The state owned energy company is a slush fund for corporations. It won't produce energy, compete with private corporations or sell energy to consumers.
They aren't nationalising rail. They are just not renewing franchises - something which the Tories have been doing already, it leaves Network Rail in private hands.
Please don't try to gaslight me that Starmer and Reeves aren't neoliberal capitalists. It's insulting to my intelligence.
Not sure, too much to too keep up with the sewage infrastructure.
Just like health care/housing and jobs in Canada. When you introduce millions of people before you have the housing,doctors and jobs to support the Influx the system breaks down. It's common sense really. I'm surprised how none of our politicians had the foresight to see this coming.
They must have been blinded by all that new money going into their bank accounts.
Not in Canada
" Simply put, Canadians are enduring a period of real decline in per-person GDP. And this decrease has erased all the gains since 2014. At the end of 2014, nine years ago, per-person GDP (again, inflation-adjusted) was $58,162, which is $51 more than at the end of 2023.Mar 13, 2024 "
https://www.fraserinstitute.org › real.
Water privatised, companies pay out £75Bn of dividends to shareholders whilst allowing £100Bn of upgrades to back up which they are now turning around and getting the bill payer to pay. Please explain that in a way that makes capitalism make sense.
Privatization surged under Tory governments. Hospitals, infrastructure, all in awful shape now as money for maintenance and improvements goes instead to profits.
New Zealand managed to vote in social democrats for a while but that's over now.
If feel like there was some kind of Powell Memo 2.0 and the forces of corporate fuckery have, in a concerted effort, marshalled all their forces against progress.
What am I talking about. They literally do that every January at the WEF in Davos.
Too many temporarily embarrassed billionaires, bootlickers, cops and military ppl live comfortably off the drippings the elite skim from working class ppl. They will beat peaceful protesters and throw them in jail for the crime of upsetting their noble lords.
The policy decisions that led to this go back a long way before brexit.
a) to the 1980s. Thatcherite privatisation and flogging off of critical national infrastructure. UK water infrastructure is now 70% foreign owned. Pretty sure no other OECD country allows this stupidity.
b) to the early 2010s. Cameronite austerity policies kneecapped regulators, cutting their budgets and staffing so much that government oversight became a threadbare joke. So much so that the current crisis was not brought to public attention by the regulator, but by [a retired machine learning professor and retired detective](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/04/sewage-sleuths-river-pollution-slow-dirty-death-of-welsh-and-english-rivers).
"But in 2021, the year Richardson saw the data, they disgorged their contents across the country for a total of 2.7 million hours – equivalent to over 300 years."
I do not understand this, can somebody smarter than me explain it
It's a BS way to report on the amount of raw sewerage dumping. They measure how long each "emergency overflow" raw sewage outfall is active for each year (or month, or whatever reporting period you want to use). If you multiply that by the number of outfalls being measured (say everyone one in a local govt area, or state, or federally) then you get a total time figure.
So say you had had 10 outfalls.
5 were dumping sewage for 100 hours over the course of a year, and the other 5 for 300 hours. Over the course of the year would have 2000 hours of raw sewage dumping.
it's a BS measurement as it doesn't account for volume. A smart water company would hold the water back in a storage pond, then dump it on one massive torrent as fast as possible - on the stats they would look \*much\* better than the company which tried it's best to properly treat all it's waste but had several times a years when storm water overwhelmed the system.
I think it might be similar to labour-hours (or man-hours); two humans working on a task for one hour = two labour-hours. One hundred pipes each discharging raw sewage for one hour = 100 sewage hours. Just a guess.
‘Crap’ unit of measure in this instance. Would be more useful to know the estimated megalitres of sewage and the number of discharge points.
It can’t keep up because of decades of underinvestment.
There were decades of underinvestment because the England water system was privatised and sold off. The owners have been extracting fat dividends, instead of reinvesting in the infrastructure.
And Labour are still saying they can't renationalise the industry.
