Sexism/other issues in the Green party England & Wales - Discussion Thread 3

[fromorbit]

Zack Polanski is making things bigger yet again so another thread needed.

Well things have developed rather a lot since the start. ZP started out as being another sexist guy in politics - no shortage those around, but he thought he could take it to a new level and he proved he could do it.

The Green threads have followed his rise from the start of with the Hypnoboobs scandal and much more. There is also:

Mothin Ali as deputy Leader who clearly doesn't believe in trans thinking, but cleverly sidesteps round talking about it, has always had a issues with encouraging racist violence and is now encouraging people to sue the Green party if they attempt to stop them saying racist stuff.

The other deputy Rachel Millward represents the posh rich faction of the Greens who manages to sounding like Reform when opposing Asylum Seekers in her area, but at the same time saying we are too harsh on immigrants in general. Obviously she also doesn't believe women are a thing. Yet she is the least crazy when violence is concerned compared to ZP, and Mothin.

Hypnoboobs scandal got worse recently when it became clear from BBC footage ZP actively believed in the Hypnoboobs thesis rather than being tricked into it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9enygvezeo

Alongside all this there is constant ongoing attacks on biological reality from the party in interviews and in policy.

Now in the last week or so after a longstanding spate of antisemetic rhetoric from some Greens during the election campaign and ZP downplaying it. We have synagogues, schools, ambulances attacked, two Jewish people dead and ZP berating unarmed police for risking their lives in fighting a violent killer who was still armed with a knife things have come to a crisis point.

The Greens are becoming ever more sinister with dozens of candidates sounding like they are seventies NF supporters with comments about uppity women and Jewish power. The huge drama over a crazy motion which they were trying to pass against Israel at conference alongside a motion to prevent women having sports will surface again their September conference.

It seems likely after next week The Greens are going to be running a bunch of councils which doesn't bode well after their antics in Bristol.

Yet there is hope, in Bristol women are fighting back_: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5455053-bristol-council-is-about-to-be-sued_

The fight back from Green Women's Declaration, ( https://www.greenwomensdeclaration.uk/ ) continues and the court cases against GPEW from Emma Bateman and Shahrar Ali are developing, both getting through legal delaying tactics as they move to trial. Gardening is needed. These cases if successful could be dramatic in their impact.

First thread - where you can follow the rise of ZP and lots of other scandal
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5328986-greens-internal-drama-warms-up

Second Thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5456759-sexismother-issues-in-the-green-party-england-wales-discussion-thread-2?

Note the Scottish Greens which are a separate party to the Green Party England/Wales have their own thread for all their sexist drama. They split off because GPEW didn't hate biology and women/gays enough at the time.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5313420-scottish-greens-being-sexist-again?page=1

I think the Tory position is that we need to engineer / adapt / novel technology our way out of the problem. Which is how humans got to this point, really. So carbon capture (some of the technology captures about 90% of emissions) rather than penalising people for their everyday lives.

Rather than totally changing the way society functions and essentially sacrificing human comfort / health and lives to pursue one narrow goal such as reducing CO2 from existing emissions.

Reduction of emissions won't work unless you get the whole of the globe doing it, anyway. As long as it's profitable to not follow suit, that won't happen. It's the Prisoner's dilemma.

Sensible energy policy would include as many fuel sources as possible - nuclear, biomass, renewables, while reducing fossil fuel usage as much as possible.

Sensible transport policy would be enormously upgraded and as far as possible free public transport.

Carbon Capture would be brilliant, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. At least, not before it can be demonstrated that it is working and being implemented. So far, fuck all at all, y'all.

'sacrificing human comfort / health and lives to pursue one narrow goal such as reducing CO2 from existing emissions'

If we accept cliimate change is real and that humans are impacting on it, then failing to reduce emissions is indeed sacrificing human comfort and health.

Yes there's a problem, and we need to find a way to undo the damage we've done and pronto, but blanket bans on technology won't do it. It was scientific advances that enabled us to do the damage, it's going to take scientific advances to get us out of this, not grandstanding gestures from political clowns. The Greens have been campaigning on this for years and at no time in all of those years have they come up with a workable plan.
One resource we haven't depleted is our intellectual resource, a radical plan would be to direct all our educational efforts to finding a way to undo the damage that we've done. No more Humanities, from now on science, science and more science until someone or more like a couple of thousand someones from all over the globe working together comes up with something.

What bans on tech?

What workable plan do you suggest?

The Greens are a relatively tiny party, they aren't in power. Why blame them for govt failures?

Climate change has been a known thing since the 70s.

We have so far failed to mitigate, reduce, or address the issues.

There's no point blaming the Greens for that. They are at least raising awareness.

Or maybe the worldwide forest fires are doing so. Anyway. It's here. We'd better think about it.

I'm afraid, having worked in the environmental field for years, the biggest problem with addressing the global environment including climate change is the negative side of human nature, which the Green Party is a grade-A example of with their hypnotits leader and coalition of TRAs and extreme Islam.

