When he was re-elected in 2024, Trump promised to bring down prices; instead, he raised them with his tariffs and his ill-fated war in Iran. The inflation rate, which had been running at 3% when he took office, is now approaching 4%. No wonder Trump’s Republican Party suffered a crushing defeat in Tuesday’s mid-term elections, in large part due to the nation’s worsening cost-of-living crisis. This week, even his own past supporters turned on him.

But the cost-of-living crisis that is reshaping American politics is not confined to the US, nor is it likely to go away soon. The UK is facing similar inflationary pressures. The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) now expects this year’s inflation rate to average out at 3.1%, up from the March forecast of 2.3%. It expects inflation to peak next year at 3.8% before settling down for a year-long average of 3.4% — a full 1.4% above its March forecast. 

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Much of the discussion surrounding the current inflation spike focuses on the impact of Trump’s war on the price of energy. The assumption is therefore that the high prices are temporary. The OBR assumes that by 2028, the UK inflation rate will be close to the Bank of England’s 2% target once again, making this inflation shock transitory. Ahead of the mid-term elections, Trump made much the same argument: that the price surge will prove fleeting.

Unfortunately, we’ve heard this before. The word “transitory” doesn’t have great currency among economists these days. The original inflation surge of 2021 was initially waved off by central bankers as a brief aberration, but here we are, in the sixth year of above-target inflation that we keep hearing is about to come down. Other than during a brief period in 2024, inflation has not returned to the 2% target Western central banks have set for it. 

In fact, since last spring inflation has been on a steady upward march — a trend we cannot attribute merely to the energy shock caused by the Iran war. In Britain, the European Union, America, Canada and Japan alike, the core inflation rate — which strips out energy and food prices to try and capture underlying pressures — has been stubbornly above target. At some point, you have to ask: when does this stop being temporary?

It appears there is something more than just an energy shock driving up inflation. For a while now, some economists who study the economic impact of climate change have been predicting that the inflation rate will move permanently higher. We may now be in the foothills of what could turn out to be higher peaks.

It had long been assumed that a gradual alteration in climate would over time affect the global economy, with countries such as Canada actually benefiting (from longer growing seasons) and poor tropical countries losing out. But we’re now seeing that the increased incidence and severity of extreme weather events is having a greater impact. Such events hit countries such as Canada harder, since there is so much more infrastructure and hence capital to be damaged or destroyed. In 2023, a summer of wildfires in Canada made it impossible for people to work in agriculture, forestry and mining in affected regions, while rail transportation had to be suspended, further hindering economic activity. As a result of smoke forcing citizens across large swathes of the country to stay indoors, there was an economic contraction that knocked the country’s per capita income back 1.3% that year.

The problem isn’t limited to Canada. Since the Sixties, the average annual number of extreme weather events has risen sevenfold. In the past few years, they’ve begun to take an unprecedented toll: of the 10 costliest extreme-weather events on record in the US, six occurred in the last decade. In Europe, this was seven. In Canada, nine out of 10 of the most costly years insurance companies have ever had to bear have taken place since 2011. These events do the most economic harm in the nations with the most capital to destroy: in 2023, four-fifths of the economic damage due to extreme weather occurred in developed countries. Not only are these catastrophes damaging property and infrastructure, they are raising insurance costs, which ultimately works its way into prices. 

On top of this, rising food prices due to poor harvests resulting from drought, storms or flood damage are driving food inflation. The reason beef prices in America have risen so fast is that a persistent drought, attributed in large measure to higher temperatures, has depleted the US beef herd. President Trump may say climate change is a hoax but such declarations can’t stop prices rising. And the rising cost of food has an outsized influence on voters’ perception of inflation. 

Similarly, while the surge in electricity prices has been attributed to such things as Britain’s gas-dependent pricing system or the excessive demand of data centers in the US, the truth is that energy bills are rising largely because of the costs involved in strengthening infrastructure against harsher weather. One study estimates that electricity bills could rise by as much as 25% in the US to cover these impacts. In that vein, Avanti West Coast rail recently had to pay British customers £20 million in refunds for delays caused this summer, mainly because the current train tracks were not built for such temperatures. Higher running costs will, of course be passed on to customers.

Since December 2019, there has been a relentless pressure on climate-sensitive price categories. US consumer prices have risen by 29%, but home insurance has risen by 37%, electricity prices by 43%  and food prices by 35%. Similarly, in the UK over the same period, consumer prices have risen 33% but food prices have risen 38%. Such pressure raises the latent inflation rate. The result is that when exogenous shocks such as the recent oil spike occur, their effects are amplified. In his testimony to the Treasury Committee in September, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and his colleagues said that climate change is causing greater volatility in supply shocks and that, over time, the subsequent pressure on inflation will be more upwards than downwards. 

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To make matters worse, higher inflation will be structural, not cyclical — which is to say the normal approach of central banks, of raising interest rates to reduce demand, won’t work. Assuming interest rates remain permanently higher, that will ultimately affect the pricing of other asset markets. 

Take the property market. Benjamin Keys, an expert on the financial risks of climate change at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, suggests that falling house prices are being obscured by countervailing cyclical trends. Though rising storm risks have sharply lowered prices in parts of Florida, the Covid real-estate boom and the trend of boomers retiring to warmer climates have helped to soften overall price declines. Keys argues that unlike earlier falls in asset prices — which were caused by cyclical bubbles that, once burst, eliminated excesses in the economy and put markets back on a sustainable path — such re-pricing will occur for as long as climate change progresses. This permanently higher inflation rate is a feature of something I call the “Icarus effect”: that economic growth triggers a set of ecological, social and political changes which raise the cost of further growth, ultimately slowing it down. 

Though the UK Chancellor John Healey may not be a climate denier like President Trump, he has joined many other Western governments in walking back some of Britain’s Net-Zero commitments in order to lower prices for consumers. Yet while this could reduce costs in the short term, it will aggravate the underlying problem. By trying to reduce inflation, Western governments could inadvertently entrench it.

Even if it is about to rain, the damage has been done — with Britain’s arable harvest set to fall to a record low. No wonder the country’s most famous farmer, Jeremy Clarkson, has changed his mind on climate change. Wildfires offer a visceral intensity that other expressions of extreme weather do not. A hosepipe ban might be frustrating, but it isn’t potentially fatal (except for your much-loved begonias). In the South, an ongoing blaze in the New Forest has hammered local businesses, killed a great many ground-nesting birds, and is set to shut down the A31 for a fortnight. That’d kill businesses across the south if it extended to the bank holiday. 

And while that fire was largely unnoticed by the rest of the country, what really grabbed people’s attention was the blaze that engulfed whole streets in Stourbridge, razing almost 40 homes. Well, that and the national emergency alert sent to millions of phones warning of a “very high risk of wildfires nationally”. A major fire, which could kill many people, looked entirely plausible. Contributing to that heightened sense of panic was the fact that that two separate trains — both in the south of England — were derailed, with 20 people injured in one. While neither incident is yet to be attributed to the weather, high temperatures seem the most likely explanation. 

Water shortages, fires, critical infrastructure starting to buckle: it’s like a checklist for the early stages of climate-induced breakdown. Gradually, and then all at once, it has become clear we aren’t prepared for the world now coming into view. Least of all our politicians.

The politics of climate, for obvious reasons, dovetails with that of energy. In spite of their loathing for one another, deep greens and climate-skeptic capitalists agree on one thing: energy abundance cannot exist in a world without fossil fuels. In the short term, we can’t have both decarbonization while using more energy than ever. Thus, at the same time that Burnham is expected to respond to unprecedented heat and drought, others are saying he must grant licenses to the Jackdaw and Rosebank sites in the North Sea. The electorate wants competing things too: to respond to climate change — a recent YouGov poll showed 74% of the public care about the issue — but for that response to have a minimal impact on daily life.

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In the long term, energy abundance and decarbonization could go hand-in-hand — certainly if you include nuclear energy and hydrogen — but even an optimist such as myself will acknowledge a rapid transition will inevitably include delays, gaffes and mistakes.

Burnham has to navigate all this, not least because here — perhaps uniquely — Reform and the Greens believe they can snatch votes away from him. Until recently, both Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage have been playing national politics on easy mode, given that with Keir Starmer, they were up against the very archetype of a machine politician. But Burnham is a far more able opponent: a specialist in parasocial relations and political guerrilla warfare. Nonetheless, on climate issues, when it come to the Greens, and on energy and the cost of living with Reform, Labour still appears unsteady. The Prime Minister’s tactics-first approach won’t suffice. 

And the stakes are high. A key pillar of Burnham’s political project is to remove the Greens as a threat and make his party the electoral default for progressives once more. Should he fail, Reform would have a decent chance of winning a Westminster majority — a prospect that, owing to an embarrassing summer for Farage and his party, is currently underpriced. We should not forget that the reason Labour put forward Burnham for the Makerfield seat, where he won his fateful byelection, is that the Greens’ Hannah Spencer had won the Gorton and Denton by-election in February — from which Burnham had been barred from standing. A huge part of our now PM’s pitch was his ability to win back Green voters — a task that became existential for Labour after May’s local elections. 

And yet, however canny Burnham might be — and no matter how far his approval ratings diverge from Polanski’s — further climate-related disruption could see the Greens bounce back. It’s even possible that the party could scale new heights if the issue were to continue to grow in salience: something which does not seem unlikely as another heatwave is predicted for September. While Polanski has successfully expanded his party’s political offer beyond the environment and social justice, championing Gaza and the cost of living crisis, climate remains its bread and butter. At the start of August, after all, Polanski declared that climate change is the biggest threat to the UK since the Second World War. Naturally, his critics responded with rolled eyes and snorts, but even if you don’t think such rhetoric matches the reality, there are people who do. And it’s those people — some of whom voted Labour in 2024 — that Polanski wants to reach. 

Perhaps next time, borrowing from the social media-friendly tactics of the PM, Polanski will make a similar assertion, only in front of a smoldering woodland, or a fire-ravaged Dunwich Heath. And when the floods inevitably come in the winter, perhaps he’ll make like Farage and don a Barbour and Hunter wellies. Climate change — and the attendant increasingly chaotic weather patterns — means the Greens will remain a national political force. That undermines a central plank of Burnhamism: that Labour can re-hegemonize the Left vote. 

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The intensity of this summer’s weather also presents problems for Farage. Certainly, he’ll find it increasingly difficult to present “environmental issues” as a fringe obsession when Britain is literally burning. “This is just the weather now,” is how an electrician I recently spoke to put it, fresh from installing his own air-con. Farage’s outriders know there’s little upside in demonizing such people, even if the puritanical Greens may equally struggle to win over a public increasingly enthusiastic for the joys of air conditioning. 

And as the weather changes, views on climate change will do too. Right now, Farage disputes the science, and Badenoch rejects Net Zero, but there could soon come a time when both feel they have no choice but to explore other emission-reduction policies, from electric cars to nuclear power stations. In any case, don’t be surprised if figures from both Reform and the Tories start to lean into conservation issues: a kind of Countryfile centrism where Reform wax lyrical about painted lady butterflies, and domestic food supply chains, as a stand-in for fossil-fuel emissions. Equally, expect the conversation around North Sea drilling to focus on granting a license to the Jackdaw site, rather than Rosebank, which is larger. Calls to open fracking sites, or re-open coal mines, could also abate. 

Meanwhile, if things keep getting hotter, the next general election could be preceded by a catastrophic weather event. Imagine having to fight for votes with parts of the country beset by flame and drought. 

Burnham is likable, and is perhaps the most normal prime minister in living memory, something discernible from his encyclopedic knowledge of Bristol City football club. His t-shirted, everyman bonhomie makes people feel good about themselves, an invaluable commodity for a politician. But can he also deliver strategic thinking on energy security and climate change? In a moment of great disruption, football-coach charm won’t be sufficient. In the long Nineties, politicians could get by on charisma and effective media management. But that moment has gone, and isn’t coming back. 

In the two decades since the film’s release, Left-of-center politics has inculcated millions of young Americans — me included — in the belief that climate change poses an existential crisis. In the documentary, Gore himself used the false analogy of a slow-boiled frog to describe societal complacency in the face of supposedly impending doom. “It takes a sudden jolt sometimes before we become aware of a danger,” intoned Gore, “If it seems gradual, we are capable of not reacting.”

Over time, the routine abuse of this philosophy made me question core tenets of the climate movement, most notably the supposed threat of imminent apocalypse. In no uncertain terms, many of its followers adhere to a quasi-religious cult: climate fundamentalism. Like related iterations of cultural progressivism, climate fundamentalism distorts facts, disregards progress, and prescribes self-defeating policies in the service of deliberately nebulous and unrealistic goals.

Many of An Inconvenient Truth’s most alarmist claims turned out to be wildly inaccurate. In 2007, Britain’s High Court of Justice found nine scientific errors that would need to come accompanied with pertinent explanations from instructors should they wish to screen the film in schools. Twenty years on, the peaks of Kilimanjaro remain snowcapped, Glacier National Park features glaciers year round, and Florida’s coastline is largely unchanged. Even in the worst of cases, Gore’s prediction of a sunken Sunshine State would take more than a millennium to become reality.

To be sure, the film’s broad explanation of manmade climate change and associated negative consequences were mostly well substantiated. A historic heat wave in Europe has reportedly contributed to thousands of excess deaths since June; flooding in my native Florida and wildfires in California are both increasingly frequent and severe. The question to ask, however, is whether any of these phenomena — and climate change more generally — constitute a terminal risk to humanity. 

Former President Joe Biden certainly thought so. In 2023, he stated: “the only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20 to 10 years.” The issue, of course, is that Biden’s assertion was patently incorrect. In human terms, climate change — unlike nuclear war — is a gradual process. Treating it otherwise is both counterproductive and obscures rational, commonsense measures that would otherwise mitigate negative consequences for the global poor and working classes. Expanding wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear power can help limit warming in the long run. 

Yet a 1.5-degree-centigrade increase in the Earth’s average temperature won’t extinguish humanity. Anyway, it’s a virtual certainty by 2040, barring an unlikely breakthrough in carbon capture technology. In turn, local, regional, and national governments will continue to funnel resources toward dams, levees, desalination plants, wildfire mitigation, tree cover, and air conditioning.  

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Much of the Middle East’s current population of more than 500 million would be unviable without current household rates of air conditioning (about 90% in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar) and existing desalination plants, some of which have been targeted in the region’s ongoing conflict. The obvious solution to saving lives from European heat waves is to emulate other high-latitude peers like Japan and South Korea and expand the continent’s meager AC coverage. Yet opposition to such proposals has come from none other than climate fundamentalists. 

In Britain, the ostensibly populist Green Party opposes AC expansion on the grounds that cooler homes would produce more fossil fuel emissions. In France, Leftist standard-bearer Jean-Luc Mélenchon told Le Monde in June, “we must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere; that would only make things worse.” Never mind the fact that only about 5% of France’s energy consumption consists of fossil fuels. 

For those of us committed to a practical, state-led energy transition, France’s eminence in nuclear power stands as a model to follow. Between 1975 and 1990, when renewables were wildly unreliable and far from cost-effective, the country built more than 50 nuclear reactors, achieving near-total energy independence and creating more than 200,000 jobs to boot. But, for decades, climate fundamentalists were among the most rabid opponents of nuclear power on account of exaggerated environmental and societal risks from nuclear waste and potential accidents. 

In Germany, the “climate-conscious” establishment Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and, especially, the Greens completed a total liquidation of the country’s existing nuclear plants by 2023. In addition to deepening dependence on natural gas from Russia and the United States, the phase-out predictably boosted the use of coal, oil, and natural gas, which currently account for 60% of primary energy consumption. The same year, the celebrity degrowth quadrumvirate of Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ralph Lauren, and RFK Jr. spearheaded a campaign that successfully closed New York’s Indian Point Power Plant. Just so, the state has since made up the energy shortfall with natural gas.

Climate fundamentalism’s self-destructiveness is by no means limited to developed countries. In Chile, efforts by then-President Gabriel Boric to promote lithium extraction were stalled by activists who accused the progressive leader of “greenwashing.” Aiming to avert a supposed “desertification” of Colombia, Leftist president Gustavo Petro halted all novel oil exploration, despite the fact that the country produces virtually no fossil-fuel emissions. Finally, in Brazil, foreign and domestic NGOs have sabotaged efforts to pave dirt roads in the Amazon on the grounds that better infrastructure will lead to increased deforestation. Never mind the fact that deforestation under President Lula Da Silva has fallen near an all-time low.

For all of its faults, An Inconvenient Truth committed a laudable if heretical act by the standards of modern climate fundamentalism: it acknowledged progress. In it, Gore celebrated collective action that reversed the hollowing of the ozone by phasing out harmful chemicals in aerosols. But when it comes to the ongoing energy transition away from fossil fuels, yet another tenet of climate fundamentalism is that any and all progress — however significant — must be played down, if not ignored outright.

In reality, much of the developed and even the developing world have made great strides since the premiere of An Inconvenient Truth. In Europe, total emissions have fallen in half since 2006. Despite Germany’s nuclear self-sabotage, non-fossil fuels currently account for roughly 70% of total energy production. And while much of the Continent’s total consumption is still reliant on fossil-fuel imports, reforestation — and, consequently, CO2 absorption — since 1990 has expanded forest cover to around 35% of Europe’s total land area.

In Latin America, CO2 emissions have remained stagnant since 2000, despite the fact that the region’s population has increased to 672 million in that period, up from 500 million. In the same period, deforestation in Brazil has fallen by over 80%. Even during the four-year period of state-sponsored land grabs and slash-and-burn agriculture of the Right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, deforestation was still around half the rate prior to 2005.

Then there is China. Historic breakthroughs in renewables, electric vehicles, and nuclear power will see the Asian titan replace much of its still-coal-dependent grid within the coming decades. The Middle Kingdom’s overwhelming dominance in exporting both solar panels and EVs is likely to power an energy transition throughout much of the developing world.

Progress has even been made in gas-guzzling America, where CO2 emissions have fallen to 4.9 billion tonnes in 2024, down from 6.1 billion in 2007. And while renewables continue to make up a growing share of the country’s energy matrix, the reality is that the bulk of this decline is a result of the shale boom replacing coal with far cleaner natural gas. Make any of this known to climate fundamentalists, and they will instinctively counter that any and all anti-apocalyptic evidence is “denialist” and funded by the fossil-fuel lobby.   

Put another way: the correct course, in the view of the climate fundamentalists, is to deny, delay, and roll back as many fossil fuels as possible regardless of the effect on the working class. Higher taxes on gas sales, restrictions on oil and gas production, and overreliance on renewables in Democratic states have led to exorbitant energy costs, even at times when gas prices nationally are low. Yet the fundamentalists won’t relent. Writing on X, as The Lever cofounder David Sirota described Biden’s reluctance to go beyond shutting down the Keystone XL Pipeline and the shale boom under Barack Obama as a “crime against humanity.” (This, even though the latter brought about 700,000 jobs and a decline in emissions.)  

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There is a better way for those of us interested both in pro-worker politics and a realistic energy transition.

Socialist mavericks like the Canadian journalist Leigh Phillips, Syracuse University professor Matt Huber, former German Left party MP Sahra Wagenknecht, and the now-defunct publication The Liberal Patriot have argued that concerns over climate change cannot come at the expense of workers and ordinary consumers. Putting pressure on working-class consumption only helps to elect the far Right. 

Yet heterodox Leftists like Huber have been excoriated by fundamentalists for daring to question core tenets of the climate movement. Huber made the commonsense argument that Democrats would do better to restore much-needed credibility with non-college voters as opposed to virtue signaling over climate. Writing in The New York Times, he opined: “American voters broadly agree that climate change is a real concern and support addressing it, but they largely do not see it as a top priority. The Pew Research Center routinely asks Americans to rank their top concerns and climate change is consistently near the bottom.” That made Huber the hated “main character” in the progressive corners of social media for the better part of a week.

None of this is to exonerate the Right and, especially, the Republican Party for their fanatical opposition to renewables. In the same way that climate fundamentalists scoffed at Americans’ pain at the pump post-Covid, the Trump administration gutted much of the Biden administration’s subsidies for renewable energy amid spiraling energy prices from the AI boom. Then, in February, the White House launched the ongoing Iran War, causing oil prices to spike.

Democrats are right to point out that renewable tech in solar, wind, and battery storage is increasingly cost-competitive and viable for solving renewables’ short-term intermittency. At the same time, batteries remain impractical for mitigating long-term intermittency, meaning that fossil fuels and nuclear still have a role to play in maintaining stable and abundant energy — and employing millions of workers. Much to their credit, climate activists from across the political spectrum, including the fundamentalists of the 2010s like Greta Thunberg, have since warmed to nuclear power, which is currently experiencing a relative global renaissance. 

Anthropogenic climate change is quite real and worthy of collective action. By all means, states should continue to drive innovation and investment in improvements to renewables and nuclear energy. Al Gore, then, sowed the seeds of an inconvenient and self-defeating cult. His fundamentalist successors would do well to reassess the myriad ways in which they’ve contributed to their own discredit.

For a time, climate seemed to dominate. Terms such as Net Zero, carbon footprint and green transition became fixtures of national and global politics. More than that, they justified a sweeping range of measures, from carbon taxes to fuel levies, and helped fuel a new wave of climate activism personified by Greta Thunberg. But then, almost as quickly as it appeared, the climate crisis faded, overshadowed by more short-term emergencies.

The pandemic shifted the focus from “saving the planet” to “saving lives”. The war in Ukraine was about energy security, not decarbonization. The carnage in Gaza, trade wars and, most recently, the Iran conflict, further crowded out climate angst. Trump’s second withdrawal from the Agreement, upon taking office for his second term, barely even registered. And when COP30 closed in Brazil earlier this year, familiar calls to end fossil fuels were met with public indifference.

Ten years on, then, one cannot help but ask: did the Paris Agreement, and the broader UN Conference of the Parties (COP) process, actually achieve anything? The record is damning. Global fossil CO2 emissions are roughly 5% higher today than at the moment Paris was signed. The 2024 rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 was the largest ever recorded. Meanwhile, national emissions-reduction plans are projected to deliver only a 12% cut in global emissions by 2035, against the 60% reduction (relative to 2019 levels) that scientists say is needed to honor the Agreement’s targets.

There is one significant nuance: the rate of emissions growth has decelerated sharply. Climate advocates point to this as evidence that Paris produced a genuine change in direction. Yet as skeptics rightly note, the absolute level of emissions has continued to rise, while the deceleration owes at least as much to cheap renewables and structural economic shifts as to the Agreement itself. In a sense, both observations are true. But what’s not in dispute is the gap between ambition and outcome.

How one interprets this failure depends on your perspective. Climate activists see it as a tragedy — proof that we are sleepwalking into catastrophe precisely as political commitment to climate action wanes. Climate skeptics, on the other hand, see it as a non-issue: the “energy transition” is quietly being dropped from the political agenda, and good riddance. In truth, both positions are wrong, albeit for different reasons.

The activists, for their part, are wrong to maintain that civilization-ending consequences are locked in unless emissions reach net zero by 2030 — a claim that’s both scientifically dubious and politically counterproductive. Not only do rising temperatures not necessarily entail mass death, but, as Albert Hirschman observed in The Rhetoric of Reaction, doomsday narratives tend to induce fatalism rather than action. If disaster is inevitable, the rational response is to stop bothering. The climate movement’s relentless escalation of apocalyptic language has almost certainly accelerated its own decline.

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But the skeptics are wrong to dismiss the energy transition altogether. For countries that lack abundant domestic fossil fuel reserves, reducing dependence on imported hydrocarbons is not an act of idealism — it’s a matter of hard-nosed national interest. The current geopolitical turbulence has clearly driven this message home, with energy import dependence becoming an acute economic and strategic liability. Europe’s exposure to the Iran conflict, and the broader volatility of global energy markets in recent years, illustrates the cost of building an entire industrial model based around imported fossil fuels, especially ones hailing from halfway around the world.

The reason both sides misread the issue — and the reason the climate agenda largely failed — lies in how the entire debate was framed from the outset. Since its origins at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, COP has been defined by two inseparable characteristics: catastrophism and globalism.

The catastrophism has deep roots. The Limits to Growth, a 1972 report commissioned by an Italian nonprofit, introduced the idea that humanity itself must be restrained for the planet’s survival. The First Global Revolution, its 1991 sequel, made this agenda explicit. “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” From that point on, environmentalism ceased to be a movement for the rational management of resources, becoming instead a project of planetary governance, one that treats humanity as both cause and culprit. Policies framed exclusively in terms of sacrifice — more expensive energy, higher taxes, restricted mobility — predictably alienated the very public whose buy-in was essential.

The globalism was equally damaging. By framing climate change as a planetary problem, one requiring planetary governance, COP foreclosed more practical, interest-based approaches to decarbonization rooted in national sovereignty. Any action taken by a single country was implicitly framed as futile; only coordinated global action counted. Moreover, the kind of state-directed industrial policies needed to actually build the infrastructure of decarbonization ran counter to the market-oriented neoliberal zeitgeist. This logic delegitimized countries such as China, which were actually investing in decarbonization through five-year plans, massive subsidies and deliberate manufacturing scale-up rather than multilateral consensus.

This framing, however, was not simply a strategic error; it was, in part, deliberate. COP took shape precisely as globalization was being institutionally embedded: the first Rio conference in 1992 coincided with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which marked the birth of the European Union. Arguing that democratic decision-making had to give way to technocratic governance in the name of planetary salvation served to reinforce this broader supranational project.

This globalist orientation was compounded by the ideological makeup of the climate movement itself. Stemming predominantly from liberal internationalist and pseudo-Marxist traditions, most environmental activists and writers share those traditions’ hostility to the nation-state. In their view, national sovereignty is an obstacle to be overcome by international governance. Paul G. Harris, a prominent environmental expert, wrote for instance of the “cancer of Westphalia”, the state-centric system that privileges national interests over international ones. In Harris’s telling, this framework had to be replaced by a system of international governance, for the good of the planet if nothing else. The result was predictable: more conservative and nationally oriented politicians came to associate any energy transition policy with globalism and its discontents, ensuring that the issue became entangled in culture wars and depriving it of any positive, sovereignty-affirming interpretation.

The institutional architecture reinforced the dysfunction. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, established in 1992, created a permanent negotiation apparatus, a framework for consultation rather than action. Each year, thousands of diplomats, officials and NGO representatives convene to “assess progress”; the very structure of the system ensures inertia. A vast bureaucratic ecosystem — UN agencies, EU directorates, NGOs, consultancies and think tanks — grew up with a material interest in perpetuating the “climate emergency”. The goal of reducing emissions became secondary to preserving the system itself, alongside the political benefits that system conferred on the elites who managed it — including all manner of authoritarian fantasies.

These dynamics explain not only the Agreement’s failure on its own terms, but also the way in which globalist-framed “climate action” actively undermined the national interest of nation-states: including industrially advanced ones.

The European Union is the most instructive example. Over the past decade, Brussels led the global charge on climate and Net Zero. At the same time, the EU has expanded its renewable energy share: from 17% of gross final energy consumption in 2014 to around 25% today. But because this was driven by climate idealism rather than a coherent push for energy sovereignty, it proceeded alongside growing external fossil fuel dependency. North Sea production declined; nuclear capacity was phased out, most dramatically in Germany; natural gas was treated as the indispensable “bridging” fuel for an intermittent-renewables grid. The paradoxical result was that the EU’s overall energy import dependency actually increased — from around 54% of gross available energy in 2014 to 58% today, with a peak of 63% in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All that despite a sharp drop in energy consumption, largely driven by stagnating economic conditions.

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Until 2022, however, Europe could at least rely on relatively cheap, and reliable, Russian gas. Since then, it has substituted it with far more expensive and volatile American LNG, on which it is now heavily dependent. The Iran conflict has exposed what this means in practice: Europe remains among the regions most exposed to energy-price spikes and supply-chain disruptions.

The energy transition has now largely disappeared from Europe’s political agenda: but not because climate idealism has been replaced by clear-eyed geopolitical thinking. Rather, it is because a policy so thoroughly divorced from Europe’s strategic interests has left the continent without the institutional capacity to think strategically at all. A return to genuine geopolitical realism would be welcome; indeed, it is the only context in which a rational energy transition could be pursued.

To understand what that would look like, it’s instructive to examine the country that has taken the most coherent alternative approach: China. In recent years, the People’s Republic’s investment in renewable energy has dwarfed that of every other country. In 2024, it spent over $800 billion on its energy transition, more than double any other economy and equivalent to 31% of the world’s total clean energy investment. Just that year, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China than in the rest of the world combined. It did so quietly, without grand proclamations and without tiresome moralizing. Crucially, it did all this not to “save the planet” but for reasons of hard national interest.

