Has it had an impact?

Earth Day started as a US 'teach-in' 56 years ago. Now it's a global event

Millions of people around the world will pause Wednesday, at least for a moment, to mark Earth Day. It's an annual event founded by people who hoped to stir activism to clean up and preserve a planet that is now home to some 8 billion humans and assorted trillions of other organisms.

Here are answers to some common questions about Earth Day and how it came to be...

Has it had an impact?


Indeed it has -

 

Hang on - this circus is all clowns

‘Dismissive approach’ from No 10 over Mandelson vetting process, Robbins says

The former top official at the Foreign Office said there was a “dismissive approach” to Peter Mandelson’s security vetting from Sir Keir Starmer’s No 10.

Sir Olly Robbins, who was sacked by the Prime Minister last week over the failure to disclose Lord Mandelson’s failed security checks – but he was granted developed vetting (DV) clearance anyway, said there was pressure from Downing Street to clear the appointment.


Ed Miliband to give major energy speech as fury erupts over 'lunacy'

Ed Miliband's "anti-oil and gas stance" will fuel fresh price hikes for families already struggling with the cost of living crisis, critics warned.

Energy Secretary Mr Miliband will "double down, not back down" on the shift to clean energy, including speeding up the rollout of renewables and electrifying heating and transport to get homes and businesses off fossil fuels.


Reeves’s cash Isa reforms in chaos

Rachel Reeves’s plans to penalise savers who hold cash in investment accounts have stalled despite months of Treasury meetings, The Telegraph understands.

In last year’s Budget, the Chancellor announced the controversial cut to the cash Isa limit from £20,000 to £12,000 for under-65s from April next year.

HMRC said later that it would penalise savers trying to use loopholes to circumvent the limit, including putting cash into stocks and shares Isas.

But industry sources told The Telegraph that after months of talks, the Treasury has not made crucial decisions about how the rules on investment accounts would work in practice.

Quality Accouting Center

With delightful accuracy, Babylon Bee hits yet another nail firmly on the head.

Ilhan Omar Assures Public Her Finances Were Handled Honestly By Professionals At 'Quality Accouting Center'

 

Source

Pylon Men (1956)

 

The reality of the Starmtrooper’s ambition

Felix Hardinge has a fine Critic piece on what he calls Soft-Play Britain, the shallow and superficial urban schemes which go no further than trying to make the place look a bit nicer.

Soft-Play Britain

Britain’s governing class talks of growth and grandeur but focuses on planters and paint schemes

On X, you see the little impulses and fixations that ani§mate [sic] the people who actually run Britain. And time and again, the revelation is the same. The people who speak most grandly about “doing things” and “growth” in practice, to be obsessed with cycling infrastructure, shopfront beautification, pedestrianisation and the general moral necessity of making places look a bit nicer.

No government has embodied this dissonance more perfectly than Starmer’s. The promise was of restored standards in public life fused to technocratic seriousness: growth, competence, a bright (and green) industrial future, perhaps even a faint revival of that old Blairite hum of modernisation. This vision could not, at least initially, be laughed out the room. Unlike the stagnant 2010s, the world has begun to recover some sense of technological momentum, above all in artificial intelligence and in space: NASA’s Artemis II mission launched on 1st April, and this week completed the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17.

Yet the reality of the Starmtrooper’s ambition is far more often the moral and aesthetic world of the municipal functionary: traffic management, frontage improvements, “public realm” tidying, and an endless preoccupation with making everything feel safer, softer, and more convivial. Millennials were the first generation to invent the “kidult”, so it makes sense that they should wish to turn the streetscape into a kind of giant soft-play area.


The whole piece is well worth reading as anyone paying attention here in the UK must see such kidult streetscape schemes all over the place.


That is why these schemes so often feel less like urbanism and more managed irritation: not a positive vision of how to build better places, but a negative politics of making existing habits harder. In practice, as Chris Bayliss notes, the supposed policy substance often dissolves into a motte-and-bailey: the attractive claim that everyone should live near life’s necessities, followed by silence when asked how those amenities are actually to be made economically viable where they do not already exist.

Replica Activists

Greenpeace installs 'wind farm' at Trump's golf resort

Environmental campaigners have staged a renewable energy demonstration at Donald Trump's golf resort in Scotland, installing mock wind turbines on a green to protest his stance on fossil fuels.

Greenpeace confirmed that three activists set up six small, replica wind turbines on the fourth hole green at Trump Turnberry Golf Club in South Ayrshire at approximately 6.30am on Monday.

The demonstrators later removed the turbine models as golfers approached, ensuring their round was not disrupted.


At least we don't have to subsidise them.

Britain is poorer than people think

Matthew Lesh has a useful CAPX piece on an old British problem, the sluggish nature of economic growth. Worth reading, although voting for political charlatans and loons who don't believe in economic growth is also an old British problem. They don't believe in education either. 


Britain is poorer than people think

• New polling shows that growth still matters to the British public
• Britons know something has gone badly wrong – they just need to see how far we’ve fallen
• The public want prosperity, not excuses

Not too long ago Keir Starmer was banging on about how growth is his ‘number one mission’. Now, with the economy once again faltering – real GDP grew by an anaemic 0.1% in the last quarter of 2025, following an equally disappointing 0.1% in the previous quarter – we are hearing a bit less on this topic.

But have no doubt: the British public still dreams of a more prosperous society.

An expansive new public opinion research project, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and undertaken by Freshwater Strategy, highlights that despite widespread pessimism, few have given up. When asked whether the UK should focus more on growth, an overwhelming 87% agree, compared to just 9% who say the country is already wealthy enough. This view cuts across the usual political divides, with strong support across genders, age groups, educational levels and regions. We may have a more divided politics than at any time in modern history, but there’s at least one thing pretty much everyone agrees on: growth.