Archie (Earl of Dumbfarton)

join a union 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇧🇦🇭🇷 🌹 old af

[Archie (Earl of Dumbfarton) @whiskyletsplay]

One side remembered to wear PPE and is having a peaceful protest. The other side are drinking, have no PPE, and are protecting a statue 80 ft in the air. A statue of a man that ABOLISHED slavery in the UK. These ‘Defenders of Newcastle’ aren’t that bright.

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

I still don’t think many people have clocked how massive this story actually is.

Thames Water is carrying £19.8bn of debt, up 2 billion in a single year, and it will run out of money before Christmas.

£19.8bn against 16 million people who cannot switch, can’t leave, and cannot stop drinking water.

That’s about £1,240 per head. 5 grand for a family of four. In some way, shape, or form, they’re on the hook for it.

That’s the part that I don’t think has landed yet. This isn’t a story about sewage in the Thames, or bonuses, or another regulator caught asleep. The actual event is 30 years of a monopoly being used as collateral by people who knew its customers could never walk away. The bill has now come due… and it’s a big one.

The pipes and the infrastructure were never the real asset. The 16 million captive water drinkers were.

What’s going to really sting is the fact there’s only two ways this gets settled. Your bill goes up, substantially, or your taxes do. Most likely both, and it’ll be on a schedule designed in a way so you don’t notice the hit, in an attempt to suppress the rage you should rightly be feeling.

And before anyone tells me the creditors are taking a 30% haircut, look at what they’ve asked for in return. Fines waived until 2030. Pollution targets “significantly modified.” Bills raised above what the regulator allows. That isn’t exactly them eating the loss now, is it. That’s them buying a regulatory holiday, on debt most of them bought at distressed prices.

Nobody voted for this, nobody borrowed it, and nobody saw the benefit of it. The debt was loaded onto a captive customer base over 30 years and paid out to shareholders who have long since gone.

16 million people are about to find out that they co-signed something they were completely unaware of.

Now, this is what should worry us all. Thames isn’t a rogue outlier, it’s just the first one to fully hit the wall. English water carries north of £60bn of debt. Southern is already junk rated, needed a £1.2bn rescue from its shareholders, and its customers are looking at a 48% bill rise this decade before you count what the CMA added on top. Every one of these companies borrowed heavily when money was free and now have to refinance it all in a world where it isn’t, while being told to spend billions on infrastructure they left rotting for 30 years. Thames is just the first and most visible of what will likely end up being a line of dominoes.

Maybe Burnham nationalises Thames Water. But ask yourself… how many more will need to be nationalised? And who do you think pays for that?

[YouGov @YouGov]

An ECIU study has found that three quarters of media coverage of the June heatwave did not mention climate change - our recent poll found 71% of Britons think climate change was a likely cause of the high temperatures

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[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump: "We had 11 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan"

[Jack D 🏳️‍🌈 @JackDunc1]

June, historically, is the least hot of the 3 summer months in the UK, yet the record has been broken on 3 consecutive days, just like it was in May. it's now nearly a full 2 degrees clear of the old record, also like May.

These aren't fine margins, this is a huge change in UK climate.

Today is also the 5th hottest day in recorded UK history, 4 of the other 5 have come since 2019.

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

There are climate activists sitting in jail for warning about this.

[bONGO 🌐 @wariocolosseum]

it’s so cool how rich ppl make our lives so much worse by making us deal with massive problems they caused

[Yet another commodity guy @tleilax___]

El Nino update. Godzilla is coming.

Most of the world will see top quartile temperatures over Jul/Aug/Sep, which is peak vegetative growth season globally for grains, half the world oilseeds and also for sugar and rice in Asia. That means more evapotranspiration and stress on crops.

India and South-East Asia will also likely see their weakeast monsoon rains in decades.

This is happening while there's a shortage of fertilizers.

[justholyshit @justholyshit]

Oh shit. AMOC collapsing is one of the nightmare scenarios.

[🐸• M͓̽A͓̽R͓̽B͓̽L͓̽E͓̽S͓̽ 『マーブル』 •🐸 #BLM @marbitozard_]

hate how no one is taking this seriously enough

[Silicon Valley Fodder @Playerinthgame]

utterly unsustainably rabidly insane. makes the Reagan years look like the New Deal era.

[Simon Hunt @SimonHuntCityAM]

The Plan 2 interest rate is set annually based on...March inflation data 🫣

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Twenty million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz yesterday.

Today the number may be zero.

Not because Iran mined the water. Not because a tanker was hit. Because Lloyd’s of London picked up the phone.