As Professor Warwick Powell from the Queensland University of Technology explains, the key analytical concept here is something called “Energy Return on Energy Invested” (EROEI): the ratio of energy produced to the energy required to produce it. High-EROEI systems generate surpluses that can be reinvested into the economy; low-EROEI systems drain it. Historically, fossil fuels offered EROEIs of 50:1, or even 100:1 in the early decades of Middle Eastern extraction. Those days are over. Shale oil and tar sands offer returns as low as 3:1 to 5:1 — barely above breakeven when system costs are included. Conversely, modern onshore wind can deliver EROEIs of up to 50:1; utility-scale solar now achieves 10:1 to 30:1 and falling. In short, the economic logic is increasingly stark.

The broader point is that China’s focus on renewables is not merely about electrification; it is electrification in the service of energy sovereignty. By increasing the share of domestically produced, high-EROEI energy into its supply mix, Beijing reduces its dependence on volatile foreign supply chains, insulates itself from outside shocks in oil and gas markets, and bolsters its net energy surplus per unit of investment. The results are clear: despite massively increasing its energy consumption over the past decade, China’s overall energy import dependency has held stable at around 20% — and the disruption caused by the conflict in Iran has left it largely unscathed.

In conclusion, the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement should be neither an occasion for mourning nor for celebration, but for clear analysis. The Agreement failed on its own terms, largely because it was structured to fail: it was embedded in a globalist institutional architecture opposed to national-interest reasoning and was promoted through apocalyptic narratives that generated fatalism instead of action. What it leaves behind is not a legacy of climate governance but an object lesson in how not to organize.

All the same, the energy transition is far from over — and it need not be driven by climate idealism to be worth pursuing. For any country serious about sovereignty, security and long-term economic resilience, the case for reducing fossil fuel import dependence remains a strong and entirely self-interested one. The question now is whether Western governments can shed the ideological baggage of the COP era and embrace a national-interest approach to the energy transition, one that simultaneously draws on renewables, domestic resources, nuclear energy and the most rational import sources available. So far, the signs are not encouraging.

The takeover in Venezuela brings under US control the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Under Trump, Washington saw Venezuelan energy bolstering hostile countries, especially oil-import-dependent China. For now, the Venezuela coup deprives the Middle Kingdom of upwards of 800,000 daily barrels, while taking away a valuable customer as well as an intelligence asset for the Russians and their Islamist allies.

This naked neo-imperialism could prove beneficial, not least for the hard-pressed Venezuelans. American supermajors like Chevron are also natural beneficiaries, with huge resources being placed to modernize the country’s shambolic energy industry and thus to restore its once proud relative prosperity.

The larger point is that successful economies either have fossil fuels or need easy access to them. Gas reserves, and the revenues they generate, grant places the Persian Gulf monarchies far more influence than populous Arab states like Egypt, which lack oil and gas. Russia has been able to underwrite its invasion of eastern Ukraine and withstand severe Western sanctions thanks to its hydrocarbon reserves. China and India look to secure imports of the same wherever they can, especially at bargain prices. Core European powers like Britain, France, and Germany, meanwhile, could punch far above their weight if they would but tap their own plentiful supplies of shale gas, but their governments refuse to do so owing to irrational green phobias about hydraulic fracturing.

Beyond Europe, however, the recognition of fossil fuels as a key element of geopolitics puts a stopper on decades of green campaigns designed to instill fear of emissions and promote wishful thinking about how to reduce them. In academia and the media, dissenters from the narrative, even academics who accepted anthropogenic climate change, are hounded if they fail to submit to the green papacy’s encyclicals.

But the green doomerism has failed to meet the reality test. We now know that predictions of climate crises, some of which date back to the 1970s, have turned out to be exaggerated or even plain wrong. For example, both ABC and NBC boldly predicted in 2008 that New York would be under water by 2015; last time I visited my familial home town, however, it seemed very much on dry land. Extinction rates, often blamed on climate change, have slowed, with even the polar bears continuing to thrive in somewhat warmed temperatures.

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A 2021 paper by Carnegie Mellon University researchers David Rode and Paul Fishbeck tracked apocalyptic predictions dating from the first Earth Day in 1970. Across half a century, 61% of the forecasts of planetary collapse have come and gone (and the planet is still here, chugging along). Even the committed climate sirens at Nature journal have been forced to retract a study that claimed the world economy would contract due to climate change.

The collapse of the worst-case scenario goes hand-in-hand with the continued strength of fossil fuels, which remain the dominant source of energy; even coal is ascendant. Despite billions spent by Western taxpayers to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use is 30 times bigger than wind and solar combined, as the energy analyst Robert Bryce notes; in the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar, but 13,000 from fossil fuels.     

Fossil-fuel energy remains “the blood” that wins economic battles, including the drive to build data centers for artificial intelligence. For a while, China was catching all the upside from the fossil-fuel resurgence by going on a coal-plant building spree (this, even as the People’s Republic invested heavily in green technologies). Meanwhile, the West, including the United States under President Joe Biden, hamstrung itself.

Americans and Europeans suffered. Living standards in the de-industrializing West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe, especially, has endured a decade of stagnation. Americans laboring under the joint rule of green capital and green government likewise suffered.

In my adopted home state of California, electricity rates have surged a staggering 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. Once a major oil producer, the Golden State now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign sources in South America and Saudi Arabia.

High energy prices most hurt those in California’s less temperate, heavily Latino interior. The crisis has driven an erosion of industrial jobs; since 1990, one-third of California’s manufacturing jobs — 1.3 million of them — have disappeared. The disparate class impacts have been confirmed recently in a study by the California Air Resources Board, which projects that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

If they stick to the climate agenda, the only way places like Europe and California can get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China put off for at least another decade — is by squelching future growth. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes that such policies would have  catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West. But China’s leaders won’t sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost.

But America under President Trump is pulling in another, better direction. And even some Democrats are going along in recognition of geopolitical reality. In the United States, Axios recently reported, Democratic lawmakers have all but abandoned use of the Green New Deal, even amid their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump. “Today,” notes longtime Democratic policy expert Will Marshall, “the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality.” Among Democrats in Congress, mentions of the once-hyped program have fallen to a bare handful, down from more than 1,000 citations in 2020.

Only 6% of Americans rank climate as a top concern, a sliver of those who see inflation as their major problem. As these concerns have faded, even ultra-green California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been begging refiners to stay in the state.   

The prospects for greens are even worse in the developing world. In Africa — the only continent whose population is growing strongly; also now home to five of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies — governments generally recoil from adopting net-zero ideologies. Leaders choose to ignore the scolding of Greta Thunberg and the green nonprofits. Instead, they prioritize bringing electricity to the roughly 600 million in sub-Saharan Africa who do not have it now.  

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Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, for example, has warned that the climate policies favored by Western nonprofits and aid agencies could precipitate a continent-wide energy crisis. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, launched a scathing attack on European climate policies in November 2022, declaring it “morally bankrupt” for Europe to use African fossil fuels while denying Africa the same right. Museveni accused Western nations of imposing “one rule for them and another rule for us”, while expecting Africa to sacrifice development for climate goals Europe has failed to meet.

“The climate-industrial complex,” as Bjorn Lonborg has put it, is, well, running out of energy. Even before the return of Trump, many green companies, despite subsidies, were failing, the product of high costs and poor delivery. 

Yet it is far too early to proclaim the permanent demise of the climatistas. They remain deeply entrenched in the universities and the mainstream media and are busy grifting in the massive nonprofit sector. A generation of children who have already been schooled in climate-change science, however exaggerated, may help them resurge. Also, those who have invested in “renewables” will be interested in recouping their losses under Trump.

Rather than ruin the basis of our prosperity and hopes for the developing world, humanity needs to adapt, much as our species has done during previous, and often more dramatic, climactic changes. In the coming years, the world must muddle through reducing emissions through practical steps like adopting natural gas over coal and restoring nuclear power.  Trump’s successors may not fully embrace these realities. But for the immediate future, at least, fossil fuels are back, for better or worse, shaping history much as they have for the past century.  

He made similar comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast in the run-up to his re-election, asserting he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”. Rogan remarked on the “dystopian” aesthetics of a wind farm in South Texas. Whether the concern is whale psychology or landscape aesthetics, there seems to be something visceral, even vibes-based, in the Right’s disdain for renewable energy.

In his second term in office, Trump has intervened on behalf of the whales — or, at least, against renewables. While Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was uniquely generous in using tax credits to support electricity from solar and wind, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) is equally ruthless in repealing them.

What distinguishes the OBBB is its exacting focus on solar and wind energy: increasingly the object of an emerging culture war. On one side, the Right argues solar and wind are “expensive and unreliable”, to use the words of Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright. Increasing reliance upon these intermittent power sources has led, Wright insists, to grids that are “less stable”.

On the other side, many on the Left see climate change as solvable only through the vast expansion of solar and wind energy — entailing a huge increase in the supply of batteries. Several high-profile commentators, including the activist Bill McKibben and the engineer Mark Jacobson, argue that the world can solve its decarbonisation needs by focusing exclusively on solar and wind, along with hydroelectric power — with, of course, more batteries. “100% renewables!” is their rallying cry.

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Granted, the Right downplays the real value of these energy sources, which are already making huge contributions to energy capacity in places such as Texas and California. But the Left is wrong to imagine that wind and solar will be a cure-all. Decarbonisation is complex, and will rely on a wider variety of energy sources and technologies to not only clean up electricity, but also deal with harder sectors like steel, cement, aviation and shipping.

Intermittency, of course, remains a real challenge for renewable energy — particularly in regions not blessed with a robust supply of sunshine or wind. The problem is not only geographical, but temporal. To deal with the recurring phenomenon of “winter”, renewable-heavy grids would need better “long-duration” batteries than those that exist today. To its credit, the IRA actually did enact a very broad-based set of support for not just solar and wind, but also nuclear power, carbon removal and green hydrogen. 

This is not the first time that energy policy has been shaped by antagonistic cultural politics. The oil shocks in the Seventies led to a wave of anti-Arab xenophobia in the United States — leading one country singer to suggest that America should cut off food supplies to the Middle East by way of retribution. Fifty years later, energy provision remains affected by culture. Germany has a significantly more carbon-intensive grid than its neighbours because it voluntarily dismantled its nuclear power plants at the behest of a vocal and powerful anti-nuclear movement. The country has spent billions on renewable energy, but these investments have not yet broken Germany’s dependence on coal and gas. 

But Biden did not have a culture war in mind with his energy policy so much as an audacious political theory. With many of its investments targeted for red states, Biden bet the IRA would create a durable political coalition that would help ward off attacks from Republicans. It was an attempted enactment of the neo-Marxist theory that clean-energy jobs and investments would appeal to the material class interests of Republicans, thus securing political support for the Democrats. 

The theory has many flaws, one of which was the reality that most of the investments had barely broken ground prior to the 2024 election. Worse, the Democrats’ theory of material interests fell prey to the larger culture war. It’s notable that, during the negotiations of the OBBB, a vocal faction in the Republican Party rose up to attempt to save some of the IRA tax credits and investments. But they were drowned out by a wider GOP that was scornful of renewable energy. Reporting suggests that, at the eleventh hour, Trump himself entered the negotiations, assuring many in his party that the OBBB would repeal the subsidies for solar and wind specifically.

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To explain their defeat, the Left has reached for another class theory. In this telling, the passing into law of the OBBB is just another example of the power of the fossil fuel industry. Likewise, the legislation could be seen as a defeat for “green capital”. Indeed, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, Abigail Ross Harper, claimed it was time to “storm the Hill” upon reading the Senate version of the bill.

At its core, though, the energy culture war is being waged not between industries so much as between classes. For the new populist Right, whose most prominent figures include JD Vance as well as Chris Wright, the class enemy is not green capital per se, but the wider “professional class”: the liberal academics, journalists and bureaucrats who, of all Americans, are the most enthusiastic about the transition to renewable energy. Although the OBBB does the bidding of fossil fuel capital, its most significant appeal to MAGA is in its broader culture-war project of “owning the libs”. Beyond solar and wind, the repeal of electric vehicle tax credits for liberal consumers plays into this larger cultural class war.

It helped that Trump and his allies in Congress could call on some supportive evidence. One striking revelation of the political fight over energy policy was that Republicans on Capitol Hill were reportedly swayed less profoundly by energy capitalists, or even energy engineers, than by a philosopher, Alex Epstein. Epstein is the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and is one of the more powerful energy “influencers” on the Right engaging in online polemics against renewable energy. On his Substack, “Energy Talking Points”, he argues solar and wind power are “not real energy” and “unreliable parasites of reliable energy”, and if the US were to embark on a “renewables-only policy”, the consequences, “…would quickly turn America into a third-world country”.

This is a battle, then, that transcends energy sectors. It is also a battle that maps precisely onto the increasingly geographical contours of political polarization. Pro-renewable liberals live in cosmopolitan, blue cities where climate change is an overarching concern. In these areas, solar and wind power appear as an unalloyed good on spreadsheets and in newspaper charts.

In rural areas, where the vast majority of these projects are constructed, people see things differently. Wind and solar farms take up a significant amount of land. This is a boon for landowners, who receive lucrative lease payments, but it is of less obvious benefit to the broader swathe of rural residents. This concern, coupled with the aesthetic problem of landscapes covered in solar panels and wind turbines, has contributed to significant resistance to these projects in rural areas all over the country.

The culture war over renewables cannot obscure the reality that the challenge of climate change is much broader than simply swapping solar and wind power for fossil fuels. It’s a civilizational infrastructure challenge, encompassing housing, transit, agriculture and energy, and will require something akin to a new, green industrial revolution reshaping entire geographies of life and work. The Trump administration’s attack on solar and wind is as superficial and unserious as Biden’s gambit that it would be enough to use tax credits to incentivize the right investments and consumer choices. 

The irony is many climate liberals have been insisting for years that renewables have become incredibly cheap and cost-competitive with fossil fuels. If that’s the case, they shouldn’t need the subsidies. Their theory is about to be put to the test. 

The fight over housing reform exposed a deep divide between the elite discourse-shaping class — those aligned with YIMBYism and the new “abundance” movement — and the older, activist-driven wing of liberalism that is parochial and operating on autopilot, directed by the concerns of a previous era. This latter group primarily wants to preserve local control and community character, even if it comes at the cost of affordability and housing availability. Animated by habit and identity and disconnected from wider debates taking place, it has long stood in the way of reform.

Newsom’s success, along with other recent YIMBY efforts across the country, suggests that in key policy areas, liberalism may be slowly shedding some of its self-imposed constraints. Understanding the conflict between an intellectually engaged elite and grassroots activists stuck in outdated paradigms is key to making sense of current battles within the American Left.

At the end of June, as part of the yearly budget process, Newsom signed two bills which mark the state’s most significant shift on housing in at least a generation. CEQA was enacted in 1970 to ensure that state and local agencies assess, disclose, and mitigate the environmental impacts of development projects. Over time, it came to be used to delay or block new housing, especially in urban areas. The new reforms limit the reach of the law by, among other changes, exempting the majority of multifamily infill housing projects, limiting the grounds for lawsuits, and streamlining review processes for qualifying developments.

Showing the importance of elite discourse, in his speech announcing the signing, Gavin Newsom thanked YIMBYs for their “abundant mindset,” adding that this was a “plug to Ezra.” For those unfamiliar with internal squabbling within the liberal coalition, this is a reference to the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which was released this year and has caused a rift among left-leaning activists and intellectuals.

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At the same time, a coalition of over 100 environmental groups sent a letter calling Newsom’s changes “the worst anti-environmental bill in California in recent memory.” Organized labor also put up a fight, demanding certain carve outs as part of the reforms, at one point “fill[ing] a hearing room at the state Capitol mocking, yelling, and storming out at points while lawmakers went over the details of Newsom’s plan.”

As someone who has tried to understand the Left from outside the coalition, I’ve been fascinated watching this debate unfold. Abundance is highly readable and convincing, especially to someone with a pro-market orientation. On the housing issue in particular, we have built too little for too long, and, as Klein and Thompson point out, there’s a reason that Republican states are more affordable places to live.

Yet little that they said on this topic was surprising. Before the book came out, these arguments had been circulating for years in liberal media. Freddie deBoer expresses frustration that NIMBYs appear to be completely shut out of the discourse, estimating that pro-YIMBY perspectives are heard in mainstream media outlets by a ratio of at least 10 to 1. So what took so long? And why did so much of the organized Left still unite in opposition to California housing reforms?

The Right-wing political theorist Curtis Yarvin famously uses the term “the Cathedral” to describe what he sees as the informal but powerful ideological and institutional complex that shapes public opinion and policy in Western democracies. Under this theory, the Cathedral had a position on housing, politicians in California realized what it was, and acted accordingly. But somehow the memo had not trickled down to organized groups within the liberal coalition. While the Cathedral just notched a major victory, it was difficult and long delayed. State Senator Scott Wiener has credited Governor Newsom for putting his political capital on the line in order to enact the recent reforms.

When I recently interviewed Derek Thompson, I asked him about this divide on the Left. He responded that the key variable is age. Older Leftists grew up in a world in which ideas about overpopulation were taken seriously and development was seen as infringing on unspoiled nature. This was the time when Paul Ehrlich’s dire warnings about overpopulation and coming famines were staples of TV and radio. Younger people, in contrast, realize that housing costs have gotten out of control, and that housing is a fundamental issue facing members of their generation as they seek to build a life.

What all of this reveals is that the concept of the Cathedral, or any framework that sees the establishment in monolithic terms, needs to be unbundled. Take a look at the environmental groups that opposed housing reform. Aside from a few exceptions, most of the rest are completely obscure, even to policy wonks.

Some have names like Green Latinos and Senior & Disability Action, organized around the logic of identity politics. Many, however, are hyper local, calling themselves Alianza Coachella Valley, Los Angeles Waterkeeper, or Sierra County Land Trust. They don’t necessarily have the support of The New York Times. But they represent the priorities of liberals with money and a desire to work in the field of activism.

These people are evergreen activists, far from the intellectual currents of their own party. We may call them practitioners of Curb Your Enthusiasm liberalism. One of the recurring themes in the early seasons of the show was Cheryl Hines, Larry David’s wife, dragging him to charity events and parties with do-gooder activists. The class her friends represented were mocked for their vapidity and virtue signalling. In “The Anonymous Donor,” for example, Larry is vilified for wanting public credit for his donation, while another donor who goes by “anonymous” is celebrated, even as it turns out that he made sure his identity was whispered throughout social gatherings.

Probably not accidentally, since art is often an exaggerated portrayal of real life, the actress who played Cheryl Hines is married to RFK Jr, who spent much of his life an anti-development environmental activist before becoming better known for his views on vaccines and public health. It’s tempting to speculate that such activists might begin to feel more at home among the GOP in the future, given that RFK is now part of the Trump administration, and some of the most strident resistance to YIMBYism in blue states comes from Republican politicians.

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This demographic tends not to incorporate much new information from the wider world. They are enamored with a few narratives like the need to always be “doing more” to protect the environment, ready to also latch on to new causes like covid safety-ism and wokeness when they detect a cultural shift that is too large to ignore. And yes, they are often very old, with a lot of time on their hands.

While the NYT, Harvard, and other shapers of the discourse often get the blame for what has gone wrong with liberalism, the story of housing reform shows how problems are often caused from below. Both Curb your Enthusiasm-style Leftists and readers of Abundance can be considered liberal elites, yet while YIMBY journalists engage in high-level persuasion, those who provide money and support to most Left-wing activist groups are channeling the ideas of intellectuals and journalists of a previous generation.

In the long run, it is those who engage in the world of ideas who often triumph on the Left. But they face formidable foes among activists in the short term. The battle over Covid restrictions seems to have been another instance where these two classes were at odds. Schools remained closed to full-time, in-person learning for much longer than elite media messaging supported such an approach.

Yarvinism is right in the sense that a few prestigious media outlets and educational establishments have an outsized role in shaping discourse; but it’s too conspiratorial in its outlook. It implies internal cohesion, centrally planned messaging, and doors being closed to outsiders, when in reality, liberal institutions are often undermined by activist groups. A better model here would be Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, with democratic legitimacy coming from rational-critical deliberation among citizens.

California is finally waking up from its self-imposed crisis. The enemies of progress have often not been the liberals most prominent in public discourse who get the most attention from conservatives, but vain, superficial, and parochial interests that seek to extract rents and signal virtue to others in their social circle while imposing costs on the rest of society. Gavin Newsom took on this class and won. He’ll have a powerful story to tell in the likely event he runs for president in 2028.

The same logic underpins the government’s more speculative effort, also announced on Wednesday, to create, via a partnership with Rolls Royce, a generation of small, modular reactors (SMRs). Britain’s extraordinarily high energy prices — some of the most expensive in the world — risk making our decarbonization efforts a losing battle. These investments in nuclear power, expensive though they might be, are unequivocally preferable to our current situation.

If we do not make better use of nuclear fission, we will fail in our ambitious and perhaps foolhardy attempt to reach Net Zero status by 2050. At some point, we might ourselves pull the plug, as it were, on this quixotic endeavor. In April, Tony Blair warned that the Net Zero push was, in its current form, “doomed to fail”. Voters, he said, “feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know the impact on global emissions is minimal”. Ask too much of voters, in other words, and they will punish the politicians who are driving down their living standards. They will fling out the baby as well as the tepid bathwater. In pragmatic spirit, Blair’s research institute called for acceptance of the temporary use of fossil fuels, and for the deployment of carbon-capture and other mitigation measures — as well as for the use of SMRs.

Naturally, Blair’s intervention incurred strong reactions. Critics of Net Zero were glad to see that a prominent figure of the center-left had, at least partially, conceded to their arguments. Committed supporters of Net Zero saw it as a betrayal and another example of Blair being a closeted Right-winger. Internal Labour voices were apoplectic that their former leader decided to air his opinion on the eve of some particularly painful local elections.

But polling is on Blair’s side, with 59% of the public prioritizing economic growth over net-zero policies. There is a shift among the elites, too, or at least the beginnings of one. Respectable voices have gradually become more openly skeptical of Net Zero. Paul Johnson, the former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, called for an “honest conversation about Net Zero” as early as 2023. Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford and a former senior government advisor, has heavily criticized the rollout of wind power and the offshoring of emissions via deindustrialization. Javier Blas, probably the best-known energy and commodities columnist, has called for “electricity realism”. JP Morgan analyst Michael Cembalest, via his annual energy reviews, highlights the challenges of electrification.

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Unlike Blair, these voices have not called for grand pivots to new technologies. Instead, they are asking that Net Zero be seen as what it is: a form of austerity, and not a catalyst for growth.

One thing these elite voices share is incredulity at the claims of Net Zero advocates. The first claim is that renewables from wind and solar energy are cheap, even as their subsidized entry into the electricity mix correlates with the rise of British energy bills.

The second claim, that “green jobs” can revitalize Britain’s industrial base, is falling to pieces. Steel mills and chemical refineries are closing, but they are not being replaced with gigafactories and electric vehicle plants.

Thirdly, there is the assertion that we can be a global leader and make a substantial change to emissions. But it is blindingly obvious our policies do not have any effect whatsoever on global emissions, which reach new records being set every year.

This disillusionment goes beyond Britain. Mark Carney is a staunch advocate of Net Zero, yet he nonetheless kicked off his premiership of Canada by scrapping the unpopular 2019 consumer carbon tax. The Trump administration, unlike the Democrats it ousted, is uninterested in the whole venture of Net Zero.

The truth is that the much vaunted “energy transition” is only a portion of the global energy story. We have heard ad nauseam about the growth of solar photovoltaics and batteries. We hear less about the fact that coal, declared dead by Boris Johnson at COP 26 in 2021, is generating electricity at record levels globally. Chinese coal mine production reached record highs in late 2024.

To the extent coal has declined, it has been replaced by another hydrocarbon, natural gas. Japanese banks and corporations, at the government’s behest, have been among the largest funders of liquefied natural gas infrastructure. In terms of final energy consumption, we are the same fossil fuel civilization we were at the start of the millennium.

Faced with increased pressure, advocates of Net Zero argue that the problem is the underlying electricity pricing system. Net Zero advocates argue that fossil fuels set the day-ahead price of electricity 98% of the time, compared to 58% of the time in Europe, and that this is the main thing pushing up bills.

This implies — falsely — that intermittents are setting prices on the continent. Even in Denmark, where wind is over 50% of the generation, intermittents do not set prices, because they are never meeting all demand. Instead, prices are often set by reliable hydroelectric and nuclear plants, assets Britain does not have in abundance. When factoring in subsidies, renewable prices are usually higher than those for gas. Gas wholesale prices have also been increased artificially by carbon costs, which consistently represent over 20% of gas wholesale prices.

This is detrimental to the government’s overriding aim to electrify transport and heating.

Gas costs are also increased by the sheer number of renewables coming onto the grid, which leads to lower utilization. The capacity factor of combined cycle gas turbines in Britain has declined from 71% in 2008 to 33% in 2023, leading investors to cancel new gas plants.

All this adds up to an increasingly convoluted energy system. The renewables buildout has given us more electricity generation capacity, at least in theory, than ever. But because of its intermittent nature, it is supplying less electricity to a country with declining electricity demand, all for a higher price.

Questions of whether this painful transition is being done well or not are perhaps less important than asking what it is all for. It is now clear that British carbon reductions have no bearing on global emissions. If Britain’s sum contribution is to deindustrialize while emissions increase globally, is our example really transferable to others?

One important question here is the extent to which the Net Zero economy is significant or desirable. Successive governments have promised an explosion of green jobs, but my research tells a different story. Looking at the government’s estimates, I found that manufacturing related to wind turbines and solar panels represented £2 billion in annual turnover in 2022, which is rather less than the £5 billion turnover in biscuit production and the £3 billion opportunity in fish and crustacean processing.

What if we widen the net? In 2022, “green” manufacturing, including hybrid vehicles and energy-efficient light bulbs, had a total turnover of £19 billion, 3% of the £650 billion turnover of British manufacturing. Alarmingly, manufacturing, green or not, has experienced next to no growth since 2006, when accounting for inflation.

All but the most devotedly neoliberal analysts would agree that Britain needs a strong manufacturing sector. But, as things stand, British industrial growth is contingent on that same growth being “green”. This has had a deleterious effect on certain sub-sectors. Take the gas boiler market, of which Britain has Europe’s most valuable. The Government seems intent on replacing gas boilers with heat pumps.

Or take Britain’s two largest goods exports: petrol-powered cars and internal combustion engines. These are set to be banned by 2030. At the best of times, we should be skeptical of governments that pursue industrial policy by coercing consumer choices. This is especially when governments do not even prioritize their countries’ industrial strengths. The threatened closure of the Scunthorpe steel mill by its Chinese owners, and its hurried re-opening by a Government whose energy policies had contributed to the closure, is a case in point. To keep the plant alive, the government even secured a ship’s worth of coking coal.

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So what is to be done? Blair’s recommendations are essentially a series of technological Hail Marys: AI, carbon capture, fusion energy, space-based solar arrays that can continuously produce energy, and solar radiation management (SRM). The latter is a catch-all term for techniques that will reflect sunlight into space, such as injecting reflective aerosol particles into the stratosphere. In essence, it is a call to take control of the climate through terraforming.

This is not climate denialism; rather, it is the view that the best way to deal with climate change is to actually reengineer the climate. For the many elites whose number one issue in Britain is economic growth, this is a far more compelling vision than the material austerity advocated for by Miliband, or the more explicit calls for degrowth from academics like Kate Raworth.

The problem is that when a 20-year strategy begins to fail, there is little scope to reverse course quickly. The government, and any aspiring opposition, now faces the prospect of undoing the debacle.

Unfortunately for them, there are few pathways to quickly alleviate the problem of high prices. Even if the government shifts against Net Zero austerity, the coal plants have already been blown up. Still, in an optimistic scenario, natural gas exploration could be expanded in the North Sea, and fracking could be allowed to develop in Lancashire and Lincolnshire. Despite gloomy estimations of the size of potential reserves, investment into further exploration could be spurred by lower taxes.

The counterproductive carbon taxes on electricity generation also need to be cut. When the government’s stated plan is to electrify everything, placing a hefty tax on wholesale electricity costs makes little sense.

