@robinmonotti@_ClimateCraze The BBC going all in on the Heat Scare last week is beginning to look like them doing a rain dance.
Will they never learn.
Scottish Water have been doing it for years - announce a hosepipe ban and the heavens open.
1976 Minister for Drought appointed and the heavens opened.
@JamesMelville Whoa, whoa, whoa! Back the bus up!
Isn’t Scotland the richest country in the world in terms of Renewable Energy?
A country that doesn’t need Torness which can supply the equivalent of 75% of Scotland’s homes with clean, green electricity?
Conventional wisdom says that leaving the European Union has harmed the British economy.
Listen to almost any Brexit debate – over the airwaves or on the professional conference circuit – and it’s invariably taken for granted being outside the EU has done serious economic damage.
Now we're in June, and as the 23rd approaches – the ten-year anniversary of that hotly-contested, era-defining referendum – this message will be rammed home again and again.
But it simply isn’t true.
My latest "Economic Agenda" column in @Telegraph
🧵1/7
https://t.co/3x1C903R8n
@Bloom76in@TEnglishSport@Alan_Morrison67 And yet Hearts were a win clear of Celtic until the fixes went in.
Both the Killie and ‘Well matches had controversial and almost identical incidents where Braga and Kyziridis were tripped/stamped on in the penalty box.
Both fouls were (incorrectly per Collum) unpunished.
The Knepp Estate in West Sussex is the most famous rewilding project in Britain. It is on Springwatch, in the broadsheets, in a bestselling book. It is the place everyone points to when they want to show you what the land does the moment humans step back and stop farming it. Look at the nightingales, the purple emperors, the storks. Proof, apparently, that we should get the animals off the land and let it go wild.
There is one problem with using Knepp this way. You have to never look at what is standing in the fields.
Knepp is full of animals. Deliberately, by design, as the entire point.
When Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree gave up on intensive farming around 2000, on heavy Sussex clay that had run the estate £1.5 million into debt, they did the reverse. They brought more animals in, of more kinds, took down seventy miles of fencing, and let them roam. Old English longhorn cattle. Tamworth pigs. Exmoor ponies. Red, fallow and roe deer. Stand-ins for the wild aurochs, boar and horses we wiped out long ago. Their grazing, browsing, trampling, rootling and dung is the engine that builds the whole mosaic of scrub and wood pasture the rare birds need. Too few animals and it chokes into dense woodland. Too many and it flattens to bare grass. The cattle are the reason the nightingale is there at all.
And Knepp does not leave nature to it. There are no wolves in Sussex, so the herds would breed until they ate the place bare. So Knepp culls them every autumn. The deer are shot by a licensed stalker. The cattle and pigs go to a small organic abattoir. Knepp calls this, without flinching, stepping into the role of the missing apex predator.
A managed herd, grazing grass, culled before winter for meat. There is a word for that, and it is a very old one.
Then comes the part that should end the argument outright. They sell the meat. Knepp Wild Range: an online butchery and a restaurant, longhorn beef aged on the bone for weeks, Tamworth pork off pigs fattened on autumn acorns, venison, charcuterie cured in house. Heston Blumenthal calls the longhorn the best beef in the world. Knepp markets the lot as the most sustainable meat you can buy, and its own website argues, in words any carnivore would recognise, that pasture-fed meat is good for you and that grazing ruminants are one of the best carbon sinks on the planet.
So Britain's flagship rewilding project is a former arable farm, gone broke under the plough, rescued by swapping the crops for free-roaming cattle, pigs, ponies and deer, then counting them, culling them, and selling them as premium grass-fed steak.
This is the thing held up as the case for taking animals off the land.
Post a Knepp turtle dove with a caption about what nature does once we stop eating meat, and you have it exactly upside down. The turtle dove is sponsored by the longhorn. The green cathedral was built by a herd of cattle, and paid for, in part, by selling the surplus as steak.
None of which means we should turn all of Britain into Knepp. We shouldn't. It grows a fraction of the food the land could, and nobody lives on nightingales. But on the one principle it actually demonstrates, it is unanswerable, and it is the precise principle the people quoting it want dead. Put the grazing animals back and the wildlife pours in. Take them away and it drains out.
The poster child for the end of livestock is a working meat farm.
Go and read its menu.
@ordinarybhoy Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Claudio Braga was the victim of an even more blatant stamp on his foot - in the penalty box - at Rugby Park but he tried to stay in his feet and finish the attack. Penalty was not awarded.
FTAOD both were penalties.
@FinnrikLarsson@ScotlandSky@SkyFootball If he hadn’t exaggerated the fall, do you think the penalty would have been awarded?
Would Braga have been fouled if, instead of trying to stay on his feet, he fell onto the plastic at Rugby park? (41 secs into highlights attached).
Does honest pay?
https://t.co/ufkWUg8WjH
@cleinad88@davidlloydreid@TEnglishSport@JamTarts@CelticFC@RangersFC@MotherwellFC Makes no difference whether Kabore had the ball or not. He was ahead of Trusty and pulling away. It was what is often called a “professional foul” or “taking one for the team.” Trusty should have known he was taking a risk but he was edgy after mistakes in 1st half.
@cleinad88@davidlloydreid@TEnglishSport@JamTarts@CelticFC@RangersFC@MotherwellFC That’s the rules.
The images of both incidents show the initial point of contact. Trusty is closer to his goal than Steinwender was in the other.
There wasn’t any great outcry last year and compare that with O’Neill’s histrionics after Trusty’s red.
@trebletrebleye1@Record_Sport Have you read the analysis of all of these incidents? Did you keep a copy? If yes, then share it.
Perhaps, instead, it’s a figment of your imagination.
@cleinad88@davidlloydreid@TEnglishSport@JamTarts@CelticFC@RangersFC@MotherwellFC At Ibrox, there were several passages of play after the alleged offence - ample opportunity to block the play. The goal was scored because nobody tracked Shankland.
How do you rationalise that being handball while Longelo’s for ‘Well v Hearts was not.