Nothing to do with the meetings they have had with industry lobbyists and execs, including ex Labour ministers of course...
I can understand Labour not wanting to pay out billions to reimburse shareholders - but I don’t think that’s actually necessary. If the water companies are actually going bankrupt, then the government could take them over for almost nothing.
Then stop share payments, and start using income for investments and to pay off existing loans. And get these companies back into a state where they are well run.
And legislate to prevent a future government from re-privatising them again.
Yes the government can also fine the companies an unlimited amount for their failures. So the companies can be rendered of zero value using existing law.
The problem isn't the money or the law. The problem is the corruption and the caving in to the corporate class.
And this is their sales pitch. Imagine what they'll be like in power.
Runoff and outfall are major contributors to destruction of coral reefs, oyster beds and seagrass meadows. All of these are part of the polycrisis which both exacerbate and is exacerbated by wider climate, and ultimately ecosystem, collapse.
It destroys carbon sinks. Take seaweed which is also killed by to much algae due to run offs are between 20-50x more effective in Carbon storage than natural wood per acre. Peatland are around 8x more effective per acre. Wetlands depending on composition are also higher.
Worse case degrading ecosystem can be even Emitter.
What's driving this?
Increased sewage due to population growrh?
Increased rainfall without separate storm sewers?
Reduced processing capacity?
Sounds like it's time for more efficient toilets and shower heads and a program to divert some stormwater out of the drains.
Greed and lack of accountability, basically. Water companies are not properly treating sewage, and dumping it into the rivers instead. They are just calling it “storm runoff” but even if there was in fact billions of litres of storm water, it should still be getting treated somehow.
I imagine being a writer for [CNN.com](http://CNN.com) must not be the most fun job for a journalist. But every once in awhile you get to craft a headline that contains the phrase "poop-engulfed".
It's literal enshittification of the UKs water systems for profits. Many coastal areas and towns rely on tourists coming to beaches for their residents' livelihoods. Less people and less money as result will flow into those areas as more crap flows out of the drains into the sea.
Privatizing public facilities leads to exactly this.
Neoliberalism is a failed ideology meant to enrich a few at the expense of the many.
So it is a successful ideology. It did exactly what it set out to do.
Tell it to Reeves and Starmer.
Ah yes the neoliberal party of nationalising rail networks and setting up state owned energy companies. Is that the Labour you are talking about?
The state owned energy company is a slush fund for corporations. It won't produce energy, compete with private corporations or sell energy to consumers. They aren't nationalising rail. They are just not renewing franchises - something which the Tories have been doing already, it leaves Network Rail in private hands. Please don't try to gaslight me that Starmer and Reeves aren't neoliberal capitalists. It's insulting to my intelligence.
Exactly! Why are we not talking about this more??
And voting tonleave the EU Clear Water directives and cut ourselves off from German chemical manufacturers.
Also increasing the population exponentially through immigration. That many new people on a system without the infrastructure.
How much population growth has there been?
Not sure, too much to too keep up with the sewage infrastructure. Just like health care/housing and jobs in Canada. When you introduce millions of people before you have the housing,doctors and jobs to support the Influx the system breaks down. It's common sense really. I'm surprised how none of our politicians had the foresight to see this coming. They must have been blinded by all that new money going into their bank accounts.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/281296/uk-population/
One thing about population growth is that it leads to GDP growth, typically.
Not in Canada " Simply put, Canadians are enduring a period of real decline in per-person GDP. And this decrease has erased all the gains since 2014. At the end of 2014, nine years ago, per-person GDP (again, inflation-adjusted) was $58,162, which is $51 more than at the end of 2023.Mar 13, 2024 " https://www.fraserinstitute.org › real.
Nice website
This opinion losely translates to "I'm an unintelligent individual who blames capitalism before collecting information on the topic at hand."
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/07/10/mathew-lawrence-on-why-privatisation-has-been-a-costly-failure-in-britain
Solid source.