One temptation will be to subsidize either producers or households at the expense of the other. The government could induce a recession by placing big bills on consumers to shield steel mills and refineries from high prices. Or they could wave goodbye to heavy industry and give consumers a temporary respite. With consumers braying and producers dropping like flies, politicians will be in an unenviable position determining who gets preferenced.

Instead, the Government is considering another way to reduce costs: switching to zonal pricing. In basic terms, this means splitting Britain into a handful of regions, with their energy prices reflecting their local generation mix. The argument is that this will reduce network costs and make prices much cheaper in areas of abundant renewables, particularly Scotland.

However, such a project is fraught with uncertainty and faces near-blanket opposition from renewable generators, manufacturers, and most utilities. The strongest argument made for zonal pricing seems not to be that it will make our energy cheap, but that it is the one policy move that will limit the ever-increasing costs of our convoluted grid.

While Scotland, a peripheral part of the broader economy with very little heavy industry, might benefit, prices in the South East would be likely to rise. This is alarming, since 75% of data center capacity is based in London and the South East. With data centers expected to be a growing share of total electricity consumption, zonal pricing is at the very least risky.

More broadly, a complicating factor for Britain’s energy situation is that it is only one of many strategic problems faced by policymakers. The global trading system is benefiting east Asian producers at the expense of Western manufacturers. Western attempts to rectify this, such as with tariffs, are contributing to further disruption. There is a lack of housing affordability. There is demographic aging, and the favorite tonic for labor shortages, mass immigration, is proving financially counterproductive and politically ruinous.

With so many red lights flashing, spending political capital and administrative bandwidth on fixing the mess of British energy is easier said than done. Perhaps most importantly, the state’s capacity to implement significant reforms, or build complex infrastructure on time and without eye-watering expense, is failing. As a result, even sensible suggestions like more nuclear fission plants are fraught with danger. South Korea’s state-run nuclear corporation KHNP has shown that it is possible to build this decades-old technology quickly and at a reasonable cost, not just in Korea but in the United Arab Emirates.

So while Miliband doubles down on Net Zero and Blair dreams of terraforming, what can energy realists do? The immediate task of reducing prices and balancing the needs of producers and households looks daunting.

First, we need to move away from hard deadlines on massively reducing emissions. We also need to move away from directing industry and consumer choices via hard bans on established technologies like gas boilers and internal combustion engines.

There is a significant appetite in the policy world for nuclear power. In recent years, fusion has become a hyped-up technology. But the energy density of fission is already by orders of magnitude greater than that of any other modern energy source. The dangers are overblown, and the current supply chain is sufficient to supply the world’s reactors for hundreds of years. Reusing spent fuel via breeder reactors makes fission effectively renewable.

While small modular reactors are promising, large reactors are already being built at scale in Korea and China at an impressive speed. Alongside the Centre for British Progress, I have laid out a plan for building 200 terawatt hours of annual nuclear generation capacity, or 50% of total generation, by 2040.

Nuclear power offers zero emissions, and any new plants could have lifespans approaching 80 and 100 years. Britain’s internal capacity to build the plants is limited, but it would be possible to set up a joint venture with South Korean firms. Dedicated researchers are already mapping out the regulatory barriers we need to target to get plants built quickly.

Fission has challenges in terms of financing, and SMRs, while promising, are not proven. But fission is nevertheless a route to cheap clean power that has already been demonstrated elsewhere. Miliband’s material austerity is becoming increasingly untenable to elites, and Blair’s technological solutions are aspirational. In the meantime, the government is left to mitigate the costly consequences of its failed policy.

The messaging is haywire. A recent newspaper headline announced with stentorian gravity the hottest May Day since records began; that same headline loomed over a photograph of swimmers frolicking in the surf. And my sheep-farmer neighbor in Cumbria — this year of all years, when the lambs were born onto bone-dry hillsides — leaned on the handlebars of his quad bike and said to me: “The thing is, Chris, when it comes to climate change, I don’t know what to believe.”

Well we do know that the world is getting hotter. Forget restricting the rise in temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as envisaged by the 2015 Paris Agreement; depending on the time period you base your monitoring on, we’ve either already breached that limit or are about to do so. In March, the French government announced measures to prepare the country for a rise of 4°C. Even 3°C would, in the words of Lord Stern, a respected British climate economist, be “way outside the experience of Homo sapiens” and “life-changingly, civilization-changingly, awful”.

Let nobody say we weren’t warned. In 2006, Stern wrote a report about the economics of climate change for Blair’s government that was widely read — and, as it turned out, widely disregarded — both in Britain and abroad. While Stern argued that “the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting”, the most powerful government at the time, that of President George W Bush, believed more in regime change than climate change.

Extrapolating from Stern’s figures, the $4-6 trillion that Bush and his successors spent invading and immiserating Afghanistan and Iraq would have paid for 10 years of the relatively inexpensive transition to a low-carbon global economy that was then on offer. Now, after two more decades of intensive fossil fuel consumption, ever-higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, and many political false starts, this transition has become both more costly and less assured of success. In 2024, the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance costed the necessary climate measures at around $6.5 trillion a year by 2030, rising to as much as $8 trillion by 2035.

On 29 April, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) published a paper entitled “The Climate Paradox: Why we need to reset action on Climate Change”. In the paper’s foreword, Blair wrote that voters are fed up with being asked to make “financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle” that have “minimal” effect on global emissions, and that the UN’s annual COP talking shops “will not deliver change at the speed required”.

Coming from a former prime minister who prided himself on his reading of public opinion and his prioritizing of “delivery” over dogma, these points were well made. Blair’s conclusion, however, was doctrinaire and unwise: “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.” Environmentalists erupted.

The paper itself was authored by Lindy Fursman, a former climate adviser to the New Zealand government. Besides advocating for more investment in adaptation and technological fixes such as carbon capture and removal — both eminently sensible, though regarded by hardline environmentalists as tantamount to “giving up” on efforts to cut emissions — Fursman divided humanity’s attitude to the crisis into three historical phases. First came an age of activism in the Nineties, which was followed by a decade or so of optimism; now, we’ve entered a far more ominous age of apathy.

The age of optimism peaked in Britain in June 2019, when the nation became the first G7 economy to commit to Net Zero by 2050. The amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act was so uncontroversial that MPs waved it through without a vote. It was a rare moment of bipartisanship in the premiership of Theresa May. It was also a year of activism. Extinction Rebellion occupied public spaces, Greta Thunberg scolded the UK parliament, and in September, in cities around the world, at least four million youngsters, many of them truants grinning in their school uniforms, took to the streets to demand radical action. So rattled was the aviation industry by flight shame that a nervy KLM ad asked customers, “Could you take the train instead? Next time, think about flying responsibly.”

Then Covid arrived, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which laid bare, in Fursman’s words, “a fundamental reality: when faced with financial hardship, domestic economic stability and living costs take precedence over climate action”.

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Blackouts are coming for Britain

By Wessie du Toit

In the furore that followed the TBI’s intervention, Stern described Fursman’s paper as “muddled and misleading”. “If the UK wobbles on its route to Net Zero,” he went on, “other countries may become less committed.” Yet regardless of whether the UK government “wobbles”, the future of the world will not be determined by climate action here.

Britain’s share of global emissions is 1% and falling. Its self-image as a decarbonization success story owes less to Net Zero policies than it does to the fact that Britain is a post-industrial economy offshoring emissions to Asian countries that make the processed food, clothes, and electronics we like to buy. By and large, we and much of the rest of Europe have done our emitting, while China surpassed America as the world’s biggest emitter more than 20 years ago.

Instead, it’s the increasingly populous emitters of the developing world — China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa — that will decide what happens next. These markets should now be receiving an unprecedented inflow of affordable climate finance to enable them to feed, house and provide energy to their people without frying the world. And yet, for reasons of indebtedness, poor credit worthiness and superior returns on Wall Street, this isn’t happening except in the case of China. According to the International Energy Agency, 90% of new clean energy investment has gone to the rich world, plus China, since 2021. Just 2% has gone to Southeast Asia. And in 2024, investments in green energy in Africa, whose population is expected to double by 2070, totalled a nugatory $22 billion. This is the most significant factor in our current predicament. But it is not the only one, and, again, politics is to blame.

Far from being the subject of an international consensus, Net Zero has become as divisive a notion as Bush and Blair’s “war on terror” in the early 2000s, and without good reason, for while the war on terror was a mendacious enterprise dressed up as an elevating mission, Net Zero was once a more or less attainable goal undone by politics. As prime minister, Blair compared the fight against climate change to the battle against fascism in the Second World War, and it was his government that published the first draft of the climate change bill that went on to become law. But he also refused to end the tax-free status of aviation fuel because it would have imperilled the great British summer holiday.

Few politicians have the integrity and wherewithal to handle an issue that would test the capacities of the greatest visionary. Nor do we ask them to. But the proposition so cogently laid out by Stern in 2006 — essentially, pay not very much now in order to avoid a world of pain later on — was ignored by our leaders, and many electorates. Planning for the long term, it seems, is anathema to our instantaneous approach to capital allocation, communication and electoral success. Indeed, it may be that electoral democracy in its current state of degeneration is fundamentally unsuited to the kind of systemic change that the crisis demands. That China continues to bring coal-fired power stations online shouldn’t obscure the fact that the People’s Republic has developed by far the most plausible plan for the transition to renewable energy of any major economy.

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The true cost of Net Zero

By David Rose

Given that the Chinese model cannot easily be adapted in the West, and that meaningful change here will only come from popular pressure on political and economic elites, what is lacking most obviously from the current debate is the loud and ungovernable clamour of those who have the most to lose.

For while climate anxiety may course through our tracked and cosseted young people, there is no sign of further mass protests. Extinction Rebellion activists are referred to Prevent. Greta agitates for Gaza. Parents advise their offspring to concentrate on their exams. As I was told by a theology teacher at a large London secondary school, the exuberance shown by pupils during the protest of September 2019, and the school’s support for their cause, has given way to “hopelessness”.

An infantilized and emasculated youth is no driver of revolutionary change. And yet there are two reasons for young people to act. On the negative side, and to descend into the vernacular, while the planet is to some extent demonstrably and unavoidably shafted, if no action is taken it will become worse than shafted. It will become increasingly uninhabitable.

The second reason isn’t negative at all. It’s an inspiring message of emancipation that can be summed up in the words of Jeremy Oppenheim, whose company, Systemiq, funnels investment and expertise into climate measures around the world. “Sustainability,” he writes, “is a promise of freedom: freedom from polluted air, from unaffordable energy, from food systems that harm our health and ecosystems, and from plastics and chemicals that trash our environment… It’s not about restrictions or fear — it’s about the possibility of a better life.” This “better life” is one of abundance in which the weather is our friend, our food actually tastes of something, and we thrive in intelligent partnership with the forces of nature. What could be more thrilling than that?

It’s telling that the most significant intervention on the climate in recent times has come from a septuagenarian former prime minister with a trust problem. It’s time for young people to start owning this crisis; time for them to throw off the noise-canceling headphones and try for a better life.

Indeed, over the past decade, the green movement has successfully trolled for big money from groups with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party, as well as some dollops from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has cynically backed efforts to curb the West’s production of natural gas, the easier to deepen its own energy dominance; and Qatar, known for financing Hamas and other Islamist groups.

Nowhere is the penetration more complete than in the universities, where Chinese and Qatari money are behind the largest proportion of the $29 billion of foreign money sunk into American universities between 2021 and 2024. This, and similar funds flooding Canadian, Australian, and British Universities, buy good will and political influence. Chinese students at institutions like Stanford are also closely monitored by the Beijing regime’s agents in order to stamp out or at least identify dissidents — and when possible, to purloin research for the motherland.

Climate change has emerged as one critical element of this collaboration. The Washington Free Beacon has reported on millions of dollars from a climate nonprofit called Energy Foundation China, run primarily out of Beijing by former Communist Party cadres, flooding campuses. The beneficiaries include the University of Maryland and Harvard (where a professor was arrested for lying to the FBI about his China ties, and then appointed at a Chinese university). The consulting firm Strategy Risks argued Harvard also hosted training sessions for XPCC, a Chinese paramilitary organization, subject to sanctions for being involved in the suppression of the Uyghurs.

The belle of the China ball, not surprisingly, is California. Engagement with the People’s Republic has been long required for elites in the Golden State, whose imports from China are roughly nine times its exports. For China, it is a wonderful place to do business. The country runs a roughly $107 billion trade surplus with California, and the disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense. California fares better with services, notably software and other tech licenses as well as universities, but this only amounts to $5 billion. As climate policy hurts average Californians through deindustrialization, high energy prices, and climate regulation, it enriches China.

The outreach began under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown, who now chairs the legislatively created California-China Climate Institute at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley has been particularly egregious in its embrace of China. So much so that the Government Select Committee on the CCP wrote an open letter to the school, venting “grave concern” about its “joint institute with state-controlled Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen government” and warning that Berkeley is facilitating Chinese espionage of American research.

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Bad news for America doomers

By Joel Kotkin

Newsom is clearly a vassal in training, traveling to China and greeting Xi like a visiting sovereign when the dictator came here. Ahead of the visit, China and California issued a “first-of-its-kind” joint declaration pledging cooperation on subnational climate action, such as “aggressively cutting greenhouse gas emissions, transitioning away from fossil fuels, and developing clean energy.”

Not surprisingly, Beijing dreams of the pliable Newsom as President Trump’s successor. In July 2024, not long after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, several media outlets — including the Asia Times, South China Morning Post, and Business Insider — reported that Newsom was seen by the regime as “a fresh but also positive and more sober-minded politician in the US” who “could be a cool head among this anti-China US consensus”.

The greens are also “all in” for this kowtowing behavior. The Hill, quoting Alex Wang — a UCLA professor and former Natural Resources Defense Council attorney who helped establish the NRDC’s China office — praised the governor for being “engagement-oriented, at a time when engagement is seen as a dirty word by some people” and sending “a green light for more collaboration” with China “to move as quickly as possible on climate action and climate research.”

But it’s not just California politicians and NGOs on the Chinese green gravy train. The Energy Foundation has also lavished large grants on groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute, whose policy agenda includes the electrification of homes and EV mandates that benefit the Middle Kingdom. This reflects China’s industrial strategy that is in part built around capturing new markets, of which “green” products like EVs and solar panels are critical components.

The CEO and president of Energy Foundation China is Ji Zou, who previously served as a deputy director-general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, under the government’s National Development and Reform Commission. In 2013 and 2014, he served as a Chinese representative to the UN Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing.

Of course, Chinese influence extends well beyond California. Right-wing groups have also been known to align with China, and its wealth has turned Republicans, like former House Speaker John Boehner and former Sen. David Vinter, into Beijing lobbyists and acolytes.

But for the most part, China’s best allies are found, perhaps unwittingly, on the progressive Left, particularly in billionaires like Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, as well as powerful foundations like Rockefeller, MacArthur, Hewlett, and a large coterie of donor-funded NGOs.
All are devoted to “fighting” climate change, whatever the cost to the unwashed.

As China gears up its increasingly anti-American response to President Trump’s trade antics, including racist AI-generated videos, it also can count on the behind-the-scenes backing of obliging Wall Streeters like Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, and Larry Fink. Business is business, I suppose.

Similarly, Silicon Valley firms seem less committed to fulfilling American aspirations than enabling Xi Jinping’s “China dream” of greater state control, more wealth, and worldwide technological supremacy. Alexander Karp, co-founder of the defense-tech firm Palantir Technologies, has argued in his recent book that most social-media and internet CEOs view the US as a “a dying empire, whose slow descent cannot be allowed to stand in the way of their own rise.” Instead, they have become accomplices helping achieve Beijing’s stated aim of becoming the leading global superpower by 2025.

The rise of pro-China politics can be seen in other countries, too. The recently elected, pro-China Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney advocates for policies that would block oil drilling and place burdens on Canadian mining, agriculture, and industry for environmental reasons, even while stating no objections to China’s coal-plant building spree to power its own solar-panel industry. A greener Canada, as currently defined, will have to genuflect to China to procure the requisite rare earth minerals and the technology for processing the “renewable” energy that Canadian Liberals crave.

This alliance between China and the greens can likewise be seen in Britain and Australia, where China has won over allies among center-Left parties. In Labour-run Britain, China is building a mega-embassy in London that will likely help the surveil and harass those who fled Communist Party rule for the assumed safety of Britain. In Germany, China has been very active in trying to evade climate-related duties on their exports. In December 2024, two of the largest German media companies conducted an investigation of “dozens of climate projects in China” that Germany approved for domestic “carbon credits” and found that the Chinese credits were “likely fake and part of a large carbon credit scam.”

Besides appealing to the profit motive of the plutocratic elites, China takes advantage of our liberal institutions — and our comparatively open economies — only to undermine them. The Chinese have become skilled at siphoning off the technological edge of the West. Chinese money also goes to diaspora groups that attack as “racist” anyone who protests CCP policies. For example, the Committee of 100, a China-aligned US group, singled out former Rep. Michelle Steel, a Korean native based in California, for being “racist.” Her real crime? Criticizing her Democratic opponent’s support for a China-backed program promoting Chinese language and culture in elementary schools.

China’s apologists justify their sympathy in large part on concern about our common earthly future. After all, the UN aid chief recently praised Beijing’s green “leadership.” Like almost anything that comes from Turtle Bay, this seems patently absurd. The country won’t stop building coal plants, at least not in the foreseeable future. Its 1,161 coal-power plants account for 55 percent of global carbon emissions from coal.

China overall emits far more GHG pollutant than any country and is responsible for more than 30 percent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share. Not content to spew at home, it is also building coal plants around the world as coal consumption hits a historic high.

The greens make little effort to demand that China stop its pollution, which no doubt the People’s Republic would refuse. Instead, the greens prefer to turn their ardor against Western industries and consumers. Greens, for example, barely raised a peep after China recently decided to slash its GHG-reduction pledge.

For China, this represents clever realpolitik. Demands for massive purchases of Chinese solar technology, rare earths, and EVs creates a huge boon to the Middle Kingdom. Current green policies necessitate a flood of Chinese EVs, as well as panels from its solar-panel industry, while green obsessions undermine Western industries.

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China is already working to make sure that key solar manufacturing technology is not exported to potential competitors. The country boasts a huge lead in solar battery production, and increasingly dominates the production of the rare earth elements, which also figure prominently in wind turbines, solar panels, and EVs. As American electric-car firms struggle with production and supply-chain issues, China’s Warren Buffett backed BYD has emerged as the world’s top EV manufacturer, with big export ambitions, while Tesla focuses much of its future growth at its Chinese factories.

We already know who pays the price for kowtowing to China. It has meant a massive erosion of jobs and productive capacity. The United States has lost an estimated 3.4 million jobs since China was invited to the World Trade Organization at the turn of the century. The US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned to $419 billion last year, up from under $10 billion in 1990. China’s ratio of imports to exports was 4 to 1 in 2018. Academics from the climate-industrial complex continue to claim renewable energy is cheaper and the move towards them is “unstoppable,” but virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are generally those with the strictest renewable policies — Germany, Britain, California.

This pro-China regime may have enriched some in the City of London, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, but is clearly no boon to the rest of the Western population. Living standards in the post-industrial West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ peacetime life expectancy has gone down for the first time. China’s successful wooing of some on the Left seems odd not only because the country is spewing greenhouse gas and repressing its people, including Muslims, but also producing a society where income inequality exceeds that of the United States.

Ultimately, the only way for the West to get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China just put off for at least another decade — can be accomplished is by squelching all future growth.

As Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes, it would entail catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West, This program, he suggests, can only succeed only by imposing “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship.” China’s leaders, for their part, are quite clear: they will not sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost. They understand clearly that declining living standards threaten their hold on absolute power.

The West needs to escape this trap. Fortunately, even some on the Left recognize the danger of dependency on China, with The New Republic recently suggesting that Washington needs to relearn “the language of mining and metallurgy.” The ultra-green Guardian has recently embraced the argument that US manufacturing needs to come back, allowing for “an exit path from neoliberal globalization” and the creation of higher-paid blue-collar jobs.

The West must choose not to surrender its productive economy to the polluting superpower in Asia. The notion of giving up progress and living standards for the middle and working classes — largely to sustain the same classes in China, Russia, and Iran — sounds like a bad bet. Voters will see it that way — and punish ruling classes that acquiesce, sooner or later.

The country is plagued by an affordability crisis, a housing shortage, crumbling infrastructure, and a general sense of diminishing expectations. For abundance liberals, it’s no accident that these crises are most acute in the states and cities where Democrats hold most of the political power.

The journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have emerged as the most prominent faces of this movement. In their buzzy new book, Abundance, they argue that scarcity is a choice, and that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need”. Progressives, in this telling, must be on the side of dynamism and productive capacity, even if this means bucking the Left’s orthodoxies.

The abundance movement gives hope for a progressive revival amid Trumpian gloom — even if proponents fail to fully reckon with the material incentives that keep many of their constituents on the side of the un-abundant status quo.

Supply-side liberals want to roll back regulations that make it harder to innovate and build. Yet it would be a mistake to cast them as neoliberals in the Clinton-Obama mold, as many on the Left are now doing. They emphasize the role of a strong, active government in shaping policy and directing markets. And while some abundance liberals describe themselves as moderates, many more are explicit about their passion for progressive ideals. The concern that unifies them is the tendency of progressive governance to hinder its own ostensible goals.

Stringent zoning laws block the construction of new housing, while burdensome rules around the use of public money make affordable public housing too expensive to build. Endless environmental reviews delay public transportation and green infrastructure projects. As Klein and Thompson put it: “Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do.”

Ordinary people suffer as a result. A majority of California tenants are now “rent-burdened”, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on housing. The same is true in New York City. Nearly a quarter of Seattle residents spend more than half of their income on rent. Even middle-class workers are being priced out of the most desirable cities and job markets.

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Nonetheless, deep-blue cities permit far fewer new homes than those with more conservative governance. Despite having 8 million more residents than Texas, the Golden State issued only half as many residential building permits in 2023. Meanwhile, in Austin, the median rent has fallen a staggering 22 percent over the last two years, even amid a tech boom, thanks to a concerted push to build new rental housing.

Difficulty building isn’t confined to the housing sector. Large infrastructure projects in blue areas regularly run behind schedule and over-budget due to onerous regulations and activist litigation. In 2008, California approved funding for an ambitious high-speed-rail project stretching across much of the state. The project is now $100 billion over-budget and a decade behind schedule. Meanwhile, the Lone Star State, with its loose regulatory climate, beats environmentally friendly California in solar and wind power capacity.

These failures partly explain why blue areas drifted most dramatically to the Right in the 2024 election, with core urban voters in liberal bastions like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City shifting 8 percentage points toward Trump. This should terrify Democrats, but they appear incapable of correcting course.

To be sure, the toxic and inane cultural politics progressives championed over the last decade did Democrats no favors at the ballot box. But rebranding the party as more socially moderate — with performative gestures towards masculinity, sports, patriotic kitsch, and Joe Rogan fans — won’t solve the deeper problems of progressive governance.

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By Catherine Liu

For some supply-side progressives, the warning signs were flashing red long before the election. Thompson began to reconsider the cause of supply shortages during the Covid pandemic, when the country was short on protective equipment, drug supplies, and hospital beds. He saw these shortages as more than mere supply-chain failures. The authorities were failing to fast-track an appropriate pandemic response in the same way they failed at housing, energy, infrastructure, and skilled labor. In a January 2022 Atlantic essay Thompson called for a broad “abundance agenda” that would harness the power of both government and markets to supply more of what people need.

Supply-side has long been a Right-coded phrase. The term refers to the economic theory that low taxes and small government boost economic output and living standards for all. Progressives have instead generally focused, to borrow Klein’s words, on “the demand side of the ledger”: subsidizing the cost of housing, food, health care, education, and other essentials.

But price controls and food stamps don’t put more eggs and other goods on supermarket shelves. Simply handing out money for people to buy a limited supply of goods drives up prices, as the inflation of recent years has made clear. Had Kamala Harris been able to follow through on her campaign promise to give $25,000 grants to first-time homebuyers, the likely result would have been a rise in the cost of housing.

When demand outstrips supply, especially for inelastic goods, redistribution is an insufficient response. Hence why supply-side progressives are calling for a political shift away from redistribution toward the production and supply of more goods and services. They want a liberalism that builds and innovates and therefore lowers prices, not just redistributes.

This is a radical departure from the last 50-plus years of progressive orthodoxy, which has focused mostly on inequality and, more recently, climate change. The climate dimension is especially prone to a combination of radicalism and pessimism that alienates ordinary people. The “degrowth” movement — which calls for managed decline and even winding down industrial society in the face of ecological collapse — has gained purchase in many corners of the Left. Even many mainstream liberals espouse tacitly antigrowth sentiments.

Such policies sabotage progressive governance. Then, too, the legislative model was forged in a different era with different problems. The environmental regulations of the postwar era sought to ameliorate the harms associated with rapid economic growth and technological progress. The postwar American economy was vibrant. Suburbs and highways and factories were going up all across the country. But the air and water were polluted, manufacturing was degrading natural environments, and crime, smog, noise, and crowding had the affluent fleeing cities.

But these environmental regulations, zoning laws, historic preservation statutes, and “grassroots” public-interest policies, implemented to protect the public in a time of rapid change, have since been captured by special interests. Activist citizen and business groups weaponize these same laws to stymie construction and growth for their own personal ends.

A willingness to grapple with the failures of progressive governance — and the ideological choices underpinning those failures — sets supply-side progressives apart from many of the other rival factions seeking to remake or just rebrand the Democratic Party. But for now, the abundance faction consists mostly of policy wonks confined to media, think tanks, and academia. A few prominent politicians have expressed support for their ideas, at least as they appear on paper, and others hit on similar themes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently issued a State Economic Blueprint teasing new infrastructure, innovation, government investment, and dynamism. (The cover features hard hats, construction cranes, and a commercial farm that is notably not bucolic.)

However, the “pathologies of the broad Left”, as Klein and Thompson put it, didn’t arise by happenstance, and they won’t be easily cured. Though regulatory hurdles were raised as well-intentioned solutions to the problems of another age, the entrenched interests keeping them in place are very much contemporary. In the cities home to much of the Democratic base, NIMBYism remains a potent force. Affluent homeowners have moved back into the cities, but they still fear the traffic, crime, noise, and blocked views that come with high-density affordable housing and infrastructure projects. They are unlikely to be happy about slumping home prices as new housing stock becomes available.

Klein and Thompson are too quick to excuse or brush aside the vested interest affluent liberals have in the status quo. Klein has asked for grace and understanding for the contradictory but human impulses of those practicing what he calls “lawn-sign liberalism”. Elsewhere, Thompson floated promoting the abundance agenda as pushback against greedy elites but stopped short of openly blaming homeowners.

Yoni Appelbaum, another supply-side progressive with a new book out, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, is more comfortable naming villains. Appelbaum points the finger at Jane Jacobs, the community activist famous for keeping planning virtuoso Robert Moses from running highways through Manhattan. Jacobs’s writing and activism against large “top-down” urban development in favor of community-based planning laid the blueprint for activist groups that would squash urban development for decades to come.

In Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back, yet another text simpatico to the abundance movement, Marc Dunkelman argues that such activists, and progressives in general, have leaned too far into a “Jeffersonian” impulse as opposed to the Hamiltonian tradition’s emphasis on developmentalism and large-scale solutions to mass problems.

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Though such honesty is refreshing, Thompson is probably right that a politics vilifying homeowners would struggle to find a constituency among affluent liberals with property in major cities. No one likes to be told that they are the problem. Even if the movement can find support among young progressives struggling to break into the housing market, the youth vote isn’t easy for progressives to mobilize (just ask Bernie Sanders); many young people are now pivoting to the Right anyway.

Immigration is another sticking point. Supply-side progressivism shares traditional progressivism’s support for expanding migration. Matthew Yglesias, a longtime associate of Klein’s, made this argument explicitly in his book One Billion Americans, published in 2020 (the title gives away the gist). However, while supply-side progressives are mostly in agreement, few seem so eager to foreground the point — understandably, given the ferocious public backlash against an unrestricted border under former President Joe Biden.

Klein and Thompson make only passing mention of the need for more skilled immigrant labor to build new infrastructure and technologies, but they spend little time defending or even making the case. Obvious questions go unacknowledged. Why can’t American citizens do these jobs? Won’t more people create even more issues with supply? The reason is surely strategic: the public has soured on mass immigration, which has been electorally damaging for progressive parties across Western democracies.

