Kyle Devine is a professor of environmental studies with a particular interest in the music industry. He investigated the ecological impact of the music industry in a previous book, Decomposed. It didn’t cover the solutions, and that has become a follow-up. As the opening sentence spells out, “this book is about people in music who are reshaping what they do in light of the climate crisis.”

“My hope is that the story of how music connects to the climate crisis, while perhaps less consequential than heavy duty economic policy or hardcore climate science, will appeal to people in ways that those things don’t. Music is like that.”

Count me in, music being another big preoccupation of mine alongside sustainability. And off we go, into a section on new technical solutions in music, then a middle section on institutional solutions, and finally one on what music itself can offer to the climate crisis.

We begin with a company experimenting with different ways to make vinyl records. Then we get another company that regrinds old records to make new ones, then another trying to sell the idea of bioplastic records to audiophiles. The alarm bells begin to ring – is this actually a book about record production? I’m a third of the way in and it’s all been about records so far. Then the technical solutions section ends, with passing reference to other ways to listen to music.

This is an odd choice for a book published in 2026, when almost two thirds of all music listening is through streaming services. Once you account for radio and live performances, less than 10% of music listening is through physical formats of any kind. Vinyl is a sliver of that again, making the book about a very narrow aspect of the music industry.

The section on institutional solutions feels only slightly broader, looking at ClimateEQ’s carbon literacy programmes for people in music, and the IMPALA carbon calculator for the industry. Brian Eno’s EarthPercent features, which raises money for environmental charities through the music industry, and a group called FEAT that gets musicians to fund solar farms. I was surprised to find no mention of Reverb, which I would have considered the leading organisation pushing climate action forward in live music, certainly in America. Neither is there anything on festivals.

The final section feels limited in scope too. We read about Coldplay’s new approach to touring in some detail, including their app that gives fans discounts for using public transport. On music itself, and whether it has a role in the climate crisis, the book plunges into a discussion of cultural studies as a discipline, its origins and influence. As a cultural studies graduate myself, I’m all in favour of this, but I wondered where the case studies and examples had gone. The only artist that gets a look in is Bjork and her music video for Utopia, concluding that its vision of ecology “resembles a gated community” – a misreading of the text, in my opinion.

Devine’s central thesis is that the ‘recomposition’ of the music industry in response to the climate crisis doesn’t go far enough. Not because it needs better technologies or better songs, but because it’s a middle class phenomenon that doesn’t challenge underlying inequalities. Capitalism and consumerism, the drivers of the climate crisis, are untroubled by a greener music industry. “None of it goes where we truly need it to – not unless it passes through a class-based confrontation with capital.”

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it means the book doesn’t really value the projects it describes. Aside from vinyl records, it feels like the author doesn’t have any real enthusiasm for the subject. Recomposed is weighted down by its own scepticism and, for me at least, never quite finds its groove.

• Recomposed is available from Earthbound Books.

On the subject of heatwaves, studies in Nature Health have calculated that there were 50,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer, the hottest on record. Remember this number for the next time a climate denying nostalgist starts telling you about 1976.

Plug-in solar is a democratising force bringing the benefits of solar to people on lower incomes and in rented accomodation. It’s now arrived in the US. The UK is proving a little slower so far, with the panels legal as of September, but few on sale and it looks like next year will be the big one.

How do you get enormous wind turbine blades to site for installation? With a blade lifter, a truck that can carry an 80m blade at a sixty degree angle so that you can drive it – very slowly – through little villages or up mountain roads. The videos of this are majestic and absurd and highly recommended.

Also recommended, the new album While the flood rages, by contemporary classical composer Max Richter. It’s inspired by the Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, one of my favourite writers. If you know the novels, you’ll know the sorts of themes involved – the tension between science and nature, competing visions of salvation through technology or a retreat from it, the hubris of biotech versus the earthy rapport between a beekeeper and the hive. Explored musically, it’s an album that playfully contrasts orchestral and electronic sounds, field recordings from nature and the city, and occasional appearances from a wordless choir. The lovely concluding track, Now we can sing, holds back its human voices for the very end, a gentle and hopeful affirmation of humanity on the other side of dystopia. Here’s a review from The Line of Best Fit.

Recent highlights

• Let’s paint some roofs white
• The science of hope
• Should we put solar panels on railway lines?

I always mention this as an idea, and I always follow it up with the caveat that I don’t know any school that’s done it yet in the UK. Maybe that’s because it’s a bad idea. Or maybe they can be first with something that’s about to catch on.

Reflective white buildings are of course very normal in many places. Compare this Google Earth image of central Athens, Greece, to a similar roofscape from London, England.

In Athens most roofs and walls are white and you can pick out the ones that aren’t. London is the other way round, with a much greater mix of colours and surfaces, and a handful of lighter roofs here and there.

