Chris Hesketh

Researching and tweeting about energy, environment, fracking and related subjects.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Demented grandpa Trump is at it again, mumbling about how America “needs” Greenland to protect itself from dangerous Russia (his best friends) and China. Well, here are the pictures of what America actually did with Greenland: more than 40 abandoned bases, rusting fuel barrels and derelict military junk left rotting in one of the most fragile ecosystems on Earth.

The largest man-made environmental disaster in Greenland’s history. And here’s the punchline: under NATO, the US could have flourishing bases there tomorrow, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers if defense was actually the point. They don’t need to own it. So when Trump says he needs Greenland for “security,” he’s either hallucinating or telling on himself. It was never about defense. It’s about enriching the worst family ever served to humanity by an evil Santa. The Trumps don’t want to protect Greenland. They want to strip-mine it, brand it, and leave it like they leave everything: bankrupt, polluted and abandoned.

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

Northern Ireland remaining in the EU single market for goods means we have an entire region running as a counterfactual on how much wealthier we’d have been had we stayed. It’s actually outperformed London.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Chris Hesketh @hesketh50]

@DrSimEvans What about the backup power in case of a sudden complete shutdown? Hinkley and Sizewell will require a huge and costly standby that doesn’t appear to feature in the costs.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Marco Rubio Has Discovered That NATO Exists

Marco Rubio stood at a podium recently and said, with the confidence of a man who has never read anything, that if NATO can’t be used to “project to other contingencies,” then “we have a problem.”

He is correct. There is a problem. The problem is Marco Rubio.

Article 5 of the NATO treaty has existed since 1949. It says, in language so simple a golden retriever could grasp it, that an attack on one member is an attack on all. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

You don’t need a law degree. You barely need literacy.

What Article 5 does not say, and what no page of the NATO founding treaty has ever suggested, is that 31 sovereign European nations signed up to serve as a strategic parking lot for American military adventures on the other side of the planet.

Denmark did not join a defensive alliance in 1949 so that, 75 years later, it could help Washington bomb a country it got bored looking at.

NATO is a shield. Not a sword. Not a taxi service. Not a valet for whatever impulsive geopolitical tantrum is trending in Washington this quarter.

The Americans have now spent 15 months confused by this distinction.

Their finest minds, their cabinet secretaries, their very best people, staring at the treaty like a dog watching television. Ears up. Deeply engaged. Understanding absolutely nothing.

The good news is that Europe has finally understood something too: you cannot outsource your survival to people who find a single sentence intellectually challenging.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

brexit: who knew?

[Very Brexit Problems @VeryBrexitProbs]

The Nigel Farage Guide to Being a Working-Class Hero

Step 1: Be born to a City stockbroker.

Step 2: Attend Dulwich College, fees currently £53,000 a year.

Step 3: Skip university. Become a City commodities trader instead.

Step 4: Run one of your metal broking firms into insolvency.

Step 5: Get elected to the European Parliament. Spend the next 21 years drawing a salary from the institution you're paid to dismantle.

Step 6: Claim £15,500 a year in expenses for an office your party was given rent-free.

Step 7: Put your wife on the EU parliamentary payroll. Take her off only when the rules force you to.

Step 8: Get investigated by the EU's anti-fraud office. Eventually have half your MEP salary docked to repay misused public funds.

Step 9: Throw a Brexit victory party at the Ritz. Decry the "professional political class" to a room of millionaires.

Step 10: Take £450,000 in personal gifts from Arron Banks. House. Car. Lifestyle.

Step 11: Take £5 million, undisclosed, from a Bangkok-based crypto billionaire. Days later, announce you're standing for parliament after all.

Step 12: Win Clacton. Take the £93,904 MP salary. Add £1.2 million a year from GB News at £2,300 an hour. Become the highest-earning MP in the House of Commons.

Step 13: Speak in parliament fewer times than any other party leader. Fly to America at least nine times in your first year. Refuse to hold in-person constituency surgeries. Holiday in France while parliament is sitting.

Step 14: Tell the working class you're one of them. Tell them to vote against their own interests, over and over again.

Pint, mate?

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

"Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction." Senator Claude Malhuret stood up in the French Senate this week and systematically torched every single member of Trump's cabinet.

Nobody was spared. Not one.

"A year ago, here in France, I compared Trump's presidency to Nero's Court. I was wrong. It's the miracle court," Malhuret began. Then he went through the roster.

"An anti-vaxxer, former heroin addict as Minister of Health." (That's RFK Jr)

"A climate-skeptic Minister of Economy." (That's Scott Bessent)

"An alcoholic TV host, Minister of the Armed Forces." (That's Pete Hegseth)

"An old Qatar agent, Minister of Justice." (That's Pam Bondi, whose former firm collected $115,000 a month lobbying for Qatar)

"A groupie of Putin, Minister of National Security." (That's Tulsi Gabbard)

Then he pulled back and went bigger.

