Books on climate change have gone through several phases over the last twenty years. There were the awareness raising books, then the alarm ringing ones as those were ignored. Then came the climate grief and anxiety books. On the other side of all three of those previous waves, there’s demand for something practical. Given that we are now living in a disrupted climate, what do we do?

Lifehouse is such a book, as that subtitle makes clear: ‘taking care of ourselves in a world on fire’. It’s written by the urbanist Adam Greenfield and informed by some specific experiences. He was resident in New York during hurricane Sandy, and saw firsthand how communities can self-organise to respond to disaster. He helped out with the grassroots emergency response Occupy Sandy, and it was clearly a formative experience. If a community can organise successfully in a disaster situation, can we do something purposeful in the ‘long emergency’ of the climate crisis?

Occupy Sandy, you may remember, was a spontaneous citizen response to the catastrophic storm that hit New York in 2012. They mobilised some 60,000 volunteers and served 20,000 meals a day across dozens of makeshift centres. They were found to be ultimately more effective than the government’s FEMA response and also the Red Cross. As Greenfield explains, the fact that they had grown out of the Occupy movement was an important part of their success. People brought their principles of autonomy, solidarity, horizontal decision-making and direct action. They could get stuff done without waiting for anyone’s permission. The accusations often levelled against the movement – that they were naive, impractical and utopian – turned out to be entirely false when tested in this context.

The book goes on to describe similar moments from history, stories of “people doing something about conditions of life they had come to find intolerable. We read about Greece during the financial crisis. Another section looks at the Black Panthers and their ‘survival programmes’, activities that have perhaps been overlooked in the wider mythologising of the era. At its height, the Panthers provided a wide range of services to communities that were being neglected, often purposefully. Food programmes such as Free Breakfasts for Children were the largest, but there were others providing dentistry, ambulances, housing, free shoes, plumbing and maintenance, and even medical research into conditions that disproportionately affected black communities.

Greenfield keeps the tone conversational and exploratory, and doesn’t dig too much into theory. One exception is the thinking of Murray Bookchin, who advocated for ‘communalism’ rather than communism, and imagined this a kind of ‘libertarian municipalism’. Strangely enough, his ideas directly inspired the anarchist state of Rojava in Syria, and have been put into practice in its self-government.

Learning from these various stories, Greenfield lands us back in community responses to climate change with the specific suggestion in the title: Lifehouses. This is where you would find a food bank, a tool library, a warm hub in winter and a cool hub in summer. If the power went out, it would be solar powered and the place to go to recharge your phone. The Lifehouse would be a centre for community response and ideally within walking distance for everyone, looking to local needs and coordinating regionally on bigger challenges. Now based in the UK, Greenfield observes that churches are often best placed to be Lifehouses. (Some already are. My own church has a vegetable garden, free books, a tool library, a food bank and the biggest solar array in the neighbourhood, though it would not be able to articulate a philosophy of resilience or mutual aid.)

The author isn’t naive about the limits to these sorts of things. Mutual aid doesn’t come with any legal rights or minimum standards. You can’t appeal to any authority if you’re let down. It’s not going to replace other structures of decison making, but neither should we expect those legacy structures to be adequate. “Stop investing faith and energy in institutions that are demonstrably failing us,” he suggests, and invest in “local self-organised action” where we can.

We need more storytelling like this, more examples to learn from, and the idea of Lifehouses is explored further in the podcast Lifepod. Individualist societies naturally give rise to individualist crisis responses such as survivalism. This extricates the rich and the strong from the crisis, without doing anything to ease the suffering of everyone else. We will all be better off working together and getting started where the opportunities present themselves.

Governments aren’t equipped to deliver what we need, and so no amount of protest will get us very far. The billionaire philanthropists can’t help, and neither should we expect any miracle technologies. In the absence of this climate cavalry, we might want to put our energies behind “faith in the wisdom of ordinary people”.

• Lifehouse is available from Earthbound Books

Carbon Brief recently published an article on why global land use emissions are falling. Among the interesting facts therein is this one: the country that leads the world in carbon removal through forestry is China.

China doesn’t have the most forest coverage, either in land area or in percentage of tree cover. Finland’s forests cover almost three quarters of the country, versus China’s 25%. For size, Brazil, Russia, the United States and Canada all have more square miles of forest. The reason that China pulls in more carbon is that its forest are growing.