Places have their own architectural traditions, and these respond to weather and climate, so we expect these kinds of differences. Average temperatures in Athens run several degrees higher. Like most places where roofs are usually white, it’s hotter all year round and drier. London is built to withstand rain and low winter light.

The trouble comes when climate patterns change and architecture doesn’t, leaving us with cities that were built for cooler times. With the UK experiencing temperatures over 40C for the first time recently, and the hottest summer on record this year, it’s clear that our buildings weren’t designed for these extremes. There are lots of adaptations we should consider, but among the cheapest and easiest would be to start painting roofs white.

One place we could learn from here is New York City, which has run the NYC Coolroofs programme since 2009. Initially operating with volunteers, it now offers work placements as well, and paints a million square feet a year. Roofs are painted for free for schools and community facilities, and at low cost for everyone else.

Nearer to home, Cool Roofs France has been championing the solution since 2015. One of their early experiments was a school roof in Paris that was painted white across half of it, so that temperatures could be compared in the two classrooms below. The classroom with the white roof was on average 2.5C cooler throughout the summer, with the biggest difference recorded at 4.8C on a particularly hot day. Cool Roofs France has its own range of paints, network of contractors and advocacy for adaptation, and they calculate that they have saved over 5 million Euros in air conditioning costs.

Perhaps it’s time for something similar in the UK.

We can start with schools. As I’ve written about before, most of Britain’s schools were built in the 60s and 70s with a modular steel frame system that hasn’t aged very well. They come with flat black roofs and poor levels of insulation under them. Summer overheating is reaching chronic levels, and while there’s no central government funding for adaptation yet, everyone can afford a few buckets of white paint.

Any downsides to consider? The same heat reflective properties will work against us in winter, reducing the free heat from the sun that we would have got from darker surfaces. Since Britain doesn’t get much sunshine in the depths of winter, the positive effect in summer will massively outweigh the negatives in winter.

There’s another positive to consider as well: because the roofs themselves are less hot, there is less expansion and contraction of materials. This, in theory at least, prolongs the life of a roof. Some white paints are also waterproof and could help prevent leaking – another chronic problem in British schools.

Like any climate solution, it needs to be done well. You need the right paint for the roof. Some are suitable for flat roofs and others aren’t. There are specialist paints for concrete, bitumen or metal roofs, and even for painting glass skylights to reduce heat while still letting in the light. Specialist paint suppliers such as Rawlins can advise on this.

It’s the wrong time of year for this now, but come the spring, I think it’s time to start painting some roofs white. I’ll start with the black roof above my office, so I’m not recommending anything I wouldn’t do myself. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What I wanted to highlight this time around was the report’s subtitle, the science of hope. Perhaps as a corrective to their gloomy reputation, the authors of the report present four positive case studies of nature recovery, and what this teaches us about hope. It’s a useful overview of what hope means in environmental circles, what it doesn’t mean, and how we can foster it.

Hope is a complicated word. At its most simplistic, it’s used to express a preference about an unknown outcome. This can be trivial – I hope it doesn’t rain later. I hope there are pastries at the meeting. Maybe we should come up with another word for this sort of thing. It seems unfair on the word that hope is also a profound and practically inexpressible characteristic of the human soul, a seam endlessly mined by poets and prophets and philosophers and never entirely grasped.

Hope is often described as a feeling, a kind of general vague positivity that we either have or don’t have. In the English language hope is something that’s found or lost, rather than something built or nurtured. Or it’s given to us. “What gives you hope?” is the classic last question to the panellists at environmental events, to end things on a positive.

Even though we all understand what hope is and know what these expressions mean, it’s hard to articulate exactly what hope is. As St Augustine wrote about time: “if no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

Well, the authors of the Living Planet Report have some ideas, with their chapter on the science of hope. They draw on psychology and social cognitive theory. This is of course different from how other traditions would explain hope, including religious traditions, and they acknowledge that. But from this perspective, hope is “a process that keeps people engaged with difficult, uncertain challenges. It develops when people connect what they value to actions they believe can make a difference, even when success is not guaranteed.”

There are three parts to this process. The first is “a goal grounded in a person’s values, identity and culture”, and they suggest that this is more about what we want to protect than what we fear to lose. The second part is a pathway for action, some steps we can take towards that goal, no matter how uncertain we might be of getting there. Part three is agency – the ability to act on your intentions. Hope arises out of these three, building momentum as they are sustained and come to reinforce each other.

For conservation, which is what the Living Planet Report is all about, this kind of hope is important. It’s how we keep going long enough to see the change we want to see. It’s not optimism, which expects positive outcomes without us having to do anything. Neither is it false hope, which would hold back the facts or exaggerate the positives. Real hope is honest and adaptable.

