Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

@racheldonald.bsky.social

722 followers 134 following 91 posts

I investigate why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it.
• Creator www.planetcritical.com
• Curator www.wewillbearwitness.org
• Climate corruption journalist
• Exclusives previously Guardian/The Intercept/Mongabay. Now exclusively on P:C

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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There is an unspoken hope that A.I, a superior intelligence, will arrive and “mend all of our problems”, that it will save us from ourselves—that it will save us from our sins.

Welcome to the sado-masochism of Judeo-Christian hyper-reality.

www.planetcritical.com/p/the-messia...

1 replies 1 reposts 12 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Megan O’Toole's avatar Megan O’Toole @meganotoole.bsky.social
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A high risk of famine persists across Gaza as almost the entire population faces high levels of acute food insecurity or worse, including half a million suffering starvation, according to a global hunger monitor. More than half of all households have exchanged their clothes for money to buy food.

0 replies 23 reposts 20 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Forests may control that waterways of the world, according to physicist Anastassia Makarieva's 'Biotic Pump Theory'.

This means further forest loss may have unknown and devastating effects on not just the global climate, but also on water supplies.

news.mongabay.com/2024/06/if-f...

1 replies 14 reposts 23 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Thank you for sharing, Dave!

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Our bodies know what words fail to describe.

The body politic lives in our own bodies, informing and inhibiting our experience in the world.

Listen to my conversation with artist, Ranu Mukherjee, about violence, power, connection and time.

www.planetcritical.com/p/the-body-p...

0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Burning wood is not ‘renewable energy,’ so why do policymakers pretend it is?

I spoke with journalist Justin Catanoso about what Drax – the UK's biggest CO2 emitter whose emissions are struck off the nation's carbon budget—is up to in California.

news.mongabay.com/2024/06/burn...

1 replies 9 reposts 15 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Laura Helmuth's avatar Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social
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Research on news coverage of protests shows that journalists tend to follow a "protest paradigm" that is uninformative, distorted, biased toward official accounts and that limits the impact of protests. 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/here...

3 replies 51 reposts 111 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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“We are nature, territorialised, impaled on the flagpole, flapping in the wind like a bird desperate to escape… lost in a world that doesn’t make sense anymore, without language to speak of the harm, without language to heal the harm.”

www.planetcritical.com/p/embracing-...

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Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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"Humanity uses its energy surplus to transform materials from one thing to another – even if we did find a way to create a renewable supply of energy, we would still run up against hard limits to material transformation: the planet is finite."

www.planetcritical.com/p/the-holy-t...

0 replies 1 reposts 7 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Erik Hoffner's avatar Erik Hoffner @erikhoffner.bsky.social
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Private property vs public good:

“There needs to be a rethinking of what people’s place is in the landscape and how that intersects with a kind of new relationship between people and nature as well.”

Essential conversation hosted by @racheldonald.bsky.social on ‘right to roam’ movement in the UK:

2 replies 21 reposts 38 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Russia finds oil in the Antarctic totalling to 10x the 50 year output of the North Sea.

UK gov says they trust Russia will respect The Antarctic Treaty that the region is not to be exploited.

Resource extraction is the priority, at any cost.

archive.ph/mmHDm

9 replies 29 reposts 60 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Ketan Joshi's avatar Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co
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"In 2013, Attenborough suggested withholding aid to those suffering famine in Ethiopia because aid didn’t address population growth. He also specifically targets regions in the Global South"

From a few years ago, my thing on Nature Dad being problematic

ketanjoshi.co/2020/10/05/d...

2 replies 11 reposts 35 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Israel using AI to target members of Hamas and killing women and children in the process makes the destruction of Gaza the first 21st century war.

Israel achieves what Silicon Valley promises: the destruction of human relationships.

www.planetcritical.com/p/friction

1 replies 3 reposts 4 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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These institutions commit violence every day under the guise of law and order and, in order to perpetuate this myth, violence is understood as an aberration in an otherwise functioning system rather than a necessary feature of that system.

www.planetcritical.com/p/the-unspea...

