…here we go again?

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has slashed the number of people on its disinformation and election integrity team just weeks after it said it was hiring for new positions to help it guard against foreign interference.

The cuts, first reported by the tech-focused media outlet The Information, included Aaron Rodericks, the head of the team, said a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns about professional consequences.

The person familiar with the cuts said four people had been let go — the entirety of X’s election integrity unit in its Dublin office. It’s unclear how many people remain on the team.
[…]
X had recently posted job openings on its “threat disruption” team, and in August it published a blog post detailing its efforts to ensure “accurate and safe political discourse on X.”

“We’re currently expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats,” the company said in the blog post.
[…]
The cuts, which were reported on the day of the second Republican presidential primary debate, are part of X’s broader pullback from its efforts to address false information and foreign interference that once ran rampant on the platform.[…]

…it’s the say-one-thing-do-the-other two-step, I guess

Musk has also aggressively criticized the company’s previous moderation efforts, releasing internal documents that he and conservative commentators have claimed showed a liberal bent to how it handled elections and misinformation.

In recent months, conservative users who had been critical of X’s content moderation policies took to posting Rodericks’ previous tweets and likes, suggesting he was working against Musk’s vision of a so-called free speech platform.
[…]
The Information’s report quickly triggered criticism from some tech watchdogs. The Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit organization that supports breaking up large tech companies, pointed to a recent European Commission report that found X had the largest uptick in disinformation and Russian propaganda of any tech platform from January to May.

“Since taking charge of X, Elon Musk has used the platform to foment antisemitism, hate speech, and disinformation — playing into the hands of bad actors like Russia, China, and Iran,” Kyle Morse, the deputy executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, said in a news release. “Decimating their election integrity team — on top of last year’s firings — means that X will continue to be a toxic hellscape that people and advertisers should avoid.”

X makes cuts to disinformation and election integrity team [NBC]

…maybe if I were a genius like elon I’d be able to explain how contraction is actually expansion…but…I’m apparently too basic for that so it just looks like straightforward bullshit about bullshit that declares itself to be “straight-talking” while corkscrewing its way around to malicious obfuscation of the part where it’s anything but…which…is about par for the course if the context is anything to go by

Ramaswamy was the most frequently attacked candidate at the California Republican presidential primary debate Wednesday night, just as he was during the August debate.

…&…context is arguably important

Former President Donald Trump wasn’t on the debate stage Wednesday, but that didn’t mean he escaped criticism. Trump was actually attacked more than any other GOP candidate throughout the night, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie repeatedly calling him out for skipping the first two debates.

https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/candidate-attacks-second-republican-debate

…& if you widen that context a smidge more…by NBC’s count the attacks on biden outnumber the ones on ramaswamy & “donald duck” combined…none of which is exactly surprising…but…finger-pointing apparently counts as “doing something”…or something?

How Long Can America’s Climate Hypocrisy Last? [NYT]

…at least while you can persuade people that if the other guy is worse you somehow get to avoid being shown to be bad

One in six species at risk of extinction in Great Britain, say wildlife experts [Guardian]

…so maybe rishi et al are just bitter about how they grew up being able to make fun of the quality of american beer & it sticks in their throat that a lot of it’s pretty good these days…although…I guess not so much in the bitter category…which flies in the face of the whole “you are what you eat” thing given that bitter…&/or sour…is very much the flavor of the month/year/election cycle…but I don’t think you can really beat the levels of hypocrisy being engaged in by sunak’s mob on the environmental front

On Tuesday, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) pleaded with governments to up the pace in reducing the world’s dependence on oil and gas. A “strong signal to energy markets” was needed, said Fatih Birol – one which indicated that governments are taking the climate seriously. Wealthy countries, he added, having disproportionately contributed to historical carbon emissions, bear a special responsibility as the climate begins to change at “frightening speed”.

…I’d say “stop me if you’ve heard this one before”…but we all know we have…& it still manages to be too fucking infuriating to shut up about…so…here’s your regular reminder that myo has your back…the little red box with the white arrow in it that generally hangs about in the bottom right corner will boost you back to the top & from there the counter that says how many comments there are will punt you past the tunes I assume I’ll get around to appending to whatever this winds up finishing with…so it’s a hop & skip to jump to the comments anytime…which is at least a benign instance of going backwards to go forwards faster…plus it actually works that way…unlike…say

On Wednesday Britain certainly sent out a signal. But it was hardly the one the IEA would have hoped for. Instead, the green light was given for the exploitation of the United Kingdom’s largest untapped oilfield. The Rosebank project in the North Sea has the potential to deliver 500m barrels of oil, which, when burned, would emit the same amount of carbon dioxide as the running of 56 coal-fired power stations for a year. Tax incentives offered to the Norwegian energy company Equinor will effectively subsidise a development certain to undermine the country’s credibility in future climate negotiations.