It’s also collective, something that emerges as people combine their efforts in service of something larger than themselves. This is the biggest “engine of change”, say WWF and ZSL, and we need it because the challenges are so vast. Behind biodiversity collapse and climate change lie the drivers of a global economy and the profit imperative. These are huge systemic problems, and it is hope that will keep us on course.

“Goals provide direction. Pathways provide a route. Agency, especially collective agency, provides the conviction that effort matters. When these reinforce each other across time, transformation becomes possible.”

• Read the whole report here

That was a decade ago. I don’t need to tell you what happened next. Perhaps it’s enough just to guess how long it took before that first solar road was quietly removed, the press and the transport minister nowhere to be seen. Across the Atlantic, the entrepreneurs behind the original viral crowdfunder are still going, but their latest update showcases their product as a solar playground for schools. They got there in the end – durable ground-level solar is a great idea as long as you don’t insist on driving trucks over it.

This came to mind when reading about Sun-Ways, a Swiss start-up that puts solar panels on railway lines. These go in-between the rails, so there are no wheels going over them. There is a lot of vibration though, and a lot of dust. And you have to remove them every time you do routine maintenance on the line. So why bother?

Sun-ways have a couple of main arguments. The first is that if we want a rapid expansion of clean energy, we need places to put solar panels. Often they get put in fields, potentially (and unnecessarily) competing with agricultural production. You can put them on roofs, but that’s thousands of individual bespoke installations, making it slow and expensive. The space between rails is wasted space, and there’s a lot of it. It has one owner to negotiate with: if the railway company wants to do it, you can unlock a lot of land for solar all in one go.

Second, it’s really quick to install. They’ve designed an automated installation rig that can be pulled by a train, based on existing track-laying machines. It can install a kilometer of panels in a day, and the same machine can lift them again for maintenance. It’s like a rolling production line for installing solar, making it so much cheaper to install than a rooftop with all its scaffolding and ladders.

Other benefits include the fact that they’re practically invisible, tucked away into existing infrastructure. You can also use them to power the trains themselves – an idea pioneered by Riding Sunbeams.

Like the solar roads, there’s a lot of interest in between-the-rails solar. The pilot project in Switzerland will be followed by a bigger stretch of track in South Korea. Japan is interested, along with China, Spain, France and Canada. A separate project is running in India, which is always doing interesting things with trains.

Also like solar roads, there’s a better solution in plain sight if you scoot the whole thing sideways by a few feet. Solar roads are a silly idea – but solar pavements or town squares would be great, and those more sensible applications got buried in the hype and the failure. Similarly, why focus on that slim line of panels between the rails when there are railway embankments that could accommodate far more panels? They could be angled correctly, as flat to the ground isn’t optimal. They wouldn’t need to be removed for maintenance. They’d be cheaper, because they won’t need the vibration mats and heavy frames to cope with trains passing above them. And you can still install them from a rolling flatcar, just one with a crane.

I’m happy to be proved wrong on this and find solar railways everywhere in a few years’ time. What we don’t want to do is try this and fail, and then never get round to the more obvious way to do it. Just as there are better ways to make a solar road, there are almost certainly better ways to make solar railways than lay panels on the tracks.

So should we put solar panels on railway tracks? Sure, though we should be alert to the way that consumer capitalism idolises innovation over proven solutions. Imagine we had two million dollars, and we spent half on panels between the tracks, and half on panels next to the tracks. In five years’ time, my money would be on the trackside panels as the ones that generated more energy, saved more money and worked out better.

There are two good reasons for reusing buildings. The first is that construction has an enormous environmental impact. In an age of climate change, we need to keep emissions in check and should think twice about the carbon footprint of new steel and poured concrete. The second reason is that new buildings are always commissioned by those that can afford them, which means the towns and cities we live in are shaped by the richest. Opening up the spaces we already have can create places that are more welcoming, and where everyone can belong.

Betsky’s not an absolutist about this and new things will continue to be made, but it doesn’t need to be the default. Neither does it mean a slavish commitment to keeping everything the same, and he teases out the differences between preservation, renovation and reuse. The architecture profession has nothing to fear from a world that prioritises reuse: as the book goes on to show, there are endless possibilities for creative expression and imaginative ideas within a reuse context.

Besides, it’s nothing new. A brief history chapter looks at how people have always broken down and reassembled what they found around them, such as the Roman columns reused in Italian buildings. I was reminded of St Albans Abbey in my hometown, built out of stone harvested from the ruins of the Roman city of Verulamium. Even well known buildings may in fact be reused. This photo of the inside of the White House in 1952 shows that what stands today is an entirely different building inside that iconic facade.

