Just about the only attempt the current government has made to engage with farmers was to appoint Baroness Batters, the former president of the National Farmers’ Union, to do a review of farm profitability. She handed her report in to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) last month, and then… well, nothing. Last week, sources told The Times that the report had been “buried” by the Treasury until after the Budget. This is outrageous: surely the Treasury needs to know what the issues are to shape the Budget accordingly. Surely they should be working with farmers, not burying the facts.

The apparently “locked away” review is expected to call for an urgent reset of the relationship between government and farmers. My guess is that it highlights what a shitshow the government has created for farmers, leaving them unsupported, exploited and barely able to function to provide the food we need. My suspicion is that burying all this avoids further embarrassment to Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who seems to have chosen farmers as her sacrificial victim.

The scale of the problem facing farmers was revealed in a separate report published earlier this month by McCain Foods, which found that one third of British farmers made no profit in the past year. More than half have considered leaving farming in the past year because of its dire finances; 40% think they will be forced to leave the industry in the next decade. And 92% of farmers think the greatest threat to the long-term growth of British farming is the government.

You might think these awful statistics would trouble our political leaders or make them wonder whether they’d got farming policy right, but we’ve seen no sign of any soul-searching yet. We’re told in soundbites that the government cares about farming — but their policies suggest otherwise, making real life on farms often close to impossible. According to the McCain report, only 4% of British farmers believe that current government support and protection is adequate.

Someone’s narrative about British farming is wrong. And I’d suggest you make a judgment: either farmers are all crazy, or else something has gone catastrophically wrong with the relationship between British politics and farmers.

It is worth acknowledging at this point that no one thinks the problems with our food system began with the current Labour government. But all serious commentators agree that this government, and the last, have screwed up massively — and worse, are actively choosing to double down on their stupidity.

Let’s remind ourselves how we got into this mess. Before Brexit, Britain was part of an EU system— the Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP — which, though far from perfect, at least attempted to protect farmers. The system often ripped off farmers by asking them to sell products below the real cost of production but bailed them out each year with production subsidies. That meant my dad scraped a living working long hours on our little farm in Cumbria, with nonsensical subsidized accounts that barely got above break-even. Still, the subsidies kept his farm afloat. Under this system, the consumer benefited from plentiful supplies of cheap food, while British farmers were protected by the Italian and French farm lobby and by EU bureaucrats who understood the boring vagaries of food systems.

The British Left hated this system: in their view, farmers seemed kind of “rich” — so why would anyone give them money? — and they certainly didn’t vote Labour. The old-school Tory toffs supported the CAP because it kept their tenant farmers happy, but when the last of these “wets” were pushed out post-Brexit by Boris Johnson and replaced by free-market wankers, all sympathy for farmers died in British politics.

After Brexit, Britain scrapped the CAP system and decided, thanks to Michael Gove, an enthusiastic Defra reformer, to implement a system that delivered way more nature on farms. The new mantra was “public payments for public goods”. We were promised that farmers would receive the same amount of money as always, though rather than being subsidized to produce bacon, milk, or bread, they would be paid to deliver good environmental stewardship by planting trees or wildflower meadows, making soil healthy, or creating ponds. The farmer would become a service provider, committed to restoring nature; meanwhile, food production would be left to the free market.

Everyone back then, including Labour, seemed to agree that the environment was a big deal. The Left’s distaste for farmers was assuaged with promises of more butterflies and birds, and the Right’s by the fact farmers would no longer be paid a “subsidy” but instead would receive the market rate for public goods.

The new system sounded promising. Yet the Conservatives failed to pay for it properly, breaking their promise that every farmer could receive the same amount of money for nature restoration as they’d previously got for food production. (This is when things began to go very sour, because farmers took the government at its word, and then it failed them). It also took Defra ages to create the new system, and when it was just about functioning and starting to look, dare I say it, quite good, the Conservatives lost a general election and Labour came into power. Since then, the whole damn thing has gone into freefall.

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The Treasury, under Reeves, then pleaded ignorance that any such “public payments for public goods” contract existed with British farmers. Labour didn’t even attempt to make the new environmental schemes available to all farmers, instead making them competitive — so many, perhaps most, farmers have not got any kind of new deal. The schemes that do exist are either paused due to over-subscription, or have already fallen way behind inflation, so the funding is in real terms a fraction of the pre-Brexit investment. The result is this: half the farmers in England have been stripped of their production subsidies and left to the mercy of the global markets; the other half are being paid by the government to take land out of food production for nature restoration. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone at the Treasury that this might make food scarcer or more expensive, or force farmers out of business.

Barely any British politicians, and apparently no one at the Treasury, understands the dire position British agriculture is now in. After all these years of government ineptitude, I have concluded that we are, as a society, agriculturally illiterate. People increasingly talk about farmers like they are some archaic vested interest group, like miners, whereas they actually feed millions of people every day. Our politics merely magnifies that illiteracy, creating rooms full of people at the Treasury who don’t even understand the basics making decisions with massive implications for our food system.

One person who clearly has no clue is Reeves, who last autumn delivered her coup de grâce: reforming inheritance tax so that farmers lost one of their remaining sops in a lifetime of being ripped off. In the past, farmland had been exempted from the tax, but from April next year, farmers will have to start paying. But farmland isn’t cash, nor does it generate much cash — so farms will inevitably have to sell land, making them less likely to survive in the future. To farmers, this doesn’t make any sense.

You can’t understand the inheritance tax angst in farming communities without understanding the context and history. The slightly crap pre-Brexit deal said to farmers like my dad: if you work hard to produce food for minimum wage, you can at least keep your farm, and hand it on to your kids. Reeves’s new deal means that farmers are going to be ripped off their whole lives, blamed for everything, and when they die their farms will incur a staggering death tax that might take the farmer’s loss-making, or already half-broke, descendants as many as 20 years to pay off.

If farmers were fairly treated and had a decent chance of profitability, then I, for one, think they could and should pay the same taxes as everyone else. But the fact is that they’ve been exploited for decades. And this is the last straw.

One response to all this, perhaps from the Left, might be: Who cares? These farmers are always whinging and are just another vested interest group that wants more handouts.

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And yet if we abandon our farmers, everyone will ultimately suffer: you, me, the environment, and the poorest people in our society. Farmers are the basis of our food system; if they withdraw their labor and capital because they can’t afford to keep farming, then who will feed the nation? So even if you think you don’t like farmers, going after them is still terrible politics. We need them to do their jobs.

We’re already beginning to see the inevitable and widely predicted consequences of our nation’s agricultural policy. Inflation is currently exceeding government targets, causing the Treasury terrible problems. And one of the key drivers of this is food price inflation, running at just below 5%, way in excess of the overall government inflation target of 2%. Food prices have risen by around 37% in the last five years. And this is disproportionately hitting the poorest in our society, who spend a greater part of their weekly budget on food.

This inflation is partly due to what’s happening on our farms. Since it has become very difficult and expensive to produce certain farm products without subsidies or protection, some farmers are simply producing less. And so prices are going up. Cattle prices have almost doubled in value since 2020, as farmland has gone out of production. And the number of dairy farmers has dropped by 56% in the past 20 years — some experts estimate that one dairy farmer a day goes out of business.

Then there’s the question of food security. Get support for farmers wrong and you’re taking a gamble that there won’t be enough food to feed the nation. Currently, according to Professor Tim Lang, the UK’s leading expert on food security, Britain’s food system is over-reliant on foreign imports and highly vulnerable to shocks and crises, such as disease outbreaks, extreme weather, or geo-political instability. Already, repeated droughts are impacting crop yields in the south-eastern triangle of England, which produces massive amounts of our food.

At the rate we’re going, the situation will only worsen. Earlier this month, a report from the All-Party Group on Science and Technology, “Feeding Britain sustainably to 2050”, warned that if the UK continues to prioritize housing, Net Zero, tree planting, and nature restoration, it could lose around a quarter of its productive farmland by 2050. This would see domestic food production reduced by a third, while the population continues to grow, leaving the UK far more reliant on imports.

Free-market ideologues say we can just import more food if we need to, but we’re living in La La Land if we think that’s a good idea in today’s unstable world. The rest of the world is increasingly focused on feeding their own growing populations, and climate change is already threatening global food supply chains. Almería in Spain, which has long fed Britain, is already drying out. Meanwhile, once-reliable exporting nations are now erecting trade barriers because of Trump-like protectionism. As an island nation, which now stands outside the EU, the UK is particularly vulnerable.

Farmers understand this, but it appears the Labour government does not. Our politicians would be wise to learn the lesson of rural America. When the grown-up parties of government fail to care about, and act upon, the pain of rural communities, the political fall-out becomes toxic. Social media finds disillusioned people and stokes their anger and alienation. This is happening now in online farming forums where Right-wing memes and explanations for the assault on farmers are spreading like wildfire. Reform knows exactly how to exploit this political failure to their advantage.

To be honest, I’m not really surprised that this government isn’t great at food, farming and the environment. All governments have blind spots and make mistakes. I can even forgive them some bad decisions. The issue is that they have refused to listen as the problems become ever more serious. The Treasury in particular seems to stubbornly dig in behind terrible policies — keener to bad-mouth farmers than hear them out. And now, at a time when we need an expert’s insights and analysis to inform a Budget, the government has buried its own farming review. It is shameful. Publish the review right now. And act upon it.

The project was back on in May, thanks to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has somewhat improbably emerged as a savvy dealmaker. Hochul allegedly agreed to allow a natural-gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to the Empire State in exchange for approval for the project. (Her office denies a quid pro quo.) All of which raised obvious questions about why the Empire Wind project was halted, at great expense to its Norwegian developer, Equinor. Beyond slogans ready-made for Fox News, does this administration have an energy policy? 

Trump’s approach to wind power resembles his approach to, well, pretty much everything: universities, Ukraine, tariffs. For all the talk of a second term more professional than the first, things have reverted to the mean, a kind of chaotic ambling that seems to lack purpose other than personal whim.  

Empire Wind turns out to have been an exception. Citing vague national security and environmental concerns, Trump has canceled $679 million for a dozen offshore wind-farm projects in various states of completion. In addition to cutting off funding, his administration ordered work to be stopped at the giant Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island, which has cost more than $6.2 billion to build and was close to completion. According to The New York Times, he is also planning to shut down work on a 114-turbine wind farm off the Maryland coast. New England 1 and 2, off the Nantucket coast, are also in trouble. 

“Under this administration, there is no future for offshore wind,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said recently at a natural gas conference in Milan.

It is true that some scientists have concerns about how marine life will be impacted by wind farms in the long run. Energy analysts also worry about the consistency of renewable sources like wind and sunlight, though those concerns have been mitigated as of late. As is the case with vaccines, Trump is aware of these anxieties, and that some share of his opponents harbor them, whether they be NIMBY homeowners or MAHA parents. That gives him just enough room to push his agenda through. 

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It does not help that the pro-science crowd can all too easily fall into climate doomerism or dismiss concerns about wind farms and solar arrays as ignorant recalcitrance. This, too, unwittingly plays into Trump’s hands. “It’s a hard time to be working in offshore wind,” policy analyst Mariel Lutz of the Left-leaning Center for American Progress told me.

Wind farms can be unsightly — if you are fortunate enough to have ocean sightlines to begin with. When it comes to his anti-wind campaign, some of Trump’s backers can be found in liberal enclaves like Martha’s Vineyard, where you will see yard signs opposing a wind farm off the coast next to fading Harris-Walz placards. The still-formidable Kennedy clan helped scotch a Cape Cod wind farm in 2017, lest the views from their Hyannis compound suffer.

Nor is it just the rich. There is also opposition in rural communities, where there are people, not just cormorants and dolphins, to consider. Wind farms can be loud, but a recent epidemiological study found no correlation to other illnesses. Still, people have concerns about enormous turbines in their backyards (well, fields). And no one is savvier at playing on people’s fears than Trump.

Yet the helter-skelter approach has significant downsides. According a brief Lutz co-authored, various offshore wind projects along the northeastern seaboard that are now stalled were to provide some 12,000 direct and 1,500 indirect jobs. 

There will also be an impact on the business climate. Of Revolution Wind, energy analyst Leon Stille wrote in a trade publication that “to pull the plug so late in the process… sends a chilling signal to investors: no matter how advanced a project may be, no matter how rigorous the permitting process, politics can still override economics at the final stage.”

In response to my request for an explanation, a White House spokesman emailed a statement claiming that “Under Joe Biden’s Green New Scam, offshore wind projects benefited from preferential treatment, rushed reviews, and haphazard vetting, while the rest of the energy industry was put on pause”. The Department of the Interior will, it said, restore “basic evaluations of national security, commercial fishing, and environmental concerns” and has “unshackled traditional American energy sources such as domestic oil, gas, and nuclear power”.  

It is true that Biden preferred a much quicker transition to renewables than most conservatives, but does anyone really believe he “rushed” the regulatory process? That is, to put it mildly, not a sin of which most Democrats stand guilty. Undoubtedly, Biden sought to discourage the extraction and use of fossil fuel, but the United States is still the largest producer of crude oil in the world. 

Trump is engaging in the kind of heavy-handed socialist-style government control conservatives supposedly abhor.

“It just seems crazy to stop these projects at this point,” Richard L. Sweeney, an energy economist at Boston College, told me in an interview. According to the latest iteration of Lazard’s annual report on the energy sector, “utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidized basis”. That report found that the cost of building gas combustion engines has reached a 10-year high.

“Natural gas is insanely expensive where I live,” Sweeney said. He points out that building out liquid-gas infrastructure in the northeast (terminals, pipelines) is simply unrealistic. 

And the dream of a resurgent coal industry will remain just that. According to the US Energy Information Administration, Trump’s beloved coal plants are closing, their total energy generation projected to fall to 145 megawatts in 2028, down from 172 megawatts this year. Analysts expect that decline to continue. Some of that has to do with the profusion of cheap natural gas, along with the rise of renewables and new environmental regulations — but whatever the reasons, it is happening, and it is not likely to be reversed. 

Trump campaigned on slashing inflation, but energy prices have proved especially intractable. Such increases can sometimes be attributed to short-term shocks, but that does not appear to be the case. Instead, energy experts point to longer-term, steady increases in the cost of transmission and distribution, partly due to new energy demands stemming from the need to build power-hungry data centers, which Trump has signaled he very much wants to do. 

Republicans used to say they were for an all-of-the-above energy policy that doesn’t hamper the fossil-fuel sector but also encourages, if only lukewarmly, the build-out of renewable energy. But as is the case with so much else (foreign policy, free speech, immigration), Trump considers it a merit to move away from conciliatory Mitt Romney-style conservatism. 

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Still, basic economics dictate that Trump’s war on wind is a terrible idea. And it seems more personal than ideological, driven by his desire to avenge the loss in Aberdeen. Notably, he is not waging a similar campaign against solar energy. 

“Let the market decide,” Sweeney says. That used to broadly reflect the conservative approach, whether it came to the value of a Harvard education or the wisdom of building a wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. It’s disturbing to see policy undertaken in such a slipshod and biased fashion, and to see obeisant executive-branch officials, including Burgum, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin parroting Trump’s claims. 

In something of a surprise, House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who is usually deferential to a fault, came out in support of a wind project off the coast of Virginia, where energy needs are spiking because of the heavy concentration of data centers. And while the President’s campaign against offshore wind is mostly going to harm coastal blue states, the three states with the highest amount of energy generated by wind are Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa — about as red as they get.

To be sure, there are legitimate debates between conservatives and progressives about how urgently we need to transition away from fossil fuels (and there are, of course, people who don’t think we need to do so at all, though their ranks are dwindling). But it is hard to think of anyone whose political fortunes aren’t directly dependent on Trump who thinks letting his personal grievances dictate our energy policy is a good idea. Nevertheless, here we are. Lutz, the policy analyst, conceded that the future of the sector is uncertain. “We will keep fighting,” she said. 

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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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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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.

Yet over recent years, the details of how this global system works have become opaque. Much of this lack of visibility is a result of physical distance. As wealthy economies became more dominated by services, factory-based activities went overseas, with firms eager to access specialized labor, or avoid tariffs, or to be close to emerging markets. In the UK, and other wealthy economies, we literally and figuratively lost sight of manufacturing.

With this distance came downsides. As manufacturing dissolved into the background of our lives, we became unaware of how fragile our systems for making and transporting things often are, and how environmentally harmful they can be to the planet. If we want to reverse this situation, which we must, the first step is to rebuild our collective awareness of the importance of manufacturing — and our own roles as consumers within this complex, vital web.

Modern manufacturing is extraordinary. Over the past 300 years, we’ve gone through three industrial revolutions and developed the ability to create previously unimaginable volumes and varieties of products: all at high quality and low cost. We’ve also developed ways to ensure that this treasure trove of goods is readily available to a huge proportion of the world’s population with astonishing speed and reliability.

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Our manufacturing systems ensure that medicines are available even in the most remote of communities. It also means we produce enough food to (in theory) feed everyone on the planet, even as we have the ability to transport billions of people by land, sea and air, safely and at low cost. Since the dawn of the internet, it also enables almost instant communication between almost everyone on earth. We can produce all the things needed to keep us sheltered, clothed, fed, healed, educated and safe.

Yet as these systems have grown, they have developed problems. These exquisitely intricate networks of production, connecting thousands of factories from the tiniest job shop to the mightiest mass production plant, have developed some rather alarming “emergent properties”. These are things that were not anticipated, but which have emerged from operating this mind-bogglingly complex system over many years. Fragility is one such emergent property. Think back to 2021, when that 200,000-ton ship, the Ever Given, got itself wedged across the Suez Canal. One error by one person on the bridge of one ship — and 10% of global manufactured goods ground to a halt for a week.

Yet this was nothing compared to the pandemic. We were shocked enough to see supermarket shelves emptying: where did all the toilet rolls go? But then our Amazon orders started getting delayed; then waiting times for new cars started stretching into the following year; then things just kind of — stopped arriving. But while this was inconvenient and annoying, it usually wasn’t life-threatening. For hospitals, though, there were much more serious consequences. We just couldn’t make enough protective equipment, nor could we scale up the production of specialized medical devices needed to keep Covid patients alive. The now-evident fragility of our manufacturing systems had deadly consequences.

Another emergent feature of our complex manufacturing systems is that they are helping to wreck the planet. Building schools, hospitals and homes requires millions of tons of cement each year, and that results in one of the largest single sources of CO2 emissions of any industrial activity. The cement industry produces four times more than all of global aviation. Our manufacturing systems can produce enough food to feed more than everyone on the planet, yet 40% of what we produce never gets eaten.

Huge amounts of resources are used to grow, harvest, process, and transport food that just gets thrown away. The clothing industry is massive, employing over 300 million people worldwide. But this industry’s emissions are greater than all international flights plus all maritime shipping. One third of all raw materials in the textile supply chain end up as waste, and are never used to make actual products. One truck’s worth of clothing per second goes to landfill or is incinerated.

Despite these challenges, however, manufacturing is transforming for the better: and we, as individuals, are at the heart of this change. What do I mean? In an odd way, we’re gradually returning to our pre-industrial past. Over the past three centuries, we’ve moved from “tell me what you want and I’ll make it” localized craftsmanship to mass manufacturing. Thanks to the development of machine tools, interchangeable parts, the assembly line, and automation technologies, companies learned how to make huge quantities of products. The challenge became one of persuading the consumer to want to buy them. This led to the emergence of marketing, advertising, planned obsolescence, consumerism — and, ultimately, unsustainable levels of waste.

But that is now changing. The pervasiveness and rapid advancements in digital technologies allow us to capture and process eye-wateringly large amounts of data on so many aspects of our lives. Thanks to this, and coupled with new technologies such as 3D printers, we are now moving from the era of mass production to one of mass customization — where manufacturers can produce unique products, each designed for the specific needs of millions of individual consumers.

We can already see one extreme example of the future of manufacturing in the way we can treat some types of cancer. Rather than making generic treatments designed for the average patient, CAR-T treatments take cells from individual patients, “re-program” them through some nifty manufacturing processes, then re-inject that unique product back into the patient. It is the ultimate form of bespoke manufacturing, where the consumer is an integral part of the process and product itself.

Mass customization could soon prove useful elsewhere too. By only making a single product for a single consumer, you inevitably end up with less waste. By tightening the link between producer and consumer, it may also make sense to link production and consumption closer together. Shorter, simpler supply chains have the added advantage of reduced pollution and increased resilience. The CAR-T example above illustrates that second benefit. Shipping delicate live human cells over long distances to specialized processing facilities comes with a degree of risk. Much better for the “factory” to be close to the hospital.

Before we reach this nirvana, though, we need to address some fundamental problems with manufacturing here in the UK. Since the Eighties, the number of things that are made here has fallen sharply. As factories were closed, and production moved overseas, we slowly lost much of our national manufacturing infrastructure — the “industrial commons” of skilled workers, local suppliers and investors. As a result, entrepreneurs seeking to grow manufacturing businesses based on the outputs of our robust science base face real challenges.

If you want to scale up a new biotech, or energy system or quantum technology business, you will need specialized technicians and suppliers: not only of components but also specialized services. Then there is the availability of appropriate physical infrastructure: spaces where you can actually run your business with access to the utilities and services needed to make and ship things. In many parts of the UK, accessing those resources and people can be really challenging. Even in science-obsessed Cambridge, lab vacancy rates stand at just 1%; in the “Golden Triangle” between London and Oxbridge, firms are short some two million square feet of research space.