About 80% of North Sea oil is sold abroad, giving the lie to ministerial arguments that this is about energy security for hard-pressed Britons. So why? The truth is that, as with the U-turns last week on net zero-related targets, Rishi Sunak is playing politics with the climate emergency. The prime minister calculates that, in the context of the cost of living crisis, the challenges of the green transition can become a wedge issue with Labour. For presumed short-term electoral gain, he is methodically disrupting a formerly broad consensus on climate commitments.

Domestically, this cynical disregard for the UK’s environmental responsibilities will leave future governments to pick up the pieces. That is deeply irresponsible. It is also to squander the possibilities of economic growth that come with the net zero timetable, which is defining the industrial parameters of the future. While fiscal inducements are deployed in the North Sea, undermining climate targets that command popular assent, insufficient government support this month caused off-shore wind sector growth to grind disastrously to a halt. A dismal combination of political opportunism and economic myopia is sabotaging Britain’s green prospects.

But it is on the global stage that the Rosebank decision will resonate most damagingly. Net zero sceptics on the British right like to point to the gulf in overall emissions between countries such as the UK and vast economies such as China and India. Yet the rest of the world is well aware of the historic role played by the industrialised west in creating the climate emergency. If countries such as the UK fail to lead the way in mitigating the damage done, the global cooperation required to limit temperature rises will be far harder to achieve. The journey to net zero is not just about statistics; it involves negotiating these political and ethical dynamics for the common good of the planet.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/27/the-guardian-view-on-the-rosebank-oilfield-a-symbol-of-sunaks-cynicism

…even his own choir includes plenty of side-eye for this particular sermon

I’m a Tory MP, but I know Rishi Sunak’s claims about the cost of net zero are false [Guardian]

…not to mention that the “new” part has me doing enough mental double-takes to feel like my brain is stuttering

Unveiling a plan to authorise more than 100 new North Sea licences on a visit to north-east Scotland, the prime minister also indicated he would approve drilling at the UK’s largest untapped reserves in the Rosebank field, which hold 500m barrels of oil.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/dismay-as-rishi-sunak-vows-to-max-out-uk-fossil-fuel-reserves

…if a week is a long time in politics then I’m not sure how something being confirmed months later qualifies as new…but…let’s be honest…fuck if I know what the rules are meant to be if what they produce under the heading of news is *gestures wildly in all directions while looking frankly unhinged*…not that there’s any shortage of people who claim to understand them…with echoes of something richard feynman said about quantum mechanics

…if this is how you appeal to your audience…you gotta be wondering how you get that many people that are that fucking stupid to put the mark in the box you want on election day

So the “real Rishi” turns out to be more like the abominable no-man. The main feature of the prime minister’s strategic reset is ditching Conservative promises he now considers to be undeliverable.

From watering down net zero targets to scrapping or delaying the key parts of the HS2 high-speed rail line that was meant to connect England’s great cities, Sunak’s strategy appears to be admitting that the approach to government his party has taken for over a decade is no way to run a country.

…I don’t know if the shorthand ever really established itself from a US perspective…but…in rough & ready terms a lot of brits see the back & forth between the tories & labour being in power as a case of putting labour in when the tories have made life intolerable & then switching horses once the other lot have spent enough public money to look like further improving (or just rendering functional) public services might…you guessed it…require raising taxes…because only the sheer unadulterated greed of the upper echelons of the tory faithful can pass for being fiscally responsible…or some bollocks…true story…so…could be wishful thinking on my part…but that the FT has this perspective is arguably a lot more damning than the faint praise might seem to indicate?

And he has a point. The net zero targets were being rendered meaningless by the failure to build the infrastructure that would enable them. An electric vehicle charging network is nowhere near ready and, more importantly, the national grid lacks the capacity for electrification of the economy.

There is no easy decision on HS2. All outcomes are bad. It is grotesquely over budget and the initial specifications smacked of vanity. Did it need to be quite so fast? Extra tunnelling to pacify rural objectors ratcheted up costs. The eastern leg from Birmingham to Leeds has already been abandoned; now the western side looks to be for the chop. The separate, previously shelved, rapid route between Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds may be resurrected but a high-speed link connecting the northern cities to each other and London is decades away at best. 

