Is any school focused and committed enough to talk about ESG – environmental, social, and governance issues – with its students? Probably not. Many universities will, of course, especially business / management departments. I wondered about this as I read that Tesla has been turfed out of Standard and Poor’s ESG index. See Greg Barker's account in UnHerd. The S&P Index is, notionally, a home for companies dedicated to excelling in environmental, social, and governance issues. Given that Tesla was replaced in the index by the petro-giant Phillips 66, you have to wonder how bad its it's eco-crimes must have been. In response, Elon Musk called ESG “a scam”. The Economist has a podcast about it.
I read that the Ludwigshafen plant of German chemical behemoth, BASF, uses about 50% as much gas as Denmark, and more than the whole of Belgium. Most of this gas (which conveniently for the Germans the EU designates as a green fuel) comes from Russia. I wonder what German students are learning these days about Mrs M's discredited international trade policy. Inevitably this has a long compound name which now has had to have angst inserted into it.
Living the sheltered life I do it has taken me a while to catch up with the idea of gaslighting, but I'm now up to speed. It's important to distinguish this concept from actual gas lighting. I think I last came across this in practice in the mid 1970s in the White Horse pub in Beverley (known as Nellie's) which then had no electricity. As dusk arrived, one of the three elderly siblings who owned the place came and turned the ceiling gas tap on and then went away. The gas hissed above our heads. Some while later (it seemed a long time), she came back and lit it. There was a noisy "whoosh". I asked about this odd practice and was told that since town gas had been replaced by North Sea supplies, the delay was to allow the gas to travel the 40 odd miles from Scarborough.
Can you tell the difference between barley and wheat? There are indications that the BBC can't as pictures of barley were used to illustrate the deal with the Russians to allow shipments of wheat to leave the country to feed the world. Ukraine grows a lot of barley as well, but that's mostly for animal food (70%), with most of the rest going for beer etc. Maybe the BBC should be putting its graphics teams through the new GCSE natural history when it's up and running. As for wheat and barley, one's got whiskers – but which one ...
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