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Yet once again, change is afoot. As a result of Covid — to say nothing of the current geopolitical tumult — we now have a growing appreciation of the value of having stronger national manufacturing capabilities.

It helps, too, that manufacturing is back in the public eye. Especially in our age of roiling change, the economic and social value of having world-leading firms, such as Rolls-Royce or GSK, is increasingly clear. At the same time, we have pockets of excellence that show how we might develop new manufacturing ideas. In South Yorkshire, for instance, there is the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), where academia and industry are co-located to support the acceleration of new manufacturing ideas. The AMRC is just one of many similar such schemes across the UK.

To ensure that manufacturing has a real impact on supporting national growth, resilience and sustainability, we need more coordination. To deliver that at a national level, meanwhile, the Government will soon release its new industrial strategy, one highlighting advanced manufacturing as a key driver of growth. By making manufacturing more visible, at any rate, we are rediscovering something fundamental: the ability to make things is a vital capability for any national economy and local community that wishes to be resilient, secure and sustainable. And with that restored visibility, hopefully we won’t again forget how vital it is to all our lives.

***

Life Is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better is published by Faber and Faber

It’s worth asking what sort of person could read this without wincing — because, if Wall Kimmerer’s influence on eco thought leaders such as Caroline Lucas and Jane Goodall is anything to go on — her fans are many. One explanation for her disciples’ tolerance for the saccharine is that they are mostly American. The week after thousands of Barboured British farmers took to Whitehall to protest Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax changes, the tone of our own rural culture cannot be more different from the world of Wall Kimmerer, in which she considers, in return for a load of berries given to her by a neighbour, “offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind”. Meanwhile in London, the legions of Jeremy Clarkson lookalikes, led by the big man himself, presented a no-nonsense, rugged and masculine front against the out-of-touch Westminster chin-strokers. Nobody in this crew spends their days communing with the local robins, “stuffing our mouths with berries and chortling with happiness”.

Yet the timing of The Serviceberry’s publication for a UK audience — it coincided with the flat-capped populists descending on the capital — is providential, because it so perfectly illuminates the polarised interests scrabbling over the political and actual environment. Though far from natural bedfellows at first glance, Wall Kimmerer and the British farmers are both launching wails of discontent against metropolitan fops in their steel-and-glass palaces. For our bumbling botanist’s part, she proposes the scaling-up of the Native American custom of potlatches, or gifting ceremonies (in which serviceberries, the fruit of the shadbush tree, are often exchanged) so that rather than hoarding resources we instead store them “in the belly of my brother”. The enemy of the essay is faceless, multinational oil conglomerates. The farmers represent our own, homegrown rural mythology — that of the ruddy-cheeked countryman — protecting not only a livelihood but a part of our heritage against a spiteful, hopelessly urban Labour government who knows only the politics of envy. In each case, the countryside is upheld as the place of reality and common sense; the city is the locus of decadence, greed and misguidance.

Unlike Clarkson’s furious legion of farmers, and Wall Kimmerer herself with her “fingers stained with berry juice”, Wall Kimmerer’s celebrity fans seem to have more in common with those faceless urban elites. These include little-known smallholders Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. But the crucial thing about The Serviceberry is that its readers are not expected to own, or have ever seen, a trowel. This essay is an invitation to fantasise, not to farm. All the swooning around Wall Kimmerer’s last book, Braiding Sweetgrass, was generated by city dreamers whose fingernails were more likely to bear a glossy coat of Chanel vernis than a grubby tint of local soil. The writer herself is highly likeable, and clearly knows her onions — but it’s worth questioning the point of all this when her readers are probably slinging her hardbacks into their baskets at Wholefoods before zooming off back to Putney in their gas-guzzling 4x4s. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, but “organic living” has become more of an aesthetic than a commitment and one wonders, particularly given the lack of solid policy in this essay, whether its peace-and-love-soaked vagueness is so very marketable because it is unchallenging to the actual realities of readers. These fans are willing to take their brood pumpkin-picking at a farm shop, and might even trade in their gas boiler for a heat pump, but there are limits. What they really want is to feel good about it.

Wall Kimmerer’s writing is interesting and in places, inviting. Her presence in the essay is that of an exasperated botanist who, faced with conundrums in economic theory — not her natural domain, by her own admission — marches off to pick berries instead. There is some, perhaps unintended, comedy in this. Wall Kimmerer spends much of her time lecturing, and half of the effort of these encounters seems to go into shoehorning in sentimentalism. During one such talk at a “big, prestigious university”, she suggests changing the name of the College of Natural Resources to “the Department of Earthly Gifts”. Okay, we get it Robin.

There is also a sort of sad comedy in the way that Wall Kimmerer’s concept of a global economy run on generosity and love is always undone by the thorny reality that some people are, in the end, just a bit too selfish for that to ever work. She describes a free farm stand where extra produce is left out for anyone to take. In the end, someone takes the stand itself. Wall Kimmerer acknowledges that “cheaters who violate the trust” are a sticking point in the “gift economy” model — but insists that “collective action, trust, and cooperation” can prevent this from happening as an alternative to state intervention. Now, I’ve never been to rural Syracuse, New York, where this author lives in peace with neighbours, swapping “zukes” (courgettes, to you and me) and “asking the plants for their guidance”. But living in London for a few years, and reading signs of escalating decline in the way people behave out on the street — spitting, pissing, littering, harassing, mugging — has gradually chipped away at my teenaged belief in the essential goodness of people. If you leave your bike unlocked, it will go. If it’s a Friday or Saturday night, people will leave half-full beer bottles dribbling over seats on the Tube for TfL workers to scrub in the morning. And if you leave lovely vegetables out for people to take for free, some selfish fucker will nick the stand.

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Governments and the courts are meant to restrain these antisocial instincts; we cannot rely on the generosity of strangers in the way Wall Kimmerer insists we should — the great proposition of The Serviceberry. Now, I suspect that most readers also feel this way; but both this and Braiding Sweetgrass are not intended as genuine manuals for social change. If we look at Wall Kimmerer’s readership, they — unlike her, whom I respect for genuinely believing, however naively, in a better society — are not arsed about hauling the CEO of ExxonMobil in front of the Supreme Court. They are here for a holiday from the depressing doom-cycles of real life; as Havana hitmaker Camila Cabello writes in the blurb of an accompanying press release, the only real aim is to be vaguely reassured that “when we heal the Earth, we heal ourselves”. All of this, like many of Wall Kimmerer’s readers, is well-meaning and occasionally charming — but pointless.

Wall Kimmerer is writing at a time of climate collapse — and she is, I reckon, broadly right about aggressive growth agendas being responsible for the plundering of natural resources, and new approaches being needed. But the problem is that hers could never work. And so, given my doubts about The Serviceberry’s meaningfulness, it’s hard to swallow the at-times spiteful way she refers to her philosophy’s enemies — conventional, selfish, stupid capitalists. Teaching us the meaning of “calyx”, she adds: “In case you were craving a delicious new word, the way some people crave money.” Oh yeah, those other people and their idiotic desire for boring old, completely useless money — something she elsewhere refers to as mere “pieces of green paper”. Well, my wealth is my words. I am rich in other ways. Not in friends, though, because people are sick of me calling them fascist pigs for having bank accounts.

The biggest thing Wall Kimmerer and the farmers of Whitehall have in common is not a passion for the natural world but a passionate hatred of thoughtless city folk. “They’re all thieves, stealing our future, while we pass around the zucchini,” she writes. There is something so patronisingly adolescent about this image — posited, with a straight face, as a vision of what has gone wrong in environmental policy, and I have no doubt that this line will be repeated not only around the dinner tables of Beverly Hills by slow-living celebrities, but in the nightmare blunt rotations of grimy hostels in South-East Asia. Clearly, it will not make it to the boardrooms of oil giants, nor the conference halls of COP. But Wall Kimmerer and her readers already know this. Other than being deliciously smug, what purpose does The Serviceberry truly serve?

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.

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.

And yet, rather than wake up to the fact that green capitalism is a myth, Western leaders are doubling down on their commitments to green growth. From President Joe Biden to former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and British Labour leader Keir Starmer, public figures in both Europe and the United States have succumbed to the siren call of a Green New Deal: a miraculous renewable energy and electric car investment programme that will supposedly spur a transition to a sustainable green economy.

The problem is that even the most radical Green New Deal will never achieve its aims. After all, a green revolution will require not just a transition to electric vehicles, hydrogen planes and renewable energy, but a complete overhaul of our material world. Every single resource we depend on — from agricultural machinery and chemical fertilisers to iron and cement for construction — will have to be replaced by a newer, greener version. And so any feasible Green New Deal will only reduce carbon dioxide emissions relative to GDP, not absolutely, before 2050. In other words, carbon dioxide levels will continue rising, albeit at a slower rate.

The vision of a Green New Deal is alluring, however, partly because it allows us to continue our consumerist frenzy without worrying about the environment — all we need to do to relieve our guilt is buy a Tesla — and partly because it has been hailed as a silver-bullet solution to economic inequality. The dream is that a green transition will create more stable, better-paid jobs for the working class, especially in the former industrial heartlands of America and Europe. Yet the world’s poorest will pay the price for a Western jobs boom. Already, the world’s richest 10% — mostly in the Global North — are responsible for half of worldwide emissions, though the poorer half will be the first to suffer from the effects of climate change. A Green New Deal will shift even more of the burden to the Global South. It is hardly a desirable solution to global poverty.

Take electric vehicles, for instance. Their lithium-ion batteries are made from rare metals found in the Atacama Salt Flats of Chile. Yet lithium extraction is highly water intensive: a single corporation can extract 1,700 litres of groundwater per second. This is already taking a toll on the nation’s ecology, with locals unable to access fresh drinking water. Another crucial metal is cobalt, of which almost 60% of the world’s supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the poorest nations in Africa. There are around 40,000 children working informally in Congolese cobalt mines, some as young as six or seven, a number of whom have been buried alive in the tunnels. But as long as such neocolonial exploits remain out of sight in the West, they are out of mind too: Western nations continue to plunder the Global South under the guise of making capitalism sustainable.

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Some techno-optimists believe that fantastical, still-to-be-invented carbon capture technologies will solve the problem of climate change. Yet these Negative Emissions Technologies (NET) could inflict even more damage on the environment and the Global South. The leading model, Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), would require farmland twice the size of India to produce enough biomass energy to keep carbon emissions down. Will we steal this land from the Indians or Brazilians who need it to cultivate food? Or will we simply slash down more of the Amazon rainforest? Meanwhile, the technology would also require an enormous amount of water: 400 million metric tonnes of it, in fact, to produce enough electricity to power the US for a year. And even if that’s possible, there’s a high chance that carbon dioxide stored beneath the Earth’s surface will end up seeping back out. By then, it will be too late to think up a better solution.

In effect, then, a Green New Deal will simply shift the dirty work of resource extraction to global peripheries — as capitalism has been doing for centuries. As far back as the mid-19th century, Marx realised that capitalism had a knack of making its ill effects invisible by displacing them elsewhere. He recognised three types of displacement: technological, spatial and temporal, all of which were vulnerable to collapse. And none of which bode well for the Green New Deal. The first idea, that technological advancement can overcome environmental crisis, we have shown to be a techno-optimist fantasy. The second, that we can export our environmental and social problems to the Global South, is a cruel form of ecological imperialism. And the third, that we can dump our problems on future generations, is the epitome of human folly and selfishness.

But if green capitalism isn’t the solution, then what is? The answer, I believe, can be found in Marx’s later writings, many of them unpublished. What many people don’t realise, including those on the Left, is that Marx underwent a drastic theoretical shift towards the end of his life — when he finally realised that technological progress and productivism, far from being forces for the common good, were in fact destroying the Earth. In the five years before his death in 1883, Marx devoted himself to studying the natural sciences, and eventually concluded that capitalism’s quest to accumulate value disrupts the metabolic relationship between humans and nature, creating an “irreparable rift” on a global scale. From then on, he advocated a style of communism that would end capitalism’s exploitation of both workers and the planet, and bring production back in sync with the slower cycles of nature.

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While Marx died before he was able to lay out his degrowth communist manifesto in a single work akin to Capital, his vision can be conjured from his scattered ecological critiques of capitalism. Capitalism, he wrote, disturbed “the metabolic interaction between man and the earth”; it hindered “the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”. Almost a century and a half later, it is time we heeded his warnings.

Of course, I am not suggesting a return to the dark communism of the Soviet Union or 20th-century China, where modes of production were nationalised by tyrannical one-party states. Marx never advocated this form of communism anyway. Instead, we should draw on his concept of “the commons” (equality of economic conditions) to steer a third way between the extremes of US-style neoliberalism and Soviet-style nationalisation. The idea is that certain public goods — such as water, electricity, shelter, healthcare and education — should be managed and shared by every member of society, independent from the markets. What is important is that, in contrast to the administrative monopoly by capitalists or socialist bureaucrats, all the affected people participate in the decision-making process and democratically manage the commonwealth. This is far from a form of top-down climate Maoism, but a grassroots movement that challenges the power of capital.

Once power has been handed over to the people, how can we possibly begin to slow down the economy? We can start by re-reading Marx’s Capital through a degrowth lens. First, we should transition, as Marx instructed, from an economy based on commodity value to one based on social utility (or use-value). We must prioritise the production of goods that are necessary to respond to the climate crisis, rather than desirable luxury goods that are useless and ecologically destructive. Once we stop producing so much meaningless junk, we can start cutting down on general working hours, as well as getting rid of “bullshit jobs” — such as investment banking, marketing and consultancy — whose sole purpose is to make money. Other capitalist extravagances, such as same-day delivery and 24-hour supermarkets, would also be obliterated. Not only will liberating people from wage slavery in this way help the environment, but it will also improve peoples’ lives, allowing more time to devote to childcare, caregiving, education and leisure. In this new system, fulfilling material needs and improving quality of life will become a far more important measure than GDP.

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On top of this, we should heed Marx’s call to make work creative and “attractive” again by abolishing the tiresome division of labour that condemns employees to repetitive, inhumane work. In an ideal world, the time that we spend at work should be satisfying, not torturous: workers should have the chance to become masters of industry and rotate between tasks, even if that means their work becomes less productive. Meanwhile, we should place a higher value on emotional labour, such as care work. While this labour-intensive work is crucial to the functioning of society, it is also not economically productive — and therefore is undervalued in a capitalist system. Helping a child or elderly person eat, drink or wash does not boost GDP, but it is a deeply human act of service. Indeed, decelerating our economy in these ways will not only save the planet, but also make our lives richer, more meaningful, and more humane. The phrase buen vivir (“to live well”), originating from the indigenous people of Ecuador, and now used by Leftists all over the world, reminds us to keep challenging the corrupted value system of Western capitalism.

For ultimately, the only thing lacking is the political will. We cannot solve a problem created by capitalism while still preserving capitalism. And while toppling capitalism and the elite 1% who control it will be difficult, it is not impossible. All that’s needed to bring about major political change, according to Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, is the non-violent support of 3.5% of the population: the rest will follow. This is all it took for the “People Power Revolution” to take down the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1984, and to start the 2003 “Revolution of Roses” in Georgia that culminated in the resignation of then-President Eduard Shevardnadze. Surely, there are already enough people in the West who care about the fate of the planet to ignite a rebellion.

*

Kohei Saito’s book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, published by W&N, is out on 18 January.

It’s easy for jaundiced old gits like me to laugh at the serious-minded puritanism of today’s youth. But Thunberg seems to arouse far stronger and darker emotions in many than a desire to gently take the mick. On the one hand, there are those who fawn excessively, treating her as a tiny omniscient oracle. And on the other are the people for whom the mere mention of her name leaves them purple with fury, putting them in mind of everything they hate about modern progressivism.

Many of her most ardent fans in the first group are well into middle age, and their veneration is frankly a bit weird. Take the 40-something British novelist Elizabeth Day, interviewing Thunberg for the aforementioned podcast with cringing deference, describing herself as a “stan”, and introducing her interviewee to listeners as “a global icon, an inspiration to millions, and still only 19”. At one point, Day exclaims covetously: “I wish I had your mind”.

Meanwhile, in a scene from the 2020 documentary I Am Greta, MPs Ed Miliband, Layla Moran, Caroline Lucas and John Bercow cluster round the awkwardly unsmiling youngster in Parliament. Almost genuflecting, Moran prevails upon Thunberg for a selfie, while Bercow, ignoring her evident discomfort, stares into her eyes and pumps her hand for just a little bit too long. In a scene shortly afterwards, the Pope does pretty much exactly the same thing.

Newton’s Third Law tells us that for every force there is an equal and opposite reaction; and this seems to be true in the cultural world just as much as in the natural one. Accordingly, Thunberg has acquired many detractors, particularly among Right-leaning politicians and commentators with aspirations to populism. Perhaps some are envious of her influence; others see political opportunity in bashing a soft and easily mockable target. A number of her most prominent critics in the documentary also come across as somewhat unhinged. Trump encourages supporters at a rally to boo her. Bolsonaro calls her a “brat”, while the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles calls her “a mentally ill Swedish child”.

Yet it is clear to anyone not already lost in projection that neither the adulation nor the demonisation is warranted. Whether or not you agree with Thunberg’s conclusions about the environment, she is usually just repeating activist talking points inherited from other people. The school strike which kicked off her fame was the idea of a different Swedish campaigner, and the resulting publicity was not particularly grassroots, but due to a well-connected media entrepreneur. And given the history of horrible bullying and social isolation which dogged her in early puberty — eventually causing her to become anorexic, depressed and selectively mute — avoiding school to protest climate injustice can’t really have been that much of an altruistic sacrifice. Whenever she goes off-piste from environmental matters, as she did last month on Palestine, here too she says exactly the sorts of things you’d expect from the average Left-leaning young person these days, complete with preferred pronouns.

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But these are not reasons to start frothing at the mouth either — quite the opposite. The point is that this is a young person of a totally predictable type: intelligent but also dogmatic, emotionally immature, somewhat socially challenged, and as yet unaware of the world’s ethical complexity. Her intense idealism, pomposity and black-and-white thinking are all developmentally appropriate, and especially so for someone on the autistic spectrum. And nor is it her fault that her mother is an opera singer, nor that her middle name is Tintin, nor that impressionable idiots keep nominating her for Nobel Prizes, nor that UN officials and world leaders seem desperate to make a heady symbol out of her.

Now that she has reached maturity, the bad news for Thunberg is that it seems likely her detractors will soon outnumber the adulators. For her star power has always been inextricably bound up with youth. Partly this is because the uncompromising purity of her vision initially appealed both to young contemporaries of hers and to fairly simple-minded elders — and many of the former, at least, are by now growing out of it. More fundamentally, it’s because for older fans, her gawky, impassioned protests have made her thrillingly emblematic of children everywhere. Once she is no longer perceived as a child, this particular source of attraction is going to lapse.

Among the liberal middle-classes, we are currently witnessing an outpouring of sentiment about children on a scale last seen in the most saccharine passages of Dickens’ novels: think of angelic Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, beset on all sides by the sins of adults and hurtling towards tragic destruction because of it. On this view, kids are not so much young and undeveloped humans with varying destinies ahead in life as a pathos-saturated victim class — alternately to be pitied, madly identified with, or revered as saintly. And for a while now, Greta has been its star.

The interesting questions, then, are not about her, but about us. In particular, why is there an apparently increasing tendency for adults to identify uncritically with the concerns of children and teens? This is not a question about why many of us care about the environment, or why we worry about what to do about climate change or the fate of future generations. We may even reach roughly the same conclusions as Thunberg, after some thought. The question is more about why some of us ever wanted to switch off our brains and let a 15-year-old do the thinking and feeling for us.

The very same phenomenon is evident in the relatively recent phenomenon of parents, teachers and even trained clinicians uncritically going along with sexual and gender identities that miserable teenagers originally invented on Tumblr, while their unhappy, confused charges head towards the hospital with adult blessings ringing in their ears. No doubt the question is overdetermined, but I think one answer is this: by means of an adult’s elaborate psychological identifications with a childish and simplistic worldview, he advertises to the wider world how babyish, harmless and ultimately blameless he is too. In other words, it’s a good way to rid yourself of felt responsibility and guilt, either for the state of the planet or anything else.

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Along with Greta-worship, manifestations of this regressive impetus seem to be everywhere among those of a certain age and income bracket. So many gestures and behavioural choices seem designed to advertise your good intentions and basic unthreatening niceness, imploring the observer not to take you very seriously because you aren’t really an adult either — and certainly not one of those adults who has power or agency over anything important. The desire not to be mistaken for someone with responsibility, I assume, partly lurks behind childless trips to theme parks, adult onesie-wearing, putting cartoon filters on Instagram posts, the ever-growing popularity of Halloween, gaming, and the stockpiling of Star Wars toys. It’s part of the basis for embracing mind-numbingly simplistic instructions such as “be kind”, or the idea that we should just “listen to experts” like obedient little children. It is embedded in silly adolescent swearing, and in the wearing of twee Christmas jumpers, and Mary Jane shoes, and much more besides.