…that might sound like gibberish…but…for context…HS2 is a rail project the ostensible goal of which was to make it possible to get from london to the north of england faster…the HS stands for High Speed…which was a load-bearing part of a whole deal to placate the north regarding the long-standing disparity between london & the rest of the country when it comes to the conjunction of spending & the wealth that comes from being a place people want to do business…the slogans involved a bunch of stuff about “leveling up” & “the northern powerhouse”…& when the terminus for the eurostar decamped from waterloo to kings cross for a minute it looked like the whole thing would let you go from paris or amsterdam clear to nearly-scotland without having to do more than change trains…but they decided that might not extract a sufficient london tax…& be too convenient for those passing through…so they shifted the end point for HS2 to somewhere that would guarantee getting from one to the other would involve doing battle with london transport…or transport for london…which is the arguably telling name behind the TFL acronym that covers public transport…but…I digress

Yet Sunak’s signal may not be what he desires. HS2 and net zero may be the most high-profile problems. But this is also the country that cannot get close to its targets for new homes, is way behind in building much-needed new nuclear reactors and is undermining its ambitions as a science powerhouse by failing to deliver the extra laboratory capacity needed in the Oxford-Cambridge arc.

Add the long-running rail and health strikes and the image is of a country reeling from years of under-investment in which nothing functions as it should.

Investors are understandably alarmed at lurches on net zero while businesses that bought into stories of northern revival will be shaken by reports of backtracking on HS2. Sunak, meanwhile, exudes a visceral aversion to industrial strategy, which means government interventions such as subsidies to Jaguar Land Rover or Tata Steel are piecemeal. And that’s before we even mention Brexit.

The danger for Sunak is that what he regards as controlled decluttering looks chaotic to others. The serious scrutiny he conducts is an indictment of a Conservative Britain unable to deliver key infrastructure projects or build for its own future. As for political nous; allowing the cancellation of the Manchester leg of HS2 into public discourse just days before his annual party conference in, erm, Manchester was hardly a triumph of media management.

Rishi Sunak’s new strategy exposes 13 years of Tory failure [FT by way of archive.ph]

…it’s not so much moving the goalposts as it is digging them up entirely & marking the field as a running track that’s forgotten to include a finish line

A psychological trick that vanity plays to avoid the humiliation of failure is to redefine success on more available terms. Sunak has pondered his predicament and rebranded himself as a courageous leader who takes “long-term decisions for a brighter future”, thus excusing him from the test of delivering good government this side of an election.

The aspiration is self-evidently noble, which is a reliable sign that it is meaningless. No candidate has ever pledged short-term tactics for a darker tomorrow.

Sunak’s allies cast him as a martyr to the facts, confronting the electorate with the difficult trade-offs required for responsible stewardship of the nation. If that were true, he might admit that the current tax base will not support public services at a level expected of an affluent European country. He might tell people that the wealth they currently have tied up in property will one day be tapped to pay for their social care.

He won’t do that, in the same way that he won’t admit that leaving the European single market was a mistake, or change planning rules that give people who already own homes a veto over plans that might benefit those who don’t.[…]

Prolonged uncertainty over HS2 looks inept. Reneging on environmental targets is more insidiously disingenuous. Sunak characterised the manoeuvre as an exercise in centre-ground pragmatism, motivated by concern that overzealous environmentalists discredit their cause and corrode consent for the greater goal of net zero. Illustrating the point, he pledged not to implement fictitious policies around mandatory car-sharing and meat-eating.

That rhetorical trick revealed the true, campaigning function of the policy shift. Retreating from an ambitious net zero policy opens a space to be filled with scare stories about Keir Starmer as a hostage to eco-fanatics. When Sunak says he worries that consumers will recoil from the bill for net zero, he is really threatening to invent a scarily big cost, attach it to hypothetical Labour policy and post it to marginal constituencies.

To call that long-term governance is Johnson-level chutzpah, but delivered without the trademark Boris glint that showed at least some awareness that he knew that you knew that he was bullshitting. Sunak does it with an unctuous piety that suggests he actually believes what he is saying.
[…]
Sunak might consider himself unlucky to have reached the apex of power just as that power is draining away. He certainly gives the impression of feeling cheated out of the chance to govern in more auspicious circumstances. But the timing of his ascent is consistent with the cycle of a long incumbency. He is the coddled product of one-party rule, which hothouses clever, ambitious young MPs who then turn out to be unimaginative and ideologically complacent.

