Jim Evans

Not a single thing has ever been mended by you standing there saying you’re offended - Idles 2020

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@theiaincameron You’ve clearly never been on a Silent Gliss training course then!

[Kevin Hague @kevverage]

say what you like about Peter Murrell using the SNP’s funds to spend £85 on gourmet beans, at least he didn’t waste the money trying to make an economic case for independence

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[Joanna Cherry KC @joannaccherry]

🤦‍♀️ Nicola Sturgeon is setting up a strawman in her interview with @bbclaurak. Nobody was complaining of embezzlement in 2021. What we were worried about was financial mismanagement & lack of transparency. She demonised us for those concerns & should take responsibility for that.

[Peter MacDonald @BlackIslePMD]

There's simply no way back from this. All the attempted defences by NS supporters evaporate like mist on a summer's day within the first minute of this.

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@martinfife @1966MJG Don’t think ESR has ever wanted to be here, sadly.

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@martinfife 82 for me. First Panini too. 😃

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

The longest line of sight in the U.K. has been seen only a few times, and photographed once. In 2015, Kris Williams was atop Snowdon in perfect conditions and managed to snap The Merrick in Southern Scotland. A remarkable distance of 232km (144 miles).

[Colin Bennett @ColBennettH4]

When the decision is made next week I would like it to be done with a puff of smoke from the cottage chimneys. White he says, black he's goes.

[Glenn @GlennGlennReal]

Not a single person in this picture is there to improve our lives, our health,the economy or our prosperity - every single one of them is a nationalist activist or grifter, totally unqualified for the job in hand.

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@martinfife Even if he gets the heave hoe, he still walks with his bank account full. A win win for Marco

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@CraigGTelfer Watched the first leg on TV, what a great quality of football from both teams

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@martinfife 3 or 4, you need to share what you are drinking!!! 1-0 wolves 😔

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@Glyndle Our swallows only arrived on Friday, weeks later than normal (scotland)

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

Well said that man

[Ben Goldsmith @BenGoldsmith]

I’ve just been in Scotland.

The writer Aldo Leopold once said that even the smallest ecological education leaves you walking through ‘a world of wounds’ which nobody else seems to see.

Scotland’s beautiful hills and glens have for the most part been stripped and scarred and left utterly desolate by generations of landowners, land managers and dreadful politicians.

You can drive in any direction for hours and see nothing but sheep and more sheep on denuded hillsides, pockmarked with vast, artless blocks of monocultural conifer plantation deadzones.

Even where there are few sheep, red deer numbers are artificially inflated for the canned shooting industry and the deer do just the same as the sheep, leaving nothing but cropped grass from the top of the hills to the bottom of the valleys, a gigantic bowling green with contours.

Developing countries which have suffered a loss of trees and nature on anything like the same scale have the rest of the world rushing to offer assistance in restoring it. Think Madagascar, or Nepal, where things are fast now being turned around.

Many of the pockets of natural woodland that remain in Scotland are totally infested with head-height invasive rhododendron.

Some landowners are turning things around, to the fury of their neighbours, but they remain a small minority. Those places are fast becoming truly magical islands of what once was and what could be again.

It’s even worse under the sea, out of sight, out of mind. Scotland says that marine protected areas represent 38% of its seas. It’s bollocks. Even the most destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling are permitted with impunity in nearly all of it. Just 1% of Scotland’s seas are actually protected.

This is what happens when you have a population that has lost touch with what nature is, and can’t see the ravages which surround it; governed by politicians who are in hock to a small minority of established vested interests who simply won’t have it any other way.

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@FulhamTransfer Jedi was playing well because he wants a WC spot, nothing to do with FFC

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@martinfife Lack of goals has finished us this season. Don’t think Muniz is the answer anymore

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@1966MJG @gerrypimm And that’s why Marco is leaving

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@gerrypimm I was there, but never remembered it being so late! Last night looked like a great night

[Jim Evans @magicbuzz]

@RobertKwolek @createstreets Can’t even sweep the streets around me, let alone spend any cash on improvements. Lovely concept