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Then there are unions. The abundance movement’s critics on the Left charge that making building easier would disrupt unions and be “politically ruinous”. It’s true that Klein & Co. identify labor laws as one of the factors holding back development. Yet Klein has also underscored his support for the labor movement, noting that countries with stronger unions build transit infrastructure faster and for less than the United States, with its much weaker labor movement. Klein is correct to warn, however, that nothing threatens the labor movement more than a public that blames it for the failures of progressive governance.

Still, criticizing labor law risks making enemies for abundance within organized labor. Likewise, few “affluent metropolitan liberals” will take kindly to the movement’s criticisms of environmental regulations, DEI initiatives, and other progressive pieties.

That’s why some abundance liberals have sought to forge partnerships across the aisle. Colin Mortimer of the Center for New Liberalism, a think tank that serves as a home for this rising strain of progressive thought, pointed to the Abundance Institute as a “Right-wing institution” promoting an abundance agenda centered around science and technology. Then there is the economist Tyler Cowen and his “state-capacity libertarianism”, which can be thought of as an inverse movement tackling the pathologies of the Right: above all, a perverse adherence to laissez-faire principles and refusal to harness the unique powers of government.

Likewise, figures in the so-called Tech Right — such as the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, who have both lamented the country’s inability to build — get lumped into the abundance mix. “The degree that we can make this a cross-partisan, bipartisan issue, we think that’s fantastic, and it’s going to be all the more reason why this movement can be effective”, Mortimer told me.

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Yet the danger is that Right and Left abundance proponents will each double down on their own side’s respective preferences without taking up the productive ideas of the other: that is, Republicans will deregulate without building up state capacity, while Democrats will splurge without deregulating.

The first months of the new Trump administration are instructive. The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, himself pro-building and pro-dynamism in the Andreessen-Thiel sense, doesn’t appear to share any interest in making government perform better — or at all. The new Trump administration, largely abandoning the pro-worker populist posturing of the campaign trail, now seems intent on realizing Grover Norquist’s quip about shrinking the government until it can be drowned in a bathtub.

For their part, Thompson and Klein frame their agenda as an opportunity to step into the vacancy Republicans create by peddling what they call a “scarcity mindset”, in which, as JD Vance infamously claimed, illegal immigrants are taking up all of the homes that could go to native citizens. Their great hope is that Democrats might help forge a new political order that displaces the faltering neoliberal consensus.

Until recently, this did not seem so out of the realm of possibility: some Republicans had shown more openness to state interventions and industrial policy, and the Biden administration, which chose to leave many of Trump’s strategic tariffs in place, was able to garner enough bipartisan support to enact no fewer than three large spending bills centered around infrastructure and industrial policy.

Lately, however, supposedly populist Republicans have come more and more to resemble their tax-cutting, government-attacking, laissez-faire predecessors, while many Democrats are falling back into tired #Resistance tropes. Can abundance liberals (and thoughtful counterparts on the Right) cut through these familiar battle lines to forge creative new solutions to the nation’s supply problems? At stake is the future not just of the Left, but American prosperity in the 21^st century.

First up, Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, announced that his new “Nature Restoration Fund” would “speed up the building of new infrastructure and homes across the country” and support a third runway at Heathrow — the fund is part of a crazed plan to make 150 infrastructure decisions by the end of this Parliament, “while supporting nature recovery at scale”!

Environmentalists everywhere gasped at his audacity. This was Orwellian doublespeak of the most shameless kind. Building roads, houses and runways is literally the opposite of nature restoration. The point isn’t that we don’t need more infrastructure projects — we often do, but until now no one has claimed they are “green”, or that environmental funding should be used to speed them up.

This is the same Steve Reed who has failed to deliver thousands of farmers the “green transition” that they were promised, and allowed the Treasury to torpedo, or pause, several strands of environmental funding for farms. It seems that in our age of Austerity 2.0, the Government can’t foot the bill for any environmental programs it promised to pay for five years ago.

Oh, and that same week, Rachel Reeves claimed that “bats and newts” were holding up economic growth, and  we really ought to be less sensitive. And that aviation is now cleaner and greener, so we don’t need to worry about that anymore — seriously, Rachel? The Chancellor likes to say that she’s making necessary “ruthless decisions”. The question is whether she makes good ones. Her number one mission for this Government is “growth” — and clearly, this even applies to environmental policy. What could possibly go wrong?

Then Steve Reed popped back up, and told us we needed to have a “national conversation about land use”. Really, Steve? How do you think a national conversation is going to go when the giant polluters are rich and powerful with direct access to No. 10? How do you think Welsh or Cumbrian hill farmers are going to fare in that conversation? What we need instead is a conversation about how corrupted, confused and contradictory environmental policy has become, and how little trust any of us have in government now.

Up until now, we were assured we were “all in it together” when it came to fighting climate change and biodiversity loss in the UK. I might have to change my diet or type of car, my household heating system or how I manage my fields, but that was kind of OK, because everyone else was doing their bit too.

But recently, this solidarity has begun to fracture. The idea of reducing consumption isn’t going down very well with voters, to put it mildly. Donald Trump was barely in the White House for five minutes when he told Americans to ignore all the climate doom and gloom and embrace cheap energy. “Drill, Baby, Drill!” he bellowed.

A similar rebellion is taking place in the UK. Not long ago, almost everyone in British politics paid lip service to the idea that we really ought to address climate and biodiversity crises. Delivery was often slow, with ridiculously small budgets, but it at least looked like we were trying. But in their desperation for economic growth, the Left, as well the Right, is now ripping up previously sacrosanct environmental and political norms.

Yet should “growth” really be our only priority? The Chancellor needs to be careful because the grown-up green consensus is a fragile one. Solving big environmental problems is hard, and most of us don’t want to do it. So if we get the hint that we’re off the hook, then the project could fall apart pretty quickly.

As a farmer, I know how frustrating environmental policy can be. Ideally, farmers would like to dredge rivers, rip out hedges and trees in our fields, and use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. All this would maximize productivity — and if “growth” was the sole purpose of our farms, we’d do all this and more. We would clear the last remaining forests and drain the last wetlands, and even reclaim the estuaries and marshes as we once did to feed Britain. But we know that doing this made our farmed landscapes into some of the most nature-depleted regions in the world. The awkward and frustrating truth is that growth isn’t the only metric that counts.

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Yet the alternative — sustainable economic growth — is hard work and complicated. Not only do we have to think about boosting productivity, but we also need to consider the environmental costs. Only idiots get to “Drill, Baby, Drill!” or “Plow, Baby, Plow!” like we live in a world without consequences.

One way that economists have tried to square this circle is “carbon offsetting”. This is when individuals and companies invest in environmental projects elsewhere — often in developing countries — in order to balance out their own carbon footprint. They can then boast about being “carbon neutral”. In theory this system allows growth to happen, while also paying for the damage we do to nature. But it is a terribly flawed idea.

When we agree to the principle of offsetting, we accept that the cost of helping nature in one place is its destruction in another. That means a fossil fuel company can bribe a wildlife trust or NGO into greenwashing what they’re doing by offsetting their carbon credits. In this way, we are all made complicit in the systemic destruction of the natural world.

Offsetting creates vast flows of capital (as “carbon credits” can be traded), but it is inherently dishonest. It is a gold rush fueled by bullshit — it’s all about creating some numbers to put in a spreadsheet back at HQ so you can claim your airline, powerplant or supermarket is “carbon neutral”. Naturally, some good will be done with some of this offsetting money, and many environmentalists are doing their best. But in the end, it’s a smoke-and-mirrors game, which turns bad guys into heroes, and assuages the guilt and responsibility of the wealthy.

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It’s above all a game that plays to the strengths of the rich and powerful. A new kind of feudalism is now emerging in the British countryside. Large landowners, who have always held their tenants and workers in contempt, can now get rid of them, let the land go, and claim vast sums of money for preserving nature and offsetting carbon emissions. You don’t need to be a qualified environmentalist to get your hands on this offset cash, just a plenty of acres, the gift-of-the-gab, some claims about “carbon sequestration” or “biodiversity gain” and a swanky website. These landowners have the scale required to play the game — and they’d far rather have a safari experience outside the back door than some grumpy tenant farmers.

What we’re seeing is a two-tier system of responsibility for the environment, with the powerful and wealthy given a free pass to pollute because they are the miraculous deliverers of “growth”. It has become a giant power play (which is about to get worse because of the vast energy needs of AI), in which the wealthy assuage their guilt by buying out everyone else — including farmers, who can’t possibly compete. Indeed, Britain’s landscapes are being rapidly bought up by wealthy landowners and giant corporations: more than 40% of land purchased last year was by non-farmers. And they seem to have our government in their pockets. They whisper about “growth” and needing deregulation and suddenly Labour becomes their pet. Meanwhile, the rest of us are bribed and cajoled into “offsetting” their mess.

Another problem is that offsetting is rarely a straight swap. A developer might bulldoze an ancient woodland, and pay for a new one to be planted elsewhere. But even if it’s twice the size, this low-quality replica won’t truly offset their damages. The ancient oak tree they felled to clear space for a new road would have taken centuries to grow, and it would have been part of an ancient ecosystem supporting hundreds of species of wild things. The new woodland they plant with plastic tree guards is an entirely false creation that will take decades, if not centuries to remotely resemble what they have destroyed. And given the logic of offsetting, someone else will in time destroy this new wood too. This cycle will repeat itself until nature is pushed to the lowest quality land and everywhere else is tarmac, housing and shopping centers.

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The worst thing about offsetting, though, is that it stops us talking honestly about industries that do real damage — burning fossil fuels or using finite natural resources. It allows us to keep polluting under the illusion it’s all OK, and that the debt has been paid. Yet shifting emissions from one place to another, from a factory to a forest, won’t reduce the emissions. It just allows big business to keep on polluting.

The solution, of course, is for the state to pay for nature restoration, or mandate it through regulation, so we all pay the real price of pollution and nature destruction. But being broke is making our government desperate and weak. Rachel Reeves’s proposed Heathrow runway threatens to create so many emissions that all the offsetting we’ve done for years will be pointless.

I’ll go back to our hillside later today, to plant some more trees, out of sheer bloody stubbornness if nothing else. In a year or two this place will be different, an emerging wood pasture with lots of wildflowers. Productive, bio-diverse and beautiful, a once broken place helped to heal. From the crest I can see for miles out across Northern England — a bleak half-broken landscape that could be an inspired mix of nature restoration and thriving family farms. Such a landscape would be full of jobs and produce vital and valuable food.

We should invest in the work of restoring the countryside, not because it greenwashes some other ugly industrial thing elsewhere, but because it is a good investment itself. It would create something for us all. But, then, it seems that we’re not all in this together: some of us are being used, and it’s starting to feel like it is for nothing.

How times change.

Speaking to Labour Conference last week, Ed Miliband — now the Secretary of State at the Department for Net Zero and Energy Security — pledged to construct an “armoury of clean power” for the United Kingdom, in order to make its electricity system “net zero” by 2030. What he didn’t mention, however, was that his brother is being paid by a venture capital outfit whose profits are likely to increase in the process.

***

When David Miliband stepped down from Parliament, his MP’s salary was a modest £66,000. But that was only a small portion of his income. In his final entry in the Commons interests register, he declared he was also being paid £100,000 a year as chairman of Sunderland Football Club, and £92,840 as an adviser to a green investment fund. To top up his account, he also accepted almost £65,000 for appearing at a London forum hosted by the foreign ministry of the United Arab Emirates.

Just over a decade later, David has refashioned himself as a man of virtue: he lives in New York, where he runs International Rescue Committee, a US-based charity that supports people in humanitarian crises. For his services, however, he receives a princely sum. In 2022, he took home a salary of $1,253,728, as well as a bonus of $150,000.

For such a level of remuneration, and with such a workload, one might expect David to be busy with the day job. Yet, for more than four years he has had an additional job: in September 2020, five months after his brother became shadow energy secretary in Sir Keir Starmer’s new shadow cabinet, it was revealed that David had become a paid advisor to Giant Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm that has a particular focus on green technology and energy. Following a series of earlier investments, it recently launched a new “climate focused growth fund” and claims it wants to invest a further $1 billion in “sustainable technologies” by the end of the decade.

All of which may seem perfectly in fitting with David’s form when it comes to juggling multiple jobs. Except for one thing: at least two of the companies Giant Ventures has invested in are likely to prosper as a direct result of decisions made by the new government. In other words, David now works for a company that stands to profit from climate policies introduced by his brother Ed.

Before and since the election, Ed Miliband has spoken of the need to create a vast energy storage network connected to the national grid — to ensure that, in a renewable energy system, the lights don’t go out when the sun is not shining and there is no wind. Part of this, he has said, will be supplied by arrays of giant batteries. He mentioned them again in his conference speech last week, when he called for the “armoury of clean power”.

Enter Field, a battery power storage firm set up in 2021 by Amit Gudka, one of the co-founders of collapsed energy firm Bulb. Field, with five sites already finished or being built, claims to be ready to meet Miliband’s challenge. And Giant Ventures seems to agree: according to data gathered by finance research experts PitchBook, it invested in Field at its outset in 2021.

Now, it is possible that Ed Miliband was unaware that Field was partly financed by Giant Ventures, although this had already been reported. It is also possible that didn’t know his brother was a member of the Giant Ventures advisory board, though that information was also public.

But that would be puzzling. According to Whitehall’s Ministerial Code, newly appointed ministers must formally declare “all interests that might be thought to give rise to a conflict” with their government post: not only their own, but those of their spouse and “close family members”. They must not only avoid any conflict, but also the “perception” that one might arise. It should have been obvious to Ed Miliband that he had a duty to check his brother’s interests.

This year’s declaration is yet to be published, but both Labour and Conservative former ministers told me that declarations of ministerial interests are usually made immediately after taking office, so that civil servants are aware from the start where conflicts might arise. I asked both the energy department and the Cabinet Office, which is responsible for the list, whether Ed had declared David’s role at Giant Ventures, but both refused to comment. Asked when the next list would be published, all they would say is that this would happen “in due course”.

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Similarly reticent, Giant Ventures refuses to disclose how much it pays David Miliband, but it seems certain he does receive a stipend: one of his fellow advisory board members, Lord John Browne, the former chairman of BP, states in the Lords register of interests that the position constitutes “remunerated employment”. For Miliband in particular, this “employment” takes a number of forms: not only does he attend board meetings — he also appears at events and in the firm’s videos and podcasts.

As for the insight he provides to the fund, a spokesperson told me that, “like all venture capital firms that are not listed on public markets, we do not publish our investor reports to the general public”. However, PitchBook has identified two firms that look likely to profit from Ed Miliband’s “clean energy superpower” revolution. As well as Field, for instance, there is Beams, which helps homeowners make their properties more energy efficient — a service that should prosper following Miliband’s pledge to impose tough, green standards on both private and public rental homes.

Miliband has also made a specific ministerial decision that will benefit Field. Less than three weeks after the election, Field became the beneficiary of a technical change to the rules governing Britain’s electricity supply system that Miliband personally signed.

The document in question, the Capacity Market (Amendment) Rules 2024, is not an easy read. It relates to the curious way that the grid pays for energy storage: under the “capacity mechanism”, the Government concludes expensive contracts with companies such as Field, who in return guarantee that they will supply a stipulated amount of electricity at a moment’s notice for a given period of time. (In the case of batteries, the limitations of battery technology mean this will be no more than a few hours.) Under this system, the companies get paid whether or not they actually supply any energy.

The cost, which has been rising steadily, is met by adding a levy to customers’ electricity bills. Energy supply expert Gordon Hughes, emeritus professor of political economy at Edinburgh University, told me that by the beginning 2026, the annual cost is likely to be more than £2 billion, the equivalent of £70 per household, and by 2030, up to £5 billion.

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Until Ed Miliband changed the rules, the problem for companies like Field was that when batteries are used and recharged repeatedly, their capacity deteriorates. This meant that battery firms had to pay to install more capacity than their contracts said they needed when their batteries were new, so that they would not be running the risk of breaching their contracts when their capacity declined. This was because the old rules said they were not allowed to add more capacity if and when it was required. “This change is clearly advantageous to them,” says Hughes, “because it allows them to reduce their upfront costs. It is also likely to increase their profits.”

This was not the only decision Miliband made on 18 July that may come to benefit Field. On the same day, he signed a letter to the national grid setting out details of the capacity mechanism’s future, which will create lucrative opportunities for firms like Field to build more batteries, enhancing their profits and the value of investments made by venture capital firms.

After the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero told me it could not comment as to whether Ed Miliband had declared his brother’s interest in Giant Ventures, I sent an email setting out details of how a conflict, or at least the appearance of one, might occur. But Its spokesperson refused to address this, saying only: “There is an established process in place for the declaration and management of interests held by ministers. This ensures that steps are taken to avoid or mitigate any potential or perceived conflicts of interest. The List of Ministers’ Interests will be published as part of this in due course.”

Giant Ventures said it did not wish to comment, while David Miliband failed to respond at all.

This is unsurprising. Since leaving Parliament, David Miliband has been reluctant to speak publicly about his relationship with Ed. But on one of the few occasions that he has, in 2015, he told The Guardian: “I’ve always said you remain brothers for life.”

There, the conversation touched on a book heralding the return of enchantment, terror, and awe to the world. And as the sky seemed to tear around me, it was as if that uncanny feeling of the world’s aliveness was suddenly all around me.

Cocooned in my warm, dry car, it felt exhilarating: insulated from the wild elements by my mechanical bubble. But that sense of engineered safety has, at a broader level, grown shakier recently – not least because there have been more wild elements about than usual. The weekend’s rain prompted flood warnings across England, and by Monday homes, streets, and cars were flooded. Schools, roads, and train routes were closed. There was even a ‘mini-tornado’ in Luton. 

Is our weather getting more uncanny? The press thinks so: it’s as though we want it to be getting worse. A chilly spell in summer is “the coldest on record”; a wet month “the wettest”. Headlines about “extreme” weather are common, while you have to read more than halfway down the Met Office’s page on “extreme rainfall” in the UK to discover that this is “within past natural variation”. 

In other words: in keeping with the usual British climate, nothing is still happening, changeably, and with lots of precipitation. But even business more or less as usual has become a dread omen: “Never-ending rain” is now promised as our winter future – and not just any old rain but “20% wetter” rain. Even small variations in temperature merit panicky headlines: earlier this year there was great merriment in India after the Mirror warned of a “heatwave” rising as high as 26 degrees, which for a subcontinent accustomed to ambient temperatures well above 40 might mean putting on a cardigan.

There’s some justice to the sniggering. The defining feature of our climate is that while it’s sometimes unkind to picnickers or cricket-lovers, it’s rarely aggressively hostile. The worst it’s conventionally likely to do is bore us to distraction, through yet another miserable winter afternoon. Following his first visit to England in 1955, the Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri concluded that the English must derive their characteristically even temper from this changeable but mild climate – not least because, he observed, once transplanted to the stark heat of the subcontinent that serenity swiftly soured into a far more unpleasant ill-temper.

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The historian Robert Winder made a similar case more recently, arguing in The Last Wolf (2017) that beyond anything else, the English are the way they are because of the landscape and weather. And yet, wonders Paul Kingsnorth in response: is that still true? Certainly, the derision that greeted Robert Jenrick for invoking “English identity” recently suggests we’re no longer quite as sure who we are. And if Kingsnorth is right, this uncertainty may be connected to our relative insulation from climate and landscape. 

Certainly, meeting thunder and lightning in the chilly, hand-to-mouth world of Bronze and Iron Age Britain must have been awe-inspiring and frightening in equal measure. No wonder the ancient Celts would burn human sacrifices to propitiate Taranis, the god of thunder and lightning. And in Anglo-Saxon Britain Þunor, a fierce god whose rumbling carriage wheels made the thunder, was so widely venerated he was often specifically named in baptismal vows as one of the deities being renounced. 

It’s not difficult to imagine that the confrontation with climate you’d experience in mostly un-heated and far less waterproof Bronze Age England would help shape both individual characters, and the culture of wider communities in that environment By contrast, while I enjoyed the midnight thunderstorm over East Anglia, I remained largely cut off from it. It felt thrilling, but not overwhelming.

When I think of traditional English foods, clothing, and festivals, many of these (such as stodgy puddings) only make sense if you live largely outdoors and your home has no central heating. So perhaps Kingsnorth is right, and the great enemy of national identity is really modernity and its technologies, in the many ways these uproot us from the spirit of a place and climate. And yet, paradoxically, it’s this same arc of modernity which is now conjuring the weather gods back into the world today.

Whether it’s caused by gods, fairies, or climate change, chaotic weather spells catastrophe for farming cultures. Over four centuries ago, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream captured that sense of deep unease: 

“…The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.”

Perhaps more than any other English literary figure, Shakespeare had one foot in the medieval world and one in early modernity. In the centuries that followed him, science and technology marched relentlessly on, driving back the weather gods — and even the fairies — while advancing our control over and protection from our environment. In its wake the world has grown a great deal more comfortable; but the price was what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “disenchantment”: the loss of magic and mystery from the world, replaced with a more banal universe of legibility and mastery. Even A Midsummer Night’s Dream we can see that slow retreat of enchantment: here, climate chaos is not — as it was for the Celts — a frightening reality that prompts human sacrifice, but a jolly device in a play, caused by fairies quarrelling.

Modernity, then, disenchanted the world by controlling it through technology. Now, though, four centuries further into that arc of discovery and power, the weather gods are back — but this time as byproducts of modernity: first with the reported threat of climate change, and secondly thanks to the power of big data to visualise these changes. 

Today, those charts and visualisations are at everyone’s fingertips, in our ubiquitous smartphones. There’s even an app called “Weather Gods” that promises to “immerse” me in climate data with graphs, sounds, and cute personifications of the elements. It grants an illusion of control over the weather — but, in practice, all I actually get is slightly more precise guidance on whether I should take an umbrella with me than I’d get from looking at the sky and making a judgement call. The same also goes for all the charts and graphs which support the torrent of dire warnings about the effect modernity itself is having, in aggregate, on the weather. No matter how many warnings or calls to action are published, emissions go on rising.

And this is because both the weather, and aggregate human consumption, are types of complex and self-propelling dynamic systems that we can see, thanks to measurement and data visualisation, but which remain radically resistant to influence. In other words: exactly the kind of mysterious force that earlier times might have personified as a god or demon.

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Of course, after four centuries of disenchantment we’re out of the habit of using such a florid term as “god” or “demon”. And yet, for all that we’re having the conversation in a “sciencey” register instead, with charts and computer models and so on, the subtext is still closer to the ancient Celts’ relation to the sky. What it expresses is a deep fear that we’re making the weather gods angry: a fear now so widespread it pervades the public conversation even in a temperate country where nothing much really has changed about the weather. 

In the light of this fear, we notice every little blip, each of which is now documented, measured, tabulated and pored over as possible evidence of “climate change”. And it’s not so much that the weather is worse than usual, but that we are expecting it to be worse, because a larger narrative about excess, greed, overreach and vengeful gods has told us it’s going to be. If it’s ironic that our modern lifestyles are conjuring their retribution, it’s even more ironic that the sciencey stuff is itself now encouraging us to see the climate in these terms, as a vengeful deity.  

Whereas ancient peoples made gods of the weather in the absence of information, we are re-awakening these gods as a byproduct of too much. And what these ancient and post-modern forms of weather god have in common is the sense of powerlessness, awe, and fear that comes with confronting the presence of forces greater than us: in a word, re-enchantment. 

We might, perhaps, find the presence of these figures easier to bear if we were willing to acknowledge them more directly. For it is growing apparent that “disenchantment” was the dream all along. It was an effect of the illusion that we were ever in control: an illusion the weather gods can shatter at will, with a single thunderbolt.

Of all these subjects, it is the latter that appears to interest Brown most. Indeed, not only does her work concern crafting Britain’s new energy strategy — she also stands to benefit from it.

There is no suggestion that Brown, a cross-bench peer known as Julia King before she was ennobled in 2015, has done anything unlawful, and in an email to UnHerd she stressed that her “integrity is critical”. Nevertheless, some of the entities now paying her may well come to benefit from the policies she has championed — including a decision by the new Labour government to invest at least £500 million in an unproven technology designed to store electricity.

In the middle of March, Brown’s committee published a report on “long-duration energy storage”. It took as read what some energy experts consider to be a controversial claim: that power generated by renewables such as wind farms and solar panels is cheaper than that from natural gas. The report’s main focus, however, was a large, unavoidable problem: what happens when there’s high demand for electricity, but the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?

The solution it offered was certainly a novel one: a process known as “green hydrogen”. This would use electricity to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which would then be stored underground in salt caverns or disused natural gas reservoirs; when demand increased, it could then be burnt in adapted power plants to generate more electricity.

Such a proposal may sound like futuristic genius, but it wasn’t without its critics. In his evidence to the committee, Michael Liebreich, one of Britain’s foremost experts on green energy finance and technology, pointed out that green hydrogen is much more expensive to handle than that made by other means, such as “blue hydrogen”, which uses natural gas. In fact, turning “overhyped” green hydrogen into electricity effectively triples the original energy’s cost, because the process of doing so needs so much power. Undaunted, the committee said the government must “engage and communicate” with the public to cure “misperceptions”, in order to “ensure support for vital hydrogen and electricity infrastructure”.

In any event, days after the general election, the Department of Net Zero and Energy Security, led by Ed Miliband, announced it was honouring a Labour pledge to commit £500 million to green hydrogen, as Brown’s committee had recommended. Generous as this was, it seems inconceivable that it could lead to the creation of the gigantic power storage reservoir Britain would need by 2030 — the date by which the government has pledged to turn the country into a “clean energy superpower” with a net-zero electricity system.

On the first day that Brown’s committee met to hear evidence in September 2023, Brown declared two interests. One was a non-executive directorship at Ørsted, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of offshore wind, which pays her £40,000 a year. She also declared her non-executive directorship of a company called Ceres Power Holdings, at which her salary, according to the firm’s latest accounts, is £74,000. According to Ceres’s website, it intends to become the world’s biggest source of green hydrogen. “Future demand for electrolysis for green hydrogen production far exceeds supply,” wrote the Ceres CEO Phil Caldwell in the company’s 2023 annual report.

Unlike MPs, peers do not have to declare how much money they earn from their paid, outside interests. As well as her income from Ceres and Ørsted, Brown’s only other interest where her income is known is the £27,000 she receives from chairing a subcommittee of the Climate Change Committee, the powerful body that Ed Miliband created last time he was energy secretary in 2008, which has statutory powers to determine Britain’s energy mix and sets its “carbon budget”. This takes Brown’s disclosed outside earnings to £141,000 a year.

However, she also receives undisclosed sums as a paid adviser to the nuclear industry company Holtec; as the chair of Frontier IP, a tech investment firm whose portfolio includes solar panel makers; and as the chair of the advisory board of BGF, another venture-capital outfit that invests in both wind and solar power. She has also declared she owns shares in Rolls Royce, which intends to build small nuclear reactors.

When I reached Brown by telephone and asked her to reveal the scale of these further payments, she abruptly ended the call. In an email, she clarified that her “integrity is critical” and her “interests are set out in full in the Register of Interests”.

However, in terms of enhancing her influence, yet another of her paid jobs may be the most important of all — her chairing of the Carbon Trust. An international consultancy founded by Tony Blair’s government in 2001, this advises businesses and public sector institutions across the globe on how to cut emissions. (She also refused to divulge how much she is paid for this, but it is evident that the Trust is well-endowed, with offices in London, Beijing, Singapore, Johannesburg and Mexico City, among others.)

Crucially, her work with the Carbon Trust appears to overlap with her role in the House of Lords. On 11 January, Brown announced she had appointed a new Carbon Trust chief executive, Chris Stark. She knew Stark well, having served on the Climate Change Committee during the six years when he was the committee’s chief executive. Her current Lords register entry even lists him as a member of her staff.

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But Stark did not last long at the Trust, for on 9 July, five days after the election, Miliband revealed that Stark was to lead the government’s “Mission Control for Clean Power 2030”. He would, Miliband said, “have a laser-like focus” on delivering the government’s net-zero target and would be working with “key energy companies and organisations” to make this happen.

Brown is not the first public official to have become richer through her involvement with green energy. Andrew Montford, the director of campaign group Net Zero Watch, suggests the sector is especially prone to remunerating people with political influence: “The renewables industry is wholly dependent on politicians for its viability, and inevitably there are relationships that become much too close.”