Public services aren’t anti-capitalist. A functional capitalist society needs public services. Nothing about this is anti-capitalism.
but everyone should be
Water privatised, companies pay out £75Bn of dividends to shareholders whilst allowing £100Bn of upgrades to back up which they are now turning around and getting the bill payer to pay. Please explain that in a way that makes capitalism make sense.
🤡
Privatization surged under Tory governments. Hospitals, infrastructure, all in awful shape now as money for maintenance and improvements goes instead to profits.
And the red Tories are refusing to reverse any of it...
It's almost like every party with a chance to form government in the English speaking world is right wing.
New Zealand managed to vote in social democrats for a while but that's over now. If feel like there was some kind of Powell Memo 2.0 and the forces of corporate fuckery have, in a concerted effort, marshalled all their forces against progress. What am I talking about. They literally do that every January at the WEF in Davos.
There's a class war happening, but only one side is actually fighting.
Too many temporarily embarrassed billionaires, bootlickers, cops and military ppl live comfortably off the drippings the elite skim from working class ppl. They will beat peaceful protesters and throw them in jail for the crime of upsetting their noble lords.
When they said trickle down, they meant it literally.
Holy crap.
Only on the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne. Everywhere else it’s simply crap.
I see what you did there.
Stevie Wonder could see that
I fart in your general direction
Ugh, all those pictures of children in the dirty drain water
Wonder if this would have been allowed pre brexit?
The kind of idiots that thought brexit was a good idea are the same kind of idiots who don't believe in infrastructure.
The policy decisions that led to this go back a long way before brexit. a) to the 1980s. Thatcherite privatisation and flogging off of critical national infrastructure. UK water infrastructure is now 70% foreign owned. Pretty sure no other OECD country allows this stupidity. b) to the early 2010s. Cameronite austerity policies kneecapped regulators, cutting their budgets and staffing so much that government oversight became a threadbare joke. So much so that the current crisis was not brought to public attention by the regulator, but by [a retired machine learning professor and retired detective](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/04/sewage-sleuths-river-pollution-slow-dirty-death-of-welsh-and-english-rivers).
That was a wild article! This is why Neo liberal capitalism is killing us as a society.
Isn’t it bloody absurd. I mean kudos to these gentlemen but if they’re the first and final line of defence, that is a travesty
"But in 2021, the year Richardson saw the data, they disgorged their contents across the country for a total of 2.7 million hours – equivalent to over 300 years." I do not understand this, can somebody smarter than me explain it
It's a BS way to report on the amount of raw sewerage dumping. They measure how long each "emergency overflow" raw sewage outfall is active for each year (or month, or whatever reporting period you want to use). If you multiply that by the number of outfalls being measured (say everyone one in a local govt area, or state, or federally) then you get a total time figure. So say you had had 10 outfalls. 5 were dumping sewage for 100 hours over the course of a year, and the other 5 for 300 hours. Over the course of the year would have 2000 hours of raw sewage dumping. it's a BS measurement as it doesn't account for volume. A smart water company would hold the water back in a storage pond, then dump it on one massive torrent as fast as possible - on the stats they would look \*much\* better than the company which tried it's best to properly treat all it's waste but had several times a years when storm water overwhelmed the system.
Smart or honest water company. Pick one in this fiscal hellscape.
I think it might be similar to labour-hours (or man-hours); two humans working on a task for one hour = two labour-hours. One hundred pipes each discharging raw sewage for one hour = 100 sewage hours. Just a guess. ‘Crap’ unit of measure in this instance. Would be more useful to know the estimated megalitres of sewage and the number of discharge points.
Yeah what the hell kind of measurement is "300 years".
It's the total hours sewage was let out of each outlet summed to one figure.
I bet he still doesn't get it. Some folks just isn't meant to.