That wasn’t the case hundred years ago, with agriculture and the timber industry pushing China’s forests to a historic low by the middle of the last century. This had consequences, including soil erosion, drought, creeping desertification and sandstorms. A series of government programmes were launched to reverse the damage. The most famous is the Three-North Shelterbelt, often called the Great Green Wall, which aims to contain the Gobi Desert. Another project was Grain for Green, which paid farmers to turn some of their crop land back into forest in order to preserve soil integrity.

As this overview describes, some of these schemes weren’t initially successful or had unintended consquences. Projects that relied on monocultures of fast-growing species such as larch or eucalyptus found their quick wins came at the expense of local biodiversity. Over time the guidance has been updated to favour native trees and natural regrowth over tree planting targets. Lessons were learned in stakeholder participation and using local knowledge, or in unlocking co-benefits to use forestry to stop landslides or restore water supplies. Projects are now having to incorporate climate resilience into their planning.

These land restoration programmes were carried out on a scale unmatched anywhere else on the planet. Tree cover has risen from around 12% in the 1970s to 25% today, a startling recovery in the course of a single lifetime. There have been some remarkable regional successes tucked beneath those national statistics, like the Taklamakan Desert. Scientists using satellite data confirmed recently that after millions of years as a sandy desert, it is now a carbon sink.

Young trees pull in more carbon as they grow, which is why China’s massive re-forestation effort has a more positive effect on emissions than some larger mature forests elsewhere. (Those standing forests are storing a lot more carbon, so it isn’t a matter of one being superior to the other.) Restoring degraded forests is also quicker than growing new ones from scratch, which also helps to account for China’s outsized contribution here.

Nobody else is going to have the scale of impact, both positive and negative, on the climate that China has. But we can learn from their successes. As the Rapid Transition Alliance explain, China has proved that land and forest restoration can be done at pace, in ways that include local populations and that don’t hold back development. Plenty of other places could run with this – including the UK.

My home country of England has just 10% forested land, where China was a generation ago. Why shouldn’t that be 25% by the time my children reach retirement age?

Chinese battery maker CATL, the world’s largest supplier of EV batteries, has reached carbon neutrality across all of its 20 factories. It will focus on supply chain emissions next, which are a bigger problem and a trickier one to solve.

I wrote about AI and capitalism recently, which highlighted the reality that AI isn’t good or bad in itself. The important question is who it serves. You can put it to work reducing emissions, or you can put to uses that increase them. Here’s a story about how the oil industry is optimising production with AI tools, which could increase global emissions by 5%. On the other hand, AI is being used to detect and report methane leaks so that they can be fixed faster.

My garden is the colour of straw this summer, after five heatwaves and a drought in the UK. So I noted this article on how rewilded land is proving more resilient to drought. This is about a single project, and I’d be interested to know if the effects are widespread.

Along similar lines, here’s a fascinating study from Washington State that shows how nature restoration can have unexpected linkages: the presence of cougars in the landscape reduces car accidents caused by deer by 76%.

Recent highlights

• Why EV battery swapping matters
• The age of solar power is here
• Positive travel experiences with Flight Free Schools

Like plug-in solar, or the transformation happening in places like Pakistan, it’s further evidence of how solar is establishing itself as the power source of the future. The technology to tap into the free energy of the sun is available to a growing percentage of the world’s population. This cuts emissions from burning fossil fuels and reduces air pollution, but it also improves energy security, lowers energy costs, and rebalances political power. The huge lobbying might of the fossil fuel companies is eroding, and a new geopolitics of solar power is emerging.

This isn’t theoretical any more. It’s happening, and we are in the first chapters of a story that will run for decades to come. We don’t know how it will play out, but a solar economy will not be like the fossil fuel economy. The last 200 years have been based around clawing materials out of the ground and setting them on fire. Control over those resources has been crucial, and a major source of conflict. Scarcity or interruption to supplies can upend economies, topple governments and cause widespread misery and deprivation.

If the sun is the centre of the energy system – as it is already in non-human systems – this looks very different. What happens when energy is essentially free, inexhaustible, and beyond anyone’s control? What does it mean to have more than you could ever need? Where fossil fuels require a huge ongoing project of digging and grinding and burning, solar infrastructure essentially lies down in the sun. Stop and think about this, as the philosopher Oxana Timofeeva invites us to do in her book Solar Politics, and it raises some profound questions.