There needs to be evidence-based policy, intelligent thought, good faith, co-operation, and joint action which will require compromise. Is the Green Party capable of this? No, clearly not. They can't even accept party members who think men don't magically become women when they don a dress.

However some countries do it better than others. In the UK, the authoritarian left is part of the problem. Punishing people rather than giving them incentives. People who can't feed their kids are unlikely to care about climate change. Expecting them to is inhumane.

And a lot of environmental activism is as cultish as trans ideology. With very little rational or logical thought at all. I remember once seeing a scientist being shunned because he gave a talk about historical pre-human climate change and that was idiotically taken as him not believing in man-made climate change.

A lot of environmental policy is trendy and not much more.

Okay, but do you think we should be trying to limit or reduce emissions?

Limiting air travel will no doubt be the start of it if they gained the power to do it. Stopping people using their cars would be next, although that one's already in the works. They want to limit the amount of meat people eat, so limiting farmers use of the machinery they need to produce the food we need to eat in order to stay alive, would be next.

I just gave you one, a radical one as well.

It's not the size that counts, being tiny doesn't mean they couldn't come up with a plan, I didn't say they hadn't enacted any plans but that for all they're talk they haven't come up with a plan that we can now enact. They should have one ready and waiting to be used if only they had done more than just talk.

This one?

'One resource we haven't depleted is our intellectual resource, a radical plan would be to direct all our educational efforts to finding a way to undo the damage that we've done. No more Humanities, from now on science, science and more science until someone or more like a couple of thousand someones from all over the globe working together comes up with something.'

I mean, this isn't a plan. It's a plan to make a plan.

Limiting air travel will no doubt be the start of it if they gained the power to do it. Stopping people using their cars would be next, although that one's already in the works. They want to limit the amount of meat people eat, so limiting farmers use of the machinery they need to produce the food we need to eat in order to stay alive, would be next.

Well, we need to reduce emissions. We can't do that without reducing our emissions.

limiting farmers use of the machinery they need to produce the food we need to eat in order to stay alive

Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean, here.

UK farming methods are on the whole fairly sustainable. What isn't, is destroying the rainforest to grow soya to feed stock.

If it's clear that doing so will actually have a net positive benefit for the environment and for humans.

The reason we care about climate change is ultimately selfish - it's because very rapid climate change is likely to cause mass human harm and death, so there's not a lot of point enacting policies that do that too. Then you're just choosing which set of humans to fuck over. That's political. Expecting your citizens to say 'oh it's fine, I'll be the one fucked over' is insane.

From an actual environment point of view (and some activists come from this point) I think life on earth will be fine if humans became extinct. Cockroaches might inherit the earth. As with previous changes to the climate, some dominant species will die out, others will benefit from and adapt to a radically different environment. Biodiversity will change. In terms of the millions of species other than humans in the world, overall I suspect a drastic reduction in the human population, even if accompanied with drastic climate change, would overall be positive. We're the problem for most of the rest.

Ultimately climate activism is selfish in many different ways.

There have been loads of supposed 'environmental' policies that have resulted in net harm. E.g. Government mandates requiring a specific percentage of renewable fuels (like ethanol or biodiesel) in commercial transport fuel, driving a commercial opportunity and land use change and destruction of forests etc to grow biofuel crops and resulting in massive CO2 release as well as reduction in biodiversity.

The climate and the economy are both complex and interact. Most environmental policies in this country at least are not looked at in the wider context, but the global environment is all about the wider context, feedback loops, balancing risks etc.

I believe that so-called 'environmental' policies are mostly these days a popularity contest and opportunity for self-congratulation and appearing to be trendy. The green party being a shining example of this.

What isn't, is destroying the rainforest to grow soya to feed stock.

We don't have any rain forests, is our Green Party going to rule the world as well.
We could do with a more sustainable food production plan, but with a population going on 70 million, we're never going to be self-sufficient in food. Not without a radical plan, even a plan to have a plan, have the Greens got one them at least. There's no way our population will be fed fully and remain healthy on greens and pulses. In order to grow anything the land needs to be fertilised, which we get from oil, we're not producing enough of that either.

The UK is only responsible for 2% of the world's admissions, we could maybe push that up to 2.5% because of our habit of out sourcing our admissions. So even if we pauper ourselves and put ourselves back to the dark ages, our noble sacrifice won't save the world. Although I guess with 70 million less mouths to feed there might be a smidgen less pollution in the world.

I think my educational plan was a plan, not a detailed plan I admit, but more than just a goal.