The former Environment Secretary John Selwyn Gummer, now Lord Deben, is another of Brown’s associates, having chaired the Climate Change Committee 2012 – 23. Throughout this period, he was also chairman of Sancroft International, an environmental consultancy firm staffed by members of his family. In February 2019, I revealed that Sancroft had been paid more than £600,000 by firms that stood to benefit from the committee’s decisions, including Johnson Matthey, which was then in the electric vehicle battery business, and Drax, which has received billions of pounds in subsidies for burning wood pellets at its power plant in north Yorkshire.

Other examples include the former Liberal Democrat energy secretary Chris Huhne, who became a director of a wood pellet firm after his release from prison in 2013, and Chris Skidmore, the former Tory MP and energy minister, who also wrote a major report for the last government on how to achieve net zero. In January 2023, a year before he stepped down from Parliament, he started being paid an annual salary of £80,000 by the Emissions Capture Company, for what he described in the interests register as “providing advice on the global energy transition and decarbonisation”. For this, his entry said, he expected to work for between 160 and 192 hours a year.

As for Brown, she said in her email: “My role as chair of the cross-party Science and Technology Committee draws on the knowledge and expertise gained from my non-parliamentary work, and rather than being a conflict, this background strengthens the work I carry out in Parliament. On the Government’s recent decision to invest in hydrogen storage, I welcome this commitment and look forward to debating the committee’s report and its recommendations in the House in due course.”

In other words, we should be thankful that so many businesses in the energy sector want to reward her for her knowledge and skills. If only the rest of us could be so virtuous — and so prosperous.

Arguably, Biden delivered on Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” promise. While Trump’s 2016 election victory represented a rhetorical break from neoliberalism, Trump’s policies — most notably tax cuts and a perniciously offensive form of deregulation — are better seen as the last gasps of the neoliberal order. Only under Biden did policy actually start to adopt a “post-neoliberal” hue , characterised by a kind of America First protectionism focused on domestic manufacturing and infrastructure investment. As a recent profile by Christian Lorentzen describes the economic and geopolitical outlook of Biden’s main advisors, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken: “They would be like Trump, only progressive.”

Yet if neoliberalism is what Adolph Reed Jr defined as “capitalism without a working-class opposition”, Biden’s approach did not seek to reanimate this opposition as much as ventriloquise it to the benefit of a corporatist project meant to save the country from Trumpism. The brutal reality is that, on the heels of punishing inflation and disastrous foreign policy, working-class voters are still leaving the Democrats in droves. And crucially, come November, such an outcome might give Trump an opportunity to remould Biden’s post-neoliberal project and secure the realignment of American politics to the populist Right for decades to come.

Nowhere is this clearer than in climate policy. Many hailed Biden as America’s first “climate president” and his administration claimed to take a “whole-of-government approach” to solving the climate crisis. Admirably, Biden broke decisively from neoliberal climate policy: most notably the kind of carbon pricing solution Barack Obama tried in vain to pass through Congress.

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For economists and other professional-class proponents, putting a price on carbon — or internalising the externalities of climate pollution — was “smart policy” and offered an elegant technocratic fix. These advocates never much cared that there was no popular base for increasing the cost of energy. Even worse, the policy was easily ridiculed by the Right, whose entire argument was that climate change was a liberal plot to destroy jobs and make life more expensive. Such policies have been roundly rejected in the ballot box and in the streets. By contrast, Biden’s climate policy was not framed around a carbon price or tax but rather in terms of investment in the energy and other infrastructure required to decarbonise. Instead of making fossil fuels more expensive, the goal was to use “industrial policy” to make clean energy cheap.

Not only did this approach signal a break with neoliberal economists — it also split from a stale wing of the environmental NGO and activist community who saw climate politics only in terms of opposition to fossil fuels. The modus operandi of these advocates was blockading pipelines and calling for bans on fracking, fossil fuel-burning cars and boilers. But opposing energy that nearly everyone still relies on in their everyday lives is bad politics. Indeed, a large majority of Americans (69%) claim they are not “ready to phase out the use of oil, coal and natural gas completely”.

Finally, analysts are waking up to the fact that decarbonisation is much more about building entirely new infrastructure — such as electricity generation units, transmission lines and public transit — than banning fossil fuels. As such, in the suite of legislation passed between 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration centred what the Financial Times’s Rana Foroohar calls a project of “re-industrialisation” or what Ezra Klein calls a “liberalism that builds”.

This impressive approach to climate policy managed at last to partially overcome the antagonism between environmentalists and labour unions. As Foroohar put it, Biden’s industrial policy is “most beneficial for groups such as the steelworkers, electrical workers and other industrial unions”. A winning climate coalition must include the very workers we need to build a green future, and Biden’s policies encouragingly pointed in this direction.

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The Biden administration also departed significantly from the green orthodoxy that decarbonisation is simply a matter of moving to “renewables”, most notably solar and wind farms. Labour unions are highly sceptical of such an approach — not least because, in the words of one union official, solar and wind installation jobs are “a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organise”. Rather, the Biden administration took an “all of the above” strategy that included a commitment to some risky technologies such as nuclear power, carbon removal and advanced geothermal. A notable example is the creation of a “Hydrogen Hub” in Philadelphia, which will establish a foothold for labour unions in a landscape marked by deindustrialisation, poverty and decline.

However, despite all Biden’s achievements, Trump is still predicted to win the election, and on the climate front, emissions continue to increase. While Biden clearly hoped that his investment programme would help to build a popular coalition able to stave off Trumpism, the reality is most Americans have little idea it exists. According to a poll by Heatmap news, “nearly 60% of voters said they knew little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act”, and other surveys suggest the same.

Part of the problem is that Bidenomics has all the marks of BlackRock — not of Biden, as it has centred private capital over muscular public sector ownership or planning. Its approach had two pillars: first, “the plans” from Elizabeth Warren’s progressive campaign, and second, Wall Street, led by BlackRock alumnus Brian Deese, who saw the opportunity to align the state with efforts to paint finance green through “Environment, Social, Governance” (ESG) investing.

This approach mobilises what Daniela Gaborb calls the “derisking state”, aimed at using government largesse to entice investments from the private sector in the form of lucrative tax credits. This means that when these investments hit the ground — and let’s be clear, most have not — they don’t plant the flag of the Biden administration in left-behind communities. Instead, they touch down under names such as Micron, Hyundai and NextEra.

Contrast this with the New Deal Works Progress Administration or the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built massive, socially useful infrastructure projects emblazoned with Franklin Roosevelt’s visage. Or the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired millions of unemployed young people to plant trees and repair the soil. The message was clear: here was a government that would directly solve public problems. In comparison, Biden’s rebrand of the Civilian Climate Corps is hiring mere tens of thousands of people and nearly all the work has been outsourced to non-profits rather than being undertaken by a remade public sector.

That said, the progressivism of Biden’s economic policy cannot be denied, given its commitment to prevailing wage standards, incentivising investment in fossil fuel communities, and, above all, full employment. Yet this was always a top-down affair, and there is scant evidence that these policies resonate much with ordinary people. With inflation still rocking household budgets and eating into modest wage gains, progressive Biden-partisans are digging in their heels: “But look at the numbers! The economy is so good!” For America’s working-class majority, however, the economy does not feel so good — and that is all that matters in the election.

And so we encounter a situation where a betting person would predict Trump winning and perhaps the Republicans winning both houses of Congress. If this happens, many of Biden’s industrial and infrastructure investments might reach fruition in the first Trump term. Climate advocates are most worried about the likelihood of Trump reversing much of Biden’s climate progress — particularly around culture-war flashpoints such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. But perhaps the more menacing scenario is that Trump is able to take credit for the Biden agenda. Some might even say it was originally the Trump agenda: reviving manufacturing and investing in American infrastructure. Imagine Trump rallies at factories opening their doors with thousands of new industrial jobs, or Trump affixing his MAGA brand to new visible investments in roads, bridges and electric grid infrastructure, just as he printed his name on millions of Covid relief cheques in 2020.

A second Trump term, unlike the first, might actually credibly enact the post-neoliberal Trumpist agenda — all thanks to Biden, who lacked a political strategy to assure it for the Democratic Party. Given that we are likely in a period of political “realignment”, with echoes of the Seventies’ swing towards the Republicans, the risk is that such an outcome could keep Right-wing populists in power for decades to come.

Of course, Trump can still lose. If he does, Democrats should remember that progressive policy alone cannot automatically generate the mass working-class politics needed to create a lasting majority in the 21st century. Rather than giving Wall Street or Donald Trump all the credit for radical Democratic infrastructure projects, Kamala Harris might be wise to plaster her face all over them.

Last week, airport world deposited me in Boston for a few days, during a heatwave that reached humid highs of 36°C. But the heat barely registered as such, thanks to America’s ubiquitous climate control, which helpfully kept my seminar strictly in the productivity zone.

On the rare occasions when I did venture outside, feeling my mind, skin, and limbs adjusting to the solid presence of heat, I found myself mulling over the meaning of air conditioning. What kind of culture sets about engineering away every local variation, even those of the air itself, in pursuit of a maximally standardised, rational and productive environment? The answer was, of course, originally America — but now, increasingly, that aircon culture has propagated worldwide.

A glance at the history and implicit ideology of air conditioning reveals that this technology began as industrial machinery, and swiftly became (at least in the United States) a domestic amenity for Everyman, on a par with indoor sanitation. It has flourished worldwide, as an enabler of economic development. And it expresses, in microcosm, the internationally homogenising power of American culture and technology.

The habitual denizens of the air it conditions, especially in airports, comprise a now-global supra-bourgeoisie. This class has come into its own in tandem with the digital and financial revolutions; its allegiance is, as conservative commentators are fond of complaining, often less to a nation than a placeless international culture of information work, buoyed by air-conditioned flights, offices and hotels, all linked by air-conditioned taxis, and facilitated by frictionless apps. Its members probably studied at Ivy League universities, but may originate from anywhere: for this aircon class, “diversity” genuinely doesn’t mean much more than minor variations in food preference, and the accent with which International Business English is delivered. This group is also, paradoxically, often at the forefront of climate-conscious and passionately egalitarian calls for global emission reductions.

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But this poses a challenge: for as well as being a principal delivery mechanism for the placeless, timeless, frictionless diverse-but-homogenous and climate-controlled culture of the international bourgeoisie, aircon is also incredibly resource-hungry. Depending on how hot the ambient temperature is in any given country, cooling the air to the temperate productivity zone can be hugely expensive, in energy terms. Should it come down to a contest between Net Zero and air-conditioned comfort, which will prevail?

The story of aircon is also the story of American global hegemony. Invented in 1902 by American engineer Willis Haviland Carrier, to address summer humidity problems in a Brooklyn printing factory, aircon swiftly spread first to other factories and then to private homes. The first mass-produced domestic aircon units cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars; but by 1947 it was already so widespread the British scholar S.F. Markham hailed it as “the greatest contribution to civilisation in this century”. By 1979, Time reported many Americans simply took it for granted: they “no longer think of interior coolness as an amenity but consider it a necessity, almost a birthright, like suffrage”. No wonder, then, that half a century later the American Olympic team should react with horror to news that the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris proposed achieving “the greenest Games yet” by providing athletes only with passive, air-source underfloor cooling and fans.

US Olympic organisers were among a number of countries that responded by promising to supply their own air conditioning. By contrast, the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge hailed the aircon-free Paris Olympic village as a positive step in emissions reduction. But perhaps this just reflects just how unevenly distributed airport world still is: Kipchoge grew up in (and still lives in) Kenya, where only around 15% of homes have air conditioning despite average summer temperatures of 35-40°C. It’s reasonable to imagine he is less alarmed by the prospect of a warm night or two, than someone from a country where 88% of homes have it despite far lower average summer temperatures.

Kipchoge’s relaxed response to the prospect of heat also points to something discreetly masked by the seeming neutrality of aircon: the way it flattens local differences. Heat doesn’t just affect comfort: it shapes whole cultures. When you don’t have access to aircon, beyond a certain level of heat, the air stops being a backdrop to everyday life; instead, it becomes something elemental. Even well before the level of heat that threatens health, in the absence of climate control it transforms what is possible — even what is thinkable.

This is obvious at the level of architecture. For example, “riad” palaces, built for wealthy Moroccan traders before the aircon era, are constructed to maximise shade and curate hidden, refreshing luxury for the chosen few. Such buildings have few or no external windows where the sun hits, but look inward instead, to an internal courtyard usually built around a pond or fountain. It’s obvious in the way climate shapes behaviour, too: even in relatively temperate Spain, before aircon the hot summers impelled a norm of working in the early morning and late evening, with a “siesta” during the hot part of the day. (Spain has only begun to abandon this practice since the spread of aircon.)

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Nor is it just cultural practices. Decades of research support the conclusion that mathematical ability, academic performance, and clarity of thought in general, are most easily sustained at airport temperatures: that is, in the mid-20s. Heat affects our emotions, too: as the New York Times put it, over a comfort threshold (again, roughly consistent with airport world norms) being hot makes us “irritable, impulsive and aggressive”. Murder, assault, and domestic violence all rise when the weather is hot.

In his travelogue A Passage to England (1959), Nirad Chaudhuri suggests that the English temperament is formed by the comparatively mild and changeable climate of the British Isles, speculating that this made the English “responsive to changes in the environment, capable of meeting surprises of all kinds […] and of taking contretemps with good humour”. Conversely, Chaudhuri argues, for the British imperial administrators, the extreme Indian heat turned a habitually temperate people into “extremists with an incredible stridency in their opinions, which became raw and crude”.

If, in Chaudhuri’s view, the heat was capable of affecting otherwise self-controlled Englishmen in this way, it invites the question: how much more of the rationalism, the work ethic, and the low-time preference commonly associated with “Western” cultural norms is at least in part the product of relatively temperate European and North American climates? Whatever the answer, studies on temperature and productivity suggest the converse is already demonstrably true. If you want rationalism and productivity to be normative, even in a hot country, you need to engineer ambient temperatures to suit.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the American empire of technology, commerce and global homogenisation began to spread roughly concurrently with the spread of air conditioning. For in practice, that’s really what “development” means: the global rollout of temperate-world lifestyles, behavioural norms, and commercial practices, underwritten by artificial climates adjusted to enable that mindset. The great Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew understood this: in a 2010 interview, he said: that, along with Singapore’s signature style of pragmatic multiculturalism, air conditioning was the single most important factor in its success, “by making development possible in the tropics”.

But this raises uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of “climate justice”. If, as Lee Kuan Yew suggested, an artificially engineered temperate climate is a precondition for the “development” referenced in the phrase “developing world”, then the unevenness of global climates is itself an injustice. As long as you understand “justice” to mean widening access to economic development, the world’s variable temperature is discriminatory to the extent that it impedes populations from being more like the denizens of airport world.

Once you add the fact that climate change is driving dangerous increases in summer heat across many parts of the world, access to cooling seems a matter of global justice for progressives. But the emissions generated by climate control are also part of what is causing temperatures to rise. Today, around 8-10% of Indian households have aircon, but International Energy Agency projections expect this to grow to 50% by 2037, impelled by steadily-rising temperatures in the country — even as the power required to operate these new units helps to accelerate the rise.

How, then, does widening access to aircon square with the need to rein in global carbon emissions for climate reasons? Is the solution a global redistribution of climate control in favour of hot countries? I suspect the US Olympic team’s response to the prospect of doing without is emblematic of the one you’d get, if you proposed to the 88% of American households with aircon that they sacrifice their cooling systems for the sake of people in Uttar Pradesh. And I also suspect that such a reaction stands as a metonym for the way “emissions reduction” will play out overall, between the aircon class and the rest.

The denizens of airport world may currently profess to be both climate-conscious and egalitarian. But this lifestyle cannot sustainably be generalised to the whole planet. And as this becomes more obvious, even the most progressive among their number will surely abandon their egalitarianism long before they switch off the aircon. After all, the only other solution would be to try and move the planet’s entire human population to the temperate zones of Europe and North America, before retreating into (presumably air-conditioned) enclaves a safe distance from the resulting chaos. And surely not even an elite blinded by aircon culture to the real depth of global human cultural differences would consider something as reckless as that.

Could history ever become a truly scientific discipline? In the past few years, a number of thinkers have found new ways to say yes. I am not so sure. Visions of history as science go back long before Asimov: during the Enlightenment, philosophers impressed by the advances being made in natural science wondered if they could discover laws of social change equivalent to the physical laws governing such things as motion or gas pressure. Looking at the indigenous peoples of the Americas, they saw similarities to the ancient Greeks and Romans and concluded that all human societies followed the same basic path of historical evolution from “savagery” to civilised modernity (exemplified, of course, by themselves).

In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed to have discovered a different universal pattern of historical change: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” Engels, in particular, did not hesitate to call history a science. Throughout the 20th century, both Marxist and non-Marxist social scientists developed elaborate quantitative models to explain why, for instance, revolutions broke out in some times and places but not in others. All these approaches had in common the assumption that throughout history impersonal forces greatly circumscribed the scope of human free will. As Marx wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”

But in the late 20th century, social scientific model-making lost its attraction for most historians. Following the so-called “cultural turn”, the discipline increasingly looked to literary studies and cultural anthropology for inspiration and experimented with “microhistories” of single individuals or incidents, such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, or Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre. History-writing of this sort, grounded in a close reading of texts, did not easily lend itself to sweeping theories of change over the centuries. Historical sociologists continued to pursue the work of model-building, but increasingly in isolation from their colleagues in history departments.

More recently, the field’s turn towards “global history” did partially revive interest in the large-scale, quantitative modelling of change. Kenneth Pomeranz’s influential 2000 book The Great Divergence, for instance, developed a theory of why certain countries successfully industrialised that placed heavy emphasis on the availability of coal and other natural resources. But much of the new “global” work is deeply bound up with issues of race and has a distinctly moralising character. The authors tend to hold European imperialism and white supremacy responsible for the ills of the modern world (not without reason, of course). But moral responsibility and blame can only be imputed to those who had the ability to choose — not to those who acted as the blind instruments of impersonal historical forces.

At the same time, new attempts at a scientific history have begun to appear. A field calling itself “cliodynamics”, spearheaded by the polymath biologist Peter Turchin, has attracted considerable attention, in part because in 2010 Turchin predicted that the United States was heading for massive instability exactly 10 years later. Turchin argues that history can become a “mathematised science” and explicitly compares himself to Asimov’s “psycho-historians”. Meanwhile, an increasing number of historians have been using data compiled by actual scientists about past physical changes in the world (especially climate change) to offer new explanations for political and social events such as the fall of the Roman Empire. For the moment, most historians remain either ignorant or sceptical of these new approaches. But should they once again embrace the banner of science?

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Cliodynamics is strongly reminiscent of the social scientific approaches of the mid-20th century. Peter Turchin’s complex mathematical models of social change put great weight on what he calls “elite overproduction” as one warning sign of coming social strife. As he puts it in his new book End Times, when the “social pyramid has gotten top-heavy”, with “too many ‘elite aspirants’ competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper levels of politics and business”, civic cohesion weakens and social fracture grows. The sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix came to some of the same conclusions in their classic study Social Mobility in Industrial Society, published in 1959, which in turn inspired many historians of revolutions.

More generally, Turchin puts far greater weight on material factors — above all, the competition for wealth and power — than on ideology, culture or sheer accident in explaining why societies undergo extreme stress. For example, he argues that the American Civil War was not “fought over slavery”, but rather “over ‘slavocracy’” — that is to say, to challenge the wealth and power of slave-owning elites. In a previous book, he and a collaborator offered a long and detailed explanation of why France fell into chaos during the Wars of Religion of the 16th century without discussing… religion. Their assumption — shared by French Marxist historians of a previous generation — is that the Reformation would not have caused such strife in the absence of underlying social pressures. To quote the Marxist Janine Estèbe, writing in 1975, “social antagonisms” were “covered by a religious cloak”. But as Natalie Zemon Davis replied to her, simply pointing to such antagonisms tells us very little about how and why people resorted to violence. “We must stretch our definition of ‘social tensions’ well beyond the issue of wealth and poverty,” Davis wrote. “Rather than being ‘covered by a religious cloak,’ the social face of the Reformation is as real as its obverse, the spiritual face, different sides of the same coin.”

Turchin makes great claims for the mathematical rigour of cliodynamics, but in fact for his model to work he has to put the math aside and resort to some very traditional — indeed, commonplace — historical interpretations. For instance, he argues that the same combination of material factors that led to the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War also threatened Great Britain with civic strife in the 1830s. But Britain avoided revolution. Why? Because emigration served as a safety valve; because of intelligent institutional reforms by a series of flexible governments; and because workers managed to claim new rights for themselves. These points can be found in most textbooks. In addition, like his social scientific predecessors, Turchin gives too little attention to the dynamism of historical events. The American Civil War may not have started as a war to end slavery, but at a certain point, as the fighting intensified, it became one. Why? The answer can’t be found simply by measuring the forms of social stress that led to the initial crisis.

Another problem for cliodynamics is that so much historical data is simply unreliable. In the earlier book, in a chapter on medieval France, Turchin and his collaborator repeatedly acknowledged that “demographic data are hard to come by for the medieval period… the data are very crude… there are no systematic wage data… the Forez and Bar-sur-Seine data cannot be directly compared”, and so forth. Nonetheless, on the basis of a plausible but by no means certain data set, they ventured confident conclusions about the way a large decline in the population of French nobles solved the problem of “elite overproduction” and helped end a period a severe political instability.

Despite the exaggerated claims, Turchin’s work can be serious and thought-provoking, and follows in a distinguished line of social scientific analysis about the origins of social crises. But it tells us much less about how such crises subsequently develop, how they can lead to such different outcomes and how they generate such wildly different ideas and ideologies. And the crises are themselves only a part of the hugely rich and complex tapestry of the human past. To reduce “history” to the mathematical modelling of social crisis would be impoverishing in the extreme.

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If few practising historians have yet embraced the cliodynamic version of scientific history, more and more are approaching the past with techniques borrowed from the natural sciences, often in collaboration with actual scientists. A fascinating recent article in The Guardian by Jacob Mikanowski surveys this new work: examples range from genetic testing of leather to see if the ancient Scythians tanned human skin (they did), to measuring air pollution as recorded in ice cores to see when Roman silver production crashed (the third century CE), to discovering that a nun who died in 1100 had traces of expensive lapis lazuli on her teeth — probably transferred while painting an illuminated manuscript. Mikanowski might also have cited the innovative use of historical linguistics by historians of medieval Africa, who use reconstructions of past vocabulary to trace the movement of peoples across the continent.

Overall, this new work falls into two broad categories. One is principally empirical and aims at simply determining such things as past temperature variations, drought conditions or the movement of peoples, animals, and commodities. Especially when the historians in question also draw on archaeological evidence, they are here following in a distinguished, long-established tradition. After all, to study the history of peoples who left no written records we have no choice but to turn to various forms of physical evidence. But as techniques have improved and evidence has accumulated, some historians have grown more ambitious — often by introducing climate change as a key driver of historical change. In perhaps the best-known recent example, the historian Kyle Harper suggested that the Roman Empire flourished and expanded in large part thanks to “a phase of warm, wet and stable climate”, only to run out of luck when the climate turned unstable, and a set of deadly infectious diseases rampaged across the Mediterranean world. Harper’s dissertation advisor, Harvard’s Michael McCormick, has offered similar arguments, and enthusiastically embraced the new marriage of history and science. The partnership, he told Mikanowski, is currently at the same stage as astronomy “when Galileo first looked up with his telescope”.

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The Georgetown historian Dagomar Degroot has offered a particularly engaging example of how “proxy data” collected by scientists can enrich our understanding of even well-documented parts of human history. In his book The Frigid Golden Age, he showed that while the early modern “Little Ice Age” posed massive challenges for all European societies, some adapted and thrived. The Dutch in particular demonstrated considerable resilience in devising techniques for dealing with record cold (perfecting ice skates, for instance). They also mastered the period’s new Atlantic wind patterns to shorten voyages for their commercial fleet and to devise effective naval tactics against enemy fleets. But while Degroot collaborated with scientists to ascertain past temperatures (for instance through a study of tree rings — narrower rings indicate colder winters), he took most of his evidence from traditional documentary sources.

Where such sources are less plentiful, or more ambiguous, the work of interpretation becomes harder, and the ability to draw “scientific” conclusions more dubious. Historians of late antiquity, for instance, have devoted enormous attention to the year 536, which Science magazine in 2018 labelled “the worst year to be alive”. Evidence from tree rings and ice cores indicates that as a result of large-scale volcanic eruptions the world experienced the coldest summer of the past two millennia. Some written records, meanwhile, suggest that at the same time the deadly “Justinianic plague” devastated Mediterranean societies. McCormick, Harper and others speculate that this one-two punch shattered the late antique world, marking the real fall of the Roman Empire. Its surviving, eastern portion, ruled from Constantinople, moved away from the Roman heritage, embracing a fervent, zealous Christianity — in a word, turning Byzantine. But other historians have countered that the plague did not in fact have world-changing effects, and that 536 may not have been particularly disastrous. One of them, Lee Mordechai of the Hebrew University, is currently writing a book arguing that the “536 event” has served as a sort of blank screen onto which the present day projects its own fears of climate disaster.

But in any case, even as these new partnerships open up new perspectives, they can still only illuminate a relatively limited range of subjects. Climate historians define the “Little Ice Age” as having lasted from the late Middle Ages to the early 19th century: a period that includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the European encounter with the Americas, the creation of the slave plantation, the Enlightenment, the American, French and Haitian Revolutions, Britain’s rise to global supremacy, the birth of Romanticism, the start of the Industrial Revolution, and much, much more. Climate change may have served as a contributing factor to many of these things, but it cannot serve as the principal explanatory factor for any of them. Human history is simply too gloriously, too colourfully and often too tragically complex to be reducible to single variables of this sort. Climatic variation, like “elite overproduction”, can help illuminate some parts of the canvas, but not others. Any explanation of change requires a willingness to bring together very different, and often incommensurable phenomena: social, economic, political, cultural, religious, environmental. While scientific methods can cast light on some of them, the idea that human history itself, in all its fantastic variation, can be reduced to a science remains a chimera.

Even Isaac Asimov recognised that sheer chance could play an outsized role in history. In his Foundation series, the “psycho-historians” forecast the fall of a galactic empire, and for centuries events turned out exactly as they had predicted. But then came along an unexpected development: the rise of a mutant human with sinister telepathic powers known as “the Mule”, who started carving out an empire of his own. Suddenly, none of the predictions panned out. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the most capacious scientific history writing.

Last week, that war escalated to near-nuclear level as the White House announced massive tariff hikes on a raft of Chinese imports — including 25% on steel and aluminum, 50% on semiconductors and solar panels, and a staggering 100% on electric vehicles (EVs). The move, they say, is in response to “China’s unfair trade practices”. The US accuses Beijing of using hefty government subsidies to flood global markets with artificially low-priced exports. By imposing its swingeing tariffs, the US hopes to create “a level playing-field in industries that are vital to our future”, and “ensure America leads the world” in these sectors. 

It’s pretty ironic that Biden is attempting to level the playing-field by embracing similar tactics to Beijing. His administration’s much-vaunted Inflation Reduction Act includes almost $400 billion in subsidies (through grants, loans and tax credits) aimed at boosting the US cleantech sector. So Biden’s attempts to paint China as a rogue nation using “non-market practices” to “game the system” seem driven by fear that the Chinese subsidies risk nullifying the effect of America’s own subsidies. 

US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen acknowledged as much when she said that “China is really not playing by the rules in the sense that they have enormous subsidies in critical areas of advanced manufacturing” and “[Biden] wants to make sure that the stimulus that’s being provided through the Inflation Reduction Act support[s] these industries”. She seemed blissfully unaware of the contradictory nature of her statement, barely concealed by the doublespeak: China “subsidises” its industries (bad), while the US “supports” them (good). 

But, then, the idea of America as a bastion of the free market, whose corporations achieved global success simply by relying on the animal spirits of capitalism and the sheer ingenuity of garage inventors à la Steve Jobs, is largely a myth. Everyone knows that Silicon Valley’s transformation into a hotbed of innovation, and the subsequent rise of the US tech industry, was made possible thanks to massive funding from the US government and military during the Cold War. Elon Musk is only the latest in a line of supposedly self-made garage inventors who have actually built their tech empire with the help of billions of dollars in US government subsidies. Just last year Tesla received $7.5 billion from the US government. 

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China, then, isn’t really doing anything different from what the US has always done. But America is riled because China is winning. And having taken up the role of “free trade” defender — accusing the Biden administration of “imped[ing] the normal functioning of global industrial and supply chains” — Beijing is forcing the US to take an increasingly protectionist stance. 

