When Mike Graham Tried to Grow Concrete, the Internet Did the Rest

Dear Cherubs, a radio interview about home insulation somehow turned into a live demonstration of how fast a debate can fall through the floorboards. Cameron Ford, an Insulate Britain spokesperson and carpenter, went on talkRADIO to talk about the campaign’s push to insulate homes, and Mike Graham seemed determined to turn the whole thing into a quiz night for facts that had already packed their bags.

THE SETUP

Ford made a very ordinary point: timber is renewable because trees can be regrown, while concrete is a manufactured material with a heavy carbon footprint. The Independent reported that Graham pushed back, asked whether cutting trees could ever be sustainable, and then reached the now-legendary answer that you can grow concrete — which is a sentence so wrong it deserves a parking ticket.

The clip then went quiet for several seconds, Ford stayed on air, and Graham ended the interview with a breezy “See you Cameron, cheerio.” At that point the silence was not awkward so much as structural. According to the Guardian, this was happening against the backdrop of a wider Insulate Britain campaign, and the group said 146 members had been arrested 690 times by that point.

THE COMEBACK

Graham later tried to save the situation on Jeremy Kyle’s show, reportedly saying concrete “expands” as it sets. The Independent said he doubled down, which is a polite way of saying he kept digging after the shovel had already left the chat.

To be fair, the science lane is more interesting than the punchline. Ingenia and the University of Bath have both reported on self-healing concrete research, including bacteria that can help produce limestone and seal cracks, while Science Focus has covered experimental “living concrete” using sand, gel and bacteria. That is a real field of research; it is just not a magical tree-to-concrete pipeline, and it is certainly not the same thing as saying a bag of cement photosynthesises in the dark.

So the viral magic here was not really about construction materials at all. It was about tone, timing, and one very public refusal to let a carpenter finish a thought. For the genre of public-argument trainwreck, thisclaimer.com is a decent tab to keep open; for everyone else, the clip remains a tidy reminder that confidence and correctness are not the same material, even if someone on live radio really wishes they were.

Sources list —
The Independent — https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/insulate-britain-concrete-trees-b1945549.html
The Independent TV — https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/talkradio-host-mike-graham-claims-concrete-grows-after-insulate-britain-controversy-b2183123.html
The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/27/insulate-britain-protests-arrests-group-defies-injunctions
Ingenia — https://www.ingenia.org.uk/articles/self-healing-concrete/
University of Bath — https://www.bath.ac.uk/case-studies/using-bacteria-to-create-spontaneous-self-healing-concrete/
Science Focus — https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/environmentally-friendly-living-concrete-capable-of-self-healing
thisclaimer.com — https://thisclaimer.com/
Wikimedia Commons (image source) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cement_mixer_side.jpg

‘Not What You’d Expect in a Democracy.’ How #Britain Is Waging War Against #ClimateProtesters

By Yasmeen Serhan/London
December 16, 2022

"As the #ClimateCrisis worsens, and as the international efforts to mitigate its effects continue to fall short, activists like #CameronFord have become more daring. Over the past year and a half, the 32-year-old British carpenter has blocked highways by gluing himself to roads and chained himself to an oil tanker.

"Like most #environmental campaigners, Ford never wanted to do anything that could land him in jail. 'I was hoping to emigrate to Canada one day,' he says from his home in Cambridge. But Ford changed his mind about the need for bolder activism after attending a talk hosted by the climate group #InsulateBritain last summer. 'It made sense to make that stand earlier, whilst there was still a chance that we could actually mitigate the worst of it, rather than once it’s too late,' he says.

"Ford is hardly alone in that view. Other British protesters like him have gone so far as to tunnel under major infrastructure projects, throw soup at famous works of art, and scale a 190-food bridge—all in a desperate bid to draw the public’s attention to the looming climate catastrophe.

"But their democratic right to protest is now at risk as the British government declares war on tactics that it regards as disruptive and, ideally, illegal. Draft legislation that the House of Commons approved in October [2022] would pose unprecedented restrictions on the right to #protest in #England and #Wales.

"'When [#ClimateCollapse] is what we face, I believe the only thing that would curtail us is the death penalty,' says Ford, 'because the alternative to us not standing up is death.'"

https://time.com/6241372/uk-public-order-bill-climate-protests/

#GreatBritain #Fascism #ClimateAction #ClimateActivism #ACAB #WaterIsLife #Oligarchy