Thunberg was such an effective emblem of this, not just because of her unusually youthful looks and her original Pippi Longstocking aesthetic, but also because her autism makes her un-self-conscious and causes her to appear extra child-like. In I Am Greta, she dances naturally on camera, or cries or sulks or fights with her father, not as a narcissist aware of being filmed might, but like someone who doesn’t yet understand what others see when they look at her. No wonder she has reportedly struggled to understand why no meaningful changes have really happened in climate policy despite the huge hype around her protests. It will perhaps take a few years more for her to understand that many enthusiastic supporters were never really focused on climate action at all, but rather upon getting themselves off the hook.

As with Oscar Wilde’s response to Dickens’s depiction of Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the most extravagantly fulsome paeans to Thunberg over the past five years. But the real savage mockery should be reserved for those progressives who canonised a precocious, stroppy, literal-minded child for basically self-interested psychological reasons. And we should also reserve some derision for those bitter Right-wingers so consumed with rage at the former group, that they can’t help but hate her for it too. If we can’t give Thunberg carbon neutrality or an end to deforestation for her birthday, a nice consolation present would be to commit to remembering that she is only 21 — and that we are not.

Almost 20 years later, the first Global Compact Leadership Summit is considered the birthplace of the ESG movement, a kind of constitutional convention for global “governance”. Annan had been championing this new approach since at least 1999, when, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he announced the creation of “a global compact of shared values and principles, which will give a human face to the global market”. The aim would be to create a “compact” of agreements that could keep up with the radical change being wrought by globalising markets. It would, of course, do much more than that.

Since Annan’s proclamation, ESG has morphed into a social and corporate inevitability. Its manifestations are evident everywhere — from academia’s heady embrace of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives to the corporate world’s collective gush over protecting the environment, preventing racism and advancing whatever else might be the “current thing” of international righthink.

Its rise appeared unstoppable — until 2023 arrived. Only this month, Republicans in Congress announced they would subpoena BlackRock, the asset management firm most closely aligned with ESG, and State Street, another Fortune 500 financial heavyweight, to investigate whether their ESG policies violate anti-trust law. Days after that news broke, the state of Tennessee announced it was suing BlackRock for making what it called “misleading” statements about ESG.

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For its part, BlackRock — undoubtedly the greatest champion of ESG — is retreating, backing “just 7% of environmental and social proposals at companies’ annual meetings in 2023 proxy season, down from 47% two years earlier,” according to the Financial Times. In the UK, signs of a brewing backlash are just as evident. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), a major lobbying group, has hired Rupert Soames, a critic of ethical investing, as its next president.

For some, the pivot away from ESG may come as a shock. But the reality is that the equilibrium has been shifting for more than a year. One of the strongest indicators that all was not well with ESG came from the most unlikely of places: the annual letter from ESG’s most high-profile supporter. Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, began publishing his letters to shareholders and CEO in 2012 in which he introduced ESG-speak into the halls of capitalism. But this year, Fink told the Aspen Ideas Festival that he’s no longer using the term since it’s been “weaponised” by critics. And ESG was notably absent from his 2023 letter in March. This might be no more than a symbol of the influence of ESG. But in the context of a decade during which the acronym was proclaimed as a shibboleth of a new kind of global corporate power, one whose proponents construe profit-seeking as a means to an end, that end being nothing less than improving the lot of mankind, it is nevertheless significant.

It’s not hard to see why ESG won broad, even fervent, appeal in its early days. By the mid-2000s, American capitalism had begun to resemble its own caricature. The global economy of the late Nineties and early 2000s was defined not just by excess, but by excessive scandal: the ruinous “privatisation” of Russia; the triple header of Enron, Long Term Capital Management, and Bernie Madoff; and in the background, an Iraq War architected by the former CEO of a major oil industry services company. And then came the mother of all scandals: the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Today, with the media tightly aligned with ESG-embracing Big Business, it’s easy to forget how antagonistic the press was to large companies in the early and mid-2000s. “Transnational corporations” became a go-to epithet insinuating a cartel-like form of legalised corruption; financiers became objects of derision; films such as The Big Short, Arbitrage, Erin Brockovich and Thank You For Smoking highlighted corporate malfeasance.

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The emergence of ESG may have been rooted in a genuine desire to do better. It’s hard to argue with calls, such as that of Brazilian president Lula da Silva at Annan’s 2004 Global Compact Leadership Summit, to see global leaders “engaged in a campaign to free all human beings from hunger”. The same holds true for preserving the natural environment and sharing the benefits — not the externalities — of corporate progress. After all, who doesn’t want a better world?

The problem with ESG, however, is that the practice didn’t match the theory. While ESG set out to make a difference, it ended up becoming a way for Big Business to flip the mass of negative attention into a positive, highly appealing ethos. ESG was all about upholding human rights and ensuring the planet didn’t get incinerated at the altar of ruthless capitalism. This meant that if you were against ESG, you were against ethics itself. And if you opposed the prerogatives of the Big Business espousing ESG, you were a heartless devotee of shareholder capitalism. This binary attitude suited firms such as BlackRock, which depend on, and compete fiercely for, a continuous inflow of fresh capital to invest. If BlackRock could successfully make the case that (a) your firm is the standard for ethical investment and (b) every other approach is so inefficient in the long term that it’s functionally corrupt, then the conclusion regarding which firms get the money is foregone. In other words, BlackRock found a way to win.

In the decade since Larry Fink began writing his letter to shareholders, in which he championed ideas such as “corporate governance and responsible investment”, BlackRock’s market cap quadrupled. The company now has $9 trillion under management, a testament not only to Fink’s financial genius but also to his unparalleled access to global leaders who make decisions at the billion-dollar level.

Fink, as a result, became a darling of the Davos set — and it was there that, in January, he chose to make another ESG confession, this one vastly more significant. At the WEF, he admitted that his firm’s close association with the ESG movement had cost BlackRock an estimated $4 billion in managed assets. While for many (if not most) asset management firms, this would be a fatal blow, it’s in fact a mere trickle lost in BlackRock’s financial ocean. But it’s also a headline. And, no matter how you spin it, it’s a loss — one that could spell the start of a devastating longer-term trend.

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But there was another, more overlooked signal that all was not well with ESG. When Fink released this year’s ESG-free letter, it contained a second omission: in previous years, Fink wrote one letter to CEOs and a separate one to investors. This neatly reflected the concept of “stakeholder capitalism” at the heart of ESG, which calls for equal consideration of all the people involved in a company’s ecosystems, including employees, customers, and the public, not just its shareholders. But this year Fink wrote only a single letter — to investors. Was Fink signalling a retrenchment, a return to the unglamorous, nuts-and-bolts endeavour of shareholder capitalism?

The idea of stakeholder capitalism is attributed largely to Klaus Schwab, creator and chairman of the World Economic Forum, who began spreading the idea in a 1971 study he co-authored called “Modern Company Management in Mechanical Engineering”. This top-down approach to shaping how wealth is created, and in whose hands it ends up, played well to a media educated in America’s Marxism-infused liberal arts colleges. And the business crowd loved it too. Suddenly, bland business conferences felt less like trade conventions and more like geopolitical summits. You weren’t merely investing in funds, selling widgets, or cooking up ever more optimised ads. You were saving the world.

By 2021, ESG had reached its peak not just of influence but power. The pandemic seemed proof of the urgency of its policies. Endlessly, we heard that Covid was a result of mankind “encroaching” on nature, squeezing it until this abstract entity struck back. We were informed that cooperation was essential and non-compliance not an option.

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But ESG’s recent victories are now starting to look pyrrhic. In 2022, Texas led a red-state boycott of BlackRock, announcing plans to pull more than $3 billion out of BlackRock funds. Since then, Republican state legislatures, including those in Florida, Kansas and Idaho, have passed laws that ban or limit the consideration of ESG.

In an even more existential blow to the ESG vision, money has become expensive. During the era of Zero Interest Rate Policy, there was enough cheap money, and enough margin, to sacrifice some of it for the sake of a good cause. But when money is tight, consumers are jittery, and investors running scared, companies take what they can get.

The cultural backlash underway is even bigger. In April, it only took a single misfired influencer outreach effort by Bud Light, which sent cans of beer to Dylan Mulvaney as part of a DEI-guided, trans-friendly campaign, to knock the brand from its top spot in American beer sales, carving 13% off its revenue. Even the Magic Kingdom has not escaped unscathed. After its battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, among the most vocal opponents of ESG in American politics, Disney is now at its most vulnerable in decades, having seen billions in shareholder value wiped away and its once-pristine brand tainted by political controversy. There is no reason to think the trend will slow.

If there is one thing businesses and markets hate, it’s uncertainty. And ESG is starting to look like another unnecessary risk — more so given that ESG has become a valuable political leverage point for politicians looking to ride the surge of populism. This doesn’t mean ESG is done: one of the major problems identified by its critics is the extent to which it has embedded in vital institutions. But we may be at a turning point, and if the risk rises higher, and there is no substantial reward to follow, ESG might find itself on the corporate chopping block.

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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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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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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A heatwave isn't the end of the world

By Thomas Fazi

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.

For a party that is trailing in the polls and uncertain of its direction, hostility to Net Zero has an obvious allure. As a rallying cry, it can speak both to the tax-cutting, libertarian wing of the party and to its culture warriors, eager to renew the fight against experts, elites and international organisations. It offers a bridge between the tech-bro-utopianism of the prime minister and the concerns of motorists and lower-earners, who are facing rising emissions-costs. For many Conservatives, Net Zero smacks of subsidies, price guarantees and market interventions: a centralised re-planning of the economy that owes more to socialism than to science. And while the Uxbridge by-election centred on air-quality, not Net Zero, it offered a glimmer of electoral light to a party raking through the ashes of its recent poll-ratings.

But climate scepticism does not (yet) have a monopoly on Conservative thought. The Conservative Environment Network lists more than 200 MPs and peers on its website, drawn from across the party spectrum. The conflict over Net Zero, then, is not a contest between the “woke” Left and the “radical” Right. It brings into collision different visions of Conservatism, in a struggle for ownership of the Conservative tradition.

Tory environmentalists can point to a strong record on the issue, stretching back to the Fifties. It was Conservative governments that created the Department of the Environment, the National Parks Authorities, the Environment Agency and the Hadley Centre for Climate Research. Tory administrations introduced the Clean Air Acts, the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Environment Act, as well as the Landfill Tax, the Road-Fuel Escalator and, in England, the Plastic Bag Charge. And it was a Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, who made Net Zero a legal obligation.

When global warming first entered public consciousness in the Eighties and Nineties, it was Margaret Thatcher who sounded the most trenchant warnings. Addressing the World Climate Conference in 1990, she accused the world of “playing with the conditions” of life. “We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin”, endangering “the biological balance … on which human life depends”. This was a distinctly Conservative environmentalism — even taking care to warn business that “there will be no profit… for anyone if pollution continues to destroy our planet”.

For Conservative environmentalists, this is not simply a record to defend. It is a reminder that there are powerful strands within Conservatism that can be mobilised against its climate sceptics. The first is the instinct to “conserve”: the idea on which both “conservatism” and “conservation” are founded. For the Conservative intellectual Roger Scruton, global warming engaged “a fundamental moral idea to which conservatives attach great importance: the idea that those responsible for damage should also repair it”. He drew inspiration from the writings of Edmund Burke and his call to partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. For Burke, the living were but the “temporary possessors and life-renters” of society. As such, they had a moral responsibility not to “commit waste on their inheritance by destroying at their pleasure”, or “to leave to those who come after a ruin instead of a habitation”.

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That belief intersected with an emphasis, drawn from Christian conservatism, on “stewardship”: the belief, as Margaret Thatcher once put it, that humans were not the lords of creation but “the Lord’s creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged… with preserving life itself”. As she told the Conservative party conference in 1988: “The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy — with a full repairing lease.”

For much of its history, the Conservative Party was pre-eminently the party of the land; rooted, not just in the “landed interest”, but in a patriotic commitment to the natural environment. As Stanley Baldwin put it: “England is the country and the country is England.” Its sights, sounds and smells — “the corncrake on a dewy morning… the wild anemones in the woods of April” — should “be the inheritance of every child born into this country”. Scruton called this “oikophilia”: the love of home, understood not as nostalgia, but as a desire to pass on the heritage into which we were born. It was an impulse, he noted, that had mobilised millions behind the cause of environmental protection, through bodies such as the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Conservatism also has a tradition of thinking critically about markets, though it has been less visible in recent decades. For Scruton, markets were not a “quasi-religious” institution but a means to an end. In so far as they tended to equilibrium, markets were a useful “social organism” that contributed to “the maintenance of the social ecology”. But if costs could be dumped on “future generations”, or if “waste and spoliation” were treated “as cost-free externalities”, markets would become “anti-social and exploitative machines”.

Scruton offered a passionate, Conservative critique of the view that “growth” was always to be prized: “Growth is good only if it does not fill the sinks. In this sense much of the growth that we have seen since the Second World War has not been a gain but a loss — a vast appropriation from the future of assets that are being used up and not replaced.” Even Thatcher insisted that “free markets” would “defeat their object” if they did “more damage to the quality of life through pollution” than the well-being they promoted by “the production of goods and services”.

In this spirit, not with the laissez-faire insouciance they’re remembered for, the Thatcher governments intervened directly in markets, using taxes to discourage leaded petrol and banning products containing harmful CFCs. This owed something to Thatcher’s respect for scientific opinion: as she warned in 1988, “a nation which does not value trained intelligence is doomed”. It also marked her aversion to debt and her belief in “precautionary action”. If it was wrong to burden future generations with the costs of borrowing, it was equally wrong “to leave environmental debts for our children to clear up”. She compared climate action to household insurance, warning that it would be “more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later”.

This was climate politics as good housekeeping. It was also ecology as national security. “Spending on the environment”, Thatcher told an American audience, “is like spending on defence — if you do not do it in time, it may be too late”. In the decades that followed, the security implications of climate change would become ever more pressing. The 2021 Integrated Review, published by Boris Johnson, listed climate change alongside terrorism as a threat to security and prosperity. It was in response to such warnings that Johnson named “tackling climate change” as his “number one international priority”.

What does this mean for the future? Climate change asks new questions of all political traditions, but Conservative environmentalism has rich resources on which to draw from across its intellectual firmament. For those who are not Conservatives, the results may sometimes be frustrating. Conservative environmentalism may be more drawn to market solutions, or more sceptical of international agreements. The localism prized by Scruton may seem hopelessly inadequate to a global crisis, while the commitment of the Conservative Environment Network to “grow our economy faster” will alarm for whom “growth” itself is the problem.

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Liz Truss still haunts the Tories

By Robert Saunders

Conservative environmentalism will not look the same as its Labour or liberal equivalents — but that is precisely why we need it. Faced with such an awesome challenge, conservatism can bring a set of tools, ideas and insights that would otherwise be missing, in a mutually enriching exchange. As John Stuart Mill reminded the liberals of his own day, “from points of view different from his, different things are perceptible; and none are more likely to have seen what he does not see, than those who do not see what he sees”.

If Conservatism turns its back on the climate question, it will be a dereliction of the Conservative tradition and those who claim to represent it. In 1936, in a debate over German rearmament, Winston Churchill, issued a warning that is as resonant today as when it was first delivered:

“Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger… The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.”

“We cannot avoid this period,” Churchill concluded; “we are in it now”. Conservatives, and everyone else, should rise to the challenge.

In reality, however, China produces more than enough rice, wheat and maize to feed its human population. So why the sudden rush? Xi Jinping, it seems, is preparing for war.

At present, China relies on colossal imports of soya beans, maize, wheat and other cereals to feed its pigs, cattle, chickens and ducks — more than 120 million metric tons last year. These are supplied by the daily arrival of bulk carriers into Chinese ports from Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the United States. If war were to break out, these imports would quickly dry up.

In China, there is no spare land for crops, leaving Beijing little choice but to uproot the trees recently planted by its costly and much-admired reforestation efforts — even though China’s forests are mostly on slopes, and new crop plantings are often swept away by the first serious rain. Local party officials executing Beijing’s orders  know this perfectly well, but disobeying means instant demotion at best.

After the colossal Yangtze River floods of 1998 destroyed 13 million homes, drowned thousands and swept away highways and rail lines, the CCP recognised that the floods had been made worse by uncontrolled deforestation. Orders were issued all across China to stop logging and to plant trees instead, with vast funding allocated to add up to roughly 90 billion trees over the next decade. Thousands of tree nurseries were established, and an army of tree-planters set to work on the bare deforested slopes, with local farmers hired to nurture the new trees. As a result, China became visibly greener in satellite images, as forest cover increased from 12% in 1998 to 24% in 2020 to then increase further — until last year. No figures have been published, but what has happened since greatly exceeds the rate of the Amazon’s deforestation, even though the West’s environmentalists have so far remained entirely silent.

There are no further forests to uproot; all that is left are the very small fruit orchards cultivated by individual farmers. And so, to the horror of the elderly peasants who planted each tree by hand, a local Party official will arrive one day with the People’s Armed Police in camouflage uniforms, and cut them down. Sometimes, this is not enough: many farmers raise ducks in their backyards to supplement their income, which the police then club to death, issuing orders to plant cereals instead. Even room-sized pigsties are destroyed to free up the few square yards of soil underneath.

Local officials know that it is madness to destroy so many livelihoods to produce a few truckloads of cheap cereals, but they have no way of changing Xi’s policies — especially when each official has juniors ready to denounce him in the hope of taking his place. It was this dynamic that produced the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward. Peasants were ordered to melt down their pots and pans to make steel in backyard furnaces, with the promise they would instead eat in the dining rooms of the promised new “communes”; they were also told to melt down their animal ploughs because new tractors were arriving. In a mere four years from 1958 to 1962, at least 30 million died of hunger — some to be eaten by those who survived — and hardly any usable steel was produced.

Now, there is no question that China has very little arable land, having lost some 4 million acres to urbanisation and industry between 1957 and 1996 — an average loss of 100,000 acres per year, which jumped to more than 1.5 million acres per year from 1997, with China’s explosive economic growth that followed the opening of the US and world markets. As a result, China now has less arable land per inhabitant than India.

But why should this matter? As a very successful exporter of increasingly advanced and costly manufactures, China can certainly pay for all its food and animal feed imports easily enough. And this is how we arrive at something much worse than the destruction of China’s new forests and the human tragedy of its destroying orchards and ducks: the reason for it all.

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Why no one can end the Ukraine war

By Edward Luttwak

The crescendo of Xi Jinping’s “rice bowl” speeches came on 21 June, when he claimed it was imperative to prepare for “extreme circumstances”, having previously warned on 6 May that China must be prepared “for worst-case and extreme scenarios” to survive “high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms” — all transparent codewords for “the danger of war”. He returned to the topic on 6 July when, on a visit to the Eastern Theater Command, whose jurisdiction includes the Strait of Taiwan, he called for increased “training under real combat conditions to raise the capability to fight and win”.

Xi’s incessant calls for “combat readiness” may mean that he actually doubts that Chinese military forces are ready for real combat. Its navy, after all, is brand new and inexperienced, while the air force is greatly inferior in its technology, mostly relying on Soviet jet engines, radar-evading “stealth” that is not really stealthy, and inferior missiles. But more importantly, Xi’s intense bellicosity and intense calls for “the rejuvenation of the Chinese people” suggests motives that we cannot even imagine. No, not Taiwan, which China could have had for the asking by merely treating Hong Kong’s freedoms with demonstrative respect, making “one country, two systems” very attractive to the Taiwanese.

Much more likely is his personal sense of shame that China’s history is a long sequence of defeats at the hands of badly outnumbered invaders — the Turkic, Mongol and Manchurian Jurchen tribespeople, and then the Japanese who might still be there if they had not attacked the US. As with Mussolini, then, Xi’s real aim may well be to turn his unwarlike people into warriors.

So far, China’s future war might appear to be all talk, but preparations are well underway. Already, catastrophic deforestation is harming all humanity while the destruction of orchards and the mass killings of ducks are impoverishing tens of millions. That is not just talk.

According to the news, however, I should be terribly concerned — terrified, in fact. Everyone’s running headline stories about the “extreme”, “record-breaking” and “deadly” hot weather sweeping across Asia, the US and, most notably, Europe. Here, the heatwave was unofficially named Cerberus, the multi-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, before being replaced by Charon, the man who ferries the dead there. Rome is being called the “infernal city”. To be honest, I can think of several much more hellish places around the world at the moment — cities plagued by poverty, terrorism and war. And yet we are told that the current heat waves are a taste of the “hell” that awaits us as a result of climate change.

Such sensationalism is revealing of the climate hysteria that has gripped the West — and the way in which it is seriously hindering our ability to devise rational solutions. Many seem convinced that if we don’t drastically reduce CO2 emissions (or eliminate them altogether) by our unmoveable deadline of 2030, climate change will extinguish humanity, if not all life on Earth. We’re told this is because “the science tells us”. This is bonkers.

Yes, climate change and global warming are real — and yes, they are largely a result of human activity — but the planet is not about to be “uninhabitable”. The science is, in fact, much more nuanced: according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is far from clear whether the world is actually experiencing more drought, flooding or hurricanes, nor the extent to which any changes are influenced by human behaviour.