The prime minister has every incentive to persuade himself that he is charting a high road of strategic statecraft. But that doesn’t make it so. The actual trajectory is a path of least resistance through a Tory core-vote comfort zone, towards a dishonest election campaign that will postpone tough choices and make the country harder to govern in the longer term.

Sunak says he is making decisions for the long term, but that’s his vanity talking. He’s failing and he knows it [Guardian]

Sunak was getting a taste for making the hard decisions. It was time to look at abolishing inheritance tax. If necessary, he wasn’t going to shy away from the tough choice to do away with a tax that affected only the wealthiest 4% of the country. It’s what the whole of the UK had been demanding and only he dared think the unthinkable. Hell, why not? Inheritance tax threatened to cost his own family something like £300m. Unless he could get the money conveniently offshore. Still it would also go down well with newspaper owners keen to protect their own fortunes. Not that that was why he was doing it. This was for the little people.

So what was the plan? Rish! smiled coyly. Again, it wouldn’t be right to speculate on the speculation he had started. And besides, the real tax cut would come from bringing down inflation. Not that this was in any way accurate. Lowering inflation wouldn’t give people more money: it would just mean prices went up more slowly. But what was the point of talking to the media, if not to lie to the country on a regular basis? That and to show he was a man of infinite energy and ideas. If of limited worth and intelligence.

Onwards and downwards. To the triple lock. Obviously he wouldn’t be doing anything to do away with it any time soon. That would be electoral suicide. Not that he ever let short-term decisions like that cloud his thinking. He was a politician cut from a sense of timelessness. A leader for the ages. Someone who would dare think of getting rid of the triple lock. That took immense courage. Especially to blink at the last moment.

Sunak had yet more dreams and visions. Transforming the education system to one where everyone was as brilliant at maths as he was. All without the necessary maths teachers. Or the curriculum. The wonder of imaginary numbers. But Rish! was on a roll. So many ideas. So few principles. Clutter the airwaves with white noise. Fantasy culture wars. The mask of inactivity. Anything to escape his own existential implosion.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/25/abolishing-hs2-and-inheritance-tax-rish-would-not-speculate-on-speculation-he-started

…meanwhile…in what might charitably be characterized as a selfless effort to make her boss seem like he isn’t the most disingenuous asshole in the vicinity…let’s not forget the efforts of the underlings

UK interior minister Suella Braverman on Tuesday, September 26, questioned whether the United Nations Refugee Convention was “fit for our modern age” during a keynote speech at a think-tank in Washington.

The speech at the center-right American Enterprise Institute intended to lay out an international plan to deal with the refugee crisis, a key political issue for her struggling Conservative party back home. Braverman called the 1951 Refugee Convention, which legally defines the term “refugee” and outlines their rights, “an incredible achievement of its age”.

“But more than 70 years on, we now live in a completely different time,” she said, citing a study that says the convention now gives at least 780 million people the potential right to move to another country.

“It is therefore incumbent upon politicians and thought leaders to ask whether the Refugee Convention, and the way it has come to be interpreted through our courts, is fit for our modern age or in need of reform,” she said.

…while we’re acknowledging stuff… hat tip to the part where “not fit for purpose” is something of a one-size-fits-all dog-whistle in UK political rhetoric…so it’s safe to say that the intended audience for the eponymously brave one’s pronouncements wasn’t exactly in the room where it happened…but…in wedge issue terms…we’re pretty much on the “great replacement” page of the hymn sheet here…&…well…between the efforts of putin on the one hand & suella’s pet project of making the UK a “hostile environment” on the other…with climate change providing the third leg of the mixed metaphor stool…some genuine engagement with the thorny issue of a massive migratory influx to much of europe would legitimately look like a grown up sort of a conversation to have about now…but…grown ups are apparently in short supply…as indeed is engagement beyond the level of sloganeering

The UK government is currently languishing in the polls and has been struggling to stem the flow since Brexit of migrant boat crossings from mainland Europe. Almost 24,000 people have made the trip this year, adding to a record backlog in asylum claims and heaping pressure on ministers who promised to “take back control” of UK borders after leaving the European Union. Controversial proposals to tackle the issue include criminalising irregular migration and sending failed asylum seekers for resettlement in Rwanda.
[…]
But the non-profit Refugee Council said the UK should instead be “addressing the real issues in the asylum system, such as the record backlog, and providing safe routes for those in need of protection” rather than taking aim at the UN convention.