Imagine a solar economy where energy never runs out and is available to everyone for free. How relevant do terms like ‘consumerism’, ‘capitalism’ or ‘economic growth’ sound in such a context? I don’t ask this to imply some kind of solar utopia, just to point out that our basic understanding of the economy developed alongside the technologies that power it. Modern economic theory has been shaped by fossil fuelled industrialisation, and the widespread adoption of renewable energy will challenge some basic assumptions about what the economy is and how it works.

I look forward to seeing how the possibilities unspool over the rest of my lifetime. In the meantime, Bill McKibben is one of the most articulate commentators on our present moment, and the opportunities of a solar economy. It’s all explained in his recent book Here Comes the Sun, and if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Bill McKibben’s TED talk from earlier this year:

Out to prove me wrong are Nissan, who recently announced that they are joining a UK government funded collaboration on efficient EV charging, which will include integrated solar.

Meanwhile on the buses, C-40 Cities are celebrating the milestone of 10,000 electric buses on the roads of Latin America. You can see where they are on their e-bus radar.

Shade the UK are running a crowdfunder at the moment to continue their work to prevent overheating – including a project they’re partnering on with us at Let’s Go Zero, and that I’ve been working on for several months. Please do contribute if you’ve got a little to spare. It’s match funded, so you can double your donation for nothing.

The EU has introduced new rules to prevent clothing companies from destroying unsold stock, one of the more perverse aspects of the fast fashion industry.

I’m still in summer mode at the moment, and still working on other writing projects, so it’ll be a little slow for a while longer in terms of new posts. But here are some recent articles in case you missed them.

Recent highlights

• The carbon cost of expanding Luton Airport
• Capitalism, now with AI
• What if we stopped talking about growth?

We’ve seen these sorts of announcements before. The first I’ve come across was all the way back in 1938, a plan for a national EV battery swapping network that was overtaken by the war and never happened. There have been several attempts since in different parts of the world, and some high profile failures.

Why does the idea of battery swapping keep coming around? What do Octopus see in the idea? And what would it take to make a success of battery swapping when others have failed?

There have always been two main ways to recharge a battery electric vehicle. One is to plug it in. The other is to put new batteries in it. Although all our EV infrastructure in the UK is built around recharging today, there’s nothing inevitable about it as a superior technology. Right from the earliest days of electric vehicles in the early 1900s, there’s been a live debate over recharging or swapping batteries. It is not yet settled.

There are advantages to both. Recharging is simpler, and charging points are easier to accomodate. You need a parking space and a grid connection with sufficient capacity, but not much more than that. Once the industry has standardised connectors, all manufacturers can design their cars to use the network. The downside is that charging takes time. That’s fine if you’re charging overnight and not using the car, but it’s a pain when topping up on long journeys. It means waiting around, every long journey takes more time, and on busy travel days there’s the stress of finding a charger.

Battery swapping solves the time problem and gets you back on the road quicker. Despite that obvious advantage, batteries are heavy and the systems for swapping them quickly are complex. It’s far more expensive to develop and build out a network of switching stations than it is to build out a charging network.

Where charge networks just need a connector, you also need car manufacturers to standardise their entire battery system, and the chassis to accommodate it. You need to design the whole car around the idea. That’s a tall order and it’s where the most high profile start-up fell down. Better Place only persuaded one company to use their system, and it burned the best part of a billion dollars in venture capital on its way to nowhere.

On its own, history suggests that the speed factor isn’t enough to justify the expense and complexity of battery swapping for EVs. But the idea has more going for it than meets the eye, and there are some good reasons why it won’t go away.

First, if your car had swappable batteries, then you wouldn’t need to buy one of your own. You would just buy the vehicle, and pay to use batteries that were owned by a charge supplier. Since the battery is the most expensive component of an EV, this makes them much more affordable. This is less relevant at the luxury end of the market. Tesla developed battery swapping, opened just one swap station in 2013 and then closed it down because nobody cared.

The luxury market is, however, small fry in the grand scale of things. Battery leasing is a business model that’s driving sales of electric scooters, motorbikes and three-wheelers in many parts of the world. It’s easy to forget this in the US or Europe, where most road traffic has four wheels, but there are many countries where cars are vastly outnumbered. Motorbikes and scooters dominate in East Asia, and it’s where the growth is in much of Africa. The transition to electric transport is a two-wheeled phenomenon in the Global South.