Scientists aren’t even sure what the impact on agriculture will be: one 2011 study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that by mid-century climate change might reduce global crop output by less than 1% of today’s output. As the UN climate panel put it: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers [such as] changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development.”

While the overall impact of climate change on humanity will be negative, nowhere does the science tell us that life on Earth will perish if we don’t go Net Zero by 2030. These deadlines are conjured by politicians, not scientists. As a result, the apocalyptic narrative currently dominating the climate debate is completely unfounded — and unethical. In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman warned about the “futility thesis” — how people will reject preventive action due to a fatalistic belief that it is simply too late to make a difference. Today, this phenomenon can be seen in the thousands of young Westerners who are suffering from “climate anxiety” and choosing not to have children. According to the UN’s latest Human Development Report, the world is more pessimistic than at any point between now and before the First World War — even though in almost every measurable way, life on Earth is better than ever.

Not only is this rhetoric of impending doom hindering the possibility of fixing the problem, it is also engendering all manner of authoritarian fantasies. It has become an article of faith that the best response is to drastically cut back CO2 emissions — and that this should be done whatever the cost. For if the world is about to end, anything is justified. The increasingly violent forms of “eco-activism” are also part of this trend. Fear, depression, desperation and authoritarianism are mutually reinforcing.

Yet any realistic climate policy will take decades to pay off; even if we significantly reduce our emissions in the following years, the total amount of carbon dioxide in the air will still increase, though at a slightly diminished rate. This is especially true for Western countries, which will account for a smaller and smaller share of global emissions in the coming years and decades. Even if rich countries completely curtail all emissions (an impossible scenario), the temperature increase, after 80 years, will only be 0.4°C smaller than it would have been otherwise, according to estimates by Bjorn Lomborg based on a model used by the UN’s panel of climate scientists. So even if Western countries were able to meet their unrealistic climate objectives, we will continue to experience the negative consequences of climate change — floods, storms and heat waves — for a very long time.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything to try to stop temperatures from rising above a certain limit. But if our aim is to actually save lives — and surely we have a greater moral obligation to those who are alive today than to future generations — then our priority should be adaptation: that is, measures that will help people cope with the effects of climate change, and which would save lives here and now.

Adaptation has already greatly reduced climate-related deaths, even in the face of rising temperatures: it’s why deaths from storm surges have been declining even as sea levels have risen; and why the most likely future scenario is that fewer people will die from climate-related flooding — just as heat-related deaths have been declining in certain countries. Adaptation is also why deaths and devastation due to wildfires have dropped dramatically; and why, overall, climate-related fatalities have declined by about 96% over the past century, despite a massive increase in the global population. This is testament to the strong relationship between economic development and climate resilience.

In the context of the current heatwaves, this means that, instead of “climate action”, people should be demanding subsidies for air conditioners and lower energy prices from their governments — straightforward measures that would drastically lower the number of heat-related deaths, not empty promises that won’t make a difference in the short term (and will have a negligible impact in the long term). But this is what happens when nightmares and elitist fantasies replace the actual material conditions of people as the basis for politics — “saving the planet” becomes more important than saving actual human beings.

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In this way, climate hysteria is completely distorting our perception of the world. Last week, a report by the World Meteorological Organization that the beginning of July was the world’s hottest week on record received widespread attention. At around the same time, another report was published — this time by the UN Development Programme — that was greeted with less interest. But it was arguably more important. It estimated that the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent surge in inflation and borrowing costs had pushed an extra 165 million people into poverty, bringing the total global figure to 1.65 billion, over 20% of the world’s population.

Climate activists often argue that those living in poor countries are the ones who will suffer the most from climate change. This is true. But, once again, it is illogical to claim that our priority, and theirs, should therefore be to reduce global emissions as fast as possible. Poor people’s priority is not be poor. A UN global poll of nearly 10 million people found climate to be the lowest policy priority among the poor, far behind education, health, and nutrition.

Of course, these objectives can’t always be treated in isolation. There are often trade-offs: reducing or eliminating world poverty requires more growth, which inevitably entails more energy and therefore more emissions. Indeed, coping with the effects of climate change is itself energy-intensive, as the climate paradox of air conditioning makes clear. Faced with this realisation, environmentalists continue to entertain the notion that the future energy needs of developing countries can be met entirely by renewables — yet this is also a fantasy.

As a report published last year by the Breakthrough Institute makes clear, even though renewables (ideally in combination with nuclear energy, which is fully carbon-free) have a role to play in the development of Africa and other poor regions, many of the world’s poorer countries have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels in the coming years: coal, oil and natural gas. “Continued and increasing fossil-fuel consumption is regrettable, but it will mean more people will be fed with less land, reducing deforestation, and enabling the transition to modern agriculture,” write the report’s two co-authors, Vijaya Ramachandran of the Breakthrough Institute and Arthur Baker of the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago. Remember, poverty is the leading cause of death in developing countries; more growth in these countries will mean more emissions but significantly fewer deaths. Moreover, helping the world’s poorest grow out of poverty will also make them more resilient in the face of climate change.

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One might think that, even for those with environmentalist sympathies, the choice here isn’t too difficult to make: fewer deaths is surely a goal worth pursuing. Instead, development banks and international funding groups such as the World Bank and the European Investment Bank are increasingly linking finance to climate adaptation and mitigation, curtailing or halting their funding of fossil-fuel or nuclear projects. Here we can observe the best example of the way in which climate hysteria is pushing us to make increasingly irrational — and ultimately very dangerous, if not deadly — choices for poor and marginalised people everywhere, in the developing world as well as in rich countries.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change; it means that we need to strike the right balance between improving human welfare — which implies more emissions in the short term — and mitigating temperature rises. As long as poverty continues to kill more people than climate change, environmentalists who profess to care about saving the world should think about who they are saving it for.

Britain’s waters are in a foul state. Official statistics show that there was an average of 825 sewage spills a day last year — including in the Environment Secretary’s own Suffolk constituency, where the water contains levels of e. coli more than 20 times the limit for bathing. In England, just 14% of rivers are rated ecologically “good”. In January, an NHS worker caught hepatitis while wild swimming, and last summer, dozens of beaches in England were closed due to toxic waste warnings.

The result is that the seemingly old-fashioned issue of sanitation — a problem most of us thought we’d solved around the same time as cholera — has once again become a political flashpoint. Half the British public now see protecting rivers as an important voting issue. In the May local elections, both the Liberal Democrats and Greens specifically targeted sewage as a swing issue — and saw their biggest gains in years. The Conservative seats newly up for by-elections should take note: Nadine Dorries’ former constituency of Mid Bedfordshire, for one, is currently in uproar at the sorry state of the river Ouse.

This is part of a wider trend: the environment is now regularly among the top four issues most important to the electorate — beating issues such as crime or childcare. It is even more of a focus in Conservative-held swing seats. And there’s a reason why sewage inspires such strong emotions — beyond the fact that it’s ruined the wild swimming trend. The scandal is in many ways a perfect microcosm of Britain’s political woes of the last decade: austerity, failed privatisation, corporate greed, climate apathy. After all, what good is a government if it can’t keep our shit out of our streams?

If you want to understand how this country’s waters got into such a mess, an obvious place to start is in 2010, with the coalition government. Its austerity policies slashed spending ringfenced for environmental protection by 80%, gutting the Environmental Agency’s ability to monitor our waters and, crucially, enforce punitive measures against polluters. It’s hardly surprising that, since then, sewage spill events into British rivers have doubled.

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But one could go back even further. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that, in 1989, privatised water utilities in England — making it the only country in the world to do so. The water companies were granted regional monopolies, debt-free, the argument being that they could run the system more competitively than the state could. In reality, many water companies have spent the decades since loading themselves with debt, deploying increasingly byzantine financial engineering to avoid corporation tax, and paying billions to shareholders and millions to their own executives — all the while under-investing in infrastructure and hiking prices for customers at rates considerably above inflation. Handed a money tap, they simply turned the spigot.

But if you want to get to the real heart of our sewage crisis, it makes sense to go back even further, to the summer of 1858, and the now infamous “Great Stink”. One of the things that period dramas never capture about Victorian England is the stench. It’s hard to imagine: tanneries filled the air with the scent of urine-soaked hides, and soap-makers with the smell of boiling bones. Carriages clogged the roads, leaving them caked in horse manure. But worst of all would have been the smell of human shit.

Before the widespread adoption of sewers, people used privies — holes that emptied into a cesspit. For centuries those cesspits were cleaned out by nightsoil men, who would come by and, for a small fee, dig out and cart your waste away to farms on the outskirts of the city to be used as fertiliser. In the 1840s, led by sanitary reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, the British government passed a series of measures to try to clean up the capital. Among their reforms: mandating the connection of cesspits to the city’s sewers.

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It was a deadly mistake. Rather than clear the air as Chadwick had hoped, the solution channelled an ever-greater deluge of foulness into the Thames. By the 1850s, the river was unimaginably polluted. Dickens called it a “deadly sewer”, Benjamin Disraeli a “stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”. In the summer of 1858, London boiled. The water levels in the river fell, leaving the waste within slathered up the banks. The smell fell foul across the city; there were reports of people feeling sick from miles away. Parliament ordered the curtains doused in lime chloride to mask the stench, with little effect.

The Great Stink led Westminster’s flailing political classes to finally act. They appointed the Joseph Bazalgette — one of the great British engineers of his time — to design a massive new sewage system for London. Bazalgette’s plan was astonishing in scope: it resulted in the laying of 720km of new sewer lines and the creation of the Victoria and Albert embankments, reshaping the city and its connection to the Thames. The resulting reduction in exposure to unclean water likely prevented millions of deaths; it’s thought that the introduction of sanitation in the 19th century added 20 years to the average human lifespan.

But Bazalgette’s design had a significant flaw; it was a combined sewer — that is, the main underground pipes were designed to carry both wastewater from buildings and rainwater collected by the city’s drains, to help dilute and flush out the system. During unusually heavy rainfall, they would flood; with such instances in mind, the sewers were designed with outlet valves called Combined Sewer Overflows, which would expel excess flow directly into waterways, untreated. Here is where our current sewage crisis stems from.

When Bazalgette designed London’s sewers, overflows were supposed to be a rare event. But various factors have conspired to make them commonplace. One is the all-engulfing expansion of concrete: new roads, pavements, and building developments block rainwater from entering natural soakaways — trees, soils, wetlands — that would otherwise absorb it. Another factor, inevitably, is climate change, which increased the occurrence and intensity of storms — and therefore flooding.

Today, there are around 100,000km of combined sewers in England alone, and around 15,000 overflows. Modern sanitary engineers hate them, but because so many of the central “hub” sewers are combined, introducing new models often doesn’t make a difference. To prevent spills, water utilities have periodically built storm overflow tanks, designed to hold excess sewage until it can be treated. But due to systemic under-investment by water companies, there is at present simply not enough capacity to store it all. For my book, Wasteland, I visited Mogden sewage works in London, which serves an estimated two million people: it has a series of storm tanks installed, and yet in 2020 alone it released enough sewage into the Thames to fill 2,768 Olympic swimming pools.

Water companies often use their ancient infrastructure as an excuse for not solving their pollution problem. It’s certainly true that replacing our combined system would be a Bazalgettian feat; a government-commissioned report, published in 2021, estimated that eliminating storm overflows in the UK would cost up to £600 billion, and increase household bills by up to £999 a year. (Not that we would have to replace the whole system to make the situation more bearable.) It would also do nothing to solve the other primary culprit behind our spoiled waters, the rampant phosphate pollution by industrial farms. The current plan, in London at least, is to divert the existing combined sewers into something even bigger: the £5 billion Tideway Tunnel currently being dug under the Thames. Thames Water estimates that when the “super sewer” is completed in 2024, 95% of raw sewage that pollutes the river today will no longer flow into it.

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But the fact is, just continuously expanding the old system isn’t going to work. This is one of the central dilemmas presented by climate change: do we press ahead with novel but potentially expensive technological solutions, or do we look back, and find inspiration in the natural world? China, for example, has met the sewage challenge by embracing so-called “sponge cities”, in which natural soakaways, permeable pavements, and wetlands are being built into city planning in order to soak up storm water and prevent flooding.

But swales and reed beds are not going to replace our traditional sewage infrastructure any time soon. Solving this problem can’t wait. With summer droughts becoming more common and storms more intense, protecting our water supply is only becoming more vital. Whoever wants to win the next election is going to need to convince the public they can turn the situation around, and fast.

Unlike Theodore “Ted” Kacyznski, I have no criminal record — the only person in my immediate family who can claim that. Perhaps most important, my flight to Montana was temporary: I returned to the world after coming to my senses, and started a family in Pittsburgh, only 40 minutes north of my small hometown. Kacyznski, at my age, was living in the waterless and electricity-free cabin where he typed out his 35,000-word manifesto while coordinating a 16-year mail bomb campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others. He died last week at 81, having whiled away his final years in a federal penitentiary.

For as long as America has existed, its men have fled for the hills. In Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry Thoreau wrote “we need the tonic of wilderness”. Almost 150 years later, his words influenced Christopher McCandless, who died after going into the wild. Regardless of the tragedy and suggested inauthenticity of stories like this, they fascinate the political chattering classes: from Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter, Karl Hess, who relocated to rural West Virginia later in life, to full-time proponents of “agrarianism” and other “back to the land” ideologies. These ideologies are diverse in their themes but, in the main, argue for a reconnection with the natural world. Modern life, they say, has severed our intrinsic relationship with the environment. Often gaining prominence at times of social upheaval and discontent — as with hippie communes in the Sixties and today’s homesteaders — they claim that industrial society’s obsession with progress and consumption eclipses essential human experiences and values. Sometimes, they wind up idealising a past that was, in reality, fraught with hardship and inequality.   

Underlying these ideologies is a powerful sense of foreboding. Those who advocate fleeing to the hills would seem to be eagerly awaiting doomsday — be it environmental, racial, class-based, or a horrific combination thereof. On both Left and Right, there’s a bumper crop of texts to excite their imaginations. The apocalypticism manifests in a call to action, to prepare, resist, or attempt to reverse course before it’s too late; it highlights genuine concerns while also making readers partners in an exciting race against destruction.

The inclination to escape is not inherently outrageous. Who hasn’t yearned, in a moment of stress or dissatisfaction, for the simplicity of a life untangled from societal woes? Yet, throughout human history, most of us have either chosen or, more often the case, been compelled to remain near home; escape is a privilege of which only a few can avail themselves. Even those who claim to live without money in remote places often rely on resources inaccessible to many. Moreover, these individuals tend to have the privilege of choice: the option to reject modern conveniences, the opportunity to learn and hone survival skills, the safety net of a family to return to if things go awry. In this sense, dropping out of society — as with those Roman senators who took to their grand countryside villas during the waning days of that empire — is a fantasy of the upper classes.

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But beyond issues of class and economics, most of us are held to our communities by invisible, powerful ties. We are entwined in a complex web of relationships, responsibilities, and affections. The young feel the weight of these things less. Back when I was a superficially educated 19-year-old college graduate, Kacyznski’s Industrial Society and Its Future held a preeminent place in my worldview. Kacyznski believed autonomy was impossible in an industrial society. “As long as the system GIVES them their opportunities, it still has them on a leash,” he wrote. Reforming this “Industrial-Technological Society” was impossible; only radical revolutionaries could bring about lasting changes. Karl Marx’s concluding exhortation from “Theses on Feuerbach” says much the same: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Kaczynski’s manifesto and Marx’s calls to action appealed to me, and many other young adults, precisely because they promised a means of breaking free from societal confines.  The young long for autonomy, to seize control in a world that often seems controlled by faceless entities and systems. It took some time for me to realise that Kacyznski, venturing outside his own academic field of mathematics, was in fact summarising fairly well-established critiques of capitalism and Leftism. The Frankfurt School theorists’ critique of the “culture industry” or Herbert Marcuse’s theories of one-dimensional man echo similar sentiments about the dehumanising effects of modern industrial societies. However, what set Kaczynski apart was the way he packaged these criticisms into an eco-fatalist, doomerist narrative with carefully numbered paragraphs.

“Had we but world enough and time”, we might be able to take the advice of revolutionaries like Kaczynski and Marx to heart. We could possibly devote our lives to relearning the skills necessary for physical labour, striving for a self-sufficient existence, toiling away while the world around us succumbs to apocalyptic decay. However, the reality for most people, as they navigate the complexities of adulthood, is a series of compromises and an acceptance of societal norms, conflicts, and even banalities. We work steady jobs, contribute to society in our own ways, and seek a balance between our ideals and the practical demands of our daily lives. After my time in Montana, I returned to academia, before settling into a career in the private sector and starting a family. My desired ending isn’t in the wilderness, but rather here in the Rust Belt, like most of my predecessors. 

Looking back, I see my Montana sojourn as a phase, an exploration of ultimately unsustainable idealistic philosophies. My life now bears more similarity to those of the well-educated cultural critics who often spout back-to-land ideologies, while paradoxically relying on modern technologies to promote their books and podcasts about self-sufficient living, or offering to let you toil on their land for free, as part of a quasi-cult or glorified multilevel marketing scheme. I get it: when I lived in Montana, I believed I was the last sane person in a soon-to-be-extinguished world. At the same time, I harboured aspirations of writing the next Great American Novel: I wanted to communicate with the world, to share my experiences and ideas, even if those ideas involved little more than getting people to acknowledge my prescience. Even those who flee into the wilderness want to connect — perhaps especially.

Kaczynski was unable or unwilling to reintegrate into society, whereas I became disillusioned with his ideas because they began to seem impractical — interesting, to be sure, yet also surprisingly childish. For all its failings, society offers us human connection, a shared history, and communal resilience in the face of adversity. We endure the disappointments of civilisation because, at its best, it provides us a framework to collaborate, innovate, and work towards something better. Kaczynski, it appears, never had this moment of disillusionment — nothing compelled him to grow up and simply accept “Industrial Society’s” leash.

The end of the world has been eternally predicted. Perhaps it really will extinguish the lot of us, and the collapse and decline that each succeeding generation’s bumper crop of Cassandras predict will come to pass. These theories of moral decline and accompanying societal collapse are evergreen. The terminology and concerns may change — overpopulation, underpopulation, heat death, a new ice age — but the adolescent anxiety remains the same. “Things ain’t like they used to be and they never were,” now at least has some social science research buttressing it. 

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My dissertation advisor used to jest about the inherent appeal of the collapse genre. There’s a certain romantic allure to the idea of witnessing and surviving the “world’s last night“. This apocalyptic charm — a once-in-a-lifetime chance to die with the world, to be there when the lights go out — invariably attracts those people who struggle to grow up.

Kaczynski was apparently unable to truly grasp the cyclical nature of history — the one field neglected in Industrial Society and Its Future. He was caught in a loop of perceived decay without recognising the possibility for growth and improvement. Alas, we still face a seeming repetition of all the problems outlined in Peter Finch’s endlessly recyclable rant from the 1976 film Network — inflation, the Russians, air that’s unfit to breathe, crime in the streets — yet none of us can know how these things will sort themselves out, only that whatever happens will be unlike anything that came before. History repeats itself — life always ends in death! — but never the same way twice.

As mere mortals born into that history, we must live in the world as it is, not as we imagine or fear it to be. The world may not be getting better, but neither is it necessarily spiralling towards global disaster. And those who attempt to flee, to escape the complexities of society, often find themselves reaching back towards it, be it through writing blogs from the wilderness or through violent acts like Kaczynski’s bombing campaign. As for the rest of us, our life may feel banal, fraught with the usual concerns about our family’s future and the state of the world. Yet it’s also tempered by an acceptance of mortality — perhaps the most powerful counterpoint to the more extreme doom-laden narratives.

It still feels strange to say the King, impossible to utter it without savouring the phrase as if in quotation marks: no other British title quite embodies the same tension between the lost magic of the realm and the banalities of modern public life. Replacing the careworn grandmother embodying the post-war diminution of the British state, our new king, part Athonite mystic, part pampered dandy, remains a mystery.

Just like the juxtaposition of Extinction Rebellion’s pagan eco-mysticism with the box-ticking, bell-ringing passive-aggressiveness of Sunak’s cycle cavalry, the King represents two divergent paths for Britain’s future. To supporters like myself, inclined to hail him — partly seriously and partly ironically — as a post-liberal figurehead, a champion of small family farms and a lost way of life, the King may still signal a renaissance of sorts. To his detractors, he represents all that is wrong with the 21st-century establishment. Some view him as the herald of top-down bureaucratic eco-austerity for the masses while the elites preserve their wealth and contentment; others see his recent capitulation to the race grifters and betrayal of a loyal family servant as evidence of all that is most destabilising and harmful about modern British life. There are two kings within Charles waiting to be crowned, just as there are two rival Britains struggling to be born.

The Queen’s funeral, with its sombre pomp and reassertion of the power and majesty of the state, could be interpreted as a rejection of modern Britain as much as the great festive events of her later life proclaimed a celebration of who we are now. What rich stores of symbolic meaning, then, await us at the coronation?