This peculiar reversal of roles is paradigmatic of the significant global economic and geopolitical power shift underway. “Free trade” generally tends to benefit the dominant economic power, at the expense of weaker economies. It is no coincidence that the US began preaching “free trade” only after it achieved economic dominance, in the mid-20th century, after resorting to heavily protectionist measures to support its manufacturing sectors, just as Britain had done before it. 

But China has since surpassed the US as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse — and it has now climbed all the way to the top of the value chain. America’s embrace of protectionism is, therefore, an admission of weakness, as it is demoted to no-longer-hegemonic status. In this respect, it makes sense for the US to not want to be completely dependent on China in increasingly critical manufacturing sectors, and to build up its own cleantech industrial base. 

To shore this industry up, the US has been trying to nurture a domestic solar supply chain through a mix of tax incentives and tariffs for over a decade — but so far has failed abysmally. As the French entrepreneur and political commentator Arnaud Bertrand noted, while the tariffs did considerably reduce the number of Chinese solar panels coming to the US (with an 86% drop over the 2012-2020 period), the billions in subsidies, from first Obama and then Biden, did not revitalise the US solar industry.

On the contrary, the American global market share of the solar industry has considerably decreased since the original tariffs were placed on Chinese solar panels — from 9% in 2010 to 2% today. Meanwhile, China’s share of the industry rose from 59% to 78%. There’s no reason to believe that the recent tariff increase will reverse this trend. There’s even less hope that they will help spur a domestic EV industry. 

There’s also a catch-22 situation at play here. Because by shielding American car manufacturers from Chinese competition, any development is likely to be hindered. But without the tariffs, US car manufacturers will struggle to survive the decade since Americans cars cost between double or triple the amount of their Chinese equivalents. So the government may artificially prop up the American auto industry for a few more years, at the expense of American consumers — but by doing so, it is only delaying its death, not saving it. 

The idea that the tariffs will help America “lead the world” in this or other sectors where China already controls most of the global market share — such as steel, aluminium and EVs — is an economically illiterate one. Especially when you consider that the US market represents a relatively small share of Chinese global sales, and that America’s declining global status means it can no longer impose its will on other countries. It’ll be lucky if it can get its sub-imperial vassals in Europe and Asia to get on board with its short-sighted trade war. 

In fact, Biden’s EV tariff hike is already further weakening America’s crumbling powerhouse status. Those EU member states with big automotive ties to China, such as Germany and Sweden, have voiced their objections — reluctant to match the United States, or to put tariffs on the imports at all. “We don’t want to dismantle global trade, that’s a stupid idea”, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said. “Punitive tariffs as a one-size-fits-all solution is not a good idea for importing and exporting countries.” 

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When we consider what kind of technologies are being targeted by the tariffs, the optics are even worse for Biden. For years he has presented himself as a champion of climate policies and emphasised the need to move towards low-emission technologies, one of the stated aims of the Inflation Reduction Act. Yet he is now attempting to punish China for managing to produce low-cost green tech, including EVs, that could turbo-charge the world’s next industrial revolution. Indeed, China has been able to achieve astounding results in this sector in large part because it has embraced much more ambitious green industrial policies than the West. Moreover, Biden’s imposition of these tariffs risks hindering the adoption of low-emission technologies by American businesses and consumers — and thereby thwarting the US’s own climate targets. It’s a messy own goal. 

Those sceptical of the need for climate policies and their achievements probably don’t think this is a big deal. But it is a big deal for a lot of people — especially Biden voters. And this policy, even though probably aimed at shoring up support for the President by showing voters that he is tough on China, could alienate many of those voters.

The economist Dani Rodrik captured the sentiment of many in the progressive camp when he said: “Put up tariffs if you must, but the moral, economic, environmental arguments are on the side of those that subsidise green products, not those who want to tax them.” You don’t have to agree with him to understand the huge political gamble that Biden has taken by declaring a full-blown trade war on China, the unintended consequences of which could cost him his presidency and hammer the final nail in the coffin of America’s powerhouse status.

It’s not just Greta who sees a link. When the current conflict in Gaza began, the climate activist group, Just Stop Oil, known for polarising, clickbait-friendly protests, such as blockading the M25 or throwing soup at Van Gogh paintings, promptly organised a sit-in at London’s Waterloo Station. 

 This sort of campaign creep is far wider than just climate and Palestine: all contemporary radical causes seem somehow to have been absorbed into one. A protean animating energy seems to ingest every progressive issue it encounters, to create a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause.

But what is it trying to achieve? Right or Right-adjacent figures as ideologically disparate as James Lindsay and Bronze Age Pervert have suggested it is the destruction of America. Or, perhaps, of “Western Civilisation”. And there may be something in that, at least if you conflate “Western Civilisation” with the American empire. After all, a great many ethnic-cleansing events are casually ignored, even as the state whose existence is explicitly underwritten by American hard power gets taken to court over such allegations. 

Given this, one might be forgiven for suspecting that Gaza’s absorption into the Omnicause really is due to its role as a proxy for hostility to the American project: a suspicion unlikely to be allayed by the sound of Palestine supporters from Yemen to Harvard Yard chanting “Death to America”. And yet, the fact that this chant is heard not just in overseas territories hostile to the American project, but also (and perhaps even more vociferously) within Ivy League campuses, suggests something more ambivalent at work. 

It might seem bewildering to hear young scions of the empire calling for the destruction of the very order that nourishes them. But that’s not what’s happening here; not really. Rather, in calling for “Death to America” they’re breathing new life into the idea they claim to deplore, and expressing a modern version of the same impulse that drove America’s original founders to leave the Old World behind, with its weight of authority and tradition, and seek to begin again in a purer, higher register.

It’s hardly original to notice the Puritan streak in modern progressivism. During the BLM riots in 2020, numerous commentators made that connection. The critic Alan Jacobs characterises this form of progressivism — the moral matrix that now marches as the Omnicause — as religious in this sense: less a precise set of doctrines than a style of believing. A “mythical experience”.

Further out on the neoreactionary fringes, the writer Curtis Yarvin argues that this “nontheistic Christian tradition”, which he calls “Universalism”, has become “the dominant modern branch of Christianity”. And the philosopher Nick Land maps this secularised-but-triumphant Puritan-heritage Christian sensibility squarely onto the American empire:

“After its military victories in the American Rebellion and the War of Secession, American Puritanism was well on the way to world domination. Its victories in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War confirmed its global hegemony. All legitimate mainstream thought on Earth today is descended from the American Puritans, and through them the English dissenters.”

The secularisation of this tradition began in earnest after the Second World War, along with its embrace by the engines of commerce. That was the point where American marketers coined the term “teenager”  — and created modern “youth culture” with it. For, strange as it may seem, after nearly a century of American cultural hegemony, the notion of adolescents challenging their forebears is not universal. Rather, it propagates in tandem with American culture: for example the Inuit community on Victoria Island, Canada, experienced no youthful delinquency until television was introduced in 1980. In the context of the American paradigm, by contrast, rebellion is not just normal but natural, whether presented “compelled” by culture or an inevitable consequence of brain development.

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Though my own memories of adolescence are hazy, I don’t remember ever questioning the idea that it was “normal” to feel rebellious — for all that, in my case, this preceded having any substantial  grounds for rebellion. Rather, it was a matter of looking around for a cause, a seemingly backward causality that’s since led me to wonder whether the normalisation of “rebellion” is the driving force behind youth activism, rather than the other way round, as young people go looking for a cause to rebel about.

And if this is so, it perhaps explains how such issues often seem to spread by social contagion, as in Thunberg’s snowballing school protests — or indeed contemporary LGBTQ activism. A similar mimetic quality can also be seen in the current American Palestine protests, where participants often seem hazy at best about what they’re actually protesting, and mostly there for the vibe. In this sense, it seems less a programme, than a sensibility: a social norm of rebelliousness, sanctified by idealism and spread mimetically, that expresses a secularised version of the Puritan style of faith and has become central to identity-formation.

Crucially, though, this has historically been oppositional only in a superficial sense. The music industry serves to illustrate: when your chief means of signalling rebellion against the staid, venal world of adulthood is buying products marketed to you and manufactured by that very same adult world, the relation between rebellion and conformity is ambivalent at best. In turn, this dynamic has propelled every “counterculture” movement since the Fifties along the same seamless conveyor-belt, from edginess to mass-market conformity, exhaustion and replacement by the next contender.

In each case, the chief by-products were a lot of money for the culture industry’s stars and producers, and a measure of youth identity-formation. But this 20th-century model of pseudo-rebellious youthful self-definition via music and clothing was scuppered by the internet, as streaming made all musical styles simultaneously available, and “fast fashion” emulsified sartorial subcultures into an eternal present. Things haven’t changed much under the surface though. The cultural norm of youthful rebellion, idealism, and mimesis is as powerful as ever. It’s just that since the inception of the internet, the locus has migrated from music and fashion to political opinions, as testified by the booming podcast and political influencer economies.

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In turn, it’s this underlying drive that explains the protean quality of the Omnicause, and its seemingly endless ability to ingest new causes and transcend new contradictions. The Protestant tradition — and especially the Puritan one — always repudiated religious authority in pursuit of religious purity. And the same mix of idealism and secession persists to this day in secularised form, in the ritual of adolescent “rebellion” incubated by 20th-century American marketeers and granted idealistic form today as “youth activism”. The myth of “the West” is that you aren’t Westerning properly unless you’re seceding from something, and what powers “the West” — really, America and its provinces — in its restlessness is this impulse to keep seceding until you find the purer society you were seeking. At the smaller scale, the myth of the American teenager is that you aren’t teenagering properly unless you’re rebelling against something and pursuing something higher. Each American teenager is thus “the West” in miniature, complete with the modern West’s baked-in will to consumerism.

The flip side of this, of course, is that rebellion never succeeds on its own terms. Instead, it simply ends up powering the civilisational engine. Thunberg isn’t American, of course, but she attained prominence in, and orients her critiques to, the America-dominated post-war order. It is, after all, only in the context of broad adherence to its rules-based internationalism that climate policies of the kind she gained prominence for proposing can even theoretically be implemented. Accordingly, we can perhaps assess the success of her mimetic and Omnicause-coded youth climate movement, against every other America-led “youth culture” movement since the Fifties.

We might suggest, indeed, that it’s heading the same way as the rockers, the hippies, the punks et cetera: first edgy, then institutionalised, and on its way to toothlessness, save as a means of powering the machine for another turn or two. Thunberg was internationally feted, and invited to address national Parliaments, the European Parliament, and even the WEF meeting at Davos: surely the climate-activist equivalent of a multi-album HMV recording deal. She became a darling of elites and internationally recognisable for a season. Meanwhile, global emissions went on rising.

So, perhaps she has pivoted to a different facet of the Omnicause simply out of frustration at the effortless ease with which her climate idealism has been absorbed, digested, and neutralised. If so, I suspect she will be disappointed again. To the extent that ongoing campus protests cause a genuine nuisance, they have already been suppressed. Where they persist, we can assume they are serving broadly the same social purpose as a music festival: fostering youthful social bonds in an idealistic context, that helps define popular culture for a generation, but changes very little in material terms.

Does this mean I’m a pessimist about “the West”? Far from it: this paradoxical and seemingly self-destructive cultural juggernaut is in fact flourishing, for the Puritans are still winning. Far from being on the brink of collapse, in their restless wake “Western Civilisation” continues to be reborn, generation after generation, in the very act of seeming to destroy itself. The Omnicause may be hated by conservatives for its destructiveness and seeming hostility to all established authority, all traditions and all institutions. But it is also the vector for that ongoing rebirth — and, with it, however galling Greta Thunberg may find it, the ongoing supremacy of the American project.

For studios, the financial appeal is pretty obvious. Each character has its devoted fanbase; if you put two characters in one movie, you can get both of them along to the cinema at once. And because the draw is the characters, not the quality of the movie itself, you can skimp on a decent script or convincing effects.

I was thinking about this as I read The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains and Bodies, by Clayton Page Aldern. At the risk of sounding cynical, it struck me as a cinematic crossover event. What are people worried about? Climate change. What else are people worried about? Modern life and mental health! What if we got someone to write a book about… how climate change is damaging our mental health? Then we’d get the climate worriers and the mental healthers buying the same book!

Aldern is not the first person to think of this, and to be fair, climate anxiety is a real problem. Every few weeks a newspaper will run an article by someone saying they won’t have children out of fear that the world won’t be fit to live in, and a global 2021 survey found that more than half of the 10,000 young people surveyed agreed with the phrase “humanity is doomed”. For what it’s worth, I think they’re entirely wrong about that — climate change will have a lot of negative effects on the world, and it’s reasonable to be worried about it, but it’s not going to kill everyone.

On the whole, though, he wants to say something both more subtle and more ambitious than “people are worried about the future”. He wants to say that climate change itself is damaging our brains. He wants to say it’s doing this in obvious ways — we get grumpier and stupider when it’s hot — and in more insidious ones, with the spread of unpleasant diseases and neurotoxins, and, most poignantly, by causing us grief and displacement and loss of identity and all these things which then have various impacts on our brain.

He does this with the weight of academic authority behind him: he is a “neuroscientist turned environmental journalist”, according to the blurb. (Although he does only have a master’s degree in neuroscience. I did a philosophy MA in 2005 but I would feel a bit of a fraud calling myself a “philosopher”.) This makes the book’s flaws all the more baffling, until you remember that it’s a crossover event.

There’s a certain kind of pop-science book that relies on a particular format: story, study, lesson. Christopher Chabris, a psychologist, first noted it in the work of the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer. But it’s a staple — you’ll notice it in Malcolm Gladwell books, for instance. You tell some moving, heartwarming or inspiring story; you recount the results of some study which apparently explains what’s going on in people’s brains in those situations; and then you draw them together to give the reader some pat little take-home message.

I rather thought that we had progressed beyond those books, at least in the upper-mid-market pop science titles that might get reviewed in The Times and New York Times, or excerpted in The Guardian. The “this study on 17 undergraduates at Ohio State University shows that actually creativity stems from our right anterior superior temporal gyrus” stuff so rarely withstood the scrutiny of the replication crisis in science that almost all of them turned out to be essentially content-free.

But Aldern follows the formula to the letter. Each chapter starts with a desperate anecdote: a child dying from an amoebic brain disease caught from a swimming pond; a father whose family burned to death in a wildfire. Then there’s a study, usually in zebrafish or fruit flies, showing us how changes to our environment make us forget, or how living near mountaintop-removal mines is associated with higher rates of depression. Then there’s a flowery lesson presented in conclusion: “The weight of nature presses, but we get to press back. A depression is a state, but it is also a refuge, a place from which to come forth.” OK then.

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But what people want from these books isn’t science per se, with its nagging uncertainty and its boring on-the-one-hand-on-the-others. What people want, I think, is vibes: a thrilling sense of fear and sadness, like watching a horror movie or a weepy. (A crossover event between Nightmare on Elm Street and The Bridges of Madison County, perhaps.) That’s my theory, anyway, which would explain why this book can contain claims that are not only under-evidenced but obviously, screamingly false, and still have E. Annie Proulx call it an “important watershed book”.

For instance, Aldern cites one study which looked at the children of mothers who were caught up in Superstorm Sandy in New York and New Jersey in 2012. It found, he said, that among other things, boys who were exposed in utero to the stress of climate change saw a 60-fold increase in ADHD. Think about that for five seconds. What is wrong with that picture? This study found that the prevalence of ADHD in US children and adolescents in 2022 was about 10%. A 60-fold increase in that prevalence would mean that 600% of boys exposed to storms while in utero get ADHD!

In Aldern’s defence, and to my surprise, the study really does claim a 62-fold increased risk specifically for ADHD in boys. But it’s obviously nonsense, a product of small sample sizes made even smaller by chopping them up into bits — boys, girls, boys with ADHD, girls with depression — and picking the most dramatic results. It is the sort of number that should make your eyebrows shoot up immediately. (And in fairness, the study itself only mentions that clearly implausible number down in the results section, and leads on somewhat more credible, though still pretty mad, ones.) Nomura’s study “almost beggars belief”, Aldern says, coming close to, but not quite reaching, an insight.

Aldern also, hilariously, says that a local brewery “saw a gap of 25 degrees Fahrenheit (-3°C)” between indoor and outdoor temperatures at one point. How, you might wonder, can a difference in temperature be positive in Fahrenheit but negative in Celsius? Easy: if you’ve put 25°F into an online temperature calculator and just copied-and-pasted the result. Yes, if the temperature outside is 25°F, that means it’s -3.9°C and pretty nippy. But if the temperature goes up by 25°F, then it can’t go down in Celsius. Again: this stuff should be obvious to anyone who’s paying attention, and that makes me think that no one involved in the book was paying attention.

But this book isn’t a serious effort to find stuff out. Maybe I, as a crashingly literal bore who wants to know how much we know, am the wrong audience. This is a book for fans of the climate crisis and the mental health epidemic, and anything that can bring the two heroes into the picture at the same time is fine.

For instance, Aldern says that “climate change causes amnesia”, because a changing environment triggers forgetting to aid learning. He backs this up with a study in fruit flies and then extrapolates from it to say that people who live near a vanishing glacier in Iceland are therefore… developing amnesia? Except he doesn’t quite say that: he slips into flowery gesturing language. (He often does, usually when it seems like he doesn’t know exactly what point he’s making: “History can be an act of elegy, but perhaps it can be an act of evolution, too.” Righto.) But I’m left baffled. Is the claim that people who live near this glacier will remember things less well, or not?

To be clear, climate change certainly is changing our brains, because our brains change with every new experience we have. That’s what learning and memory is: the subtle rewiring of our brains to store new information. But for most people, climate change — at least so far, in most of the world — is subtle; bad, but subtle. The changes it has wrought in most of our lives so far are minor. The Covid pandemic or the war in Ukraine driving up petrol prices will have changed our environment far more in recent years.

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Or, to be honest, much more quotidian things than that. If you’ve moved house or changed jobs, had a child, started a new relationship or ended an old one, you will have felt the world around you change much more dramatically than anything that climate change has (so far, for most of us) done. And maybe these events do cause us to forget more, or cause our identities to “slip”, as Aldern claims climate change does. But we don’t tend to think of them as fundamentally eating away at who we are. No one’s going to write a book called The Weight of Moving House about the neuroscience of having to remember which box you packed the duvets in.

Climate change is real and will cause real problems. And some of those problems will be psychological: no doubt a lot of people have suffered and will suffer trauma, as changing weather patterns mean their crops die or their houses flood or burn. But this isn’t mystical or subtle, it’s just bog-standard “horrible events are unpleasant to live through”. You don’t need studies about transient forgetting in fruit flies to explain it.

What would be more interesting to examine, perhaps, is the nature of climate anxiety itself. It makes sense to worry about it — as mentioned, it’s big and unsettling, and full of unknowns. But in the West, I think, there’s also a nagging sense of guilt: we drove the cars and built the factories, we polluted the atmosphere, and we got rich doing so. I do wonder if books like this are a manifestation of that guilt: we buy them to show that we’re the good guys, we worry, the climate plagues our thoughts.

The irony is that — precisely because, for most Western people, climate change is still a relatively distant concept — the real impacts of climate change on mental health come via the media, including books such as Aldern’s. But the case that climate change is “changing our minds and bodies” in some subtle, insidious way — any more than all the other changes in our environment — is, to put it mildly, not convincingly made.

But it’s not there to convince us, any more than Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is meant to convince me that King Kong is really on the loose. It’s just a crossover. Love climate change? Love mental health? Then you’ll love The Weight of Nature!

In hindsight, it’s now accepted that the therapists were frequently implanting these “memories” in their suggestible patients. Recovered memory was a social mania — a.k.a. a moral panic, social contagion, mass formation psychosis, or mass hysteria. In the throes of the popular delirium, many people found this exercise in psychic archaeology wholly convincing (and no little titillating). For a few years, recovered memories were even accepted as factual testimony in American courts. Only from a distance does the sordid psychological dowsing look barmy.

For me, since roughly 2012, what has therefore been more disturbing than the content of any given hysteria is our continuing susceptibility to collective derangement, which can spread and take hold with alarming rapidity in a digital era. To examine the unnerving phenomenon of the communal fever, often destructive but rarely contested at its height, in my most recent novel Mania I invented my own. Suddenly everyone accepts that all humans are equally intelligent, and “cognitive discrimination” is “the last great civil rights fight”. In other words, there’s no such thing as stupid. Because that assertion is itself stupid, my concocted mania seems apt.

Within the astonishingly short time frame of 10 years, I count four real-life collective crazes: transgenderism, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns (which spawned sub-crazes over masks and vaccines), and Black Lives Matter. I also worry we’re already in the grip of social mania number five.

Take trans. Gender-identity disorder was not that long ago an extraordinarily rare psychiatric diagnosis largely constrained to men. Abruptly circa 2012 — on the heels of such a successful crusade for gay rights and even gay marriage that homosexuality became passé — a profusion of television documentaries hit our screens about little boys who wore dresses and played with dolls. Fast-forward to the present, and the renamed diagnosis has exploded by thousands of percent across the West and now pertains abundantly to girls. Teachers tell toddlers that they have to decide whether they’re a girl or a boy or something in-between. We’re subjecting children to powerful, life-altering experimental drugs and surgically removing healthy breasts and genitals, even at the cost of permanent sexual dysfunction and infertility. “Some people are born in the wrong body” has become a truism, which sounds to me as medically credible as phrenology or bloodletting.

The social mania displays a few consistent characteristics. First and foremost, it never seems like a social mania at the time. In the thick of a widespread preoccupation, its precepts simply seem like the truth. Trans women are women; get over it. Or: masculinity is toxic; virtually all women have been subject to sexual torment and male abuse of power; regarding any accusations they make, no matter how far-fetched or petty, women must be believed. Or: Covid-19 is so lethal, and such a threat to our endurance as a species, that we’ve no choice but to shut down our whole economies and abdicate our every civil liberty to contain the disease. Or: all Western countries are “systemically racist”; all white people are genetically racist; the police are all racist (even if they’re black) and should be defunded or abolished; the only remedy for “structural racism” is anti-meritocratic, over-compensatory racial quotas in hiring and education.

While the seeds of a mania have often been planted earlier, for most ordinary people it comes out of nowhere. Transgenderism rocketed to a cultural fetish over a matter of  months. After one fully fledged creep was exposed as a serial sex abuser, #MeToo spread on Twitter like potato blight. Literally overnight, citizenries in March 2020 took it for granted that their “liberal democracies” could justifiably deny them freedom of movement, assembly, association, press and even speech, while many became eager enforcers of the chaotic, despotic, and sometimes positively silly new regime. It took only a few days for George Floyd’s death to trigger huge protest marches all over the world. This hyperbolic response to a single undeserved killing in a one mid-sized American city was partially fed by the pent-up frustrations of whole populations under house arrest during Covid. But for Koreans to troop down the streets of Seoul chanting, “Black lives matter!” when the country has hardly any black people was insensible. Likewise, Britons chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” when their constabulary is unarmed. Moreover, all these recent examples illustrate how moral panics have become more international in scope than ever before.

Manias are fuelled by emotion. The cult of trans has capitalised on our yearning to seem enlightened and compassionate.  It has been presented as the logical next step after gay rights, the movement plays on our craving to feel ultra-contemporary. #MeToo both fed off and promulgated resentment, self-pity, and vengeance; in standing up to abuse of power, it tempted some women to abuse their own power to ruin men’s lives. Covid lockdowns stirred primitive terror of death and contagion, until we came to view other people as mere vectors of disease. BLM stimulated the nascent Christian proclivities for guilt, repentance, and penitence even in the secular, while offering black people opportunity to vent frustration, self-righteous fury, and even hatred. All manias thrive on our desire to be included by our own herd and on our anxiety about being exiled — or, if you will, about being UnHerded.

Because a proper mania brooks no dissent. In its grip, everyone believes the same thing, says the same thing, and even uses the same language. A quasi-religious fervour makes anyone outside the bubble of shared obsession seem heretical, dangerous, insane or outright evil. Opponents of lockdowns were granny killers; the unvaccinated were pariahs who shouldn’t be allowed to fly, eat out or obtain healthcare, while some argued “anti-vaxxers” should be imprisoned or put to death. Their rhetoric and affect often violent, transactivists tar critics as murderers; not long ago, writing a single discouraging word about the mutilation of children would end your career. (Self-protectively, I kept my own journalistic mouth shut for a good four years; most journalists are still prudently bumping along on the trans bandwagon.) Women who expressed reservations about the indiscriminate sweep of #MeToo were traitors to their sex. In 2020, even tweeting “All lives matter” got you sacked.

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Manias are prone to grow increasingly extreme, accumulating evermore casualties before collapsing from their contradictions. Stalin’s show trials, Cambodia’s killing fields, Mao’s cultural revolution, obviously Nazism; the eugenics movement in the West (which we like to forget), the rage for lobotomies, and the paranoia about Satanism in day-care centres and the contagion of multiple personality disorder of the Nineties — all these misguided infatuations got worse before they imploded.

Hula hoops were harmless, but most manias are malign. The trans movement has warped primary school education, demented our culture with confusion over biological reality, condemned thousands of children to painful surgery and pharmaceutical side-effects, encroached on women’s privacy, and corrupted female sports. #MeToo contaminated relations between the sexes with such mistrust that it may have alone lowered the Western birth rate, while destroying the careers of countless men whose sins were at most venial. Covid lockdowns ravaged our economies, fuelled inflation, and exploded sovereign debt, while damaging the prospects of a generation of school children. BLM has exacerbated racial animosity, demonised meritocracy, and fostered a wasteful, parasitical managerial class of DEI enforcers whom it will be laborious to get shed of.

Yet both the priests and disciples of moral panics are driven by good intentions. They genuinely believe they are doing God’s work. Aggressively virtuous, “wokeness” is one big bundle of mania.

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Some hysterias die an easier death than others. Although the fragile, whiny accuser of a US Supreme Court nominee was once heralded as awesomely “courageous”, Christine Blasey Ford’s recent memoir has drawn weary disdain. Ergo, #MeToo is over. Nevertheless, a social frenzy seldom subsides because its agitators announce they were addled, just as the masses of ordinary people caught up in the derangement seldom acknowledge having been led astray. Everyone simply moves on, only to become consumed by something else.

There’s rarely an identifiable point at which a mania is debunked (barring a world war or counterrevolution). Few will recant, much less apologise to the victims of their excesses. A funny amnesia sets in, as forgetfulness is more palatable than shame; the Chinese have simply erased the cultural revolution from their history books. Occasionally, when folks outside the dogmatic bubble prosecute, the cheerleaders of utter tosh are called to account. We did have Nuremburg, and the belated Pol Pot trials in Cambodia. By contrast, the UK’s farcical Covid inquiry is conducted by the same establishment it’s investigating. The subsequent report may criticise single politicians for not having locked down sooner, but it can’t conclude that the lockdowns were a cataclysmic mistake, lest practically everyone at the top be implicated.

Once manias die down, most people pretend they never believed these things to begin with. Having contracted Covid five or six times post-vaccination, multiply boosted mRNA fanatics aren’t prone to advertise their vicious denunciation of the unvaccinated only two or three years ago — any more than recovered memory patients are inclined to advertise that they destroyed their relationship with their parents over an erroneous psychiatric fad. We like to think that we’re “modern” (and what peoples in the present have ever fancied themselves otherwise?) and that we base our beliefs on fact. But we’re just as prey to mass delusions as we ever were.

Accordingly, how’s this for mania number five. It isn’t a mania; it’s just the truth: check. It’s suddenly all anyone in the media seems to talk about, and they use all the same language: check. It’s powered by emotion: check. It brooks no dissent, refuses to acknowledge there’s even a debate to be had, and doghouses all sceptics as evil “deniers” who will bring about the end of world: check. It’s malign, getting increasingly extreme, and is driven by the very best of intentions: check, check, check. I’m not about to get into the argument here, but the escalating hysteria over climate change — or the climate “emergency”, climate “crisis”, or climate “collapse” — displays all the markers, does it not?

I was wrong. Over the past six months, several governments and international organisations — including the White House, the EU, the British research agency ARIA, the Climate Overshoot Commission, and various UN bodies — have produced reports that cautiously advocate the very same idea: releasing aerosols into the atmosphere in order to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface. The concept is known as solar engineering, or solar radiation modification (SRM), and it’s a specific type of geoengineering aimed at offsetting climate change by reflecting sunlight (“solar radiation”) back into space.

