by corporations and oligarchs, organisational […]
Fossil fuel companies walk away from the lands they have devastated, often without paying a penny to restore them. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1st June 2023 When you’re in a hole, keep digging. This is the strategy of opencast miners across the world: our past debts and future liabilities can one day […]
This government runs on dirty money. That’s why it’s torching the planet. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 29th March 2023 Money for the criminals, prison for the heroes: this, in brief, is the government’s climate policy. If something is damaging to the public interest, it’s likely to be rewarded and subsidised. If it’s […]
Pumping water from one messed-up catchment to another solves nothing. We need to fix our problems at source. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd March 2023 It’s a classic end-of-pipe solution. Rather than addressing the problem at source, it piles one problem upon another. Yet, like so many disastrous schemes, it is now […]