The sheer strangeness of this event, its apartness from modern Britain, is the essence of its meaning. When our king is anointed as God’s chosen in the great stone sepulchre of the British people, we will witness something strange and literally magical. So divorced from modernity as to be almost incomprehensible, we will witness, like puzzled anthropologists, the ancient rituals of our own lost British tribe. The choice of music, of court dress and of religious benedictions that will attend this descendant of both Vlad Dracul and Mohammed, in this most Catholic ceremony of a Protestant country, are rich fodder for grandstanding and debate. All politics, all power, is at heart symbolic, resting on ancient foundations like a modern church on ancient monoliths: only once or twice in our lifetimes will the state draw back its robes and reveal her hidden mysteries to us.

How is Charles to rule and bring this strange duality, the ancient and the modern, into public life? For decades, he was mocked as an eccentric, a weirdo who talked to his plants and praised the rustic hardships of traditional peasant life from within his palace walls. This urge to call him weird as an insult, springs from the same source as the eye-rolling ironic epithet “normal country” levelled at Britain. Instead, it is a compliment. Britain is not a normal country, whatever that would be, and thank God.

From the beginning of recorded history, Britain has always been viewed as a place strange and apart from the rest of Europe and the world, an insular realm of eccentric people and half-understood customs. In the awkward adolescence of his reign, between the inheritance of his role and his donning of the crown, Charles has perhaps hidden his own essential weirdness, in an attempt to fit how he felt modern Britain wants him to be. It is only now, as he prepares to assume the role, that Charles has begun to let his weirdness show.

In its true meaning, wyrd is “fate”, the supernatural destiny imposed on all men, just as Charles’s destiny, long-delayed, has finally settled upon him. We must encourage, through Charles, the wyrd’s manifestations in public life.

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Consider Charles’s much-analysed choice of the Green Man as his symbol on the Coronation invitations. What does it tell us about our new king? What makes it so fascinating is not that it is a submerged pagan symbol buried beneath Christian decoration — a popular claim modern folklorists reject — but rather the very knowing ambiguity of the Green Man, a Christian symbol of rebirth that gains its power from the winked suggestion of older, deeper roots. It is a symbol so intentionally rich in opposing meanings, so downright weird, that no settled meaning can ever be found: it was created to be puzzled over, argued about, and in doing so to uncover hidden truths. It is time for the Green Man to run riot in SW1, for Charles to enrich British public life with his own fertile ambiguities.

How, for example, would our Green Man king bridge the gap between Palace Green’s eco-protesters, fearful of what they believe to be an apocalyptic near-future, and the opposing political tendency, fearful of what they believe to be a dawning age of eco-austerity? In an age where our dependence on Russian energy and neglect of nuclear power has driven ordinary families into financial difficulty, the argument that Britain’s antiquated housing stock requires better insulation has been widely adopted by urban yimby commentators, evidence of one path through a divided political sphere.

King Charles, tireless promoter of traditional craftsmanship, could make the still-little-known case to the public that it is precisely because Britain’s housing stock dates from before the 20th century, and was built with traditional breathable materials such as lime, that insulation with modern impermeable materials, as Insulate Britain promote, would worsen the problem. This simple truth, well-known to heritage professionals, has been entirely neglected. And who could have a better pulpit to make the case for a better way forward? For if Britain’s largely Victorian houses could be insulated using traditional materials by a scaled-up, newly-trained workforce of high-skilled, high-wage craftsmen, a major political and economic problem could be resolved according to the methods Charles has spent a lifetime promoting.

Similarly, the recent collapse of much of Britain’s intensive agriculture model has heightened the growing clash between those who believe it is the way to food security, and those who believe it is despoiling Britain’s fields, forests and waterways; nor does it keep the nation fed and healthy, nor our farmers in business. As a longstanding advocate for the small family farm, King Charles can bridge this gap: instead of lecturing the nation on how to do better, he could show how the best nature-friendly farming systems work by converting Buckingham Palace’s 40 acres of private gardens into a working small farm. Imagine a rural oasis of hay meadows and rippling fields of grain in the centre of the capital, a haven of wildlife watched over by our benign farmer king. Through taking action, the king can become a living bridge between the capital and the countryside, the old ways and the new.

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While ideas like these may seem trifling and eccentrically small-scale to both the eco-modernists, enraptured by grand geoengineering projects, and to large-scale rewilders alike, it is their pure simplicity that grants them power. While fate has planted him at the nation’s apex, the abiding characteristic of our new king is his genuine love and affection for the humble and vernacular, even if only expressed in an occasional holiday from the super-rich luxuries of his permanent existence. It is a rare head of state who mends hedges and sleeps in peasants’ cottages and monasteries for relaxation (even if his personal lodgings are more those of abbots’ quarters than monks’ cells); he can now share the same powers of regeneration these simple pleasures must bring to him with the nation as a whole.

It is only through converting the advocacy of the Prince of Wales into the necessary labour of showing and doing that our Green Man King can make himself and the monarchy a central, guiding presence in British public life. To heal the new divisions of the coming age, and make the coronation a genuine period of national rebirth, there are worse options than embracing the sheer Weirdness of Charles III.

After all, who doesn’t love beavers? As well as providing a furry flood-defence, beavers are lauded as “ecosystem engineers” for their stimulation of biodiversity. Their fans range from Michael Gove — who, as Environment Secretary, splurged £20,000 on a trial to reintroduce the rodents to the River Otter — to the residents of Pickering, in Yorkshire, whose homes were saved from flooding by an upstream beaver dam slowing excess water. Reassuringly, the Rewilding Britain charity informs us: “Beavers are vegan and don’t eat fish or other animals.”

That is the final straw. Beavermania needs a cold shower of reality. The “rewilding superstar” is herbivorous; veganism is a human philosophical choice. And reintroducing them comes with negatives, for the environment and for people. Indeed, their reintroduction is proof of the fallacy of “rewilding” as a conservation concept. A very expensive fallacy. Michael Gove’s £20,000 is but a drop in the river when it comes to the cost of beaver reintroduction. The Scottish Beaver Trial of 2009-14, which tested the waters for their reintroduction north of the border, cost £2 million in admin alone: a sum that is the stuff of dreams for most conservation charities. And then there is the infrastructure. The standard model of beaver re-introduction is to initially fence the “wild” animals in enclosures of about two hectares. Since beavers both burrow and climb, the fencing has to be heavy duty stuff: installation, per beaver introduction, easily costs £30,000.

Beavers also gnaw trees. An adult beaver can bring down a 10-inch-wide tree in under an hour; single beavers have been known to fell 200 trees a year. We are normally, if you remember, urged to plant trees, for the sake of the environment. But trees also have financial worth: in the upper Danube region of Germany, beavers have caused £5 million of damage. Alas, beavers are indiscriminate lumberjacks, so valuable timber requires guards, or deterrent slime. These things, too, cost money.

Beavers chop down the trees, of course, in order to build dams. And as any child who has ever played in a ditch or stream will explain, impede flowing water and you get flooding behind the impediment. When a dam built by humans floods a village, we protest. But when a beavers’ dam causes flooding, we call it a biodiverse wetland paradise. Yet it is no less destructive, of both infrastructure and agricultural land. The evidence for this can be found anywhere beavers have been reintroduced. The Scottish Beaver Trial at Knapdale paid out £38,000 to cover flood damage caused by a single colony of beavers to a mere 200 metres of road. To compensate farmers for loss of crops on flooded farmland, plus the beavers’ hearty liking for farmed veg, the German state of Bavaria coughs up €450,000 annually, while the Polish government paid out over €4 million in 2017 alone. As well as building their dams, beavers burrow into riverbanks, for up to 100 metres, destabilising them. The Polish Interior Ministry partly blamed the devastating floods of 2010 on the country’s then 70,000 beavers, stating: “The greatest enemy of the flood defences is an animal called the beaver.”

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Unsurprisingly, “initial societal enthusiasm” for beaver reintroductions in Poland, which commenced in 1975, is washing away, to be replaced with “pointing out the problems connected with the phenomenon”. Here is a lesson for the UK: the more beavers we have, the more potential there is for human-beaver conflict. Both Defra and the Scottish government already operate “beaver mitigation schemes”; the latter’s, after acknowledging that “not all beaver activity is helpful in every situation”, offers to, among other things, “provide free expert advice on how to manage beaver activity” and “trial new technology to track beaver activity to minimise the burden on land managers”. The dream and the goal of rewilding, according to Rewilding Britain, is “restoring ecosystems to the point where nature can take care of itself”, yet beavers in Scotland, fantastically, actually require state management. So much for “rewilding”.

And when the management fails, the beavers are relocated or killed. In Scotland, support for the species’s expansion is already declining: in 2021, 90 beavers were culled, and 120 captured, to prevent serious damage to agriculture. Those who advocate uncontrolled beaver reintroduction are as culpable of the killings as the person pulling the trigger: it is well-known that wherever you have large beaver populations, and anything more than a negligible human population, the former end up being culled. The beaver population of Poland is 3.2 per 10 km²; in 2019, permits were issued for the reduction of about 6% of that population, a sum of 8,391 beavers. Beaver culling and relocating in Scotland, the area with the lowest human population density, has already reached over 10%. If rewilding can’t happen in Scotland, it can’t happen anywhere in the UK.

But maybe beavers are worth all this inconvenience, and all the millions? Maybe their heralded “natural flood-prevention” and ecosystem engineering is a win, for the public purse and the environment? On the possibility of beavers being major mitigators of flooding in Britain, the mathematicians of Leeds University are barely unable to contain their mirth:

“even a 10% flood reduction of the FEV [Flood Excess Volume] using beaver colonies and beaver dams, requires hundreds of such colonies per river catchment… serious flood mitigation by massive introduction of beaver colonies is completely unrealistic, in stark contrast to statements made in scientific literature and in the media.”

To this observation, one must add another: when beavers build dams on streams, they effectively replace one habitat — that of fast moving water — with another, that of ponds and wetland. Arguments rage as to whether this beaver eco-engineering is good or bad for other species. As Beavermaniacs frequently remind us, the wetlands created by the dams of Castor fiber are favourable to creatures ranging from frog to kingfisher. But conservationists concerned about our dwindling, fragile numbers of wild trout and salmon — now at their lowest levels since records began and “reaching crisis point” — have gnawing fears about beaver dams, which are barriers to piscatorial migration.

Each side, almost daily, advances a scientific report proving their case. The only safe conclusion is that of The Earth Science Review: “Effective management of beaver impacts on fish may simply come down to careful consideration of individual dam and site characteristics… and the characteristics of the fish species being considered.” In plain English: “It depends on the stream, on the dam.” Since beavers cannot be relied upon to determine whether their settlement on a stream is good or bad for the neighbourhood fish, humans will have to. Again: so much for rewilding.

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Besides, whether we have beavers and whether we have wetlands are separate questions. There exists an animal even better at dam-making than Castor fiber. It is called Homo sapiens sapiens. Consider the branch of low-cost conservation called “beaver dam mimicry”, whereby dams are built out of rocks or posts. Last time I did it, it was a morning’s work with a digger. Want to emulate the beavers’ tree-felling? Use a chainsaw. You don’t need beavers to create wetland, or a tree-felled riverbank. You need a couple of hundred quid’s worth of kit. Also, human-constructed dams can be fabricated with built-in access for migratory fish, so the salmon win too. Faux-beaver dams, now commonplace in the US, show “promise in achieving a range of conservation goals, including increasing the retention of water and sediment, helping maintain late season flows, and improving stream and streamside habitat quality”. So, the benefits of beaver without the negatives of beaver.

In a de-natured countryside, it is pertinent to ask whether the greater good of the environment is really served by channelling so much conservation money into one species. Plenty of fauna and flora are extinct or locally extinct — including the hare, the corncrake, the ghost orchid. Any of them might appreciate some of the cash thrown at Castor fiber. Rabbit, like beavers, are “eco-system engineers”. Their numbers decreased 83% in Scotland between 1996 and 2018. Where is the fuss on their behalf? Is it lacking because bunnies don’t satisfy the rewilders’ romantic fantasies of the return of the wildwood?

Yes, beavers are engaging ambassadors for nature — no small matter — and yes, they have value as tourist attractions. But only for now, while their numbers are limited. When our countryside and towns heave with beavers, they will lose their appeal. When they cause the environment more problems than they solve, we will regret idealising them. It’s time to press pause on beaver reintroduction. Before they become a damn costly pest.

Populations grow exponentially, he argued, but food supply grows in a more linear way. And so, at some point there are more people alive than there is food to support them, whereupon there will be some crisis — plague, famine, war — that will reduce the population so that it comes back into line with the amount of food there is to support it. One way of avoiding this is to take preventative measures to reduce the population, including cutting support for the poor so that they are encouraged to have fewer children. As such, Malthus famously opposed the Poor Laws of the 18th century, a primitive form of welfare provision.

Many thought he hadn’t quite got the message of Matthew’s gospel. And the cultural commentators of the 19th century — including, variously, the Romantic poets and, most vociferously of all, Karl Marx — engaged in what we would now call a “pile on”. Malthus was cancelled. But despite the extent of the hostility this mild-mannered clergyman engendered, his views never quite seemed to go away. This week, the modern day Malthusian, 90-year-old biologist Paul Ehrlich, was invited on to the American TV show 60 Minutes, where he expressed views that come straight from Malthus. “The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilisation we’re used to,” he argued. Apparently, humanity is now consuming 175% of what the planet can regenerate.

Ehrlich has a long history of such prognostications. In 1968, he published The Population Bomb, which began: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the Seventies, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” Two million copies of the book were sold. Under his influence, couples decided not to have children and men went out and had vasectomies. But Ehrlich was wrong. In fact, from roughly the time of the book’s publication, the global death rate has declined substantially.

Ehrlich was especially pessimistic about the situation in Asia. “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” In classic Malthusian style, he proposed that countries such as India that refused to implement population control measures should be cut off from aid — in effect, starving them into submission. But from the time his book was published to the early 21st century, India tripled its population from 400 million to 1.2 billion.

And yet the rates of malnourishment and poverty in India have declined. Ehrlich was dismissed as a dangerous crank. Which is why his return on a programme as high-profile as 60 Minutes caused outrage. Jordan Peterson tweeted: “Paul Ehrlich has been famously wrong about everything he has predicted for six decades” — to which Twitter boss Elon Musk replied: “His Population Bomb book might be the most damaging anti-human thing ever written.”

Given well over 200 years of unrelenting hostility, why is it that Malthusian ideas refuse to go away? And equally puzzlingly, why is it that some people get cancelled for expressing them and others don’t? Take national treasure David Attenborough. In 2013, he explained to the Telegraph: “What are all these famines in Ethiopia, what are they all about? They’re about too many people for too little land. That’s what it’s about… We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.” In his 2020 documentary A Life on Our Planet, he insisted: “As I see it, humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology, and we can reduce the growth of our population.”

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The environmental crisis has given Malthus a new lease of life. We now live in the Anthropocene era — and with its consequent focus on the impact humanity has on the planet, Malthus is back on the agenda. As economist Jeffrey Sachs put it, “when [he] trained in economics, Malthusian reasoning was a target of mockery”, but he later came to realise that “the Malthusian spectre is not truly banished — indeed far from it.” Later, in 2008, Sachs published a book with a distinctly Malthusian title, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

The core of the moral case against Malthus is that he blames the poor for their poverty. And not just blames, but proposes that they are punished for it too, with Poor Laws (Malthus) or flour withdrawn (Attenborough) so that the conditions for population expansion are not extended. As many have pointed out, given the location of population hotspots, this is also effectively racist.

Those who want to promote the capitalist economics of continual growth have leapt on these arguments to bash those who argue that we should tread lightly on this planet. Marx may have hated Malthus, seeing in his philosophy a dangerous alternative to Marx’s own desire to upend the mechanics of capitalism. But long-term, Malthus’s idea that the planet provides only a limited supply of resources may be a much more threatening thought to the philosophy of the free market.

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There are two basic ways of thinking about the issues Malthus raised. One is empirical and data-led, with population graphs describing complex demographics. And one major criticism of Malthus was that he wasn’t very good with the numbers. But there is also an underlying philosophical issue behind the numbers. For Malthus the theologian, nature after the Fall was unable to provide an unlimited supply of resources. For the Romantics, by contrast, nature was ever bountiful, supplying a plentiful answer to expanding human need.

Likewise, the new Romantics, as it were, believe that technology is permanently creative, offering new and inventive ways of supporting growing populations. That is a bet that some of us are less than confident in making. Malthus’s dark and morally repugnant prescriptions for the plight he diagnosed do not necessarily invalidate the diagnosis itself. However much we may want to cancel Malthus and his ideas, they just won’t go away. The Anthropocene frames the Anthropos as the problem: will humanity eventually eat itself? It’s a disturbing nightmare that won’t go away.

Or perhaps it’s the danger of freedom. The thrill of becoming lost. The imperfections of nature that cannot offer complete, bubble-wrapped security and comfort. But wherever imperfection exists, there is someone out there to sell you the dream. Why submit to the chaotic, beautiful imperfections of nature, when you can have a “forever flawless” artificial lawn?

Advertised by their promoters as the perfect solution to gardens bronzed by the unrelenting warmth of climate change, time spent outside mowing and weeding, burn marks from pet urine, and dirty shoes, the artificial lawn market has expanded rapidly in the last decade. There is money to be made — with industry forecasters predicting that global demand for artificial lawn will reach $7 billion by 2025. They’re not cheap either — Which? magazine advises that a fake lawn is comparatively expensive, especially if landscapers or specialists are employed for its installation, which is important for preventing visible seams, wrinkles and having a properly fitted underlay: “The prices quoted for fitting a 50m² area ranged from £1,000 to £2,700 — double the price of the artificial grass alone.”

So what is the appeal of artificial grass, and why is this such a rapidly expanding industry? Clues are abundant in marketing pitches for the product, citing low maintenance burdens and year-round “flawless” green lawn. One advert for New Lawn promises to “give your family the perfect, safe and mud-free garden year round”.

But this vision of perfection is, frankly, chilling. Can you imagine any child delighting in the artificial crunch of plastic under their feet over the sensory stimulation of real, natural grass in its resplendent, fragrant verdancy? Artificial lawn gardens are fundamentally sterile. The removal of nature goes well beyond the blades of grass. To install outdoor carpet, plastic membranes must be laid down to ensure that plants are unable to take root and grow among the artificial fibres. This means no clover, no buttercups, no daisies. None of the invertebrates and other insects that feed on pollen and decomposing matter. No birds, either — what are they to feed upon in this barren wasteland?

Perfect Grass Ltd. offers this dystopian advice for preventing the simple pleasure of watching birds enjoy a source of food during a long, cold winter: “Keep bird feeders well away from your artificial grass. These will only encourage droppings to build up and rodents to dig at the grass below the feeder.” Grim. The desert conditions persist below ground too — without a source of grass cuttings and other organic matter breaking down into the soil, detritivores like earthworms are starved too. Instead of decomposing humic matter and aerating the soil, without food, they themselves decompose. And deprived of oxygen, the conditions underfoot offer forth the foul odours of the anaerobic rot of whatever organic matter remains, often amplified by pet urine, a known problem for artificial grass.

But worry not, the purveyors of perfection have another solution: chemicals. We’re not just talking about vinegar, washing up liquid and detergents, soaking into the groundwater. There are companies out there to sell you the smell of real grass for your fake grass. Perfect Grass offers this advice for brushing perfume into your plastic:

“If you want your artificial grass to smell like the real thing then add some artificial grass cleaner to it and brush it in… This compound is a colourless liquid that has an intense smell of freshly cut grass. Mixed with other ingredients and bingo – you are able to deliver that freshly cut grass smell.”

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But it’s not all heavenly in plastic paradise. The very same website advises against using lawn fragrance to mask odours that are inherent to artificial grass: “We don’t recommend using these products to cover up the smell of dog wee for example, as we have found it results in a “dog wee grass smell”. It is best used like a perfume; you wouldn’t apply perfume or aftershave without washing first!”

Avoiding maintenance is said to be one of the key advantages of artificial lawns. Yet here again the dream is a failed one. If they are to fulfil their promise of perfection, outdoor carpets require vacuuming to remove debris such as leaves, blossom and twigs. The fibres also require regular agitation to remain firm and upright. Many of the outdoor vacuum cleaners for this purpose (such as the “Lazybrush”) even bear a striking resemblance to… a lawnmower.

Even regular brushing and vacuuming in colder, wetter climates will not be enough to prevent the build-up of moss and moulds, which darken the lawn, break down the plastic fibres and end the fake perfection. Again, artificial lawn chemicals can come to the rescue — or, if all else fails, you can pressure wash your plastic grass clean again. In the summer, moss and mould give way to intense heat, because artificial lawns absorb and radiate much more heat than natural grass. Aura Landscapes tested this with an infrared thermometer, finding that artificial grass in the sun reached over 60ºC — enough to cause thermal burns to human skin.

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So, given how awful artificial lawn is, how easy is it to dispose of it? In fact, artificial lawns dispose of themselves, shedding mass as microplastics into the air and watercourse. Research on microplastic emissions from domestic artificial lawn is limited, but playing-field astroturf has been estimated to be the second-largest source of microplastics in the environment after road wear and tyre abrasion. The remainder, once it reaches the end of its useful life of potentially less than ten years, is very hard to recycle, owing to the sheer variety of polymers involved to achieve the “right” texture, ultraviolet light resistance, colour and general durability. Thus, it ends up in landfill.