The idea of solar engineering is not new, but for a long time it was relegated to the fringes of the scientific community — and the realms of science fiction. However, as the very existence of these reports makes clear, the concept has been attracting more and more attention in recent years, largely thanks to the growing panic over climate change. And much of the interest in solar engineering stems from the fact that, unlike other climate mitigation policies, which require decades to yield any significant results, “SRM offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years”, as the White House report claims, even to “the preindustrial level” according to “highly idealised modeling studies”.

That report followed on from a 2021 study by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), “Reflecting Sunlight”, which suggested that “the US should cautiously pursue solar geoengineering research to better understand options for responding to climate change risks”. Mark Symes, director of the UK’s research agency ARIA, agrees: “Through carefully-considered engineering solutions it may eventually be possible to actively and responsibly control the climate and weather at regional and global scale.” Earlier this year, more than 100 scientists signed an open letter calling on governments to increase research into solar geoengineering.

Scientists point to large historical volcanic eruptions — which result in massive quantities of sulfur dioxide and dust particles being spewed into the atmosphere — as examples of the effectiveness of “stratospheric aerosol injection”. They’re not wrong: the 1815 Tambora eruption cooled the Earth by 0.7°C and led to a “year without summer”; more recently, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in 1991, cooled the planet by about half a degree Celsius on average for many months. So, the idea goes, by spraying a certain amount of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, we could replicate the effects of a major eruption and cool the Earth. Problem solved?

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Not quite. All the reports acknowledge that there are serious risks associated with solar radiation modification, which could affect human health, biodiversity and geopolitics. That’s because modifying sunlight could alter global weather patterns, disrupt food supplies and in fact lead to abrupt warming if the practice was widely deployed and then halted. But despite such caveats, the very existence of these reports represents a huge opening of the Overton window when it comes to the issue of geoengineering. Indeed: “The fact that this report even exists is probably the most consequential component”, Shuchi Talati of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering crowed after the White House’s report.

In other words, what matters here isn’t so much the content of these reports — which rightly highlight the risks of such interventions, and the need to proceed with caution — but the mere fact that the issue is treated as a topic of legitimate debate, thus slowly getting the public accustomed to the concept. But even more worryingly, perhaps, now that the geoengineering genie is out of the bottle, can we really expect governments and institutions to keep it under control?

After all, we live in an era in which private and corporate power has largely unshackled itself from any forms of meaningful public control, when it hasn’t outright merged with the institutions of the state, subordinating the latter to its own logic. As a result, billionaires, philanthrocapitalists and investment funds arguably exercise a greater influence over society than most governments. And, of course, they love playing God — especially when it offers massive opportunities for profit. So perhaps it is no surprise that much of the pressure for solar engineering also comes from this rarefied community.

In a speech to the Munich Security Conference last year, George Soros endorsed using solar geoengineering to combat climate change. Jeff Bezos has partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the geoengineering non-profit SilverLining, closely tied to Silicon Valley venture capital, to help create models that show what would happen if we blocked out some of the sun’s rays. Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Open Philanthropy, is another major funder of SRM projects. And then there is, of course, the ever-lurking Bill Gates: in 2021, he backed a sun-dimming project by the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), which aimed to spray calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over Sweden to test its effects on sunlight scattering.

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The project, however, was strongly criticised by environmentalists and indigenous groups, with 30 groups of indigenous peoples from around the world calling upon Harvard University to abandon the Gates-backed plans to test its solar geoengineering tech. “We do not approve legitimising development towards solar geoengineering technology, nor for it to be conducted in or above our lands, territories and skies, nor in any ecosystems anywhere,” stated a letter from the Saami Council, which represents Saami people across Scandinavia and in Russia. In the end, the test was called off. But this didn’t stop the ominously named American start-up Make Sunsets, which focuses on stratospheric aerosol injection — “Cooling the planet one reflective cloud at the time”  — from carrying out several tests in the United States.

This means that sun-dimming experiments are already being conducted by private companies, with little or no oversight or regulation. And the edging of this technology into reality is part of a more general phenomenon in climate action: the emergence of a “climate power bloc” encompassing liberal-technocratic politicians, certain climate scientists, environmental NGOs, “green” philanthropists, and Silicon Valley “climate capitalists”. At this intersection of ideology, class and economic interests, extreme and ambitious ideas such as solar engineering find fertile ground. And they are primed to grow further into the popular consciousness — which has already been conditioned to think of climate change as an apocalyptic threat, and to therefore accept “do or die” solutions.

Activists and scientists have started to push back. We’ve already seen the successful prevention of the SCoPEx test. Then, last year, more than 60 senior climate scientists and governance scholars from around the world published an open letter, since supported by more than 450 academics, calling for an “International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering”. They emphasise the very serious risks: to human health, but also to the ecosystem itself, with precipitation patterns, vegetation and crop production all disrupted.

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The problem, as is often the case, is mission creep — the gradual broadening of the original objectives of a certain programme, often under the influence of technological path dependency. Once a technology comes into existence it tends to be used for the simple fact that it exists, especially if it has been normalised for the public. Hence the call for “research into solar engineering” is, wittingly or not, paving the ground for its future adoption. And its advocates have an existential climate discourse on their side. SRM lobbyists can always claim that the alternative is worse — if that alternative is planetary extinction. As Anote Tong, a former president of Kiribati, a low-lying Pacific island state menaced by rising sea levels, told the New Yorker last year: “It has to be either geoengineering or total destruction”.

In this sense, the debate over solar engineering is symptomatic of how we are interpreting climate change: as a utopian speculation created in response to the dystopia we increasingly see as our future. This logic is designed to spur humanity into action, to find answers to the climate crisis that avoid vicious socioeconomic costs — which is why some sceptics of radical decarbonisation are sympathetic to solar geoengineering. It’s also why climate change activists such as Greta Thunberg oppose it — because it would threaten commitments to decarbonisation. We should oppose this binary logic. We shouldn’t have to choose between radical decarbonisation and geoengineering: fuelled by an impetus towards climate doomerism, they are both dangerous in their own way.

Saito’s argument is pretty straightforward: capitalism is destroying the planet, and the only way to pull civilisation back from the brink of extinction is for “the entire world, without exception, to become a part of a sustainable, just society”. In other words, to embrace degrowth communism — a radical reorganisation of society based on the elimination of mass production and consumption, the prioritisation of use-value (social utility) over commodity value, and the total decarbonisation of the economy.

According to Saito — and this is what puts him at odds with most Marxists — Marx himself, towards the end of his life, embraced this kind of back-to-Earth communism, rejecting his earlier “productivist” iterations of communism. Indeed, Saito goes to great lengths in the book to rehabilitate Marx’s ideas in the light of contemporary progressive sensibilities, offering what some would describe as a “woke” interpretation of the German philosopher.

Several pages, for example, are dedicated to absolving Marx from the accusation of Eurocentrism — the idea, undeniably present in Marx’s most famous works, that every nation was required to follow the path of capitalistic industrialisation laid out by Western Europe, because this would eventually prepare the ground for revolution. “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future,” Marx writes in Capital.

According to Saito, Marx, in his later life, made a clean break with this view, acknowledging that the archaic, steady-state communal societies of the non-Western and pre-capitalist world actually represented a powerful alternative to capitalism — one that contained the seeds of revolution, and held important lessons even for the industrialised countries of the West.

This may very well be true. Yet, for all his criticism of Marx’s early Eurocentrism, Saito seems oblivious to his own Eurocentrism — or perhaps I should say Western-centrism. Even though Saito claims to speak “on behalf of the Global South and future generations”, and insists that the problems we face are global in nature, the truth is that Saito’s concerns reflect a very particular worldview: that of relatively affluent Westerners, especially young millennials and members of Generation Z.

Saito’s entire worldview, after all, is informed by a deep concern with the climate crisis and its allegedly existential threat to humanity. Throughout the book, he often repeats the quasi-millenarist notion that “human civilisation is facing a threat to its very existence” as a result of climate change. But this apocalyptic, doom-laden approach to the climate issue, which is at odds with climate science itself, is a specifically Western phenomenon.

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This is understandable: post-material concerns such as ecology tend to take hold in places where basic material concerns have already been satisfied — that is, in affluent countries, first and foremost Western ones. It is no coincidence that Saito comes from Japan, which enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. But for most people on the planet, especially those living in poorer countries, climate change systematically ranks among the lowest policy priorities — well below more pressing material concerns such as hunger and poverty, access to water and sanitation, and education.

To the billions of people who still live in extreme poverty, and the millions who don’t even have access to electricity, Saito’s vision of degrowth communism, and his plea to scale back production and consumption, is unlikely to be very appealing. In fact, Saito’s insistence that countries in the Global South should refrain from pursuing growth — even “green growth” — might very well be seen as a form of Western eco-imperialism. Or, indeed, Eurocentrism: isn’t Saito implying that every country in the world should simply conform to the worldview of Western middle-class environmentalists?

In this sense, degrowth communism suffers from the same drawback of old-school communism: it’s an intrinsically universalist worldview, one that purports to offer a one-size-fits-all solution for all human societies, regardless of local cultural and civilisational specificities. This globalist outlook is typical of post-Nineties leftism, which Saito harks back to in several respects. This is also evident in his rejection of the nation-state, viewed as a reactionary, quasi-fascist construct, rather than the framework through which virtually all the major social, economic and political advancements of the past centuries were achieved.

It’s a view that is completely at odds with global realities. Simply put, the billion-plus people who still live in poverty in countries such as India, not to mention those in Africa, legitimately aspire to the comforts of industrialisation: round-the-clock electricity, modern housing, heating and cooling technologies, and healthcare. This will inevitably drive up their energy consumption. Western environmentalists such as Saito continue to entertain the notion that the future energy needs of developing countries can be met entirely by renewables, mainly wind and solar, but this is a fantasy.

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Many of the world’s poorest nations have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels in the coming years, ideally in combination with nuclear energy, if they want to raise living standards — and indeed are taking steps in that direction, despite demands from rich-world advocates and policymakers for developing countries to abstain from fossil-based resources. This will drive up their emissions, but it will also pull millions of people out of poverty. Insofar as trade-offs go, this should be a no-brainer. But not for Western eco-warriors such as Saito.

Moreover, development and growth in the Global South should be welcomed for reasons other than just poverty reduction; it’s also about shifting the balance of power. For all of Saito’s criticism of the Imperial Mode of Living — the Global North’s reliance on the plunder of the people and resources in the Global South — he conveniently disregards the fact that the only way to for poorer countries to break free from the grip of Western domination is to boost their relative economic strength.

Indeed, Saito completely ignores the biggest story of our time: the shifting of the world’s geopolitical balance of power from the West to the Brics bloc, which was made possible because a country, China, managed to develop its own productive forces, and become a global powerhouse, at breakneck speed. This required the burning of huge amounts of fossil fuels — but has contributed to weakening the West’s stranglehold on the world to a degree that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. You would expect a critic of Western imperialism such as Saito to welcome this global shift; it isn’t even touched upon in the book.

Instead, Slow Down often reads like it was written in the late Nineties or early-2000s, at the height of the unipolar era. The Global South is described as a powerless victim of Western imperialism. But this is itself a Eurocentric view, one that ignores the huge challenges being mounted around the world against the Western international order — in Ukraine, the Red Sea, Francophone Africa and elsewhere. This includes breaking out of the structural underdevelopment imposed on developing nations by the West.

The fact that Saito completely ignores this trend betrays his Western middle-class biases: for eco-leftists like him, the fight against climate change will always trump the fight against imperialism. They would rather have the masses of the Global South languish in a state of underdevelopment rather than see them develop their productive forces — which inevitably entails the burning of fossil fuels. As it turns out, developing countries have no intention of pandering to Western middle-class concerns.

But while Saito’s message of degrowth has little to offer to the countries of the Global South, it would be a mistake to disregard it entirely. After all, in Western countries, it clearly resonates, and it’s important to understand why. His call for degrowth communism, like other contemporary critiques of capitalism, taps into a growing disillusionment with the Western socioeconomic model. Saito states the obvious when he says that our current system is no longer working for most people: notwithstanding the fact that we live in affluent societies, many of us are overworked, underpaid and lead ever-more precarious lives. Economic inequality continues to rise.

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But perhaps even more dramatically, we live increasingly atomised, purposeless lives: there’s no higher meaning binding us together as a society. French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term anomie to describe a society defined by a breakdown in social norms and moral values. Aside from the diminishing returns of abiding by society’s rules — finding a job, creating a family — many young people wonder what the point of it all is. No wonder they are attracted by radical ideas such as degrowth communism, which promise less stuff but richer, fuller, deeper, more meaningful lives.

As Saito writes, under degrowth communism “there will be more opportunities to do sports, go hiking, take up gardening and get back in touch with nature. We will have time once again to play guitar, paint pictures, read. We can host those close to us in our homes and eat together with friends and family.” It’s easy to see the appeal of this vision. Not only does it offer the prospect of a better life; perhaps even more importantly, it offers something to fight for. It offers meaning. And the climate issue only strengthens the project’s secular-theological grounding: it’s not just about transforming society — but about “saving the world”.

In this sense, ideas such as degrowth communism and climate doomerism are, ultimately, the flipside of the anomic societies created by late-stage capitalism. Perhaps Marx was right: capitalism really does end up sowing the seeds of its own demise — not because of ever-rising levels of productivity, but because of ever-decreasing levels of meaning.

If we use the stages of grief as a model for human reckoning with tragedy, we are currently desperately bargaining that we might simply flip a switch — be it policy or market-based — and continue to expect to live as we have in the relatively peaceful End of History period of the past few decades.

Climate change activists, for example, look to the state and potential mechanisms for world governance via climate conferences to solve the problem. If only we put in the right number of bike lanes or subsidise the transition to a world of electric vehicles, industrial society would lumber on. Free-marketeers, relatedly, look to the unfettered global market to innovate our way to unleashing energy abundance never before captured in human history — a fantasy of the world economy run on nuclear power with Silicon Valley-backed AI-run vertical farms underwriting fully automated luxury capitalism.

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These assumptions — that industrial society must continue indefinitely, or that we must develop solutions at grand scales — has us stuck in a political and technological gridlock, and limits our ability to imagine alternatives. Some of the most salient cultural traditions for this historical moment live outside the current oversized scale of market and state.

Writers such as John Michael Greer, who have compared ours to collapsed civilisations of the past, have been proclaiming that we are at the end of the industrial society. In response, forward-thinking individuals are cobbling together a worldview to get us through this period of crisis: something like the conservatism of Christopher Lasch combined with the environmentalism of Wendell Berry, a synthesis we might call Left Conservatism.

In practice, this nascent ideology looks to revive civil society, cares about ecology and culture of place, desires robust local and regional economies, is broadly anti-war, and rejects the ongoing bureaucratisation and commodification of all the most sacred aspects of life. This milieu of thinking doesn’t belong to a set political tradition — hence the contradiction in terms — but, above all, Left Conservatism centres the local, the particular and the human-scaled.

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Whether or not we are ready for it, we are entering a world in which the market and state are failing to meet basic needs. We will therefore need to embrace much more radical self-determination, at various scales for various problems. Those who take on the responsibility of de-scaling our economy and politics will be the most successful in the New Tragic Age, which may not be so tragic after all, depending on how we prepare.

There is an interesting history of something like Left Conservatism in the United States, especially owing to federalism and the ability to devolve power to states. Writers such as Berry, Lasch and Norman Mailer represent versions of this alternative to the typical Left-Right binary. In an interview with Martin Amis, Mailer describes the appeal of the term:

“The best thing that can be said for conservatism, and there are a great many terrible things to say about it, but the best thing to say about it is that they (conservatives) do tend to have a certain appreciation of the world as a whole. I become uneasy when I find people drawing up solutions, which is, of course, the great vice of the Left, to solve difficult problems, because I think they cut out too many of the nuances. So, Left Conservatism is my way of reminding myself that you have to deal with everything in context.”

In a globalised market and bureaucratic state, nearly every aspect of life is decontextualised — a line on a spreadsheet to be analysed by financiers or policy-makers. The principle of subsidiarity, or the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest possible scale, closest to where they will have an impact, is a helpful rule. Political questions answered on appropriate scales would allow for a patchwork of diverse cultures — working in concert when necessary and focusing on self-determination where appropriate.

Here, the environmentalism of Berry is scaled down. Instead of focusing primarily on the global and intangible, Berry’s environmentalism is about local ecologies, fundamentally inextricable from place and culture. What follows from this distinction is a radically different ontology: a concern for global concepts such as climate seems to drive activists toward acts of destruction, whereas a focus on the stewardship of a specific, knowable ecology encourages acts of creation.

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Lasch is best known for documenting the advancing narcissism of the modern era, but he also mourned the loss of the culture of pre-industrial times. He bemoaned “the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” and called for a reinvigoration of active participation in civic life. Primarily known as a Leftist, Lasch retained a respect for the positive potential of the state, as long as it remained in balance with strong families, neighbourhoods, and working “guilds”.

For both, whether dealing with the market or the state, it is the scaling down of focus that radically reorganises the field of action. The inhuman scales through which we currently engage in politics rightfully make us feel out of control. Our sense is that the only way to protect ourselves from such totalising forces is to either recoil from them or to destroy them in some way or another. You can see this most clearly in climate activism, where the sense of helplessness leads to a rage channeled toward acts of destruction. However, when the scale is more human — a neighbourhood, a family, a garden — suddenly the possibility for acts of creation or stewardship become much more real, and the responsibility for action more tangible.

Those hovering around these ideas — localism, civic orientation, care for local ecologies — are seeking to move beyond the gridlock of over-scaled politics as currently constituted. They see the future clear-eyed, and know that more partisan appeals to solutions of the global market or governance will just provide us more of the same. The “Left” part of Left Conservatism is recognition of the need to protect ourselves from the exploitative forces of the market — the desire to commodify and sell off every last sacred thing. The “conservative” part is the desire to protect the sacred from the flattening authority of bureaucracy. Despite superficial political differences of individuals, working at the local scale as neighbours can start to draw out the shared sense of the sacred: a clean environment, a safe community, a thriving home.

By contrast, only a small number of Grinches with long memories and cynical dispositions point out that Churchill opened his wartime premiership with the promise of nothing but “blood, sweat and tears”. (His government of 1951, by contrast, promised to “set the people free” and ended up being, even in the eyes of his greatest admirers, an embarrassing shambles.) As for Reagan, his success owed at least as much to fear — of the Soviet Union, of national decline, of urban disorder — as it did to hope. Rambo not Rockie is the film to watch if you want to understand American politics in the early Eighties. We Grinches would point out that the most successful politician of recent times, Donald Trump, trades on the feeling that “carnage” is just around the corner.

Of course, the Left has a particular problem. It is, or has been, about selling change. Left-wing candidates have usually sought to persuade their supporters that things can get better, whereas British Conservatives argued that change was likely for the worst.

This brings us to the current state of the Labour Party. A few years ago, it looked as though Starmer would be Neil Kinnock — painfully leading his party back to electability but not quite fast enough to get elected himself. Now everything is going right for him. He is ahead in the opinion polls; his party is disciplined; his opponents — the SNP as much as the Conservatives — are falling apart. Prudent commentators talk of the dramatic swing that would be necessary for Labour to get an absolute majority in parliament, but my own money is on something close to a landslide.

This is not, though, quite the same as saying that Labour should be optimistic. In his conference speech last week, Starmer blamed the Tories for “kicking the hope out”. But this is not a hopeful time. Tony Blair came to power in almost uniquely propitious circumstances. Norman Lamont lost the Tories their reputation for economic competence with the sharp drop in the value of the pound on Black Wednesday of 1992, but Labour inherited the benefits of Ken Clarke’s competent Chancellorship that followed Lamont’s dismissal. Blair also reaped the results of patient negotiation by the Major government in Northern Ireland. This was good news for the province but also for the climate in Westminster: for the first time since the Sixties, senior ministers could walk the streets without a phalanx of nervous-looking bodyguards.

Conditions beyond the reach of the British government’s policy were also good. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that peace and democracy seemed to be on the rise. Almost everywhere except North Korea, spending on armaments dropped in the Nineties. World-weary commentators had spent years saying countries that had lived under Communist rule would take decades to adjust to liberal democracy but, as it turned out, the Czech Republic — one of the more repressive countries in the eastern bloc during the Eighties — was a liberal democracy within a few years. Even China seemed to have moved away from the repression of 1989, which was why the handover of Hong Kong did not, in the short term, produce the exodus that some had expected.

Compare this with what is likely to hit the next Labour government. If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, he will face the worst circumstances that any new British prime minister has faced since May 1940. The sadistic relish with which Jeremy Hunt references economic figures makes one suspect that, first, he has given up all hope of buying the next election with tax cuts and, second, he does not even want to buy the next election because he knows that the consequences of Brexit and Covid may still be making themselves felt in five years’ time. And that’s not to mention the larger, sometimes existential, problems that the next government is going to face: Putin, Trump, China, climate change.

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Starmer needs Corbyn's secret weapon

By Ian Martin

So, the model for an incoming Starmer government should not be Blair’s victory in 1997 but Thatcher’s in 1979. She was not swept into power by a wave of hope; she floated in on a tide of despair. The Labour Party was exhausted after five years of trying to rule with a tiny minority. One of its most important leaders, Roy Jenkins, had effectively given up on the party. Not that the Tories were bouncing with excitement. At the time, the body thinking most usefully about the future of the Conservative Party was The Authority of Government Group: it met in an atmosphere of Eeyorish gloom. Its members thought that the power of the unions, among other things, might make Britain ungovernable — they were particularly worried by the prospect of future miners’ strikes, which they thought they would be unable to “win”. Some of them privately admired the Callaghan Labour government of 1976 to 1979, and doubted whether they would be able to do any better if they were elected.

Britain today is gripped by the same kind of pessimism that prevailed in the late Seventies — and Starmer needs to recognise this. The Labour Party should act within its constraints rather than acting as their job is to cheer everyone up with a group sing song. Indeed, nothing will undermine the Tories more than their recent, and most un-Tory, displays of optimism. Rishi Sunak’s new slogan seems to be “Long-term decisions for a brighter future”. If I were a Labour strategist, I would plaster the country with photographs of a grinning Boris Johnson having his cake and eating it.

Labour should play down expectations. It is often said that the public have lost faith in politicians. This is the exact opposite of what has happened. They have lost respect for politicians but, in some respects, this is precisely because they have too much faith in them. The public has come to treat politics as 17th-century peasants treated witchcraft — as a source of unlimited, if often malign, power. The fact that the NHS has long waiting lists in the aftermath of Covid is assumed to be the result of incompetence or bad intentions by ministers, rather as crop failure would once have been regarded as the result of some unpopular old woman putting toads in her cauldron.

Thatcher’s great achievement was to persuade people that there are many things that a government cannot do much about. Furthermore, when a government can do something, it invariably means making ruthless decisions about the balance between harm and good; as Nigel Lawson, quoting the French politician Pierre Mendès France, put it in his resignation speech: “To govern is to choose.” For Thatcher, this insight was applied to the economy: subsidies were withdrawn from industries that were bound to fail. The area of brutal choice for Starmer will be the environment.

Currently, the Labour leader is running scared from the result of the Uxbridge by-election, where opposition to Sadiq Khan’s measures against the most polluting cars seemed to account for an unexpected Tory victory. Starmer is also given to spouting nonsense about how everyone will benefit from a “Green industrial revolution”, when the truth is that protecting the future of the planet — or even just protecting the lungs of children who are unfortunate enough to live near the Westway flyover — is not going to come from a cosy, win-win solution. People, particularly vociferous middle-aged men, will be made to stop doing things that they want to do. Similarly, Starmer, who campaigned so energetically against Britain leaving the European Union, can hardly now plausibly claim that there is a “good Brexit” — especially at a time when the public seems to be losing faith that such a thing exists. Starmer should level with voters: his negotiations with Europe will be an exercise in damage control.

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Will the working class strike back?

By Richard Vinen

The other lesson of 1979 is that parties should not be sentimental about their voters. Many Tories were heartbroken that Scots abandoned them in that election: it is said that “Rab” Butler told Thatcher that she would have Scotland engraved on her heart as Mary Tudor had Calais, lost to the English crown in 1558, engraved on hers. But it was a small price to pay for winning seats in Essex or the Midlands. Labour should write off part of the Red Wall vote. Losing Birmingham Northfield, a working-class seat that used to revolve around the Longbridge car plant, is a small price to pay for holding every other seat in the city. There has been much talk recently of the “woke elite” holding “luxury beliefs” when it comes to, say, immigration — but “woke elite” in this context really means an educated middle class that is larger than ever before, and politically engaged. In truth, there would be no more self-indulgent luxury for the Labour Party than to hold on to a diminishing group of traditional working-class voters out of nostalgia, as if Left-wing politics is a Hovis ad.

Of course, there are some respects in which the first Thatcher government is a bad model for Starmer. Thatcher was lucky because Britain became a net exporter of oil early in her government and because General Galtieri was stupid enough to give her an opportunity for an easy military victory and, thus, a much higher level of electoral support. This meant that, for her first few years, Thatcher just had to survive, whereas she could afford to be radical — even, sometimes, optimistic — after the 1983 election. It is hard to imagine fortune smiling in this way on any British government in the next few years — and easy to imagine scenarios, such as a Russian attack on Poland, that would make a sizeable dent in Starmer’s good luck.

Unlike Thatcher, Starmer cannot afford to wait. He should take brave and controversial decisions early on — prioritising those, such as making some serious progress on the HS2 rail line, that would be hard for any subsequent government to reverse. Because for all his optimism, he cannot bet on a second term. Perhaps, in short, the best hope for the next Labour government would be to start with as little hope as possible.

The Conservatives have interpreted their win in Uxbridge as a response to Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez), effectively a tax on those who drive cars judged to be over-polluting; Rishi Sunak instantly followed up this victory with the announcement of 100 new oil drilling licences in the North Sea. Last week, sensing the popular backlash building, he went further, pledging to reverse many of the UK’s net-zero policies.

Sunak’s exploitation of the net-zero backlash was typical of an emerging strategy on the Right. Climate-minded policymakers float or implement a policy that, rightly or wrongly, is perceived as harming the economy and working people. The policy then allows Right-wing forces to mobilise mass anger against what is construed as an elite conspiracy to make ordinary life more difficult and costly — and the Right reaps the electoral gains.

This conservative mobilisation of class inequality has held for even longer in America. In 1993, the newly elected Clinton Administration rallied around a policy that was all the rage in the environmental think-tank circuit — green taxes. Their language then still had an edge of neoliberal novelty: policymakers could solve the “market failure” by “internalising” the costs of pollution and “nudging” the market toward clean solutions.

Predictably, the policy failed to garner the necessary support in Congress and there was an outcry on the Right. One letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle captured the rage in a way the van-drivers of Uxbridge might now understand: “You will pay this tax every time you turn on your stove, run your refrigerator, iron your clothes, drive your car, water your lawn or flush your toilet. There is nothing that you do or any part of your life that will not ‘pay’ this tax.” Unsurprisingly, the Republicans rode a historic “red wave” in the 1994 midterm elections and gained control of Congress for the first time in 42 years.

Fifteen years later, President Barack Obama rode into office with a Democratic supermajority, a massive economic crisis, and radical calls for a “Green New Deal”. Instead, drawing from the same free-market environmentalism, he unveiled a complicated emissions trading programme called “cap and trade” (immediately labelled “Cap and Tax” by the Right), and helped spark the 2009-2010 Tea Party rebellion and his own party’s defeat in the 2010 midterms. By 2016, Right-wing opponents of climate action were actively claiming to be on the side of the working class. Billionaire oil tycoon Charles Koch declared himself to be “very concerned [about climate policies] because the poorest Americans use three times the energy as the percentage of their income as the average American does. This is going to disproportionately hurt the poor.” Charles Koch, man of the people.

A similar backlash is taking place across the world today: in France, Emmanuel Macron’s 2018 fuel tax incited mass revolt with the Yellow Vest movement, who contrasted liberal concern with the “end of the world” with their own struggle to pay their bills at the “end of the month”. This year, the German Green Party has suggested forcing households to purchase expensive heat pumps, only to see their popularity plummet and the rise of the AfD. Heavily Democratic states such as New York and California have floated banning gas stoves or internal combustion engines, encouraging a tide of populist ridicule.