Yvette Cooper, home affairs spokeswoman for the opposition Labour Party, accused Braverman of having “given up on fixing the Tories’ asylum chaos” and “looking for anyone else to blame”.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/09/27/uk-interior-minister-braverman-questions-role-of-un-refugee-convention

…still…you’d think that sort of thing would be in with a shot at being the biggest stories in terms of coverage…& maybe they are…hard to tell from this echo chamber of mine…but…given that I generally avoid anything associated with the man…the sheer amount of shit about the shit this shithead has been shoveling sure makes it seem like it’s getting top billing?

As the GB News drama continued to unfold – after Lawrence Fox’s suspension from the broadcaster for an on-air misogynistic rant – the story took an unexpected twist.

…again…for context…GB news isn’t fox news…but…puns on the asshole’s name notwithstanding…it might as well be…& I caught a thing on the radio where the BBC interviewed a lady who used to be on their airwaves before resigning because she was made a minister…because that would be improper…not that the interviewer asked how that reflected on her backbench colleague jacob “we have a queen & her name is victoria” rees-mogg…who has his own show…where he often hosts fellow tory MPs for discussions that at this point have drawn some disapproving looks from the industry regulator (OFCOM) for the way they serially drop the ball on one of the requirements for being a “public service broadcaster” with a license

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/07/gb-news-four-more-ofcom-investigations-impartiality-rules

…still…credit where credit is due…the pompous prick did provide a masterclass in the art of throwing someone under the bus

It was little surprise that Fox, the darling of rightwing culture warriors, would double down on comments that even GB News deemed too offensive to let slide. But Fox’s decision to turn on Dan Wootton – whom GB News has refused to investigate over allegations of historic inappropriate sexual messaging – was more of a curve ball. By Wednesday night Wootton had also been suspended by the channel and GB News insiders were in shock at the loss of two of their highest-profile presenters.

It all began on Tuesday, when Fox used a guest appearance on Wootton’s evening show to call the political journalist Ava Evans a “little woman” and suggested no one would want to “shag” her. When Fox said, “Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman, ever. Who wasn’t an incel,” Wootton responded with a short laugh.

When Fox continued, saying women such as Evans were “pathetic and embarrassing”, Wootton laughed and said “Oh Laurence” as his guest concluded: “Who’d want to shag that?”

Wootton, looking at his screen, went on to raise Evans’ reaction to Fox, saying: “I’m just going to provide a touch of balance from her because she did actually respond to this earlier today, saying that she regretted [earlier comments dismissing the idea of a men’s minister to address concerns about men’s mental health] but she didn’t apologise.”

…so…starts bad…gets swiftly worse in a full on #teamnobody dumpster fire of the vanities

I want to reiterate my regret over last night’s exchange with Laurence on GB News.
Having looked at the footage, I can see how inappropriate my reaction to his totally unacceptable remarks appears to be and want to be clear that I was in no way amused by the comments.
I reacted…

— Dan Wootton (@danwootton) September 27, 2023

A phone call might have been polite.

By matter of interest for the audience contributors do a pre interview before going on, so they knew exactly what I intended to say.

I fully defend the the home of free speech’s right to capitulate to the mob… https://t.co/RQJsYZDbnw pic.twitter.com/9MTwhMDXOZ

— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) September 27, 2023

Then, at 11:04am, Fox went nuclear. Reposting Wootton’s apology, he wrote: “Honesty is the best policy”, followed by a photograph that appeared to show an exchange between the pair – although names were not included – suggesting that Wootton had found the exchange amusing. “Making you giggle is my weekly joy,” said the first message, sent apparently at 9.55pm, followed by several laughing emojis. The response was several laughing emojis, followed by: “You can imagine them freaking out in the gallery!!!!!”, to which the response came: “So much fun. Xx”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/27/why-laurence-fox-turned-on-dan-wootton-gb-news-rant-apology

…clearly they & I operate very different definitions of the term “fun”…but there’s no denying that there’s plenty of games afoot…so…I guess try not to let them distract you the way they have me this morning?