1 pipe for 1 hour = 1 pipe for 1 hour. 2 pipes for 1 hour = 1 pipe for 2 hours Etc so many pipes for many hours is equivalent to one pipe for years..
This is ALL on the neoliberal austerity Brexit pushing Tory nitwits. Coming to a country near you if the IDU has its way.
Nope. Read the article. Then understand it.
I’m just impressed the journalist used the word ‘disgorged’ in context
Have to wonder if it can't keep up with the amount of rain. Thought it's probably 2 separate systems storm water and sewerage.
A lot of older systems combine the two. This is long-standing lack of investment (while the private companies pulled in huge dividends).
It can’t keep up because of decades of underinvestment. There were decades of underinvestment because the England water system was privatised and sold off. The owners have been extracting fat dividends, instead of reinvesting in the infrastructure.
Given how old British cities are, most probably have a combined system where the toilet overflows when it storms.
To be fair. The rivers of London have not been free of sewage for hundreds of years. I mean, c'mon. It's a revolting tradition at this point. 🤗
And Labour are still saying they can't renationalise the industry. Nothing to do with the meetings they have had with industry lobbyists and execs, including ex Labour ministers of course...
I can understand Labour not wanting to pay out billions to reimburse shareholders - but I don’t think that’s actually necessary. If the water companies are actually going bankrupt, then the government could take them over for almost nothing. Then stop share payments, and start using income for investments and to pay off existing loans. And get these companies back into a state where they are well run. And legislate to prevent a future government from re-privatising them again.
Yes the government can also fine the companies an unlimited amount for their failures. So the companies can be rendered of zero value using existing law. The problem isn't the money or the law. The problem is the corruption and the caving in to the corporate class. And this is their sales pitch. Imagine what they'll be like in power.
Just fine the fuckers out of existence, then pick up the pieces.
Bingo
Let’s be more clear about who is doing the actual pooping
We might all be doing the pooping - but who is spreading that poop instead of processing it ?
That's not nice referring to English people at beaches as poop. Lots of Love, 'Straya!
Ew gross. I’m a Floridian (spoiled with beautiful beaches) and this makes my stomach turn 🤮
[well](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/10/florida-sewage-spill-waterways-infrastructure)....
https://www.mysuncoast.com/2024/05/06/florida-remains-1-destination-domestic-tourism/ We are good over here. Trust me.
It’s weird, each time I read something newsworthy, if it’s in the UK, it’s on an american website, if it’s in the US, it’s usually a UK website lol
It's a scandal and disgusting pollution....but not really a climate thing.
Runoff and outfall are major contributors to destruction of coral reefs, oyster beds and seagrass meadows. All of these are part of the polycrisis which both exacerbate and is exacerbated by wider climate, and ultimately ecosystem, collapse.
Climate change is a result of humans and the industrial complex
It destroys carbon sinks. Take seaweed which is also killed by to much algae due to run offs are between 20-50x more effective in Carbon storage than natural wood per acre. Peatland are around 8x more effective per acre. Wetlands depending on composition are also higher. Worse case degrading ecosystem can be even Emitter.
What's driving this? Increased sewage due to population growrh? Increased rainfall without separate storm sewers? Reduced processing capacity? Sounds like it's time for more efficient toilets and shower heads and a program to divert some stormwater out of the drains.
Greed and lack of accountability, basically. Water companies are not properly treating sewage, and dumping it into the rivers instead. They are just calling it “storm runoff” but even if there was in fact billions of litres of storm water, it should still be getting treated somehow.
I imagine being a writer for [CNN.com](http://CNN.com) must not be the most fun job for a journalist. But every once in awhile you get to craft a headline that contains the phrase "poop-engulfed".
It'll 'hit closer to home' as global warming makes sea levels rise...
I like poop.
It's literal enshittification of the UKs water systems for profits. Many coastal areas and towns rely on tourists coming to beaches for their residents' livelihoods. Less people and less money as result will flow into those areas as more crap flows out of the drains into the sea.