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Renewable energy's progressive halo

By Matt Huber

Why do these climate policy technocrats repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot? Because, at the heart of their thinking, there is a deeper moralism that won’t let political reality get in the way of their historic mission. Ultimately, such approaches might be dubbed “techno-behaviouralism” — insisting that the main challenge of climate change is to reform the immoral carbon practices of dispersed consumers throughout the upper, middle and working classes. Rather than tackling the problem of who owns and controls fossil-fuel based production (a relative minority of society), carbon behaviouralism aims its sights on the “irresponsible” choices of millions of consumers of all classes. It hopes to use policy tools to get them to drive less (or drive more efficient cars), insulate their homes, eat less meat, fly less. One notorious study in 2017 even went as far as to advise individuals to not have children.

The first phase of this policy outlook was to use the disciplining force of the market — particularly the price mechanism — to “nudge” consumers toward low-carbon choices. But now the severity of the climate crisis is forcing these technocrats to ratchet up their strategy to outright coercion: banning fossil-fuel boilers, gas stoves, internal combustion engines, or forcing farmers to rapidly implement costly practices. Rather than winning them over to an attractive political project, the masses must be reformed into more virtuous low-carbon practices. And even when the climate technocrats focus on society’s rampant class inequality, they only morally reprimand the lifestyles of the rich — their private jets, for example. They hardly ever consider how the rich make rather than spend their money: organising investment and for-profit production with likely far greater effects on the climate.

This has much less to do with the climate than with the ruling ideologies of a dying era — neoliberalism and technocracy. But environmentalism was not always morally fixated on the consumption of the masses. In the Sixties, the modern environmental movement emerged with a strong argument that our problems were rooted in forms of industrial production. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring railed against the chemical industry producing what she called “elixirs of death”. Tony Mazzocchi, a union leader and an organiser of the first Earth Day in 1970, saw that his fellow workers were the ones first exposed to harmful toxic pollution before it went into the community air and water. He also recognised that workers and unions had strategic leverage to force owners to reform these sites of production: “When you start to interfere with the forces of production, you’re going to the heart of the beast, right?”

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At this stage, it was pretty straightforward that environmentalism meant a form of “industrial policy”: implementing regulations that would force capitalist industry to install or replace polluting equipment in favour of cleaner alternatives. As such, policies such as the Clean Air and Water Acts had great success. But two political developments nipped this burgeoning movement in the bud. First, free-market reformers targeted both the regulatory and welfare state with the twin processes of fiscal austerity and regulatory reform. An emergent form of free-market environmentalism argued that even if industrial pollution control was successful, it was unduly burdensome, hindered global competitiveness, and, above all, was not “cost-effective”. Cap and trade, green taxes and green consumption all emerged as cheaper alternatives to the top-down environmental regulatory state. Why dictate what industry must do, when you can allow markets and prices to do the work indirectly?

Second, a new and inhuman form of environmentalism supplanted the earlier one. Certain thinkers of the post-war era — most prominently William Vogt and Paul Ehrlich — were comfortable asserting straightforward Malthusian explanations of environmental crisis. Ehrlich famously argued that a “population bomb” in the largely poor, developing world imperilled humanity. It soon became clear, however, that this crude Malthusianism focused too much on the poor, and ignored the outsized contribution of specific populations in the rich counties. Early in the Seventies, “affluence” was discovered as the key driver of environmental breakdown (famously alongside population and technology in the IPAT equation). A follow up to his bestselling book The Population Bomb was Paul Ehrlich’s The End of Affluence, blaming unsustainability on consumer societies — and, at least partially, on the consumption of the ordinary working person.

By the Eighties and Nineties, ecological thinkers such as William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel devised a whole mode of analysis — ecological “footprints” — which traced all environmental impacts to the consumption of resources by consumers (this prompted British Petroleum to invent the concept of a “carbon footprint”, which they happily promoted as part of their ill-fated “Beyond Petroleum” campaign in 2004). While focusing on “consumers” makes sense for natural ecosystems, the capitalist economy disaggregates consumption from owners who control and profit from production. The latter not only enable consumption, but have much more power over societal resources and thus more environmental impact. Footprint analysis erased these capitalists profiteers from environmental responsibility.

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A heatwave isn't the end of the world

By Thomas Fazi

The result of this footprint ideology was a shift to what John Bellamy Foster and coauthors have called “economic Malthusianism”. Like Malthus’s original arguments, it disregards the power of capital in favour of a moralistic focus on policing imprudent behaviour. But, whether focusing on consumption or demographics, it leads to similar calls for radical population reductions. In fact, William Rees published a paper just this year claiming humanity is heading toward a “population correction” and suggested that “informed estimates put the long-term carrying capacity [of the Earth] at as few as 100 million to as many as three billion people”. In other words, between 98.75% to 62.5% of the current human population needs to die off. This is how our modern climate discourse — top-down, moralising, apocalyptic — emerged.

But this also mirrored shifts throughout the larger political economy. Just as deindustrialisation attacked industrial workers and unions and celebrated the educated knowledge worker, a new form of environmentalism downplayed production and glorified the agency of the environmentally conscious middle-class consumer — the people who staff the state agencies and non-profits that deploy carrots and sticks to herd the masses toward environmental enlightenment. Anyone who looks seriously at the problem should realise solving it will require not lifestyle modification but political and social change. New infrastructures for energy, housing, transport built not by the middle class but blue-collar industrial workers. And abandoned industrial regions could find obvious self-interest in a public-jobs programme aimed at constructing this new economy.

It is telling that, rather than gathering around such a programme on the Left, “green” industrial workers — such as those in the Danish wind industry — are rejecting environmentalism and voting for the Right. After all, the environmental movement still remains populated by middle-class activists brimming with moral certitude that their political project must include corralling the consumptive behaviour of ordinary people. That we could both save the planet and make life significantly better for the majority simply does not cross their mind. And as long as the Left simply renews the climate politics of the last 30 years, workers will continue to reject a platform that has nothing to offer them.

In 1947, the mercury here plummeted to -62.8ºC, so cold that reportedly frozen droplets of moisture in exhaled breath tinkled to the floor like shards of broken glass. In the summer of 1915, meanwhile, temperatures reached 37.8ºC, a record that stands to this day. Over the past 40 years, as the Arctic has warmed at a rate anything up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, the Yukon Flats, which straddle the Arctic Circle, have recorded the biggest temperature increases of all. Winters here are now on average 4.9ºC warmer than they were in the Fifties. In summer, the vast forests of spruce which span the Gwich’in territory are routinely ablaze.

Edward Alexander, a 46-year-old co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, grew up in Fort Yukon and now lives in the Alaskan city of Fairbanks. For the past eight years, the father-of-four has worked as a volunteer firefighter, helping to tackle the devastating wildfires ravaging the Arctic and boreal north. This year, Canada has already registered its worst wildfire season on record, which has destroyed more than 52,000 square miles of the country — an area greater than the size of England. In Alaska, meanwhile, the frequency of wildfires exceeding one million acres in size has doubled in the past 30 years.

Alexander estimates that wildfires have claimed around four million acres of Gwich’in land since the Fifties, and in summer a thick band of smog often blankets the Yukon Flats. “We have had a front row seat to the beginning of the Pyrocene, as they are starting to call it,” he says. “The burning of the world.” Rain now falls instead of snow, caribou herds on which the Gwich’in rely have changed their patterns of migration, the rivers have warmed and salmon populations collapsed. And as the ice recedes, outside interests have started eying up the natural resources underneath the melting permafrost. After a deal was struck in 2019, oil and gas prospectors are currently scoping out the Yukon Flats.

A similar story is being recorded right across the High North. “Arctic amplification” is the term meteorologists use for the accelerated rate of global warming. But the same amplification is occurring with the geopolitics of the region. The Arctic is melting — one scientific study, published in June, claimed that the first summer in which all sea ice disappears could occur as early as the 2030s — and, from China to the US to Putin’s Russia, suddenly everyone wants a piece. The era of “Arctic exceptionalism” declared by Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 is resolutely over, his entreaties for the Arctic to remain a “zone of peace” free from conflict and exploitation forgotten. As climate change accelerates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cleaved apart the international order, the Arctic has emerged as the potential theatre of the next global conflict.

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Alexander, who also represents the Gwich’in on the Arctic council (which includes the eight Arctic states, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the US and Russia) warns that the global race to plunder the Arctic could have devastating consequences. “If you don’t co-operate on the Arctic and we don’t get these things right, then I’ll tell you this, my friend: the world can change very rapidly.”

Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.

China — which has ominously declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — also harbours ambitions to transform the passage into a silk road of the far north, while in March, a Russian delegation to India held talks over new co-operation over the route. The West is similarly flexing its muscles, with Finland (and the expected accession of Sweden) extending Nato’s borders into the Arctic. In June, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the US would be opening an outpost in the far-north Norwegian town of Tromsø, stressing the need to have “a diplomatic footprint” above the Arctic Circle. “The war in Ukraine has really torpedoed this idea of Artic exceptionalism,” explains Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “The whole focus of northern Europe has basically now shifted to building security against Russia.”

As Melvin points out, the heavy losses sustained by Russia’s land army in Ukraine will force it to become increasingly reliant on its nuclear forces stationed in the Arctic, where the UK and US have also long operated their own attack submarines. Russia’s Northern Fleet comprises of a dozen or so nuclear-powered attack submarines as well as surface vessels, including two heavy nuclear-powered missile battle cruisers. In recent years, Russia has also reoccupied old Cold War-era Arctic bases to bolster its presence. “They will feel more vulnerable as a result of not having a strong army, and I think we are likely to see them threaten nuclear options much more as part of national defence,” Melvin says of Russia’s designs in the Arctic. “They are going to be much more explicit and threatening.”

Beneath the ice, the Arctic possesses untold riches. The region is estimated to contain a fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves and rare earth elements such as gold, nickel and zinc. While most of these are present within the largely undisputed land borders of the Arctic nations, it is the increasingly navigable international waters that present the most likely flashpoint. An ongoing process led by a United Nations commission is considering sovereignty rights to the central Arctic Ocean between Russia, Denmark and Canada. While Putin is cooperating with the process so far, he has also planted a flag in the most literal sense — dropping a titanium standard of the Russian Federation two miles beneath the ocean on the North Pole seabed in 2007. Fishing rights are also key; as southern oceans heat up, species will migrate ever further north, causing estimated catches in higher latitudes to increase by up to 20 per cent by 2050.

According to Professor Klaus Dodds, an expert in geopolitics and ice studies based at Royal Holloway and author of the recent book, Border Wars, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard could prove another area of conflict. Under a treaty originally signed in 1920, a host of countries including China and Russia have rights to engage in commercial activities across Svalbard. Moscow conducts coal mining operations on the island of Spitsbergen (and insists on referring to Svalbard by the same name, to emphasise its historic claim on the land). In settlements such as Barentsburg, Russian is the predominant language.

“The concern is we know we have potential flashpoints like Svalbard which, having caused agitation and tension in the past, might be escalated very quickly,” Dodds says. Aggression could be anything from attacks on underwater cables (last year, a Russian trawler was linked to the severing of a sub-sea fibre-optic cable which linked Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland), to an outright attack on oil and gas infrastructure. “The Norwegian European Arctic will be the space where, if anything, this is most likely to happen,” Dodds says. “That would also be the ultimate opportunity for Russia to test Nato’s resolve.”

Regardless of the potential for nuclear conflict, a burning Arctic poses grave threats for humanity. The Arctic permafrost contains peatland soils which are the world’s most vital carbon sink. Globally, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the forests combined. When this burns, it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere creating something of a doom loop. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, wildfires across Canada have released 290 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere between January and August, more than 25% of the global total for 2023 in the year to date. 

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Thawing permafrost is also exposing chemical and radioactive waste and millennia-old “zombie viruses”. In 2016, around 100,000 reindeer were culled in the Russian far north after an anthrax outbreak that killed a 12-year-old boy. Plague bacillus, smallpox and other historic diseases are also feared to soon re-emerge from the melting earth. The discovery earlier this summer of 46,000-year-old roundworms lying dormant in Siberia, which are happily reproducing once again, may hold clues for adapting to climate change — but they also raise questions about what else might venture forth in a thaw. And herein lies the great lesson of the far north, Professor Dodds explains: nothing here ever happens in isolation — there will be wider ramifications across the globe. “Change in the Arctic is never restricted to the Arctic itself,” he says. “It is almost as if the Arctic strikes back.”

The time is long gone where we could think of the Arctic as a great pristine wilderness. Instead it has become the burning crucible of our climate crisis. But, as the towering glaciers melt and the seas of the Earth’s fifth largest ocean are revealed to us at last, their future looks even darker still, reanimating the biological threats of our deep past, and providing yet another site for human competition and conquest.

She was the art editor at Harper’s Magazine when I worked there 20 years ago. We bonded when everybody in the office took a personality test one afternoon. It was supposed to determine whether you were a “Dreamer” or “Practical”. Stacey and I both scored 97% Dreamer. She’s hilarious and sharp and compulsively creative. As a kid in South Carolina, she used to sing in malls with her family. Her message said that her husband Sam’s book about fireflies had finally been printed.

I knew what she was talking about from having followed the project from a distance, over text. Her husband, Samuel James, is a world-class photographer who grew up in Cincinnati. When she met him, they were in the New York journalism scene but parachuted out as a couple and landed in the forested Appalachian foothills of his native Ohio, the southern part, not far from the Kentucky border. It’s the middle of nowhere, frankly, even by southern Ohio standards, but their immediate visual environment is very beautiful and state-parkish.

Stacey and Sam are both passionate naturalists. They’re home-schooling their daughter, Josephine, which for Josephine means a lot of studying biology in the woods. When it’s time to learn about metamorphosis, she goes to the pond. Twice a year she and her mother help move hundreds of DeKay’s Brownsnakes across a road that blocks their natural migration path. They count them as they go. Last fall it was 679, juveniles and adults. Sam is sometimes hired to inspect the middens of endangered Alleghany woodrats. He looks for raccoon scat, which can infect the woodrats with a deadly parasite.

Sam and Stacey had no way of knowing, when they made the move to that the particular little part of Ohio, that it was a global hotspot for firefly diversity. They found that out only by going for walks through old fields and forests, in May and June. The lightning bugs were everywhere. Some nights they would be so thick that they seemed to affect the overall light-level. It wasn’t just the number but the variety, too. Different sub-species had their own colours and patterns of signalling. They lit up during different phases of the evening and night, and in different microhabitats. Some preferred meadows; others, the trees. Some went on flashing for hours, whereas others had briefer windows.

Sam started trying to photograph them. He wanted to document the phenomenon, but also to preserve something, if possible, of what it was like to witness it. That meant capturing elements of time and rhythm. He started going to the fields before dusk and staying late, basically all night. They would all three go. Josephine watched and played until she passed out on Sam’s tripod bag on the ground — many nights of doing that, over four years, experimenting with ultra-long exposures. Sometimes he would leave the shutter open for nearly half an hour (after which point the image started to get too noisy with information). He discovered that, for whatever reason, a relatively modest Canon digital camera worked best for this sort of picture. It seemed to stay sharp longest in the low-light conditions.

Sam had made a book of this work, and now Stacey wrote to tell me that they had received the first box of copies in the mail. I had heard so much about the project, and they wanted me to be among the first to see the finished thing. I was moved. I wrote back in congratulation and excitement and said something like: “Send me a PDF!!!” After that, there was an uncharacteristic silence of one or two days. You know how you can feel, in the rhythm of texting, when there’s something not quite right about a pause on the other end?

At last, Stacey wrote to say that she and Sam had discussed the matter and were uncomfortable with the idea that my first encounter with the book should be electronic. It was not the right way to experience the object. They had taken pains to make it a work of art. The printing had been as important as the photography. I needed to see a physical copy. I told her that I understood (and did) but explained that, unfortunately, I was way up in northern Michigan, a nine-hour road trip from their house. “That’s okay,” she said. “We’re fine to drive.” She’s one of those people who vibrate through the world like that.

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She wasn’t being quite as intense as I make it sound. Someone in their family has a cabin up near where I was. I’d forgotten. They’d been to that part of the country before. We made a plan, and about a week later the little family came rolling up in a Jeep. Stacey has beautiful silvery hair now — she almost had a Patti Smith thing going. Sam looks like he could be Bradley Cooper’s younger brother. With them was Josephine, a precocious six-year-old pip of a girl with a winning bowl cut. She was excited because they had seen a porcupine in a tree by their cabin. I asked her what it was doing. “It was very very sleepy and just stared at us,” she said.

Inside the cottage, in the little dining area where the best light was, we spread the book open on the white wooden table. The format is 9”x12”, broad pages. The matte cover is gravitational: a picture of darkness, but darkness as Samuel James has learned to photograph it, with a tremendous subtlety of gradation between the blue and black, and the greens of the forest glowing through darkly from behind. Sometimes there is moonlight. The image has the quality of actual nighttime, as if you could walk through it into the field. It is dappled all over with small bursts of yellow, wherever a firefly has flashed.

There are technical challenges involved in printing images of the night, especially when the focus is on the bright light of the fireflies’ bodies. Doing both was the challenge — holding onto the “tones and textures in the darks”, Sam said, “and still having the flash be luminous”. The fireflies had to glow on the page. Sam wound up settling on the independent Dutch fine-art publisher Fw:Books. He worked with Fw’s founding designer, Hans Gremmen, and with the Dutch printing house Drukkerij Robstolk, which has a reputation for handling dark images. Sam and Stacey flew to Amsterdam to consult in the production process. They described standing by the press and watching the printer hand-mix a batch of what they called “firefly yellow”, using ultra-saturated Japanese paint.

“His name was Niels,” Stacey said. “He had a little pot and a spatula.”

“It was cool to me,” Sam said, “because I felt like there was a lineage, going back in history, in Holland, to book-binding and the printed page.”

The only time they intervened, Sam said, was when it came to differentiating the different firefly colours. “This was an art project, but it was also a science project,” he said. “Some of the fireflies are that brilliant yellow, but others are green, and this one” — he flipped forward several pages — “is orange. Plus there are other yellows.” Some pages showed more than one flash-colour, meaning it had been a spot where multiple species mingled. Because of the long exposure time, you could see the flash-patterns, too. Some looked dot-dot-dot. Others made short streaks. Some made long straight comet trails. Or little isolated green blobs, like floating lanterns. Crazy squiggles. Elegant curves and bows. Some flash synchronously, in rhythm. It’s very special to be in the forest when that’s happening, a thousand fairy lights blinking on and off together in unison all around you. Each species has its own code. “My favourite one is the Pyractomena angulata,” Stacey said, “because he’s orange and he just will shimmer, a lot of quick flashes off and on.”

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It gets even more complex, Sam said, when you realise that the species sometimes mimic one another, for various strategic reasons, most having to do with reproduction. It’s the males who go around flashing, trying to attract the females. “The females are sort of hidden in the vegetation,” Sam said, “discreet. You don’t really see them.” But females can flash if they want. They do so mainly in response to the males — little winks. But there’s another, darker reason females sometimes flash: the females of certain species engage in a form of cannibalistic mimicry. By imitating the mating signals flashed by the females of another species, they lure in horny males and gobble them up. All of this communication and deception is happening above the field, in a language of chemical light. (It makes sense that Werner Herzog includes Sam’s firefly images in his new film about neuro-biology.)

I asked how many species there were in the patch of land where Sam had been shooting. “Twenty-six,” he said, “that we’ve identified. Of those twenty-six, nineteen make a flash code.”

I was surprised to hear that some don’t flash. “Some of them have evolved and foregone the whole business of flashing at night,” he said. “Too dangerous.”

I asked why there would be such great firefly diversity in that hollow where they live. “I don’t actually know the reason,” Sam said. “The Appalachians are a firefly hotspot in general.”

“It’s really dark where we are,” Stacey added. “You have to have darkness and you have to have snails. The babies eat, voraciously, snails.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “also, the soil has to be right. And we’re next to a preserve, so there’s not a lot of spraying and farming… But as to why there are so many kinds of firefly? It’s still a mystery to me.”

Sam added that there is still a lot we don’t know about these creatures. Scientists do even not agree on how or why firefly bioluminescence evolved. Some argue that it had to do with sex from the start (a means of attracting mates). That seems to be the dominant camp. It includes Lynn Frierson Faust, a pillar of lightning-bug and glowworm studies whose work Sam and Stacey frequently mentioned. But other entomologists theorise that the fireflies began to glow because of something called aposematism, an evolutionary mechanism by which species turn unusually garish or brightly coloured, in order to warn predators of the poison they contain — or to fool predators into thinking they contain it. In the fireflies’ case, the poison is real. Their chemicals are toxic. To some animals, anyway — bats, mice and lizards. Plenty of creatures eat them.

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Sam turned a page of the book. “These dusk-flashers,” he said, “these yellow guys, they only flash at dusk and then they’re gone…”

In much the same fashion, Sam and Stacey and Josephine were suddenly gone, back to southern Ohio. But they left behind a copy of the book, which I’ve picked up at least 20 times since then. It absorbs you. The woods and sky are so dark in some of the images that you almost can’t see them; you have to sit there and let them reveal themselves. Meanwhile, all of this light-painting shines across the pages.

It’s hard not to feel a little melancholy, in this summer of climate horrors, looking at pictures of fireflies. There has always been something utopian about them (in my notebook I have a newspaper clipping from 1810 reporting that the “streets of Washington were lighted for the first time last week with glow worms and fire bugs, 500 of these insects being confined in every lamp…”). Their habitat is threatened — as Stacey had pointed out, they need darkness — and I see far fewer of them than when I was a kid, or even 20 years ago. God forbid there should come a day when a child will be forced to consult a book, to know what it was like to experience fireflies in full array. But if the day does come, Samuel James’s Nightairs will have safeguarded a glimmer.

But what if a different crisis gets us first? What if the biggest problem we face is that billions of people are getting old at a faster rate than babies are being born? In Italy there are so few children that schools are “vanishing like the melting glaciers”. In Japan, adult nappies have outsold the baby variety for over a decade. Indeed, there is such a superabundance of waste from incontinence products that one town has started burning them for fuel. The problem is global: for countless millennia, forming families was the most intuitive thing imaginable, but no longer.

Of course, not everybody sees this as a problem. The glass-half-full take is that the declining birthrate has finally put our Malthusian terrors to bed. The threat of exponential overpopulation has corrected itself: for instance, China’s population is set to drop from 1.4 billion today to 800 million by 2100. The glass-half-empty view is that there won’t be enough young people to sustain this vastly expanded older population. The advice offered by economists is simple and utilitarian: countries that are depopulating must increase immigration.

But the materialist nature of today’s discussion, where it is being had, obscures the many profound existential questions posed by the impending arrival of a grey planet. In fact, there is only one forum in which these are being addressed: science fiction. Here, a handful of stories have tried to imagine what a world without children would look like.

The most famous of these thought experiments is Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film, Children of Men, based on the PD James novel, in which an ecological catastrophe has rendered the human race infertile, and civilisation stands on the brink of collapse. But while Children of Men is bleak enough, and contains generous helpings of man’s inhumanity to man, it is only set 18 years after the last birth. As a result, there are still plenty of young people about, among them a vigorous 40-ish-year-old Clive Owen, who ultimately discovers a mother and baby. The film ends with their rescue, and choral music, and the sound of children laughing. Crisis averted!

But if Children of Men loses its nerve, ultimately resisting the full ramifications of its premise, the same cannot be said of Greybeard, a novel by the British Grand Master of science fiction, Brian Aldiss. Written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it imagines that a nuclear catastrophe has left all humans and many animal species infertile. Crucially, Aldiss begins his story half a century after the event, when humanity is on the verge of extinction. The youngest people in the novel are Algy Timberlane, aka “Greybeard”, and his wife, Martha, who are both 56. Most of the characters are in their seventies or older.

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This enables Aldiss to explore the nature of an aging planet in detail. His first assumption is that a physically frail, and therefore vulnerable, community is a much more fearful one. At the start of his novel, Greybeard and his wife have spent a decade living in the village of Sparcot, which is run by a petty local tyrant. They have accepted his irascible rule in exchange for the promise of security. The residents squabble and complain about toothache while living in fear of invading Scotsmen and, of all creatures, stoats — one of the few species of mammal to have escaped the catastrophe with their reproductive organs intact, meaning they proliferate. The choice of animal is inspired: if Aldiss’s protagonists had feared feral dogs, their weakness would have been less obvious; how much worse that this diminished population cannot control a pest that nobody today gives a second thought. How alarming that Aldiss’s prophecy is starting to come true, on depopulated Japanese islands where cats vastly outnumber pensioners.

Loss of strength is only part of the problem, however. Civilisation is also undone by a collective loss of will. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the survivors hope that the infertility is a transient phase from which they will recover. Then, as the years pass, and it becomes clear that there will be no children to inherit the fruits of their labour, people lose interest in maintaining society beyond the bare necessities required to survive. The economy collapses and the result is a simpler, reduced world, of villages without businesses and new technologies. But this is not the pastoral dream of today’s “degrowth” proponents; it is an impoverished, dilapidated world that has given up on itself, and awaits oblivion.

Darkest of all, however, is Aldiss’s take on how this ageing remnant of humanity would treat children. Ownership and exploitation are the dominant attitudes. Initially, a global effort is made to gather the surviving minors in three “Childsweep” centres, where there are “three psychiatrists to every child”, to help them cope with the trauma of the world they have inherited. But like any scarce resource, the children become the subject of an international dispute, which leads to a catastrophic war. When, decades later, Greybeard arrives in a village which has a handful of mutant children, he finds that they are periodically put on display as a “treat” for the inhabitants of a village. Later still, when he discovers a few healthy youths, the first one he meets is being kept as a sex slave by a con man. Aldiss’ bitterness may be partly explained by the fact that when he wrote the book, he had lost custody of his children following a divorce, but his point is universal: as we saw during the pandemic, when humanity is under pressure, it does not treat its children well.

Of course, Greybeard is extreme by design. I’m not arguing that our leaders should abandon all thoughts of climate change and prepare for a crumbling world overrun by feral stoats in which most adults abuse the dwindling number of children. But the thing about the real world, as opposed to the world inside a novel, is that we can have many intersecting (and insurmountable) problems at the same time. Today’s climate change activists think too much like novelists: they are performing one simple thought experiment, by imagining our world as it is now — the same balance of young and old, the same technologies, the same governments — and extrapolating the future along one central theme, in search of a tidy resolution. But the warmer planet they imagine will also be a grey planet, filled with elderly people.

There will be many more Joe Bidens unable to make it to the end of a speech or climb stairs unaided, many more Mitch McConnells freezing before the cameras, many more geriatric pop stars miming to songs they first performed 50 years earlier. And they will be the lucky ones. A great many others will be alone, ill, vulnerable, surrounded by decaying infrastructure, while rats and other creatures run wild. In this context, we may want to reconsider some of our anxieties about the AI apocalypse. Indeed, this could be one area where it would benefit us to be a little less existential and a little more materialist. An older, depopulated world will clearly require a far higher degree of automation and augmentation; there’s a reason that Japan is known for its robot technology.

Aldiss’s conceit rules out some possibilities that are open to us, of course, including the economists’ favourite: immigration. But you don’t need to be a science fiction grand master to imagine how this policy might go awry. They are assuming that older, poorer countries will remain attractive destinations for the inhabitants of younger ones; that there will not be significant backlash from the existing populations; that the immigrants themselves will not adopt the customs of their host societies, stop reproducing, and also grow old.

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Those countries that cannot stomach more immigration will seek to incentivise larger families. This is the approach of Hungary, which grants mothers under 30 an exemption from income tax. Historically, however, the idea of rewarding families for great feats of reproduction has had mixed results. And the time may be coming when no matter how attractive the tax breaks, couples simply can’t have children. Sperm counts are plummeting worldwide. Scientists have suggested that everything from obesity to “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” may be responsible, but without firm conclusions, humans may yet end up like French bulldogs, unable to reproduce without direct medical intervention. And of course, some communities opt for extinction over change: today, for every 150 Parsi Zoroastrians born in India, 600 die, but the community refuses to recognise the children of women who marry outsiders. In the 200 years of their existence, the Shakers have had ample opportunity to reconsider their celibacy, but have declined to do so, relying on conversion to keep the numbers up. Today, two remain.

You would think that — given its inevitability — we would put a bit more effort into imagining this grey new world. But Greybeard is one of very few attempts to confront a planet in which most people are very, very old. In politics, the story is worse than in literature. All the signs are that we would rather not think about it: China, for instance, stopped reporting on its fertility rate in 2017. Perhaps this is because we have already made our decision: like the Parsis, we are not going to have more children, and so all we can do is wait for the great die-off to unfold.