The government is doing nothing about the insane rise in data usage via mobile phones. I don't want to do things I used to do with actual humans via apps but I have no choice, this is less freedom for consumers. This is not environmentally (or socially) neutral.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/09/google-developers-significantly-misstate-carbon-emissions-of-proposed-uk-datacentres

From the article above

"Google and Greystoke have publicly argued that their developments will have a tolerable, in some cases insignificant, impact on the UK’s climate roadmap. Elsham Tech Park’s developers have said it will improve biodiversity on its campus by having bird and bat boxes, and wildflower grassland.
All three developments are classed as having a “minor adverse” impact on the UK’s overall climate goals.
However, the Thurrock datacentre will produce more emissions than an international airport, and Elsham Tech Park’s peak emissions will reach 1m tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2033-34 – just short of the 1.2m tonnes of carbon emissions of all the UK’s domestic flights"

Yet there is very little debate about whether companies should be allowed to force users to use data all the time to do everything. There is no reason I should have to use a data harvesting app to pay for school lunches, for example. I should be able to just pay the school directly.

We need to think about whether we're making life for our citizens better or worse via environmental policies as well as whether it benefits a global goal. And we should make damn sure we're not hugely reducing quality of life AND damaging the environment for a headline.

The TL:DR from the above is - it could be argued there is no point limiting flights if you're also building data centres and exponentially driving unnecessary data usage upwards.

Edited to add: Of course the latter will make the 1% richer, the former only means people can visit their families (obviously politicians and businesspeople will still be able to fly).

I agree the wholesale adoption of the tech advances is reckless and why we're in the climate shit we're in. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to do it, and sometimes old school is just as effective at getting the job done on a local level.
If the Greens were to propose a 5 year whole wide ban on the adoption of new technology, until we've had enough time to assess the impact and the need for it I might support that. Of course the US and China in particular won't go for that but our government could start by not buying any more of the tech systems that any country is flogging.

But then our government is turning into Big Brother, and it can't spy on the population without its high tech toys.
It's not just the people who have to change their habits but governments do as well, and as governments probably contribute more admissions than the population do, I say the governments go first, if they lead and we will follow.

The GP could have been making the case for policies, however contentious, that would benefit the environment, for the last decade. They might even have gained some traction, given the very obvious way the climate is changing and affecting everyone’s lives. Instead, they focused on identity politics and anti-science, reality denying bullshit.

They blew it.

You're suggesting that we don't try to reduce emissions based on the belief that human extinction or mass human death will be a good thing, overall?

Is that your position, or have I misunderstood?

Everyone on earth can say 'I'm not making any lifestyle changes until everyone else does'.

We will see how that works out - it seems to be the general approach.

Climate change affects the whole globe. In fact it's disproportionately affecting Europe, so far. So we have to have solutions that are enacted globally, and we have to do what we can. We're all in it together, in terms of the effects of climate change.

Yes, environmentalists have plans. The most urgent of these is reducing emissions, reducing fossil fuel usage. Do you disagree that we should be doing this?

No disagreement from me on those points.

Yes.

Possible they were infiltrated. There's a lot of money to be lost should some of the policies they suggest be enacted - see posts above. Lots of people will lose lots of money - primarily the fossil fuel industry.

Possible they were just too naive.

It's a neat trick to suggest that limiting or reducing fossil fuels will impoverish the average citizen. Like we are all profiting from the vast revenues of the fossil fuel industry at the moment!

What we need to do is ensure sensible management and public ownership of new tech, like wind and solar, wave and nuclear.

Unfortunately its currently all being signed off to foreign interests.

No but it is A position in the most extreme fringes of environmental activism, essentially.

The point is, everything is framed as 'good for the environment' but actually the thing that would be MOST 'good for the environment' if you're talking biodiversity and stopping man-made climate change is less humans. This is the truth that no-one wants to say but for many environmental policies it's about who suffers.

Environmental activism is largely about who - among humans - has to bear the cost of reducing the harm to other humans. Because humanity is the way it is, that usually means the 1% don't have to change their behaviour at all, governments flying their PMs around the world to climate conferences is a good example, and I think policies like limiting flights normal people can take to see their families is a good example of this.

I personally care about humanity. I don't want environmental policies causing harm of the most vulnerable and sometimes they do. Also, sometimes they cause environmental damage (see biofuel above) because they're not well thought through. A lot of discussion around this all reminds me of TRAs - it's cult like, you're a heretic if you express any concern about anything.

It's also inconsistent, if you want open borders (as GP does) then those people coming to the UK will visit their home country relatively frequently because they have relatives there. You're creating a population that will travel far more than the native UK population, you're driving up the demand for flights on one hand and performatively saying you'll be reducing them on the other.

Possible they were infiltrated

I really hadn’t thought of that, but it would make perfect sense.

Rachel Millward the deputy green that's allowed on media was on the radio the other day campaigning against data centres. I think it might be that there might be one about to be built in the vicinity of her council area but can't remember now

They also had a guy from some data company who did point out that the BBC sounds app they were being heard on was powered by a data centre, and so was the green party website.

Moreover, the work from home promotion being championed by the green party to cut carbon emissions from travel would be dependent on data centres.

It's a moot point and it touches on a lot of stuff like the "NIMBY" thing. Millward infamously was also campaigning against a migrants hostel in her council area. Then parrots "refugees are welcome here"