Already, hundreds of fields that were installed in the mid-2000s in the US are at or beyond their estimated eight-to-10-year life spans. Now these fields are being torn up, en masse. In one 2017 report, the Synthetic Turf Council projected that by the end of the decade, at least 750 fields will be replaced annually. The average field contains approximately 18 tonnes of plastic carpet and 18 tonnes of infill, according to the report. This means that as much as 150,000 tonnes of waste could require disposal every year. The problem is not unique to North America — one Dutch report on how artificial turf is disposed of at the end of its useful life found that recycling facilities often do not follow through with their promises, either taking the money and storing the turf instead of recycling it in reasonable time, or even selling it abroad. Storing large volumes of flammable plastic and rubber is inherently risky, too. The very same facility featured in the Dutch report later suffered a large fire, which took days to put out, releasing toxic fumes into the air.

All of the above said, the most fundamental reason to despise artificial lawns, is that they look shit. Tacky, lifeless green carpets don’t look like a perfect lawn; they look like what they are — as fake, plasticky, and artificial as an American newsreader. Outdoor carpet follows the “uncanny valley” model of emotional response to likenesses. That is to say, it looks unnatural and dystopian precisely because it is so close to, and yet so far from, the natural thing it is trying to emulate. Artificial lawn installation companies often share before and after comparisons: before, the perfect imperfection of nature — a garden habitat for invertebrates, hedgehogs, insects and birds; after, a sterile, fake perfection — devoid of variation, devoid of life. Fake turf is the manifestation of a deep cultural weakness, expressed in short-termism and a distaste and disrespect for the wonder, variety, and temporality of the natural world. Artificial lawns are the “Live, Laugh, Lobotomy” of gardening.

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It’s time to go to war against plastic turf. Some municipalities already are: Boston has banned artificial lawn in its city parks. Professional societies are also weighing in — the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) recently declared: “We launched our sustainability strategy last year and fake grass is just not in line with our ethos and views on plastic. We recommend using real grass because of its environmental benefits, which include supporting wildlife, mitigating flooding and cooling the environment.” The RHS’s flagship event, the Chelsea Flower Show, introduced a ban for artificial grass in 2022.

Even if we can’t ban it nationwide, surely the civic minded among us can take the initiative in filling watering cans with acetone and paying a visit to our dear neighbours’ artificial lawns? And if that doesn’t take your fancy, do what you can. If you move somewhere with one, or if you have one already — rip it out, and restore the hum, buzz and chaotic beauty of nature to your surrounds. The planet will thank you, and so will your discerning neighbours.

***

An unabridged, illustrated version of this article first appeared on the writer’s Himbonomics substack.

And yet, for many in the Western intelligentsia and policymaking circles, little Vinice is a harbinger of doom — a reminder of how “overpopulation” is destroying the planet. The prize for the most miserable response predictably goes to the New York Times. The paper used the occasion to offer a platform to Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which calls on people to abstain from reproduction to usher in man’s extinction — the only possible solution to the problems facing the Earth. “Look what we did to this planet. We’re not a good species,” Knight is quoted as saying.

At the very least, by opting out of reproduction, couples will avoid “sentencing their offspring to a rapidly deteriorating quality of life and unimaginably horrible death”, according to the movement’s website. This mixture of misanthropic anti-humanism and Malthusian apocalypticism used to be among the fringiest of fringe theories; today, however, wishing for humanity’s extinction is touted as just another form of benign environmentalism. The reaction of other mainstream outlets was less grotesque, but the message was more or less the same: the growing global population, said CNN, represents a serious “challenge” to the environment.

The idea of “overpopulation” is difficult to talk about seriously, since it is inevitably tied to outlandish conspiracy theories about 5G or Covid vaccines being part of a nefarious plan to depopulate the planet; but it’s clear the elites are concerned about the issue, as the Times piece demonstrates. The argument is one we’ve heard a million times: human activity is destroying the planet’s biodiversity, and outstripping its capacity to replenish natural resources, and more people on the planet means more pressure on nature.

The issue is rarely framed in terms of the need to forcibly reduce the world population — though it is becoming increasingly acceptable to talk of the need for tools of population control, such as one-child policies, regardless of the fact that the population growth rate is falling rapidly. Rather we are told of the need to “change the way we live” by reducing our “ecological footprint”. The most important goal of all, according to governments and international institutions, is Net Zero — the need for the world to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to zero as soon as possible.

This might seem like a sensible idea on paper; there’s no denying that fossil fuels have serious drawbacks in terms of climate alteration and pollution. Yet its practical implementation is a different matter entirely. The pressure on developing nations by institutions such as World Economic Forum, the UN and the World Bank to stop subsidising fossil fuels or to ban fertilisers in food production has already caused chaos, political instability and unrest in dozens of countries: in 2019, there were major protests in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Lebanon, Ecuador, Iraq, Chile, and Iran.

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These protests serve as a reminder that one can be concerned about climate change and the state of the planet while still being sceptical of the idea that these problems can be solved through top-down solutions imposed on nations by the Davos-attending, private jet-flying, corporate-backed (if not corporation-owning) policy-building elites of the world — people at the absolute peak of the global capitalist power pyramid. Yet remarkably, these very elites have found an unlikely ally in the struggle against the evils of anthropogenic activities: radical anti-capitalists known as “degrowthers”.

Degrowthers claim that the problem at the root of humanity’s negative impact on the planet is economic growth itself, which in turn is said to be driven by the logic of the capitalist mode of production. It is, in the words of Jason Hickel, one of the most prominent degrowth advocates, “organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption”. The solution to the many of the world’s problems, according to degrowthers, is therefore to “go beyond growth” — and ultimately capitalism itself.

Once relegated to the political fringes, degrowth theory has been gaining traction in recent years among environmentalists and Leftists. Who, five years ago, would have bet on an academic book about the relationship between capitalism and the planet becoming a bestseller? Well, Capital in the Anthropocene (English translation forthcoming), a book on degrowth from a Marxist perspective written by Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, appears to be on track to do just that, having sold more than half a million copies in Japan since the book was published in 2020.

Saito’s message is simple: capitalism’s drive for profit is destroying the planet and only “degrowth communism” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth. Humans need to find a “new way of living”, and that means replacing capitalism.

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But what does this mean in practice? There seems to be some confusion about this, even among degrowth activists. Growth is generally measured using the concept of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which represents the total value of all the goods and services produced domestically by a nation during a given period, and therefore the size of its economy. If the latter is expanding, we call it economic growth; if it is contracting, we call it a recession or even a depression, depending on the length of the contraction.

Yet while the appeal of turning to GDP seems obvious — a higher GDP tends to be associated with higher incomes and higher standards of living, and studies show it correlates with national happiness — material wealth isn’t everything. Indeed, the concept of GDP has long been criticised as a poor way to measure a country’s well-being. It doesn’t take into account the state of the environment, levels of inequality or human health, or crime rates; neither does it take into account whether a country is growing its GDP by building guns and prisons or by building schools and hospitals. And yes, growth clearly has a negative impact on the natural world — as does any human activity, for that matter.

However, it’s one thing to acknowledge the limitations of economic growth — that is, GDP —  as a measure of national well-being; it’s another to say we should dismiss it altogether, or even that we should “stop growing”, especially when so many countries around the world are striving to industrialise and grow out of poverty. To be fair, degrowthers such as Hickel are keen to note that “degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the [global] economy.” But this is little more than sophistry, as that would almost certainly entail a reduction in GDP.

Hickel says this could be achieved by allowing low-income countries to “increase energy and resource use in order to meet human needs” — which is a welcome distinction from the WEF’s Net Zero-for-all approach — while drastically reducing energy and resource use in high-income countries, by “scal[ing] down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production (i.e. the production of SUVs, arms, beef, private transportation, advertising and planned obsolescence), while expanding socially important sectors like healthcare, education, care and conviviality”.

I wouldn’t mind living in a society with better parks, schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, and fewer SUVs, Primarks and H&Ms, with good jobs for all in non-polluting industries and sectors. The problem, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t the society envisioned by degrowthers. It’s the unintended consequences of their theory. Most obviously, they erroneously conflate energy and resource consumption, but the two are very different. The production of things inevitably entails the use of finite resources, and therefore cannot be expanded indefinitely. But the same doesn’t go for the production of energy: nuclear energy, for instance, could provide bountiful, clean, carbon-free energy, thus allowing us to potentially expand energy use — ideally to power less resource-intensive industries and sectors — while rapidly phasing out fossil fuels once and for all. And yet, most environmentalists and degrowthers are zealously opposed to nuclear energy.

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This highlights the second problem of degrowthism (and environmentalism in general, for that matter): its inescapable Luddite, anti-industrialist bias, which represents a conceptual obstacle to the massive state-sponsored industrial and infrastructure investment that would be needed to make our economies more sustainable — for instance, by rapidly building up nuclear capacity.

And here lies the third problem: even assuming citizens in Western countries did come round to accepting a deliberate reduction in their material wealth in exchange for immaterial benefits, it is highly unlikely they’d consent to the massive expansion of state power that would be required to implement such a programme. The authoritarianism and assault on democracy witnessed during the pandemic has understandably made many fearful of unchecked government power. No programme that requires giving the state even more sweeping powers of intervention in the economy — something which I personally view as necessary — will win the support it needs until we’re able to build a new democratic social contract. This means, among other things, clawing back the only institution that has historically managed to deliver democracy — the nation-state — from the clutches of the globalists and corporate interests that have hijacked it. But this will take time — something degrowthers constantly repeat we don’t have.

This is where the most concerning element of degrowthism and any other form of apocalyptic environmentalism comes in: by constantly engaging in “doomerism” — the idea that either we fix everything or we’re all screwed — they’re effectively saying that anything is justified in order to “save the planet”, including all manner of authoritarian interventions. It’s like Zero Covid on steroids. After all, if the very survival of life on Earth is at stake, surely we can’t allow the complexities of democratic debate and deliberation to stand in the way of doing what’s needed? Indeed, rather ominously, Saito cites the pandemic as proof that “rapid change is possible” — with apparently little concern for the fact that this “change” was achieved by sweeping aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarising societies, cracking down on civil liberties, and implementing unprecedented measures of social control.

In this sense, doomerism offers a political cover to what is ultimately the easiest way to reduce people’s consumption levels: making ordinary people poorer — which indeed seems to be the solution pursued by elites. This highlights probably the main flaw in degrowth theory: the driving force of capitalism is not growth or even profits, but power. Those sitting at the top of the capitalist pyramid are more than happy to have less growth if this means increasing their influence. How else should one understand our ruling classes’ passion for growth-crushing austerity?

This is the ultimate paradox of degrowth communism: its proponents may want to overthrow capitalism, but their ideology is actually empowering the globalist capitalist elites they claim to be fighting.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

Since his ascension, King Charles and his model community have become an unlikely source of inspiration for those jaded by modern politics. A honeymoon of praise has flourished around the King’s idiosyncratic, anti-modernist philosophy concerning life, work and nature. All of this has largely focused on his experimental community on the outskirts of Dorchester. And this buzz has even worked its way to the lips of Michael Gove, the minister responsible for revolutionising Britain’s housing stock, who this week rhapsodised about Poundbury’s beauty and vision.

Poundbury was conceived in the late Eighties when a section of the Duchy of Cornwall estate was confronted by Dorset County Council with new house-building targets for lower-income families. Today, it has a community of 4,600 people, up to half of whom find employment in the town, living in new-build properties so eye-pleasing they couldn’t possibly have been built this century.

“People often come here sceptical and end up changing their minds,” says Blake Holt of the resident’s association, which, unlike most such groups, is more accustomed to promoting the town’s ethos than solving neighbourly disputes. Blake talks me through the sustainability, social integration, and “harmony” between man and his environment that Charles and his architect Leon Krier have built into every shop front, front door, flowerbed and fountain. With empty words like sustainability too often thrown at us, it’s intriguing to actually see them in action. Blake talks of the local factory, the anaerobic digester plant that covers most of the town’s energy needs, and the Duchy’s commitment to having 35% of housing as “affordable”. He speaks of the many who have come here, from ministers to amateur mystics, in search of some sort of alternative to the reality of living in England in the 21st century.

Not all are convinced. The New Yorker’s profile of the town from September got tied up in a Truman Show analogy after it questioned what “the best of the United Kingdom’s past” could really “tell us about its future”. “Architectural visionary, or regressive Nimby?” asked The Times in a recent reappraisal of the King’s take on architecture that saw the town described as a “nostalgic vision”. This was how Poundbury was widely interpreted after Charles’s ascension: a sad, backward refusal that fails to reckon with Britain’s present, let alone its future.

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Walking through town, you can see this is all wrong. We walk past a carpet shop housed inside a building that looks like a Roman Temple, then a fountain that wouldn’t look out of place in Moorish Spain. It would be a mistake to confuse Charles’s cultural and aesthetic cherry-picking with a bygone age, let alone the values he has actively tried to install into the town. It doesn’t take long to realise that nothing like Poundbury has ever really existed in England’s past. This radical blend of conservatism, localism, environmentalism and aesthetic appreciation is more idealistic than nostalgic, more pioneering than retrograde.

We arrive at the edge of town, the clear boundary between Poundbury and Dorchester. You look back at the forgotten England, the one you normally see from a high speed train window. The disused water tower, the matchbox council housing. You start to wonder if — or even when — Poundbury could start to exist there too.

The world out there is in crisis — and not just Dorchester. Far from a beacon of innovation, Britain is fast becoming renowned as a lesson in economic stagnation and failure. Throw in the death of the Queen, a flurry of Prime Ministers and a Budget that crashed the economy, and you have a very English apocalypse. Both in the sense of such grim incompetence you can only laugh, but also in the old religious sense of the word: in the divine revelation of a truth. Surely we can’t go on like this. Something in Britain must change.

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Charles, or his cheerleaders, could well argue that what he was trying to implement on the edge of Dorchester was at least an attempt to grapple with this. Poundbury isn’t about the past, it’s about a different, more cautious understanding of what is likely to be a poorer, uncertain future. Critics of Charles may sneer at his alternative to the globalised modernity he sees at the root of our problems: the idiosyncratic mix of mysticism, localism and environmentalism he laid out in his 2010 book Harmony. But as acute observers of the King’s philosophy have observed, his desire to find harmony between man and his environment is not just a sounding board for nice ideas about fewer cars, sustainable farming and pretty houses. Charles, and by extension his planning committees, is trying to grapple with a more existential question that now dominates our country’s future. When the tide of globalisation turns and the age of abundance ends, what do we really have left?

In Poundbury, there is an answer of sorts woven into the architecture and community. It’s not hard to see why so many make the pilgrimage. The King is asking questions about living, purpose and our future, and has found feasible answers compatible with a wider cross-section of British society. Meaning in community, localism and environment. Security in energy, employment and home. A culture, aesthetic and way of life in complete contrast to the globalised modernity that has dominated the country for so long. This is a language few of our politicians talk, let alone understand. Could what has worked so well for Poundbury, be scaled into the ethos of our nation? Could it tame the forces of our present and future apocalypse?

Of course, this version of our future is not without its sacrifices, something Poundbury itself has struggled with. On the other side of town, one that looks away from Dorchester and out to the rolling fields of Dorset, there is a more desired but increasingly exclusive version of modern Britain. Here, in the final stages of the town’s development, a trio of property companies are set to take advantage of the 29% premium new arrivals are willing to pay to become residents. In the Queen Mother Square, in the middle of the town, I can see a busy Waitrose, and just next to that a luxury spa. Poundbury’s vision has become a victim of its own success. Now without its founding Prince to shepherd its ethos, it’s easy to see its rising house prices take the reins. Instead of being a viable alternative for a different kind of Britain in the 21st century, much of Poundbury is fast becoming a luxury refuge for those lucky enough to afford where to see out the storm.

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Here the pilgrimage must come to an end. Regardless of whether or not Poundbury will stay true to the King’s philosophy, the reality is that increasingly we will have to take seriously the vision of the future it was built to anticipate. A less gentrified form of Poundbury may provide us with an ideal of what might work in a poorer country as the tide of globalisation turns. For a country long weaned on the opposite, the path to optimal decline may well be a tough sell. It will require us and our politicians to confront a set of questions we may soon have no choice but to answer.

Can we continue to bury a forgotten England from a high-speed train window in poorly-built, isolated communities? Or can we rediscover a common purpose and identity that will allow us to forego the cultural and economic individualism of high modernity many of us may no longer be able to afford? Until we face up to these questions, we will keep returning to Poundbury.

Conrad’s analogy was more apt than he perhaps realised: in that distant past, a considerable portion of Britain’s surface was itself rainforest, a dark and forbidding place for Rome’s colonial adventurers to venture into and civilise. After all, when Boudicca launched her revolt against Roman rule in AD60, burning down the thriving colonial outpost of Londinium, she had chosen her moment well. The Roman governor Gaius Seutonius Paulinus was busy campaigning in his own heart of darkness, the mystical island of Mona or Ynys Mon — today’s Anglesey — where the Druids fomented rebellion from within their sacred oak groves, dripping with rain and, according to the Romans, human guts. Their first task upon victory, as Tacitus observed, was “to demolish the groves consecrated to their savage cults: for they considered it a pious duty to slake the altars with captive blood and to consult their deities by means of human entrails”.

Even without the human sacrifices, Britain’s last patches of temperate rainforest still possess a markedly eerie quality, as the writer and land campaigner Guy Shrubsole observes in his excellent new book, Lost Rainforests of Britain. In Dartmoor’s tiny surviving fragment of rainforest, Wistman’s Wood, “grimacing faces appear in the gnarled and knotted trunks, bringing to mind the Ents of Tolkien’s Fangorn Forest. Wreathed in autumnal mists, the wood feels Otherworldly, and with good reason. It is as soaked in legend as it is in rain.”

It is this eternal, cool ambient moisture that makes a woodland, wrapped in sea fog and drenched in rain, a rainforest, in the technical sense of being a place “wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants”, their gnarled and wizened trunks eerily shrouded in green mosses, lichens, fungi and other epiphytes listed by the author in loving botanical detail. Even the wood’s very name derives, Shrubsole notes, “from the Devonshire dialect word wisht, meaning ‘eerie, uncanny’ or, in some readings, ‘pixie-haunted’” — a place for centuries “seen as a domain of pixies and fairy folk, a ‘thin place’ where the gap between our world and a spectral Otherworld is narrow and passable”.

And yet, as with so much of the deep magic of our realm, Wistman’s Wood has been almost extinguished by modernity. Only eight acres of the wood survive, surrounded by a bleak and inhospitable moorland haunted only by ravenous sheep. The sad story of Wistman’s Wood is thus the story of Britain’s lost rainforests in miniature. Once covering up to a fifth of Britain’s landmass, concentrated on the western seaboard where Atlantic rains still shroud the steep hills in mist and gloom, Britain’s temperate rainforests have been felled, grazed and overplanted so ruthlessly that they now cover less than 0.5% of the country. The loss of much of this ancient, mythic landscape is more recent than we may realise: the post-war planting of conifer plantations alone, Shrubsole notes, means that “we may well have felled some 66,000 acres of Britain’s rainforests in the twentieth century alone – an area the size of Birmingham – and all in the name of planting trees for timber”.

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This loss through sheer neglect is not just a tragedy for Britain: it is the destruction of a habitat of global significance. As Shrubsole notes, “temperate rainforest is actually rarer than the tropical variety: it covers just 1% of the world’s surface”. Yet remarkably, this precious habitat is not protected by law — indeed, no government bodies have ever bothered to even map its remaining fragments, meaning the precise extent of Britain’s surviving rainforests are a matter of supposition, recorded by a small band of obsessive enthusiasts. A celebrated campaigner for land rights, Shrubsole takes aim at Britain’s fragmented and unequal system of land ownership as the root cause of the decline. In Scotland, as he observes, fewer than 500 people, often mysterious offshore investors, own half of the land, leaving sterile deer-wrecked moorland where rain-drenched, life-filled hazelwoods would naturally thrive.

In England, where archaic quasi-feudal patterns of land ownership have rarely been matched by dutifully benevolent stewardship, the situation is not much better. Indeed, those who profess to care for the environment have often been the nemeses of England’s last patches of rainforest. The Dartington Hall estate in Devon, a pioneer of organic farming methods, was directly responsible for grubbing up precious stands of ancient rainforest to plant lucrative conifer plantations. Even the survival of Wistman’s Wood itself, part of the Duchy of Cornwall estate, is threatened by the neglect of its former steward and our present King to install proper fencing to prevent nearby sheep from nibbling away at its edges: a disappointing lapse from such a passionate advocate of the natural environment, and one we should hope his successor, the new Prince of Wales, will take care to rectify.

