David Robin

Born @ 312.4ppm
“reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” Walkers of the world, unite!
Banner:Contrails, Palmerston N

[David Robin @HoloceneDays]

@marcdaalder The carbon budget for 1.5C is on the verge of running out. Projects with CO2eq breakeven dates decades from now are pointless. We haven’t the *carbon*, so we’ve got to think.

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

"A high court judge has just greenlit criminal proceedings against Rajiv Menon KC, one of the UK's most prominent human rights barristers...this unprecedented move has sent shockwaves through the legal profession and is actively terrifying junior defence lawyers."

Courts aren't just gagging defendants – now they're threatening independent lawyers with prison for reminding jurors that, when deciding on a case, they can use their conscience.

Justice Jeremy Johnson has continued with his attempt to have Rajiv Menon KC, the human rights barrister who represented one of the recently sentenced Filton 4, convicted of contempt of court.

Footage: @ranjanbalakumaran

[Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 @rahmstorf]

@ryankatzrosene

[David Robin @HoloceneDays]

Excellent, constructive fiscal fisking

[David Peez @RebelEkonomista]

RNZ's Budget analysis is a masterclass in mainstream myth. "The government's finances have been battered." "Inflation makes health spending harder." "The ratings agencies are watching." Every sentence assumes the thing it should be questioning. Full breakdown in comments.

[David Peez @RebelEkonomista]

The real constraint on government spending is inflation - too much demand chasing too few real resources.
That is a legitimate debate.
What is not legitimate: using a false household analogy to make political choices look like natural laws - and cutting public services on the back of it.

[David Peez @RebelEkonomista]

So what does the NZ government's deficit actually mean?
By accounting identity: the government's deficit = the private sector's surplus.
When Willis returns to surplus - taxing more than spending - she is draining financial assets from NZ households and businesses. She should say so plainly.

[Jeff Berardelli @WeatherProf]

Genesis of a Super El Niño! Why do we expect this El Niño to be one of the strongest on record? - A main reason: Huge subsurface heat - exceeding most anything we’ve observed in spring - motoring eastward from the deep Western Tropical Pacific Ocean to the East Pacific and emerging at the surface. This is rapidly warming the El Niño region. This is how El Niño forms - it’s not new, it’s just supercharged. This matches most computer model forecasts for a historic El Niño pattern, throwing Earth’s climate patterns off-kilter. Expect robust effects of El Niño to begin this summer and maximize this fall and winter. The aim of the visual is to help people orient to subsurface views, tough to do without a frame of reference. Credit to @cyclonicwx for the animating map inlay. #elnino #science #stem #climate

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE

There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"

Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!

And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that someone.

She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."

Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.

And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.

Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.

There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.

There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."

There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”

Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.

She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.

What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.

These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.

Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.

We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.

So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.

A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.

Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.

Let us stand with her.

Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.

[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

[Flight Free UK @FlightFreeUK]

Used cooking oil & animal fat for SAF?
UK road sector already uses more than we produce.
Diverting it to aviation (the least efficient user) just pushes demand for virgin palm oil elsewhere.
It’s not waste it’s musical chairs with forests.
#SAF

[Flight Free UK @FlightFreeUK]

Biofuel SAF needs crops like palm, soy, rapeseed.
Result? Deforestation, biodiversity collapse, water shortages, rising food prices.
We already saw this disaster when road transport scaled biofuels.
Now they want it for planes too?
#NotSustainable

[Russel Norman @RusselNorman]

Former head of Marsden Oil refinery on NZ Govt: "Most other countries in the world outside MAGA US states and New Zealand are [going for 100% renewables and electrifying transport] now, at pace. For some reason, New Zealand 's going down the 1980s' path." https://t.co/ug1FRGdtdj

[David Robin @HoloceneDays]

Economics From Adam Smith to 2029: A Complete Rethink https://t.co/jKbBvOUJ5r via @YouTube

[David Robin @HoloceneDays]

Economics From Adam Smith to 2029: A Complete Rethink https://t.co/jKbBvOUJ5r via @YouTube

[Helen Clark @HelenClarkNZ]

The statement on the 🇺🇸 & 🇮🇱 attacks on Iran by #NZ Govt is a disgrace. The Govt knows full well that international law has been breached even though negotiations were under way. It knows that 🇺🇸 walked away from the last nuclear agreement with Iran. Why the servility?

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Three European governments accuse me - based on statements I never made -with a virulence and conviction that they have NEVER used against those who have slaughtered 20,000+ children in 858 days.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

In praise, support and, yes, celebration of Francesca Albanese.

As Francesca prepares to present her 8th report to the UN on the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, her demonisation follows a familiar pattern:

Some fake NGO spreads falsehoods about Francesca, outrage is then engineered and, finally, calls for her resignation as the UN’s Special Rapporteur are issued by the governments of Germany, France, Czechia etc. - by politicians who for years now have done their utmost to arm and provide diplomatic cover to Israel’s genocidal government.

Why? For a simple reason: So that you and I, we, do not talk about the hideous facts that Francesca is exposing with such brilliant clarity and legal precision: the Palestinians’ genocide, the economic motives of a corporate world that profits from the Occupation, the torture of Israel’s Palestinian captives, Israel’s never-ending violations of International Law etc.

Today, Francesca Albanese’s detractors, those who seek to shield Israel from her well-documented, factual, legitimate criticism by getting her fired or by forcing her resignation from her position of UN Special Rapporteur – these people do not understand one thing:

Francesca will NEVER stop! She will continue to expose Israel’s crimes whether she is the UN’s Special Rapporteur or not. My message to them is simple: Francesca Albanese may be even more successful in shining light on Israel’s genocide if you strip her of her UN role. Beware what you wish for!

[David Robin @HoloceneDays]

Climate - Prof Kevin Anderson | National Emergency Briefing https://t.co/sKSFVsJyNo via @YouTube

[Climate Dad @ClimateDad77]

Imagine living on a planet at its hottest in 125,000 years, where CO2 levels are their highest in MILLIONS of years & where you have to work your whole life in a system that’s decimating what little is left of nature just to enrich the most depraved psychopaths who’ve ever lived.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

On this day in 1953, the US and Britain carried out a brutal coup that deposed Mohammad Mosaddegh, the popular Prime Minister of Iran, beloved for his progressive and pro-worker reforms, because he sought to restore national control over the country's oil reserves.

[David Robin @HoloceneDays]

Climate - Prof Kevin Anderson | National Emergency Briefing https://t.co/sKSFVsJyNo via @YouTube

[Dave Goulson @DaveGoulson]

https://t.co/dAVVaLpr28
Perhaps the seriousness of our situation is finally beginning to sink in?