Marilyn at 100: When Icon Status Becomes a Climate Warning

The Ghost in the Machine: Marilyn’s Centenary and the Cost of Eternal Fame

One hundred years after her birth, Marilyn Monroe remains the ultimate cultural product—a woman reduced to an image, then sold back to the world as myth. The National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition doesn’t just celebrate her; it exposes the machinery of fame: the photographers who owned her likeness, the studios that monetised her tragedy, the public that consumed her until there was nothing left. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a warning. In an era where every celebrity becomes a brand and every brand becomes a climate criminal, Monroe’s centenary forces a question: What does it cost to keep an icon alive?

The answer isn’t just in the glossy prints hanging in London. It’s in the datacentres humming off Shanghai’s coast, in the mines where BHP digs up the earth to power them, and in the way Britain—once a leader in green rhetoric—now chases the same extractive dreams it once condemned.

Underwater Servers, Overheated Promises: When "Green" Tech Drowns in Hypocrisy

China’s new wind-powered underwater datacentre is being hailed as a climate breakthrough. It uses 30% less energy than land-based equivalents, recycles seawater for cooling, and—crucially—lets Beijing claim it’s leading the green AI revolution. But dig deeper, and the cracks appear.

First, the energy savings are real, but the scale is not. This single facility’s 24-megawatt capacity is a drop in the ocean compared to the 1,000+ megawatts a single hyperscale datacentre can demand. Second, the project is a joint venture with a state-owned construction giant, CCCC—a company with a history of environmental violations in Belt and Road projects. Third, and most damning: the datacentre isn’t powering hospitals or schools. It’s feeding China’s AI boom, a sector notorious for its insatiable energy appetite. The same week this "green" facility launched, reports emerged of Chinese tech firms buying up coal plants to meet demand.

Britain, meanwhile, watches from the sidelines—not as a critic, but as a customer. UK companies are among the biggest clients of Chinese datacentres, outsourcing their digital infrastructure to a country that’s building new coal plants at a rate unseen since the Industrial Revolution. The irony? Just two years ago, the UK government published a National AI Strategy that framed AI as a tool for climate solutions. The reality? Britain’s AI ambitions are being powered by the same fossil fuels it claims to be phasing out.

BHP’s Climate Retreat: When "Existential Threat" Becomes a PR Footnote

In 2019, BHP called climate change an "existential threat" to its business. Leaked internal memos from 2026 reveal how quickly that rhetoric collapsed under the weight of shareholder pressure. The world’s largest miner has quietly abandoned its decarbonisation targets for iron ore and copper mines, opting instead for "carbon-neutral" offsets that environmental groups call "creative accounting."

The documents show BHP’s shift wasn’t driven by science, but by cold economics. As demand for AI chips and electric vehicles surged, so did the need for copper—a metal BHP extracts at a rate that would make a 19th-century robber baron blush. The company’s new line? "We’ll decarbonise eventually." In the meantime, it’s lobbying against stricter emissions regulations in Australia, arguing that "energy security" (read: cheap coal) must come first.

This is the same company that spent millions on ads featuring wind turbines and smiling children, all while its mines guzzle water in drought-stricken regions. It’s the same playbook Britain’s own energy giants used during the fracking debate: greenwash the present, delay the future.

The Black-Headed Gull and Britain’s Climate Blind Spot

A lost black-headed gull—normally a fixture of European skies—has turned up in Geraldton, Western Australia, 15,000 kilometres off course. Birdwatchers are calling it a "twitcher’s dream," but the real story is in the subtext. This isn’t just a vagrant bird. It’s a symptom.

Climate scientists have warned for years that shifting weather patterns are disrupting migratory routes. The gull’s detour isn’t an anomaly; it’s a data point in a larger collapse. Yet in Britain, where the RSPB has documented a 60% decline in seabird populations since the 1980s, the response has been silence. The government’s latest Environment Improvement Plan mentions "biodiversity" 47 times but includes no binding targets for marine protection. Meanwhile, offshore wind farms—hailed as Britain’s green energy saviour—are being fast-tracked without proper assessments of their impact on seabird colonies.

The gull’s arrival in Australia should be a wake-up call. Instead, it’s a footnote in a news cycle dominated by AI hype and celebrity anniversaries. Nature doesn’t do symbolism, but if it did, this bird would be it: a creature adrift in a world that’s too busy chasing the next big thing to notice the old one dying.

What’s Left When the Myths Fade?

Marilyn Monroe’s centenary is a masterclass in cultural necromancy. We’ve turned a woman into a product, a product into a myth, and a myth into an eternal revenue stream. The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition isn’t just about her; it’s about us—the public that demanded her perfection, the industry that sold her pain, and the generations that keep buying the same story, repackaged.

The same forces are at work in Britain’s climate narrative. We’ve turned "green growth" into a brand, AI into a saviour, and corporate sustainability reports into works of fiction. The underwater datacentres, the abandoned decarbonisation targets, the lost gull—these aren’t isolated failures. They’re the inevitable result of a system that treats the planet like a stage set, where the performance matters more than the reality.

Monroe once said, "I don’t want to be a joke. I want to be an artist or nothing." A century on, her words read like a prophecy. We’ve turned her into a joke—a meme, a Halloween costume, a commodity. And we’re doing the same to the planet. The question isn’t whether we’ll run out of energy or resources. It’s whether we’ll run out of excuses first.