…I mean…I’m not saying taylor swift can save us…but lawrence fox isn’t getting droves of new tory voters signed up

On Tuesday morning, the singer posted a short message on Instagram encouraging her 272 million followers to register to vote. Afterward, the website she directed her fans to — the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org — recorded more than 35,000 registrations, according to the organization.
[…]
The 35,252 new registrations on National Voter Registration Day were the most since 2020, the organization said, and a 23% jump over last year. The number of 18-year-olds registered was more than double 2022.
[…]
It’s not clear exactly how many of the registrations were tied to Swift’s Instagram. Vote.org reported a 1,226% jump in participation in the hour after the post.
[…]
Her visibility is at a high this year amid her Eras tour — which could become the highest-grossing concert tour in history upon its completion next year — and the release of her re-recorded albums Speak Now, which landed in July, and 1989, which is on tap for release in October.

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/22/1201183160/taylor-swift-instagram-voter-registration

…but enough people are putting money where her mouth is that the term swiftonomics was coined by bloomberg a while back

Welcome to ‘Swiftonomics’: What Taylor Swift Reveals About the US Economy

…& I heard someone quote a figure of getting on for $6billion that her current tour has, according to some estimates, single-handedly added to the US GDP

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-eras-tour-boosted-economy-tourism-federal-reserve-how-much-money-made/

…which are some pretty enviable…not to mention useful…numbers to be posting in “a man’s world”…so…bucking the trend could get to be fashionable…I mean…wonders never cease…&…contrary to the example of toxic wastes of space like the not-so-cunning fox or the man who would be martian or whatever unctuous bit of primordial ooze you might find springing to mind…there’s even good slime out there if you look hard enough

In 2001, a group of Japanese scientists made a startling discovery at a rubbish dump. In trenches packed with dirt and waste, they found a slimy film of bacteria that had been happily chewing through plastic bottles, toys and other bric-a-brac. As it broke down the trash, the bacteria harvested the carbon in the plastic for energy, which it used to grow, move and divide into even more plastic-hungry bacteria. Even if not in quite the hand-to-mouth-to-stomach way we normally understand it, the bacteria was eating the plastic.

The scientists were led by Kohei Oda, a professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology. His team was looking for substances that could soften synthetic fabrics, such as polyester, which is made from the same kind of plastic used in most beverage bottles. Oda is a microbiologist, and he believes that whatever scientific problem one faces, microbes have probably already worked out a solution. “I say to people, watch this part of nature very carefully. It often has very good ideas,” Oda told me recently.

What Oda and his colleagues found in that rubbish dump had never been seen before. They had hoped to discover some micro-organism that had evolved a simple way to attack the surface of plastic. But this bacteria was doing much more than that – it appeared to be breaking down plastic fully and processing it into basic nutrients. From our vantage point, hyperaware of the scale of plastic pollution, the potential of this discovery seems obvious. But back in 2001 – still three years before the term “microplastic” even came into use – it was “not considered a topic of great interest”, Oda said. The preliminary papers on the bacteria his team put together were never published.
[…]
Current methods of breaking down or recycling plastics are woefully inadequate. The vast majority of plastic recycling involvesa crushing and grinding stage, which frays and snaps the fibres that make up plastic, leaving them in a lower-quality state. While a glass or aluminium container can be melted down and reformed an unlimited number of times, the smooth plastic of a water bottle, say, degrades every time it is recycled. A recycled plastic bottle becomes a mottled bag, which becomes fibrous jacket insulation, which then becomes road filler, never to be recycled again. And that is the best case scenario. In reality, hardly any plastic – just 9% – ever enters a recycling plant. The sole permanent way we’ve found to dispose of plastic is incineration, which is the fate of nearly 70 million tonnes of plastic every year – but incineration drives the climate crisis by releasing the carbon in the plastic into the air, as well as any noxious chemicals it might be mixed with.

In the years after their discovery, Oda and his student Kazumi Hiraga, now a professor, continued corresponding and conducting experiments. When they finally published their work in the prestigious journal Science in 2016, it emerged into a world desperate for solutions to the plastic crisis, and it was a blockbuster hit. Oda and his colleagues named the bacteria that they had discovered in the rubbish dump Ideonella sakaiensis – after the city of Sakai, where it was found – and in the paper, they described a specific enzyme that the bacteria was producing which allowed it to break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the most common plastic found in clothing and packaging. The paper was reported widely in the press, and it currently has more than 1,000 scientific citations, placing it in the top 0.1% of all papers.