This is a good match for swappable batteries, because the battery for an electric scooter is the size of a shoebox. You can pick it up by hand and pass it over a counter for a new one. In a tuk-tuk or a micro-car, you might have two or three modular batteries of that size. A battery swapping station can serve hundreds of customers from a unit the size of a shipping container. This is a far cry from a battery swapping station for a car, with its larger land footprint and sophisticated robots to move and install charge packs.

If we shift our perspective from north to south, and from four wheels to two, battery swapping makes complete sense. It is far from theoretical, and is already a thriving industry. See SUN Mobility in India, for example, or Ampersand in Kenya and Rwanda.

There’s another big advantage to swapping networks to bear in mind, and that’s the ability to charge batteries when energy is cheap. Rather than plugging in and charging on demand, battery companies can take advantage of overnight rates or times of surplus, and this keeps costs down for everyone. As a bonus, slow and measured charging is much better for the battery than rapid charging, so batteries may well last longer. It shifts battery power towards a service model, bringing them into the circular economy.

This timing factor explains Octopus’ interest in the UK. They will be serving trucks, which means very large batteries. An electric HGV could have a battery with a capacity of 400 or 500kwh. Every battery swapping station will have a whole stack of these at various levels of charge, and so they will double-up as a grid-level energy storage facility.

What Octopus will be able to do is to charge these battery packs when energy prices are low, either overnight or during periods of high wind or solar production. Users get lower prices, and it will play an important part in integrating variable energy sources into the grid. The system will run in two directions, so that Octopus can sell power back to the grid during demand spikes. This is bread and butter stuff for Octopus, who began as a software company and already have the systems for managing energy storage and smart charging.

There’s a reason why this works with trucks too. Trucking is a more predictable business than individual motoring, and so battery swapping points can be at motorway service stations or at depots. You need fewer of them, and Octopus will be using a platform that’s already proven and profitable in China. Chinese HGV companies are designing for it, and European manufacturers such as Volvo and Scania are moving in that direction.

It’s in the interests of the logistics industry to move towards battery swapping too. They want to minimise the number of vehicles standing idle across their fleet, and the charging time on a 500kwh battery is going to be a major inefficiency. The same would be true of delivery vans, buses and taxis, where battery swapping will help keep vehicles on the road. This too is a proven approach in China and in a handful of other places.

Battery swapping for cars is still a difficult proposition, though possible. One car brand in China, NIO, is making it work already. CATL, the world’s largest battery company, are investing in the Chinese battery swapping market. It’s arguably mainstream already, and in the long term it looks likely that China is going to have the best of both worlds. You’ll be able charge your car at home for everyday use, but swap batteries on longer journeys, and outsource battery ownership to a service company. We’ll see.

For the rest of us, I’m not convinced this sort of hybrid system will be available to ordinary drivers in the UK any time soon, as fast-charging networks are expanding and eroding the case for them. Where swapping really makes sense is with fleets and with vehicles with larger batteries. And at the other end of the scale, it works with smaller vehicles in developing countries and is already playing a role in leapfrogging past fossil fuels.

All individual action risks being small and tokenistic, so we should always ask how we can push our ethical choices up a level. Choosing not to fly is great, but it’s even better if we can influence our workplace, school or community group to reduce flying. The impact is much greater when we take collective action, and that’s why Flight Free Schools is a really useful campaign.

Flight Free Schools invites schools to think through their policies around flying on school trips, and make deliberate choices. You can aim for the gold level commitment and not fly at all, but there are silver and bronze pledges that allow for some flying or help to manage a transition away from flying.

As well as directly reducing emissions from school trips, a Flight Free Schools commitment raises the issue with staff and students. It holds the practice of flying up to scrutiny, and might well influence a few people and families to think about their own holiday habits. It makes it normal to ask questions about alternatives to flying, and it gives students an experience of them.

I won’t name the school, but to give a specific example, there’s a high school near me that is offering a skiing trip to students. This is quite common in high schools, and there are lots of skiing destinations in Europe that are accessible by train or coach. This school has chosen to take its skiing trip to Canada this year, and has Japan booked in for 2028. Those are entirely unnecessary long-haul flights. The latter trip costs £3,490 per student, immediately putting it beyond most Luton families, so choosing a closer resort would make it more inclusive as well as more sustainable.

Here’s what one sixth form college have done, proving that sustainable travel does not mean inferior school trips. And this isn’t just for schools – Flight Free Schools is a campaign from the wider Flight Free charity, so you can take part as an individual as well.