War risk underwriters began canceling policies for strait transits hours after Operation Epic Fury launched. The Financial Times confirmed premiums surging 50 percent. Baseline war risk sits at 0.25 percent of hull value. For a hundred million dollar tanker that is 250,000 dollars per voyage. At peak escalation rates, one million per transit. Vessels linked to American or Israeli interests are becoming uninsurable entirely. No price. No policy. No passage.

The KHK Empress was loaded with Omani crude heading for Basra when it executed a U-turn mid-strait and redirected to India. The Eagle Veracruz halted at the western approach carrying two million barrels of Saudi crude bound for China. The Front Shanghai stopped off Sharjah with Iraqi crude destined for Rotterdam. Nippon Yusen ordered its entire fleet to avoid Hormuz. Greece told its merchant armada to reassess passage. Hapag-Lloyd suspended all transits.

None of them were fired upon. Every one of them got the same call.

More than fifty million years ago the Arabian plate collided with the Eurasian plate and compressed the Persian Gulf into a basin that drains through a single geological bottleneck twenty one miles wide. Twenty one percent of global petroleum. Twenty percent of all seaborne LNG. One fifth of industrial civilization’s energy supply forced through a tectonic accident narrower than the English Channel, bordered on one side by the country whose supreme leader was killed yesterday morning.

The USS Abraham Lincoln carries enough Tomahawks to sink every IRGC patrol boat in 48 hours. Operation Praying Mantis crippled Iran’s operational naval forces in eight hours in 1988. The Fifth Fleet has rehearsed this scenario for decades.

None of that matters. Aircraft carriers cannot force an underwriter to rewrite a policy. Tomahawks cannot lower a premium. The most powerful navy in human history cannot make a Lloyd’s syndicate decide that a VLCC transiting Iranian coastal waters represents an acceptable risk on a Saturday afternoon when missiles are landing in Dubai.

Goldman Sachs estimates Brent could peak at 110 dollars per barrel. JP Morgan projects 120 to 130. At those levels every airline bleeds cash. Every central bank watches three years of inflation fighting reignite overnight. Bypass pipelines from Saudi Arabia and the UAE handle roughly three million barrels. Hormuz handles twenty million. The math does not close.

Iran figured out something the Pentagon still has not.

You do not need to close a strait. You just need to make it uninsurable.

https://t.co/BrzGRrU3VW

[Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis]

The govt's Student Loan Plan 2 repayment freeze in April 2027 must be reversed. It isn't moral.

I'm concerned that my debate with Kemi Badenoch this morning distracts from the most immediate problem. In April 2027 Rachel Reeves will freeze the Plan 2 student loan threshold until 2030 which by then will increase graduate repayments by £300/yr more.

This is effectively a unilateral negative breach of the student loan contract. Students were told the threshold would rise with average earnings. No commercial lender would be allowed to do this. The govt shouldn't do it either.

Changing the terms of future students loans is a political decision - people may not like it but it is transparent. Negatively changing the terms of contracts already signed, and long in place, is a breach of natural justice.

[Archie (Earl of Dumbfarton) @whiskyletsplay]

Today was a good day. Prince Andrew is a good start.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

CBS is lost. Trump controls it.

[Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran]

Trump is so concerned about flipping Texas, that he is using his FCC goons to censor his opponents.

To go to all this trouble, and coordinate with the FCC means they are having *SERIOUS* internal discussions about Texas.

And they know @jamestalarico is a threat!

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

He only got four years for attacking someone with an axe.

[Chris Gloninger, CCM, CBM @ChrisGloninger]

Atmospheric scientist here. Let me tell you what was actually "slashed" today.

Slashed: The Endangerment Finding — a 200-page scientific review upheld by the Supreme Court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and reaffirmed by the National Academies of Sciences in 2025.

Slashed: The legal authority to regulate carbon from cars, power plants, and factories. All of it. Gone in one afternoon.

Now here's what you're "saving":

Yesterday Trump ordered the Pentagon — the largest energy consumer on Earth — to buy coal electricity.

Coal costs $69–$169/MWh.
Wind costs $27–$53/MWh.
Solar costs $38–$78/MWh.

99% of U.S. coal plants cost more to run than replacing them with brand-new solar or wind.

That's your tax dollars buying the most expensive electricity on the market. By executive order. While the Peabody Energy CEO stood in the room.

And the human cost of what you're "saving"?

460,000 American deaths linked to coal pollution in 20 years. Coal PM2.5 is 2.1x deadlier than other air pollution. (Henneman et al., Science, 2023)

All to protect an industry that employs 44,000 people total. Clean energy employs 3.5 million.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I am no Starmer fan but I feel the same way.