"A Turkish proverb says: when a clown settles in a palace, he does not become king. It is the palace that becomes a circus."

Malhuret pointed out that since Trump created his so-called Board of Peace, he has launched more military strikes than Biden did in his entire term. He called out the Boeing jet Qatar gifted Trump worth $400 million.

He called out the stock market manipulation that only insiders benefit from. He called out the Gulf investment deals enriching Trump and his family.

"Any one of these conflicts of interest would have caused an immediate procedure of impeachment here," Malhuret said. "But we are not here. We are in MAGA's America where public business is conducted in favor of private interests."

Then came the line that cut deepest. "Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction."

This is how the world sees us now. Not through Fox News. Not through Truth Social. Through the cold, clear eyes of allied nations watching a great country be hollowed out by crooks.

Every American should hear this speech. Share it everywhere.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Let me walk you through what happened one hour before Trump announced the five day moratorium on Iran strikes.

$1.5 billion in notional S&P E-mini futures contracts. Four to six times normal activity.

One hour before the announcement.

Simultaneously, $192 million in crude oil futures purchased at the same time.

They made between $300 and $400 million dollars off those trades.

Trump claimed he spoke to an Iranian official to negotiate the moratorium.

The Iranians said that person doesn't exist and the conversation never happened.

This is not the first time.

It has happened multiple times. He says something. The trade goes on. He says another thing. The market moves.

But whatever you call it — they are laughing at you and they are laughing at me while they do it.

Hunter Biden sold a painting and Washington lost its mind.

These people are making hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars trading on information that only exists inside the most powerful office in the world.

I think we are dramatically underreporting how much money is actually being made here.

This isn't politics anymore.

This is a financial operation running out of the White House.

[The Green Party @TheGreenParty]

April fools... but the only joke is Labour refusing to nationalise water to protect our rivers and lower our bills

[Simon Evans @DrSimEvans]

NEW ANALYSIS: Record wind and solar generation saved UK from gas imports worth £1bn in March 2026

📈Wind+solar were up 22% year-on-year in March to a record high for the month
⛴️This avoided the need for gas imports worth £1bn at current high prices

https://t.co/E2meLmnPe8

[Chris Hesketh @hesketh50]

@AssaadRazzouk What about the cost of 3.2GW of standby power in case Hinkley suddenly goes offline?
Renewables plus backup batteries would be more reliable as well as cheaper.

[Assaad Razzouk @AssaadRazzouk]

The math behind the Hinkley Point C disaster is infuriating: EDF just pushed, again, the start-up to 2030 and the cost exploded from an original £18b in 2016 to £49b

But how much solar or offshore wind does £49b buy in the real world?

THREAD

https://t.co/Fhg3gjb9We

[Daractenus @Daractenus]

Theres a very long list of US products that cannot be sold in the EU thanks to EU regulations. Since the favorite pastime of the Trump regime and every US oligarch is now to demonize EU regulations, I thought it would be very much worth going through some of those products.🧵

[Їne Back Їversen @IneBackIversen]

1: Let’s talk about Steve Witkoff, because I think the narrative of him being a “useful idiot” is a dangerous trap to walk in.

It’s darker than that.

Witkoff has spent three decades swimming in russian money, russian mob circles, and russian real-estate pipeline.

A thread 🧵

[Anders Åslund @anders_aslund]

What suggests that Trump works for Putin & Xi & not for the US?
1. He has launched an extraordinary and erratic trade war against all but Russia;
2. eliminated U.S. foreign aid programs;
3. upended U.S. alliances;
4. degraded the US administration; /1

[Terje Helland @terjehelland]

🇬🇪Georgia’s paradox: a government despised by its people, yet firmly in power.
Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream survives not through popularity, but by fusing repression, economic dependency, and rigged institutions.
🧵In this thread I try to explain this paradox.

1/16

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

The Russian economy is collapsing, Ukrainian strikes are crippling RU energy & will only expand, and all Putin has left is terror attacks on civilians. What to do? Call Trump to the rescue! Get sanctions lifted, stop UKR strikes, marginalize Europe, kill more innocents. 1/7

[Mark W Tebbutt @mwt2008]

The EU claims air pollution causes 287,000 premature deaths a year. In reality, modern science puts the toll far higher — over 659,000. Why? There’s no safe level of PM2.5. Gas cooking adds another 40,000 deaths indoors.

Net zero isn’t just climate policy — it’s how we move away from combustion, clean up our air, and save lives. Every step toward electrification and renewables reduces disease, dementia, and early death. #AirPollution #NetZero