JIM CRUMLEY: Spending our way out of the pandemic could cost us the Earth Protesters in covid masks at a climate change demonstration at Mossmorran at the weekend. Politics, the economy and the environment are never far apart. The deeper planet Earth free-falls into the mayhem that is the 21st century, the more chaotically they dodgem-car into each other with Earth-shattering consequences. I think I might be able to claim two linguistic firsts in that sentence, the first use of “dodgem-car” as a verb, and the first use of “Earth-shattering” in which it literally means what it says. The Earth is actually coming to pieces.