For the campaign to save Britain’s dying rainforests is not, in itself, a difficult task. All that is really necessary, at least at first, is to fence off the surviving remnants to prevent the destructive grazing of sheep and deer, and the grubbing up of invasive rhododendrenons, allowing the surviving patches to regenerate. Left to their own devices, much of Britain’s western uplands would become rainforest once more, a wild and evocative landscape rich in historic associations. As Shrubsole observes, “the fragments that remain are reminders of our lost heritage: an ecosystem that inspired some of our greatest myths and legends”. This vivid sense of myth and magic, the yearning for deep history that these landscapes evoke is powerful, and deftly evoked by Shrubsole, perhaps rarely for a current-day Left-wing activist. For as he notes, “the Atlantic rainforests are woven into Celtic mythology, the weird tales of The Mabinogion, the Arthurian romances, the body of literature that folklorists call ‘the Matter of Britain’”, and even today “they can inspire and rejuvenate us, just as they did our predecessors.”

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The restorative properties of this mission, blending myth and land stewardship, are inspiringly real: one former soldier, the evocatively named Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, is healing the psychic wounds of combat in Afghanistan by returning his family’s Cornish farm to rainforest. In Ireland, a landscape even more denuded of its native woodland and blanketed in sterile forestry plantations than Britain, the writer and farmer Eoghan Daltun is pursuing a parallel project, restoring and expanding his own small patch of West Cork rainforest. To restore such habitats does not mean to close them off to human activity, as many critics of rewilding fear: Shrubsole’s book gives inspiring examples of small landowners returning to premodern methods of farming, allowing native cattle and pigs to rootle through the forests in place of the destructive desert interloper, the sheep. Across these isles, passionate individuals are doing their best, on a small scale, to restore habitats of global importance without support or subsidy.

Yet much more can, and surely should be done. As Shrubsole observes, “when it comes to temperate rainforest, Britain truly is world-beating”, yet “we call on Brazil and Indonesia to save their rainforests, yet don’t own up to the fact that Britain is a rainforest nation, too — just one that’s already cut most of ours down”. At minimal cost, and little effort, the government could record what patches of Britain’s rainforests still survive then pursue a course of action to regrow them, linking the sterile subsidy-sinks of our western uplands into a dense and nature-rich landscape of Atlantic oak and hazelwoods. By doing so, not only could we reverse the catastrophic decline of birds and insects driving many of Britain’s native species to extinction, but we can achieve something of less tangible, mythic importance: restoring our national connection to the land, and rewilding ourselves.

A committed campaign to save Britain’s rainforests would surely strike the imagination of many people who may not even know that they still — just — exist. It is a more concrete and achievable good than that achieved by throwing soup at paintings, say, and one more likely to win public support. As Shrubsole calculates, simply by installing a 150-metre fenced buffer zone around the surviving patches of rainforest, we could double their extent in a generation. The Duke of Cornwall could easily pledge to protect and expand the two threatened patches of rainforest, Wistman’s Wood and Black Tor Beare, he owns in Dartmoor, and in doing so provide an example for other landowners to follow. From Scotland to the Lake District, Wales to Devon and Cornwall, and (though Shrubsole ignores the province) Northern Ireland, much of the country was until very recent times rainforest, and could easily be rainforest once again. In saving these ancient habitats, as rich in myth and legend as in wildlife, we can restore the sacred groves of our ancestors, and make Britain once more one of the wild places of the Earth.

When Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism in 1979, well into the post-war wealth boom that turbocharged the industrial era, he argued that narcissistic tendencies develop partially as a result of industrial society. He identified phenomena as disparate as the modern school system, sport, psychotherapy, advertising and consumer culture as playing a role in the development of widespread, unchecked narcissism. But he didn’t go far enough: it was a glut of energy resources that instilled in us the belief that we could control nature as if we were gods.

For decades, our standard of living in the developed world seemingly increased without end. The improbable access to energy coupled with crony capitalism turned wealthy societies into pure consumers, swallowing anything and everything the economy could imagine and manufacture. Our system was unrivalled in history. Our inner Narcissus was unleashed.

Two major trends influenced our narcissistic tendencies in this energy-rich universe: we developed personal meaning in consumption, turning what we wear, where we eat, and where we shop into our religion. Consumption became a signal of belonging in a world breaking apart any semblance of community.

We also developed a collective philosophy of progress that told us we have won history: we had conquered all the resource and material challenges of the past. We believed that our collective wealth as a species was only going to keep growing. No wonder, then, that progressivism, in its traditional sense, became the widespread political psychology exactly as the upward slope of oil consumption looked almost exponential.

These two widespread psychological outcomes unveiled the worst of our egocentric propensities. On the one hand: we identified with what we chose to consume, an inward-looking narcissism, displaying self-worth through ostensibly corporate fandom, a religion of the self. On the other, we displayed an optimistic faith in human limitlessness.

Fusing the two together, the abundance of cheap energy lumbered the developed world with a narcissistic psychosis. You can see this in everything from the overvaluation of an individual’s salary and power as measures of success to the denigration of caring roles and familial obligation. In each case, the focus is on the individual thriving while ignoring the interdependence that makes life possible.

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But look at the world today: the seemingly constant upward trajectory of humanity is faltering. On the far side of industrial development, we have begun to reach a peak — in affluence, in meaning, and now in access to resources and position. Increasingly, there is widespread social disorganisation and political dysfunction as our high-energy society reaches its material limits. Economic theorists call this the crisis of capitalism; energy analysts call it peak oil; social commentators call it the meaning crisis; Weber called it disenchantment; Marx called it alienation. Whatever we want to call it, we have fewer resources now and it is changing how we think.

According to relative deprivation theory, as individuals in a society achieve a certain level of affluence and sense of security, any lowering of that standard leads to a feeling of entitlement and a sensation of being robbed. Sociologists suggest this sense of loss can often foment social movements and result in society wide outbreaks of deviant behaviour.

But this general sense of malaise and unease has also created a widespread culture of victimhood. Similar to Lasch, who relied on the clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder to explain societal narcissism, I believe that these tendencies are manifested in borderline personality disorder, or BPD. The characteristics of BPD include a sense of paranoia, the feeling that you are on the receiving end of unfair treatment, and a sort of mental witch-hunt against the individual or group believed to be behind it.

The political factions we now see arising out of various forms of social disorder — environmental, economic, financial — demonstrate just this trend: a widespread cultural outbreak of borderline personality disorder, centring around victimhood. Just as the seemingly endless exploitation of cheap energy caused us to once see ourselves as gods, our now-dwindling resources have us seeing monsters lurking everywhere in the shadows.

Consider the class of overproduced elites, the neurotic radicals of our current era. Working on the assumption that cheap energy and growth would maintain its trajectory forever, our institutions oversaw the creation of more white-collar positions. But today, at the end of the hyper-industrial era, these positions are becoming scarce. And what follows is not just a sense of deprivation-fuelled entitlement, but also a kind of bitter in-fighting with victimhood as its currency.

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Take the madness of our universities as an example. Individuals prepare their whole lives to go into academia, only to graduate into a cratering job market with nearly-impossible-to-land positions. In certain fields, PhDs work for years as low paid adjuncts or postdocs, often moving around the country with young families in the hopes of one day finally landing a tenured position. But instead of recognising the end of limitless white-collar growth as the proximate cause, frustrated would-be academics turn to those gaining the limited positions as both the enemy and the cause. In a dark psychological twist, victimhood politics have now become a means to secure a scarce position.

Similarly, those suffering from clinical BPD have been known to use their sense of victimhood as a way to control situations or achieve desired ends — such as when privileged white women pretend to be women of colour, or when activists attempt to dethrone existing “privileged” elites under the pretences of racism, sexism or some other victimisation of underprivileged groups.

But while this trend might be most immediately apparent within leftist, or “woke”, identity politics, there is also a parallel strain of victimhood politics in something like the red-pill movement made up primarily of young men. Frustrated by the lack of healthy male role models, opportunities to experience coming of age rituals and meaningful work, these men have now turned to women as the proximate cause of their ills, like early-modern peasants blaming witches for their misfortunes.

They bemoan the gynocracy, haunted by memories of mothers and teachers who have controlled and scolded them throughout their lives. And as a result, they seek out strong and often toxic role models who feed into their victimised self-perception and encourage misogyny. Fundamentally, this is just the same kind of aggrieved politics as the derangement of late-stage liberalism: this is not the life I was promised, I must find a nearby scapegoat to pin the blame on.

These are just two examples from the Left and Right, but this broader culture of BPD is widespread and growing. Radical feminists blame men, ecomodernists blame Luddites, vegans blame ranchers, environmentalists blame climate change deniers — the list goes on. But while this culture is clearly unhealthy, it’s also a natural and understandable psychological response to the sense of powerlessness fostered by an increasingly constrained material world.

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The ultimate destination of this narcissistic fantasy is ridding the world of all its evildoers — a kind of gnostic apocalypse in which only the truly righteous will enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet this is the exact opposite of the cultural approach we’ll need to survive. In the previous era of increasing resources, we had the riches to increase our independence; we no longer needed one another to survive. Today, however, as resources and stability begin to wane, we must rely on one another again.

The antidote to the individualistic culture of narcissism created by the upswing of energy resources, as well as the culture of victimhood birthed by its painful downswing, is a culture of interdependence, an acceptance of limits, and a reliance on mutual care. Historically, humans living within material constraints were forced to rely on one another to get by, with some of the worst impulses of human nature constrained by mutual interdependence. Our greatest moderating force is the experience of being relied upon, and relying upon others.

Fossil fuels drove us all crazy: perhaps the collapse of man’s brief age of energy abundance can make us sane again.

“We did it out of despair,” says Annemarie Nijhoff, who lives there with her partner Boelo ten Have. “That’s why we painted the farmhouse pink. It has been in the family for generations, carefully maintained. But for the last 10 years, it has been cracking so fast that we cannot repair it. Every time we report damage, we are told we are outside the earthquake zone.

“We believe it is a result of mine-related damage. We can’t pull it down because it’s a national monument. So we are completely stuck.”

Theirs is a common tale. This northernmost Dutch province has seen more than a million reports of damage since 1986, due to decades of earthquakes caused by 60 years of gas exploitation. In the process of emptying fourth-fifths of a field that contained 2,800 billion cubic metres of gas, the Dutch state has earned the equivalent of €417 billion. Its partner the Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM) — owned by Shell and ExxonMobil — has taken the equivalent of €64.7 billion, according to figures seen by the Financieele Dagblad.

But what is most shocking is what has gone on behind closed doors: a succession of secret deals and convenient political myopia that are slowly being exposed in a ground-shaking parliamentary enquiry being televised across the country.

When the gas field was discovered and the first well was drilled in 1959, it was a gift to the once Nazi-occupied and war-torn country. But as the decades wore on, alarming signals of seismic activity, earthquakes and damage to buildings were dismissed, belittled and ignored by central government, which needed both the gas and the cash from exports.

Slowly, inexorably, press coverage and public outrage started to swell until, in early 2021, parliament voted to install its ultimate weapon of scrutiny: an enquiry to examine politicians, oil and gas executives, mining experts, residents and even schoolchildren who found themselves living in temporary homes with earthquake-proofed beds, as their families fell apart.

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Now in its fourth week of hearings, the enquiry has uncovered political ignorance, secret lobbying, and agreements with NAM to avoid reducing production to strictly necessary levels. It also exposed a brazen admission by the former finance minister that, especially after the financial crash, the Treasury couldn’t do without the gas cash. Even though earthquakes were worsening and by 2015 the high court ordered non-essential extraction to stop, it did not.

Today, as a result, at a moment of Europe-wide energy insecurity, much-needed Dutch gas is no longer a political option, even if up to 20% of the field is still there. Thanks to tin-eared politicians and slippery oil firms, we are as vulnerable as the rest of Europe. Indeed, a week after Liz Truss removed a ban on unconventional fracking for shale gas in the UK (which is prohibited in the Netherlands), the Dutch experience might be seen as a lesson for politicians to listen and tread carefully.

In the beginning, the gas was welcome. “Straight after the Second World War, industry and government worked very closely to rebuild the Netherlands and extracting the gas for the benefit of the people at that time was a good thing,” says Liesbeth van Tongeren, Green Left politician and former director of Greenpeace Nederlands, who campaigned as an MP to reduce gas extraction from Groningen. Rather than build a sovereign wealth fund like Norway, the gas boosted the annual budget for the state, especially in later years.

But then, in 1986, the earthquakes began to start. The worst didn’t take place until August 2012, in Huizinge: it measured 3.6 on the Richter scale, but because of its relatively shallow depth (compared to natural earthquakes), it caused extensive damage and a cataclysmic feeling of shock.

By 2013, Groningen province was campaigning for expert research into the risks and compensation for damage. Yet somehow, that same year, gas extraction rose from 27 billion cubic metres to almost 54 billion, with the NAM advocating for more. The years that followed involved high court rulings, political promises to “stop the gas tap” and three different bodies charged with compensating owners and strengthening buildings.

But on the ground, the tremors were trivialised, partly because nobody died or was seriously injured as a direct result. “The Hague had the feeling that this was very far away,” says Van Tongeren. “If anything like that earthquake had happened in Amsterdam, it would have been dealt with completely differently. It was easier to ignore.”

Fast forward to today, however, and pledges to stop extracting gas from the field remain unfulfilled. Like every country in Europe, the Netherlands is scrambling to create more processing facilities for Liquefied Natural Gas. Any political debate about increasing this year’s 2.8 billion cubic metres of gas is unlikely to go anywhere. The government is promising to close the Groningen field entirely in 2023 or 2024, but only “if the geopolitical situation makes it possible”.

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Meanwhile, Groningers are left angry and bewildered. What they are hearing in the enquiry reaffirms their suspicions over the years, the sense of being taken for fools, and a justification for all of their mistrust. “Some people think it’s all very well to have a parliamentary enquiry but that it won’t solve today’s problem,” Coert Fossen, chair of the Groninger Bodem Beweging (Groningen Ground Movement), tells me.

Another reason for their frustration is the fact that many have had to fight for every euro of compensation. Another historic house in Groningen has just been painted protest pink, an estimated 13,000 homes are still unsafe, and tens of thousands of claims have been rejected.

Fabian Buiter, a financial controller from Beerta, probably heard the most outrageous excuse from the Instituut Mijnbouwschade Groningen (IMG) now handling claims. An inspector said splits in his bathroom tiles masking €30,000 of damage were due to poor quality fittings and the soap he used in the shower. He lives on the edge of the official “contour lines” and after a failed court case, paid for the damage himself. He might even laugh about the soap-dodgers, if the whole thing didn’t make him want to cry.

Small wonder, then, that these down-to-earth Groningers, who are more used to ploughing the fields and keeping themselves to themselves, have lost trust in their government. For them, the political damage is done; and even when the gas stops, the earthquakes will continue for decades.

Some in The Hague put their hope in a strong enquiry report next February, leading to the creation of an independent arbiter that can control and effectively regulate fossil fuel extraction in the future. Others believe the situation will help speed up a transition to renewable energy. The danger is that despite the efforts of earnest parliamentarians, this scandal, like all the others in The Hague, will soon be written up, written off, and a part of fading memory. But in this corner of the Netherlands, the aftershock will remain.

In reality, however, these announcements have turned out to be little more than PR stunts. Take the case of Brookfield, a Canadian asset manager that employs Carney as its vice chair. Last year, it announced that it was “net zero across its $575 billion asset portfolio”, only for it to be revealed that the company had in fact invested billions of dollars in fossil fuel projects, including a coal port and an oil sands pipeline. Following public outcry, Carney issued a statement in which he admitted that he was talking of “avoided emissions” — not overall emissions. And this from the man who is in charge of leading the world to Net Zero…

Carney’s back-pedalling is revealing of how companies are using “creative” interpretations of Net Zero to greenwash their image while continuing to make billions from fossil fuels. The truth is that governments haven’t fared much better. In recent years, several emission-reducing policies have been rolled out — mainly market-based emissions-trading systems, carbon taxes and subsidies for renewables. Meanwhile, huge sums of money have been poured into experimental technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), with hitherto very poor results. Yet fossil fuels still account for around 80% of the world’s energy. Newly industrialised economies, first and foremost China and India, today account for 35% of global emissions. On the other hand, developed countries have seen their emissions decline.

That said, one thing is clear — while the West is clearly responsible for the overwhelming majority of past emissions, future emissions are going to be driven primarily by newly emerging economies. Regardless of what we do in the West, the billions of people who still live in poverty in countries such as India, not to mention those in Africa, and who legitimately aspire to the comforts of industrialisation, will drive a colossal surge in energy demand in the coming years. Projected worldwide consumption of all types of energy 30 years from now is about 50% higher than today, most of it in poorer countries.

This usually invites two types of response: the Malthusian-pessimist kind, which claims that this is intrinsically unsustainable, and that the world can’t afford the massive increase in fossil fuels that the widespread development of the Global South would inevitably entail; and the naïve-environmentalist kind, which contends that developing countries can rely on solar panels and wind turbines to sustainably grow their way out of poverty. Both of these responses share one thing: they’re wrong.

What’s interesting, however, is how these two approaches overlap when it comes to Net-Zero polices in the West. Climate ideology has become a dangerous mix of end-of-days apocalypticism, with thousands of young Westerners now suffering from “climate anxiety”; of individual scapegoating, where ordinary citizens who bear little responsibility for systemic problems are guilt-tripped into thinking that they bear the burden for potential ecological collapse; and of eco-authoritarian hubris, based on the notion that the West needs to drastically accelerate its process of decarbonisation.

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A perfect example of the latter is Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte’s recent proposal to drastically cut back nitrogen emissions (70-80%) in the country’s farming sector. The consequence of such a reduction would be to close down around 30-50% of the Dutch livestock and agricultural industry; according to the government, 11,200 farms will have to close and another 17,600 farmers will have to significantly reduce their livestock.

Understandably, the decision has sparked massive protests among those who see this is part of a wider plan by green elites to “reset” the international food system. They point out how Rutte himself is a golden boy and an Agenda Contributor of the World Economic Forum, among the most vehement proponents of Net Zero. According to the protesting farmers, one of the underlying reasons for the move is to squeeze small farmers out of the market, thus allowing them to be bought out by multinational agribusiness giants. To make things worse, the Netherlands is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States, meaning the government’s plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a global food and resource shortage — a disaster caused by the same global elites who are now peddling Net Zero.

This isn’t just happening in the Netherlands. In July, thousands of protesters stormed Sri Lanka’s presidential palace and forced the president and prime minister to resign. As in the Netherlands, the protests were sparked by the government’s decision to ban fertilisers and pesticides in favour of organic, climate-friendly alternatives — a decision that devastated millions of the country’s farmers and caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, and turned the country from rice exporter to importer. The defenestrated prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was also, like Rutte, a devoted member and Agenda Contributor of the WEF; in 2018, he published an article on the organisation’s website titled: “This is How I Will Make My Country Rich by 2025”. (Following the protests, the WEF swiftly removed the article from its website.)

In light of all this, it’s easy to see why a growing number of people view Net Zero as either a case study in utter incompetence or, even more troublingly, as the latest example of “crisis capitalism”, whereby crises are exploited (and in some cases engineered) by ruling elites to push through restructurings of the capitalist system — usually by concentrating capital and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people in a manner that would likely face unsurmountable popular opposition in “normal” times. We saw it happen with the financial crisis, with the pandemic, with the war in Ukraine. Now it is being repeated with the climate crisis.

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This is not to say that the climate and environmental crises are not real — they very much are. What we need to do is retain the capacity to separate the reality of a problem from the establishment’s political use of the latter. There are several good reasons for decarbonising our economies; climate change is just one of them — and arguably not even the most important. Fossil fuels are incredibly polluting, causing millions of deaths every year. They also, as we are now learning, make us dependent on a handful of countries that actually produce most of the world’s fossil fuels. So, moving beyond fossil fuels is fundamental, even simply from a geopolitical standpoint — and we mustn’t let the disastrous decisions currently being taken by globalist elites in the name of decarbonisation distract us from that.

There are also very good reasons to doubt that decarbonisation is really the elites’ end goal. For all the talk of Net Zero, a recent study of $634 billion in energy-sector subsidies in 2020 found that around 70% went to fossil fuels and only 20% went to renewable power generation. In 2021, support for fossil fuels actually increased compared to previous years. Things have become even worse since the start of the war in Ukraine, as several European countries have turned to coal and even fracking in a desperate attempt to replace Russian gas supplies.

All this casts serious shadows over elites’ claims of having decarbonisation at heart. But there’s one thing that more than any other raises doubts about their good faith: the fact that while they keep coming up with increasingly fantastical solutions to CO2 emissions, they largely keep ignoring the only existing technology that can help us rapidly phase out fossil fuels once and for all — without disrupting Western societies, and without denying the rest of the world the living standards they legitimately aspire to. I’m talking, of course, about nuclear energy.

The reason nuclear energy is largely absent from the decarbonisation debate is that the latter is based on a lie: that we can generate all the world’s energy needs from renewable sources — primarily wind and solar power. This has become a mantra for much of the climate movement, but it’s a delusion.

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Aside from the problems arising from covering colossal tracts of land with wind turbines and solar panels (which require hugely polluting rare earth elements, most of which are in China) to meet the world’s growing energy needs, the fact is that both are intermittent and energy storage technologies don’t come close to what would be needed. Even with a high percentage of renewables, a stable, constant source of energy would still be needed — and that’s either going to be fossil fuels or nuclear energy. As James Hansen, the Nasa climate scientist who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the Eighties, has pointed out, nuclear is “the only viable path that has been proposed for rapid global decarbonisation”.