But the real hope is that this goes beyond a single species of bacteria that can eat a single kind of plastic. Over the past half-century, microbiology – the study of small organisms including bacteria and some fungi – has undergone a revolution that Jo Handelsman, former president of the American Society for Microbiology, and a science adviser to the Obama White House, described to me as possibly the most significant biological advance since Darwin’s discovery of evolution. We now know that micro-organisms constitute a vast, hidden world entwined with our own. We are only beginning to grasp their variety, and their often incredible powers. Many scientists have come around to Oda’s view – that for the host of seemingly intractable problems we are working on, microbes may have already begun to find a solution. All we need to do is look.
[…]
Fortunately, over the past four decades, scientists have become remarkably proficient at engineering and manipulating enzymes. When it comes to plastic chewing, “the Ideonella enzyme is actually very early in its evolutionary development”, says Andy Pickford, a professor of molecular biophysics at the University of Portsmouth. It is the goal of human scientists to take it the rest of the way.
[…]
If you want to improve natural enzyme performance, there are approaches that work in almost every case. Chemical reactions tend to work better at higher temperatures, for instance (this is why, if you want to make a cake, it is better to set the oven at 180C rather than 50C); but most enzymes are most stable at the ambient temperature of the organism they work in – 37C in the case of humans. By rewriting the DNA that codes an enzyme, scientists can tweak its structure and function, making it more stable at higher temperatures, say, which helps it work faster.

Bell’s own work – which focuses on PETase, the enzyme that Ideonella sakaiensis produces to break down PET plastics – takes a brute-force approach in order to turbocharge natural evolution. Bell takes the regions of the enzyme that work directly on plastic and uses genetic engineering to subject them to every possible mutation. In the wild, a mutation in an enzyme might occur only once in every few thousand times the bacteria divides. Bell ensures she gets hundreds, or thousands of potentially beneficial mutants to test. She then measures each one for its ability to degrade plastic. Any candidates that show even marginal improvement get another round of mutations. The head of the NREL research group, Gregg Beckham, refers to it as “evolving the crap out of an enzyme”. Last year, she published her latest findings, on a PETase enzyme she had engineered that could degrade PET many times faster than the original enzyme.

But building an enzyme that suits our purposes isn’t just a case of scientists tinkering until they get the perfect tool. Before the publication of Oda’s paper in 2016, no one knew that bacteria capable of digesting plastic existed. Now, we have one solidly documented case. Given that we have discovered only a tiny fraction of microbial life, a far better candidate might be out there. In engineering terms, we may currently be trying to squeeze elite racing performance out of a Toyota Yaris engine, when somewhere, yet to be discovered, there is the bacterial equivalent of a Ferrari. “This is something we constantly struggle with,” says Beckham. “Do we go back to the well to search and see if nature has the solution? Or do we take the small footholds we have to the lab and work on them now?”

…one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure?

This question has led to a boom in what is known as bioprospecting. Like panning for gold in a river, bioprospectors travel the world looking to discover interesting and potentially lucrative microbes. In 2019, a team at Gwangju National University in South Korea took a construction drilling rig to the municipal dump outside town, and drilled 15 metres under the trash trenches to reveal decades-old plastic garbage. In it, Prof Soo-Jin Yeom and her students found a variety of the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis that appeared to be able to survive using polyethylene bags as food. Yeom’s team is now studying which enzymes the bacteria might be using, and whether it is really able to metabolise the plastic.
[…]
About 25 years ago, the consensus among scientists was that there were probably fewer than ten million species of microbes on the planet; in the past decade, some new studies have put the number as high as a trillion, the vast majority still unknown. In our bodies, scientists have found microbes that affect everything from our ability to resist disease to our very moods. In the deep seas, scientists have found microbes that live on boiling thermal vents. In crude oil deposits, they have found microbes that have evolved to break down fossil fuels. The more we look, the more extraordinary discoveries we will make.

…who knows…maybe one day they’ll find a substance that can extrude something constructive out of the surfeit of human bullshit that’s produced daily & covered in such exhausting…sorry…exhaustive detail by a sea of outlets…but…until then…at least this sounds more by way of promising than making promises?