The court are the latest in a long line of people and organisations to turn a blind eye to the environmental cost of airport growth, a list that starts with Luton’s council and political parties, and ends with the Secretary of State. One exception is the Planning Inspectorate, whose exhaustive investigation concluded that “the public benefits do not outweigh the environmental harm”.

So let’s look at the balance here more specifically. What are the public benefits? And what is the environmental harm?

The press releases all mention the former and are quiet on the latter, so it’s much easier to answer the first question. The benefits of airport expansion are 11,000 new jobs, 4,400 of which will be specifically within Luton. The project is expected to generate an extra £1.5 billion in economic growth every year.

Since the council owns the airport, this will mean significant further funding for local communities and causes – “up to an additional £13 million” by the mid-40s. Don’t get me wrong, that’s useful. I am yet to claim airport funds for any of my own projects, but they already fund the work of many of my friends in the local arts scene or environmental and community sectors. Airport funding keeps the libraries open, refurbishes parks, pays for school gardens, and supports the carnival and the fireworks.

It’s no wonder nobody wants to answer the second question, but I here goes. According to the airport’s latest sustainability report, the total emissions from Luton Airport are 1,310,848 tonnes of greenhouse gases.

To put that into some context, that’s the same amount of fossil fuel pollution as a small country. For comparison, the Seychelles produces 1,240,000 tonnes of CO2, Eswatini 1,390,000. There are 45 countries with fossil emissions smaller than Luton Airport, which is why airport expansion has to be considered in a wider context, and not just a matter of local traffic and noise.

By my own maths, which I’m happy to have corrected should Luton Airport publish an official estimate, the expanded airport will be closer to 2,210,498 tonnes. That’s about the same as Fiji.

But wait – isn’t the airport setting strict limits to carbon emissions? This is a recurring theme in the propaganda in favour of airport expansion: Luton Airport proposes limits to its environmental impact, in a framework it calls Green Controlled Growth.

Under this framework, legally binding limits will be set to noise pollution, air pollution, carbon emissions and traffic. If it breaches these, it has to pause expansion until it gets back on track. This is a groundbreaking idea in theory, and no other airport has anything like this. The devil is in the detail however.

The Green Controlled Growth framework only applies to operational emissions from the airport building and infrastructure. Quoting directly from their own report, “these emissions account for approximately 0.4% of the Airport’s total reported greenhouse gas footprint.”

These vaunted environmental limits don’t include the planes, as those are subject to separate government targets. Even though Luton Airport puts the fuel in those planes and is therefore directly responsible for their burning, this is somebody else’s problem. You need to root around in the online pfds to find this out – the 0.4% figure doesn’t feature in the press releases.

So this the trade-off we’ve made in expanding Luton Airport: we are committing to an expansion in greenhouse gases that’s equivalent to the African nation of Estwatini, population 1.2 million. We’re doing that for 12,000 jobs and £1.5 billion. The announcement was made during a drought in the UK, in a year of record breaking summer heat.

Does that sound reasonable?

In the associated full length ad, a series of people overcome their ineptitude with a little help from Gemini, including Harry Kane. Unable to find anything football related to make use of his skills, he is shown asking Gemini to help him schedule the food prep for a barbecue. (This, by the way, is a good way to give your guests food poisoning.)

This is of course the latest round of AI promotion, which has always smacked of desperation to my mind. It’s been thrust into applications where we’d never needed it before. We are ambushed by it on Amazon, as if we are incapable of doing our own shopping. Search engines hack together an AI summary that may or may not be useful. Word documents open with a variety of suggestions, as if we open new documents and then decide why afterwards. I don’t remember previous generations of technology being quite so aggressively pushed at prospective users. It’s as if – whisper it – the AI companies know that most of their tools aren’t really all that useful.

Cory Doctorow’s new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, has an explanation for this. Cramming AI into everything isn’t for you, he suggests. It’s for the shareholders. A vast amount of money has been gambled on AI. Companies have to show the investors that people want AI, and they do this through engagement stats.

Lots of engagement with AI tools demonstrates how popular and useful this all is, so Google, Microsoft et al task their engineers with driving up engagement. It’s often a key performance indicator, something they need to deliver if they want to keep their jobs. One easy way to game the engagement stats is to make AI an opt-out feature rather than an opt-in one, basically a very expensive internet pop-up.

