Peter Watts

Director triathlete and enthusiastic Londoner *A charcoal tiger leaves carbon footprints* (he / him) 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️🇪🇺🇬🇧

[BCCM @BCCM_AU]

At yesterday's #BCCMSummit, we released the Climate Action Progress Report with @PeterWattsSD (Watts Sustainability), which highlights progress on our Co-ops and Mutuals Declaration of Climate Action and calls for more organisations to engage. https://t.co/qd3LB4XNFG

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

@FarmingUK You can promote British Milk without disengenuous greenwash. trying to say something is env friendly based on one narrow metric is nonsense. Methane emissions, river pollution, ammonia emissions, there’s a long list of evidence about neg env impacts of dairy farming

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

@sarahsmithlab Congratulations Sarah, you’ll be an amazing MP

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

Bright and early, Robin is standing guard #Dogsatpollingstations

[Keith Burge @carryonkeith]

"Hi Rishi, it's Michelle from Mone Military Uniforms."

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

Deluded as well as cruel, trans people are a natural part of the human condition - existed in every society and throughout history. Hate and ignorance isn't going to change that. As an LGBT person myself, I can vouch for them always being there and part of our diversity

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

@OwenJonesStan @Naeluckmate @MinnOrchia India didn't become a woman. India is cosplaying a misogynistic male fantasy of what a woman is.

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

@MartinSLewis @EastMidRailway Yeah agree, I tried to take EMR from St Pancras to Derby last weekend and they wouldn’t even let me board because the train was over-full. Journey back overcrowded, no seats, stressful and expensive @EastMidRailway take some responsibility and sort this out

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

@DaleVince @NadineDorries @TalkTV You only flinched slightly when she said COP26 was the best COP for a generation

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

@DrTELS @ClubOfRome @LeonSimons8 The model has industrial output falling off a cliff from this year - I doubt that is going to happen - even a global recession wouldn't have that impact in those timescales. Population has also already gone through 8 billion mark - how much can we read into this model?

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

@Nigel_Farage https://t.co/NIgbuKNNaV UK power grid is currently 37.9% wind, yesterday was above 50%. Cheap, low carbon energy, a UK success story

[Will Hislop @WillDHislop]

Sustainability (explained by Shell)

#sustainability #Shell #BP #oilcompanies @CleanCreatives @Shell @BP_plc

[Earthjustice @Earthjustice]

Red knots make one of the most epic migrations in the animal kingdom, which begins as far south as Tierra del Fuego and travels 9,000 miles north to the Arctic Circle. Protecting ecosystems along the way, like Delaware Bay, is essential. https://t.co/7AIFjvU481

[Dave Cross (he/him) 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @davecrossx]

THIS perfectly sums up the ‘culture war’ against trans people, feature by @squinteratn … thank you to @IndiaWilloughby #TransRightsAreHumanRights

[Rosie Holt @RosieisaHolt]

“Constituents have been writing to me …saying they don’t want to live in a bin house” -MP defends PM scrapping green pledges

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

@RishiSunak As a business owner, I can say with absolute certainty, the Conservative Party is the antithesis of what this country’s commercial sector needs. See: Brexit, institutional corruption, net zero lies etc etc

[Dave Jones @CleanPowerDave]

SUNDAY THREAD:

This week the IEA updated their groundbreaking 1.5 degree Net Zero report. I was lucky enough to be a peer reviewer, and I want to explain in my own words what I think it means..

Yes we can still keep to 1.5 degrees! Were you ready to give up? So many people were

[Mark Kieran - Democracy Activist @MarkKieranUK]

WARNING: THREAD CONTAINS GRAPHIC LANGUAGE

🧵 What a morally vacuous, embarrassingly incompetent monster Suella Braverman is.

Having worked at the Home Office deciding asylum applications, I know the 1951 Refugee Convention's terms are far clearer than her pernicious propaganda would suggest.

She says many asylum seekers base their claims on “feeling” discriminated against in their home countries. But the scope of the Convention is limited to people who believe they have a “well-founded fear of persecution” for some specific reasons. Those reasons are race, nationality, religion, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Mere feelings of discrimination would not meet that rigorous test, and any application made on those grounds would (rightly) be fast-tracked for refusal.

She suggests that persecution, by definition, must involve a threat to life. Not true. Persecution often DOES involve a threat to life, but other things can qualify as persecution (arbitrary detention, unjustified confiscation of assets, withdrawal of state protection from crime). Braverman knows this, but the boneheads whose votes she is soliciting do not, so hey, why not spin the line?

In my time at the Home Office, I refused many asylum applications which, on the evidence presented, clearly did not meet the test of a well-founded fear of persecution on Convention grounds. The majority of those applications were made by people (mostly young men) who appeared to be seeking better economic futures for themselves and their families. That's completely understandable, and I never blamed them for trying, but it's not grounds for asylum, so neither did I feel any guilt in refusing them…that's not the purpose of the asylum system.

But I did grant asylum to a number of people who had clearly faced unimaginable horror in their own countries before escaping to the UK, where they felt safe and where they believed they would be able to live the rest of their lives in peace.

There was the Sikh activist who had a kettle of boiling water poured over him during a police interrogation. There was the woman from a minority Muslim sect who, when her husband died, and her neighbours started throwing stones through her windows at night, sought the protection of the local police only to be publicly ridiculed and then gang-raped by six officers in front of her three young children. There were the young Tamil men forced to inhale the fumes of burnt chilli powder by Sri Lankan police. Others hung upside-down and beaten for days until they confessed to crimes they played no part in. And many, many more with genuine, provable experiences just as gruesome.

Nearly thirty years on, I can still recall the faces of those people as they recounted their experiences to me during interviews and the tears in the eyes of the interpreters as they translated words no one should ever have to hear.

Since my days in the Home Office, I can’t recall a single Home Secretary who hasn’t had to wrestle one way or another with the asylum system. But neither can I recall one who has approached the task with as little humanity in their heart as Braverman. Truly, she is in a league of her own.

I simply don’t believe the majority of people in this country support the cruel policies that Braverman embraces so enthusiastically. As I listen to her today, my sincerest hope is that when Open Britain and our partners finally deliver a functional democracy in this country, monsters like her will never again be able to game their way into high office and abuse the power they find there.

This is our fight.

If you've read this far, please consider giving this a retweet and following me, @OpenBritainHQ and @StopTheRot_UK so you can be part of this positive change. Thank you.

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

This is what the UK should be using to inspire its energy policy

[Assaad Razzouk @AssaadRazzouk]

Surprisingly bullish new IEA Net Zero Roadmap:
>No new "long lead time" oil & gas after 2023
>Ramp up renewables 3x (doable)
>Double energy efficiency (doable)
>Cut methane 75% (easy)
>Up electrification (doable)

In plain English: Ensure Big Oil are tamed -with laws and lawsuits

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

@ClaireCoutinho Since the IEA’s analysis is that we can’t have any new oil and gas to have a chance of a livable planet, I find the UK’s policies disenguous in the extreme https://t.co/h0J8VX15vx

[Peter Watts @PeterWattsSD]

When the government says they are green-lighting oil and gas for UK prosperity, they are lying to you

[Joe Dillon (he/him) @JoeWithIt]

Some horrible economics here. 🧵

1) 90% of existing fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground to meet 1.5C (source @CarbonBubble). Opening up new fields is incompatible with a liveable world.