0 replies 1 reposts 3 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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State power is built on a “willingness to put bodies on the line”. It is founded on violence. But that violence has been re-imagined as justice, ensuring that the most violent actors in the world are free of scrutiny or accountability.

www.planetcritical.com/p/the-unspea...

1 replies 2 reposts 5 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Parksy's avatar Parksy @parksy83.bsky.social
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“That such people need to be presented with incentives in order to take rational, considered and long-term decisions only shows they are fundamentally incapable of navigating the eco-crisis they have been instrumental in causing.”

0 replies 1 reposts 7 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Nations complicit in Darfur genocide: UAE, Russia, Libya, Chad, CAR, reports Middle East Eye.

I wrote about this 2 months ago, and how the USA brokered deals for UAE to supply LNG to EU in exchange to stop propping up the Russian ruble with Sudanese gold.

www.planetcritical.com/p/climate-wa...

1 replies 3 reposts 3 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Civil engineer Delton Chen joins me to discuss the Global Carbon Reward, a “carrot policy” to incentivise polluting industries to reduce emissions whilst encouraging the private market to invest in research and development of mitigation technologies.

www.planetcritical.com/p/global-car...

0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Oil in the North Sea is expected to be net-energy negative by 2031.

Around the world, the lights will go off in nations that don’t have back-up renewables. That’s most of them.

www.planetcritical.com/p/the-oil-cr...

0 replies 1 reposts 5 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Thank you for flagging this—my language was misleading and I have corrected the article.

0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Yes please! Or feel free to ping me at rachel@planetcritical.com

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Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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The renewable tension: Renewables offer decentralised energy systems which centralised power hates. But they also increase our material footprint, and mining drives environmental conflict.

Simply: We can't do this without absolute energy reductions.

www.planetcritical.com/p/the-realit...

7 replies 20 reposts 48 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Emilio Gutiérrez 's avatar Emilio Gutiérrez @emigtz.bsky.social
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I made a super long thread of almost 190 posts(with papers, articles and videos) debunking the IDF (mostly thanks to exmilitary content creators ) Joined the previous threads in one. Hope you like it, and for any Izzy supporter, you can send them this. @farhana.bsky.social @altibel.bsky.social

2 replies 7 reposts 15 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Hello! I would like to interview you on this.

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Ketan Joshi's avatar Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co
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There is definitely a phenomenon where a climate-delaying, pro-fossil centre-right governments know they can tie up the entire professional class by designing unnecessary complexity into climate policy. So experts, analysts etc lose themselves in formulas, acronyms and spreadsheets.....

6 replies 38 reposts 137 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Iain Soutar 's avatar Iain Soutar @isoutar.bsky.social
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Microsoft, Google, and Meta reveal their energy and water demands globally rival those of small countries.

6 replies 109 reposts 192 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

Soraya Nadia McDonald 's avatar Soraya Nadia McDonald @sorayamcdonald.bsky.social
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These people are drunk on gerrymandered supermajorities and white supremacy They're not even bothering with fig leaves anymore. This is anti-Black authoritarianism. No, it's not just Florida, and no, you cannot just write off everyone living in the South

10 replies 504 reposts 1159 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Oui! Avec un français don au moins il y aura un vrai francophone

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Don’t mean to panic anyone but I’ve agreed to do a climate podcast in French.

2 replies 0 reposts 7 likes

Reposted by Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)

David Ho's avatar David Ho @davidho.bsky.social
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USA! USA! USA! "The US, which has produced more crude oil than any country has ever done in history for the past six years in a row, led the way in new oil and gas projects in 2022 and 2023…"

1 replies 10 reposts 25 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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The riches afforded to every living creature are stolen, giving the wealthiest the opportunity to further destroy and pollute the planet we depend upon. This is the law of capitalism; the exponential bulldozing of one’s own limits.

Welcome To Hell.

www.planetcritical.com/p/welcome-to...

0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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“Offsetting is lauded as a solution because the people who get rich off of harm and have the money to make it someone else’s problem. Offsetting works because the richest feel the harm they cause last. “

www.planetcritical.com/p/peter-pan-...

0 replies 2 reposts 7 likes

Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical)'s avatar Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) @racheldonald.bsky.social
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Oooh I’m so pleased!!

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