If the tech companies can’t show increasing engagement, the investors will panic and sell before AI ever makes any money. Almost no AI companies are turning a profit right now – OpenAI burns $20 billion a year, xAI loses a billion every month, and the industry as a whole is on track to lose $700 billion this year. The moment the investors lose confidence, it’s over. And this is why big tech is so painfully needy: please, please please just push the colourful button and do something – anything – with AI.

Doctorow suggests that we should ask specific questions about any new technology. “Stop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to, and who the gadget does it for.”

In this case, AI is serving capitalism.

Not you, not human progress, not some ideal of efficiency or convenience. Fundamentally, AI as it currently being pursued exists for the primary purpose of making more money for people who are already very wealthy.

This is where the reverse centaur of the title comes in. In technologist slang, good technologies make us like centaurs – a human with the advantages of a horse’s speed and strength. A person using binoculars or riding a bike is like a centaur, as the technology amplifies their human faculties.

A reverse centaur, on the other hand, is a horse with human legs. It’s a backward configuration that makes the human a servant of the technology – a person addicted to the endless scroll of social media, for example, or a delivery driver at the mercy of an app. The big tech version of AI risks making us into reverse centaurs, an imposition on society for the benefit of the richest.

AI could be done differently, Doctorow argues. Open Source AI projects are evidence of that. So is Deepseek and other Chinese disruptors. These lighter weight and more adaptive AI applications are more likely to survive the popping of the bubble, while the big cloud-based American model will collapse and take the stock markets with them. Hence the ‘life after AI’ bit of the title. There will be plenty of useful AI tools for us to use on the other side of the coming crash, though the disruption will be immense. Some of the world’s most valuable companies are likely to fail, with the AI bubble taking its dishonorable place in history alongside tulip mania, the Wall Street crash of 1929 or the derivatives scandal.

Cory Doctorow’s theory of ‘enshittification‘, explained in the book of the same name, articulates something that I’d been seeing everywhere online. His new book applies that theory specifically to AI, and it’s well worth reading. Other opinions on AI are available and it’s by no means the last word on the subject. What it does well is move the conversation around AI from simple questions about whether it’s good or bad, and locate it within capitalism and the drive for economic growth. With that in mind, we can ask better questions about who AI serves, and interrogate the underlying power relationships behind the AI boom.

• You can pick up The Reverse Centaur’s Guide from Earthbound Books
• I don’t generally use AI tools on the blog, but it felt appropriate to ask Google Gemini to generate a suitably apocalyptic header image.

It’s a full reset from his predecessor Keir Starmer, who told the country that “the defining mission of this government is to grow the economy.”

Keir replaced Rishi ‘Seven Bins‘ Sunak, whose advice was to “relentlessly focus on growth“.

He in turn took over from Liz Truss, who said that “what I’m about is about growing the economy”.

How different this was to Boris Johnson: “My government’s priority is to grow and strengthen the economy.”

Teresa May’s priority, on the other hand, was to “drive economic growth up and down the country”.

David Cameron promised that “a relentless focus on growth is what you will get from this government.”

Lastly, Gordon Brown, who said that “going for growth is the government’s number one priority.”

There have been eight prime ministers since I began writing this blog. It’s a list of politicians with a wide variety of views, competencies and popularity. One thing they all have in common is a commitment to economic growth.

Some of this was nuanced, with a greater or lesser degree of attention on how it was distributed. Starmer, May and Johnson all specified that they wanted it to be shared, while Truss openly scorned talk of distribution. Andy Burnham brings nuance too, specifically mentioning “good growth in every postcode”. This is important, and I don’t want to imply equivalence in economic approach across the eight prime ministers. Nevertheless, the underlying pattern is the same, the quotes largely interchangeable, and the latest resident of Number 10 has dutifully pledged his allegiance to the god of growth.

I use the word god deliberately, because I think growth fulfils a religious function in modern politics. We put our faith in it to solve our problems. It is the answer to our ills. It will either shine upon us and bless us, or it will abandon us to recession. Growth has many believers and a vociferous priesthood, and questioning its centrality makes you a heretic.

With my heretic hat on then, let me say briefly why I don’t stand among the growth worshippers. I’ve written an entire book on this if you want more detailed arguments, but perhaps the most important of all is this: growth is an abstract. It doesn’t mean anything on its own, like ‘activity’, ‘motion’, or ‘action’.