Finding new microbes and tinkering with them in the lab are the first steps, but scientists know that the final leap – into what they tend to call “the real world” or “industry” – can be elusive. In the case of plastic-eating microbes, that leap has now been made. Since 2021, a French company named Carbios has been running an operation that uses a bacterial enzyme to process about 250kg of PET plastic waste every day, breaking it down into its precursor molecules, which can then be made directly into new plastic. It’s not quite composting it back into the earth itself, but Carbios has achieved the holy grail of plastic recycling, bringing it much closer to an infinitely recyclable material like glass or aluminium.
[…]
In the wild, the bacteria would produce a limited amount of plastic-targeting enzyme, and many other enzymes and waste products as well. To accelerate the process, Carbios pays a biotech company to harvest and concentrate huge amounts of pure plastic-digesting enzyme from bacteria. The Carbios scientists then place the plastic nurdles in a solution of water and enzyme, inside a sealed steel tank several metres high. In the adjoining lab where the process is tested, you can observe the reaction taking place in smaller vessels. Inside, the off-white plastic bits swirl about like the flakes in a snowglobe. As time goes on, the plastic erodes away, its components dissolving into the solution, leaving only a greyish liquid churning behind the glass. The liquid now contains not solid PET, but two liquid chemicals called ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid, which can be separated out and turned into new plastic.

The technique Carbios has developed appears to scale easily. Two years ago the company was recycling a few kilos of plastic in a lab; now it can do about 250kg a day. In 2025, it will open a much bigger facility near the border with Belgium, with the capacity to recycle more than 130 tonnes a day.

…& you got to keep an eye on them side-effects

These factories aren’t a magic solution. The enzyme recycling process is a series of biological and chemical reactions, and as they scale up, you’re reminded that nature is a ruthless accountant. If you track the various inputs required, and the carbon emissions, you find that cleaning the plastic, then heating and freezing it, comes with a major energy cost. The chemical reaction itself turns the surrounding solution acidic, and so like an outdoor pool, chemical base must be constantly added to the solution to keep it close to neutral, which creates several kilograms of sodium sulphate as a byproduct each time the reaction runs. Sodium sulphate has many uses, including glassmaking and in detergents, but everything from manufacturing the chemical base, to moving the sodium sulphate on to further uses, adds environmental costs and logistical friction.

…it’s not perfect

But microbes do have the ability to nullify some of the planet’s most noxious toxins, cleansing entire landscapes in the process. This works best on chemicals that have been present on earth for millions of years, allowing microbes to develop a taste for them. When the Exxon Valdez dumped 41m litres of oil into the Gulf of Alaska in 1989, coverage of the cleanup focused on images of environmentalists scrubbing oil-sodden seals and puffins. But much of the actual oil removal was accomplished by bacteria that naturally feed on crude oil. Nearly 50,000kg of nitrogen fertiliser was spread along the shoreline to turbocharge bacterial growth. Similarly, when a former industrial site in Stratford, east London, was chosen for the 2012 Olympic Games, the committee charged with cleaning it up moved more than 2,000 dump trucks’ worth of soil contaminated with petroleum and other chemicals to sites where it was pumped full of nitrogen and oxygen for weeks, inducing a bloom of bacterial growth that consumed the toxins. The soil was returned to Stratford, and the Olympic park sits atop it now.

The question of whether the same could be accomplished with plastic in the environment has received far less interest – and funding – than the prospect of more effective recycling. “There is not exactly a market incentive to clean up our waste, whether it’s CO2, or plastic,” says Victor di Lorenzo, a scientist at the Spanish National Biotechnology Centre in Madrid, and an evangelist for the large-scale application of microbes to solve humanity’s problems. “There is a return on investment to recycle plastic. But who will pay for these larger-scale projects that would help wider society? This is something only public support would remedy.”

…but…as the saying goes…it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?

Oda is convinced we haven’t even scratched the surface. When he and his colleagues first found Ideonella at the dump nearly 20 years ago, it wasn’t working solo. “As soon as I saw the film of micro-organisms on the plastic, I knew it was many microbes working together,” Oda told me. His team realised that while Ideonella was breaking the plastic into its industrially valuable precursors, other microbes were stepping in to further chew those into simple nutrients the microbial community could use. They were symbiotic. Partners, in a way. Oda has since written several papers pointing out that microbial communities might be developed into a system to remove micro- and nanoplastics from the soil. But he has received little interest.

In our conversations, Oda repeatedly bemoaned the lack of truly world-changing ideas coming from people who wanted to commercialise the discoveries he and his colleagues had made. There was an incredible amount of excitement about a factory that could turn old plastic into new; far less, it seemed, about one that could turn plastic back into water and air.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste

…anyway…I’m late getting this hoisted…so this is where it meets its unceremonious end…& my search for a handful of things that sound better begins?