This, then, is the great Net Zero lie: it’s primary goal isn’t remedying the climate crisis. After all, a solution to the crisis stands right in front of us — only to be ignored by our political and financial elites. Faced with such deception, it’s hardly surprising that many are starting to question their motives; and in more and more countries, are starting to let it be known that they have had enough.

It was her fate to preside over perhaps the fastest and most dramatic decline of any nation’s wealth and power in recorded history, a bitter function she fulfilled with compassion, quiet dignity, and a sincere Christian devotion to her duty. She oversaw the creation of 21^st-century Britain, and if she felt the same ambivalence over the results that we all do, she kept it to herself. Through it all, she kept a fractious nation united in turbulent times, the one calm and steady certainty we have all known through lives of constant, and unsettling change.

Listening to the BBC radio news reporting her last great task of state, the appointment at Balmoral of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, I noticed that our state broadcaster made a point of explicitly recording that the nation had undergone yet one more smooth transition of power. Not every nation is blessed with such orderly transitions: no wonder the reaction from quarters of less happy realms, where such peaceful continuity can only be dreamed of, has at times been as bitter and jealous as we have seen. A nation is a family writ large. As Orwell wrote, Britain is “a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.” And as at any time of loss and change, it is in moments like this we are shown who mourns with us, and who does not, who our family and friends are, and who they are not.

For these are solemn mysteries, not readily understood by other tribes. Anyone who meets a member of the Royal Family remembers the occasion for the rest of their lives. The encounter is shared, brought out in conversation over decades. And in the same way, anyone who has lost a parent will feel a part of themselves sharing this moment of our King’s loss: witnessing the Royal Family’s grief we remember our own loss, an entire nation joined in a collective act of remembrance and contemplation. For as the Austrian political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote: “a monarchy involves all the troubles, problems and joys of family life, on a large and public scale.”

My mother was born in London, two years into our late Queen’s reign, to a family of strong Irish republican sympathies with little love for the Royal Family. Yet even so, the collective rituals of our state, embodied in the Royal Family, would come to envelop her, as she lived and died under one Queen’s long reign. Just as we all remember that strange, disordered time, I remember, as a callow and cynical teenager, my late mother respectfully attending the crowds that watched Diana’s cortege pass down the M1 motorway through Hertfordshire towards London and her funeral. The collective act of sympathy and commemoration that reinforces the nation as a unit had brought her too, with no inherited links of blood or sentiment, within the British family fold.

And in the same way, this liminal moment of transition from one way of life to another will live on in my own family story, just as it will in yours or in any other British family’s. On Thursday evening, I went to pick up my eldest son from Scouts just after the news broke; we strolled along the harbourside to get fish and chips from a chippy where the radio played national anthem and we heard the Prime Minister paying her respects. At six years old, he will remember this moment for the rest of his life: what he was doing, what we said, what we ate together sitting, as we never do, in front of the television, watching the state broadcaster like every other British household. In such a way are nations strengthened and maintained as a collective body by the family unit around whom our state’s rituals revolve.

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But all things must change, and the nation our new King has inherited is not a happy one. There is much for him to do to keep our collective family together, and we must hope that he will play a more active role in governance than his mother felt her due. Our constitution grants our monarch greater political power than the Queen chose to exercise, and we are fortunate that our new King possesses a willingness to intercede in public life that has at times tested the patience of Prime Ministers. He must be encouraged to continue: whatever his personal foibles, his instincts are good and just, and his decades-long critiques of globalisation, of our despoliation of our natural and built environments and our pell-mell rush towards the mythical horizon of progress have been tragically borne out by events.

What do we know of how our new King intends to rule? He is, after all, a man, like the nation he now rules, of strange and esoteric depths, both progressive and conservative in ways our party system does not adequately reflect. In his little-discussed 2010 book, Harmony, Charles remarks in a “call for revolution” that “it is very strange that we carry on behaving as we do. If we were on a walk in a forest and found ourselves on the wrong path, then the last thing we would do is carry on walking in the wrong direction. We would instead retrace our steps, go back to where we took the wrong turn, and follow the right path.” For, as he writes: “I cannot stress the point enough: we are travelling along a very wrong road.”

A follower of the Perennialist philosophy of René Guénon, and an admirer of the great American writer and farmer Wendell Berry, King Charles III has observed that: “Just as natural species, once lost, cannot be re-created in test tubes, so traditional, so-called ‘perennial’ wisdom, once lost, cannot be reinvented. This is the real damage being done by our disconnection, which is fast becoming all but complete in the modern world, all the while proving that the great experiment to stand apart from the rest of creation has failed.” A Christian mystic, a layer of hedgerows and protector of the soil, there is a mythic quality of identification between our King and his land which we have not experienced for some time.

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He was never really 'Phil the Greek'

By Aris Roussinos

For Charles III, inspired by the Orthodox Christianity of his fathers, believes sincerely that “we need to escape the straitjacket of the Modernist world view” and has for decades shared his “concern from the very start… that Western culture was accelerating away from values and a perspective that had, up until then, been embedded in its traditional roots.” As he writes: “What I could see then was that without those traditional ‘anchors’ our civilisation would find itself in an increasingly difficult and exposed position. And, regrettably, that is what has happened. This is why, ever since those disturbing days, I have expended vast amounts of energy to help save what remains of those traditional approaches. I knew they would be needed for a ‘rainy day’ which I fear is now close by.”

What is our King’s vision of a just and rightly-ordered realm? As he writes, “in the 21st century we desperately need an alternative vision… a future where food production and its distribution will have to all happen more locally to each other and be less dependent, certainly, on aircraft; where the car will become much more subordinated to the needs of the pedestrian; where our economy will have to operate on a far less generous supply of raw materials and natural resources.” It is of a land “where the character of our built environments once more reflects the harmonious, universal principles of which we are an integral part”. A King moved to write a book in which he condemns the poisoning of our seas and rivers will have much to advise a Tory government that has overseen our disastrous, squalid water system: our one-time anti-monarchist leader Liz Truss will be fortunate in such an example of what true British Conservatism, of every field and hedgerow, actually means.

In practice, King Charles has done more than anyone living in this country to promote humane and people-centred farming and architecture, and to preserve as a living tradition the historic arts and handicrafts of not just our own culture but of man’s patrimony as a whole. And as King, there is more that he can do, and must be encouraged to do. It is right and just that both the Communication Workers Union and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers have called off their planned strikes for next week in honour of our late Queen, but the bonds of respect that bind state and sovereign, ruler and ruled must go both ways. It is, for example, beneath the dignity of our state that the Royal Mail, founded by Henry VIII in 1516, be parcelled off and sold to foreign investors at the behest of EU directives, a course of action that 96% of CWU members opposed. A state must guard and protect its assets and its workers just as it does its great rituals and ceremonies: the Royal Mail is no less a part of our history than Windsor Castle and the Palace, and the accession of Charles III must bring into being the revival of the British state, or else the British state, our shared home, will be lost entirely.

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Only a monarch can control the elites

By Curtis Yarvin

For there is still much for us all to win, just as there is still much for us to lose if we continue further down our wrong path. Consider the one last great infrastructure project of our late Queen’s reign, the Elizabeth Line, and imagine what we would gain from a revival of the British state’s power and glory under her son and successor. Imagine His Majesty’s Railways, linking the beautiful and humanely-planned new towns our King could oversee on the Crown Estate, just as he has expressed his own philosophy in warm brick and stone in Poundbury and Nansledan on his Duchy of Cornwall lands. A benign and thoughtful King can do much to guide an inexperienced Prime Minister at a time of crisis. As he wrote: “I wonder if we might see wisdom in the Chinese word for ‘crisis’, which also means ‘opportunity’? It is almost a knee-jerk reaction to try to put things back as they were when we hit such a crisis, but we could be more positive and forward-looking and consider another approach that could create something different — a framework that is more sustainable; an approach to economics that is more proportionate, balanced and connected; an economics that recognises the need for harmony.”

Queen Elizabeth was fated to reign over a British state in sharp and calamitous decline, and it may yet be our new King’s unhappy fate to preside over the dissolution of our United Kingdom. But we must be thankful that our King understands there are great opportunities to be found and utilised in our current time of crisis. An unpopular Prime Minister taking office at such a dangerous and turbulent period will be naturally inclined to lean on the continuity and legitimacy only our monarchy affords, and a King equally inclined towards politics and a guiding role in our nation’s development must surely make use of the rare destiny he has been granted, for which he has prepared for his entire life. There is time still to save our struggling family unit, and rebuild our shared home towards the humane vision both our King’s faith and instinct guide him — a great Carolean restoration that will mark his place in our national history.

The ideology of the mega-rich will shape our society for the next generation, in large part through philanthropy. The non-profit sector, the primary vehicle for inherited wealth to be laundered into political influence, has been growing rapidly; in the US, non-profits’ assets have grown nine-fold since 1980. In 2020, non-profits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting over 5.6% of the US economy. Increasingly, much this money came from the new tech elite: among the most prolific donors were Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott; Bill Gates and his now-discarded wife, Melinda French Gates; Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; and Laureen Powell Jobs, the Left-leaning publisher of the Atlantic and the widow of Apple’s founder.

This rise of non-profits is reminiscent of feudal times, when the rich and powerful donated to the Church to ensure that its message wouldn’t threaten their power. Indeed, our society is becoming more like the Middle Ages all the time, with entrepreneurial success becoming more difficult and property and wealth becoming ever more concentrated. “Inherited wealth”, notes Thomas Piketty, is making a “comeback”. In the US, according to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030 and $75 trillion by 2060.

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The cost of Biden's racialism

By Joel Kotkin

Of course, the use of inherited wealth to push Left-wing causes is nothing new. As Heather Mac Donald demonstrated in 1996, big-money foundations in the US have been bankrolling far-Left politics for several generations. But the rise of the tech oligarchy seems likely to accelerate this move to the gentrified Left. Many of these billionaires are still in their 30s and 40s but have accumulated more cash than anyone since the Gilded Age. And unlike their early 20th-century counterparts, today’s robber-barons — with a few notable exceptions, such as Peter Thiel — are decisively aligned with the Left. In 2020, five of the top eight donors to Joe Biden came from people tied to tech firms.

This is partly explained by Trump’s toxicity, which engendered something of an oligarchical jihad to overthrow a man who was both needlessly crass and potentially threatening to their monopolies. Particularly critical in the 2020 election was the weaponising of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which poured over $300 million into state and local election administration to stoke turnout. Conservatives claim, with some justification, that these efforts were concentrated in highly Democratic areas of swing states, and therefore may have tilted the outcome. But what is beyond question is that Zuckerberg and the others participated in what Time — owned by yet another oligarch, Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com — gleefully described as “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes”.

But at least you could make a compelling argument that it was a good idea to get rid of Trump. On other issues, however, such as race, policing, education, and gender, oligarchs and their non-profits continue to agitate for what are often societally disastrous policies.

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Why millennials are dropping out

By Joel Kotkin

The ultra-rich have been particularly attracted to draconian climate positions. By 2017, billionaires such as Tom Steyer — and powerful foundations like Rockefeller, Doris Duke, Walton, MacArthur, Hewlett, and George Soros’s Open Society — were sending hundreds of millions to leading environmental  groups. By contrast, the largest Right-wing foundation, Heritage, was attracting 50% or less than the biggest green non-profits. Jeff Bezos, amid his pandemic bonanza, announced $10 billion in gifts aimed mostly at progressive and green non-profits. The oligarchs’ philanthropy also provides a cushy home for climate bureaucrats, with the inheritor of the Jobs fortune now welcoming California’s chief regulator to head up her climate-focused $3 billion Waverley Street Foundation.

We can expect that this radicalisation will become even more obvious in the next generation of tech and finance heirs, such as the socialist offspring of the founders of Qualcomm, featured in a New York Times profile on “the rich kids who want to tear down capitalism”. Born into the gentry Left, these young trust-funders will be able to subsidise the most extreme elements of the progressive agenda without having to worry about how that agenda might affect a business they had nothing to do with building.

This rise of a small class of ultra-rich, yet non-productive, social influencers does not bode well for the future. In a profoundly dysfunctional political culture, the rich and their massive non-profits will enjoy an extraordinary power to set the public agenda by funding notionally grassroots activist groups and manipulating an increasingly gullible media, parts of which they already own or control.

Indeed, the power of these organisations could grow so great that the only real solution may be to check their influence through removing or altering their privileged tax status — non-profits generally pay 15% or less on their income than corporations — and forcing them to eschew politics. They may consider themselves, as progressive author David Callaghan suggests, the “enlightened rich”, but their bank accounts make them natural targets for redistribution. In some cases, the funded minions of the rich are morphing from grateful supplicants into something like the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Already, more Democrats support socialism than capitalism, with socialism particularly popular among the young. Much like their counterparts in the run-up to the French Revolution, our elites appear to be embracing revolutionary ideas that end up threatening, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “their own rights and even their existence”.

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How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew Crawford

The adoption of self-destructive ideologies by the idle rich is nothing new; in fact, it’s a recurring pattern in modern history. In the 20th-century, members of the upper classes often embraced communism and even worked for the Soviet Union, whose founding credo was the annihilation of their own class. But while Stalinism may be out of fashion, charges of hypocrisy are not — and agitated young activists won’t long tolerate billionaires who lament climate change but fly their private jets to discuss the “crisis” in places like Davos. After all, if the world is on the verge of a global apocalypse, how can the luxurious lifestyles of so many of the world’s most public green advocates be acceptable?

Fearing the potential whirlwind, some tech titans and Wall Street oligarchs are already making emergency escape plans in case of civil unrest. But the real danger may be confiscation, as people recognise the enormous gap between oligarchic posturing and the reality of class relations. As the World Socialist Website puts it: “Charity and philanthropic patronage are aristocratic forms. They are a symptom of an unequal society in which resources have pooled to an irrational degree at one pole of society.”

Yet while the current oligarchs deserve opprobrium, the ultimate danger posed by the non-profit tsunami lies in their feckless embrace of a policy agenda that undermines the very essence of competitive capitalism. Like feudal lords, this new elite, emboldened by a common ideology, may continue to thrive in a world of frozen social relations, but only by destroying the very system that brought them their own good fortune. And, just as with Oedipus, it’s only a matter of time before that backfires in a disastrous fashion.

The makeshift labels these people give themselves often have an implicit note of self-satisfaction: “4Runner Environmentalists”, “Green-necks” or “literary Westerners”. The terms denote a mix of cultural and political tendencies that cut across some of America’s great divides. They tend to be pro-gun but pro-environmental regulation, to have deep faith in the American experiment but a deep awareness of its flaws, to be suspicious of both big government and big corporations, and, above all, to hate the twinned power of government and business, which is the force that mostly shapes the West as we know it.

DeVoto is the high priest of this sect. Born in 1897 in Ogden, Utah, he spent most of his adulthood in the East, writing for Harper’s, teaching at Harvard, and occupying a tenuous middle ground in the political wars of his time: he was called a fascist in the pages of The Nation and the Daily Worker, and a communist by the Wyoming Cattlemen’s Association. He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, but he was also urbane and unabashedly sophisticated. His monumental 1947 Harper’s essay, “The West Against Itself”, may be the single most significant piece of periodical writing in the history of the American conservation movement. It exposed and almost singlehandedly blocked a vast scheme to sell off hundreds of millions of acres of public land. It also elaborated DeVoto’s thesis of the West as a “plundered province”, a story retold in Nate Schweber’s recent This America of Ours, a long-overdue first biography of DeVoto.

“He described how the wealth of the West’s natural resources had been systematically siphoned to the East,” Schweber writes, about DeVoto’s first use of this term. “And how — contrary to popular myth — it was Western settlers who learned to work together who halted the liquidation.”

This is the difficult and illuminating thing about reading DeVoto today, because in all of his writings he is resistant to the idea that settlers and small-time workers of the West were the engines of the genocide and despoliation that came to the region in their wake. In DeVoto’s telling, these people were complicated moral agents and often victims themselves, caught up in a churning machine of capital and government that, by the 20th century, had created a Western system defined by “laissez-faire capitalism with socialism, ownership rights without responsibility, investment but not regulation”. It was a picture of the corporatism that now colours every single part of American life, and DeVoto saw it as emerging in its first clear form in the government protection of powerful extractive industries in the Mountain West.

DeVoto’s most disturbing, poignant, and rich account of how we got to this point can be found in Across the Wide Missouri, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. It took me several tries to actually finish the book. It is long, frustrating, and at times confusing, both hard to follow and hard to put down once you get into its flow.

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This is not how civil wars start

By James Pogue

It is easy to see why the book is largely forgotten today. It reads like a history in the old American tradition of Francis Parkman or William H. Prescott, with dense, high-diction prose, and an implicit expectation that the reader is familiar with a set of characters — John Jacob Astor, Jim Bridger — who might have been familiar to Americans in 1947 but are much less so today. It also unfolds in a confusing set of braided personal narratives, telling the story of everyone from a wayward Scottish noble who found his calling in the West to the legendarily beautiful missionary Narcissa Whitman, one of the first two white women known to have crossed the Rocky Mountains, and who ended up living such a brutal and tragic life that it’s shocking no one has made a movie of it yet.

Across the Wide Missouri is so complex and iterative that attempting to describe its “plot” is a fools’ errand. But the book takes shape around a conflict between Astor’s American Fur Company and Bridger’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company, over the wealth of pelts that was beginning to flow from the mountain streams and valleys of the Interior West. This trade was the American West’s first great extractive industry, and it was what drove the exploration of the region. And in this story, you can see the whole blighted future of the region, and to some degree, that of America.

The fur trappers on whose labor the industry relied lived some of the most difficult lives anyone has ever lived, and almost none of them made much money. They were always hard men, often cruel. But they were also joyous, and the best parts of the book involve a series of retellings of the annual summer rendezvous, when trappers and native tribes gathered in drunken comity to trade, party, have sex and marry (intermarriage between whites and natives was the defining social structure of the mountain trade), and load up supplies for the winter.

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By Phil Klay

The picture here is very different from the one we get about Western history today, one that focuses on whites as the agents of genocide and “settler-colonialism”. DeVoto is interested instead in the brief period when the whites who came into the West did so without an eye to conquest or even settlement. “May we assume that enough has been said about release and debauch at the summer rendezvous?” he writes about one of the last such gatherings. “The trappers drank as many pints of alcohol as ever at five dollars a pint, sang as many songs, held as many horse races, bought as many squaws…. Rendezvous was the mountain man’s Christmas, county fair, harvest festival, and crowned-slave carnival of Saturn — this year as always.”

But it was not to last. The rabid competition between the fur companies kept the trappers in debt and wrecked the supply of beaver pelts. And it brought the tribes they lived and traded among into a system of dependence on the manufactured goods and alcohol that the companies proffered in exchange for the furs. The smallpox epidemic of 1837 was carried up the Missouri River on an American Fur Company supply boat, and the ensuing epidemic killed 90% of some of the tribes the trappers were most intimate and friendly with, like the Mandans, and almost as many among tribes they feared and fought, like the Blackfeet. It destroyed the market structure that the freewheeling trapper culture depended on, and by destroying native populations it laid the ground for the settler conquest and extractive pillage of the West that was to come.

The enduring power of DeVoto, one that makes him vital and not a little subversive today, is in his ability to tell the story of the birth of the extractive Western machine that doesn’t admit for easy culprits: “This narrative will not be suspected of admiring the business ethics of the Company,” he writes, “but it must protest the tendency of 20th-century historians to hold the 1830s in American history to ideas which the 1830s had never heard of, which they would not have understood, and which produce confusion or nonsense when imposed on them today.”

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America will always fear Caesar

By Ross Douthat

For anyone who has the tenacity and time to finish it, Across the Wide Missouri ends up being almost inexpressibly rewarding and inexpressibly dark — a portrait of a moment in a part of America that only a few hundred or so Americans ever experienced and that very few Americans today know much about, but that did more than any other to shape our idea of a freewheeling Western frontier. It understands both the trappers and Natives who participated in the Western fur trade in the context of a system which “converted property, manipulated credit, and stripped the plundered province to the sole end of canalising eastward whatever wealth the West might produce”.

DeVoto’s purpose was not to absolve the trappers of their complicity in a system that ended up destroying the free West they inhabited and loved, but to show how the engines of capital and commerce coopted them into that destruction, against their own desires and interests. DeVoto acknowledged and even emphasised the violence between trappers and Native tribes during the fur-trading era. But he understood this violence, which caused many personal and bloody feuds but little wholesale carnage, as something different than what was to come — “the less murderous [and more state-directed] violence that was a condition of white society in the West”.

This was the state-engineered extractive regime that DeVoto spent his career railing against, and it is the force that has lead so many Americans in recent years to conclude that the settlement of the West is a single history of evil acts committed by evil men. But there is another story — one of the strange middle-ground reality that fur-trading era represented — that has hardly had any retelling since DeVoto’s difficult, annoying, brilliant magnum opus.

“This narrative calls attention to the fact that historical judgements must be peripheral or inane,” he wrote, uncannily anticipating the politico-historical debates of our current time, “until the preliminaries of historical statement have been made. And now feels free to return to its job.” We can only hope that more historians of this stripe will emerge today.