If we were to swap the word ‘action’ into the quotes above, we’d see the problem. If a politician promised “relentless focus on action”, we’d ask further questions – what actions? Who is acting? For what? Be more specific.

Talk of growth is so normalised that we accept it at face value, but we ought to ask the same questions: growth of what? For whom?

Growth in the abstract may or may not be a good thing. We always have to be more specific. There are plenty of forms of economic growth that we should resist, and industries that should be shrinking. Fossil fuels is one. AI is another, so massively inflated in value at the moment that it’s likely to punch a hole in the global economy any day now.

Some forms of growth are evidence of failure. Should we celebrate growth in the emergency tyre replacement sector if it actually reflects a breakdown in road maintenance spending and the proliferation of potholes?

Growth is also meaningless without saying who it is for, because context is everything. More for those who don’t have enough is vitally important, potentially life-saving, and that’s why it makes no sense to be anti-growth. Growth for people who already have more than they need, however, is pointless. It is a form of waste. In a context of extreme inequality, more for the richest is actively corrosive to society and to democracy.

Another reason to pause before talking about economic growth is that most people don’t understand it anyway. The vast majority of voters will tell you that it matters, because they are constantly primed to say so. A recent survey found that 87% of voters wanted a stronger focus on growth, which makes you wonder where it should come in a list of government priorities if number one isn’t high enough.

At the same time, the Royal Economic Society found that half the population can’t pick the definition of GDP out of a multiple choice question. We don’t know the god we worship.

What would happen if we stopped talking about it?

By all means let the statisticians calculate GDP, and let the treasury and the economics track it. But what if politicians paused every time they wrote ‘growth’ in a speech, crossed it out and put in something specific? Perhaps we could cut to the chase and talk more about what we really value. Higher wages, rather than higher economic growth. Security, a reliable pension. Funding for health and education. Work that pays and businesses that share the wealth. Safe and beautiful places to live, clean air and a thriving natural world.

What if, like Adam Smith did, we talked about improvements rather than growth?

Put a moratorium on mentions of growth in speeches, and politicians would have to be more specific about the improvements they seek. They’d need to tie their policies into the things that matter to people, rather than falling back on abstractions and assumptions. They would need to show how increased prosperity would reach ordinary citizens, what it would feel like to live in a healthier economy, how you would know that you were benefitting.

Dropping the economic jargon of GDP would also reduce the distance that people feel between themselves and politics. It would rebuild trust, and give voters more clarity on what politicians are actually suggesting.

And maybe we could put an end to the echo chamber while we’re at it, and end this sequence of prime ministers who all sound like each other.

A map showing legislation for balcony solar in each US state, with around half moving forward with it. Plug-in solar should be available in the UK by the end of the summer if all goes to plan, and will bring solar power within reach for millions of renters and low income households.

The culture warriors hate it, but London’s commitment to reducing air pollution under mayor Sadiq Khan has yielded a 40% drop in pollution related deaths.

Swedish railway operators have been painting the rails white to make them more reflective and reduce the risk of buckling during heatwaves.

Scientists and meteorologists, fired by the tens of thousands by the Trump administration, have rebuilt the Climate.gov website that their government deleted. They’re carrying on their work at Climate.us.

It’s been a very busy end of term round here. Lots of school visits to fit in, and I’m finishing the next draft of a children’s book, so not much time for the blog of late. It will likely remain fairly quiet over the summer, but I’m still here…

Recent highlights

• Inequality and the planetary boundaries
• Book review: We need to tax billionaires, by Gabriel Zucman
• The changing colours of the energy transition

A study in Nature offers this useful visual summary of the planetary boundaries, divided into deciles. In the case of climate change, the red segment below, we see that the richest 10% are responsible for 43% of carbon emissions.

The pattern repeats with the richest responsible of 23% of damage from land use change, 24% of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. For biodiversity loss the share is 37%, and water use at 18%. All of these, you will notice, breach the safe limit, which is marked by the red line near the centre of the graph. It’s even worse if you split the top 1%.

At the other end of the economic ladder, the poorest decile are responsible for relatively and are within the safe thresholds on all six measures here.

“Our analysis reveals extreme inequality in environmental footprints,” write the researchers, “highlighting the disproportionate responsibility of affluent groups in both developed and developing countries.” A reminder then, that while environmental action needs everyone, the need to reduce consumption applies first and foremost to the richest.