That photo isn’t in the book, and it’s one of a great many things I looked up for myself along the way (see last week’s post on BlueCity for another). The book is packed with fascinating examples of warehouses and factories, workshops and railyards repurposed for housing or community centres. Some of them are high profile, such as the Tate Modern gallery in London, installed inside the shell of a power station. New York’s High Line linear park features, and the Shougang steel mill that served as the backdrop for the 2022 Winter Olympics. Others were new to me, like the public swimming pool in an old coking plant in Zollverein, Germany.

There’s room for more informal aspects of reuse as well, including squatting, with a section on Christiana in Copenhagen or DIY reuse projects in Manchester. Betsky writes about ‘dumpster diving’ and bricolage approaches with their cobbled together aesthetics, “architecture as hunting and gathering”. It doesn’t need to be permanent either, and a chapter on ‘ephemeral architecture’ investigates Burning Man and other festivals. Most impressive of these is Kumbh Mela, the Hindu festival that is held every 12 years and requires a temporary megacity on the banks of the Ganges. 660 million people attended over the month-long event in 2025, the busiest day peaking at 76 million people on site and earning it the distinction of the biggest gathering of human beings in history. Yes, I had to put the book down and read about that as well.

Reuse can be done at landscape scale and not just buildings, and I particularly enjoyed this chapter as it covered parks made out of highways, flyovers and railway lines, something I’ve written about before as an excellent way to create more inclusive and human-centric cities. It also covered ‘daylighting’ buried rivers, something we know about here in Luton, and Yu Kongjian‘s sponge parks, of which I am a big fan.

How do we shift towards this circular economy vision for buildings? Betsky wants to see reuse taught in architecture schools, resisting the siren call of monument building. The construction industry needs to evolve a complementary twin in the form of a deconstruction industry. Demolition is cheap and create huge quantities of useless waste. Deconstructing buildings is slower and more expensive, but saves materials for incorporating into new projects. The more buildings are built with dismantling in mind, the easier it will be for future generations, with buildings become material banks for reuse.

That’s a hopeful thought, pointing us towards an architecture that is forward looking while honouring the past. As Betsky says, “keeping a building is an act of optimism.”

• Don’t Build, Rebuild is available from Earthbound Books

More evidence that if you’re losing farmland to solar farms, you’re doing it wrong. The biggest agrivoltaic project in Italy has just opened. It’s called Big Fish, it’s paid for by Amazon, and it has the panels mounted on three metre gantries so that farming can carry on underneath.

It is now more expensive to hire an oil tanker to sail from the US to China than it is to send a rocket into space, according to Bloomberg. It’s $80 million for the tanker, up from $17 million before Trump’s attack on Iran. It’s $74 million for a SpaceX launch.

Brian Obara describes a nice participative design project from Kenya, where architects worked with residents to come up with new ideas for homes that stayed cooler and kept out mosquitos.

Friends of the Earth are hiring a community organiser for Luton, and should you be interested, you have three days left to get a job application in.

Recent highlights

• Mapping heat for a more resilient Brighton
• BlueCity’s circular economy hub
• Can Germany phase out fossil fuels by 2045?

We’re still getting used to that idea, with different interpretations of what that should mean. For the privileged, it means drinking English sparkling wine and congratulating yourself on not being poor. For people with serious health conditions, or working outdoors, or living on the top floors of tower blocks, it’s an altogether more challenging time and can even be deadly. Government statistics show 2,877 heat-associated deaths from the May and June heatwaves.

One place that is taking summer heat seriously is the coastal city of Brighton & Hove, which has just released a street-by-street analysis of heat across a 1km square of downtown. The urban heat island is a well known phenomenon, but if you want to do anything about it you need more detail on where it gets hottest and what the solutions might be. You can’t cool a whole city at once, but if you can identify specific locations that overheat and overlay that with data on where people gather, you can make a difference to citizen’s experience of heat.

The study was carried out by Hannah Dunsby and combined meteorological records for 2022 with LIDAR data that maps streets in fine detail and three dimensions, accounting for building heights, street furniture, trees and plants. They found that during heatwaves, it gets hottest in wide streets, in open spaces, and at transport hubs. This gives us some priorities.

For example, North Street is a busy road with little shade and prone to overheating. It has a series of bus-stops where people have to stand and wait in the heat. Those bus stops are good locations for cooling interventions.

A briefing paper on the research makes a series of recommendations, prioritising cooler spaces, creating shade, and cooling buses. Data mapping can spot homes at risk, and in music to my ears – schools at risk of overheating. I’ve done a lot of work on school overheating this year, including mapping exercises and surveying to identify problem areas of the country. More on that another time, but this kind of detail in specific places is exactly the kind of thing we need to build resilience.

There’s work to be done at the institutional level too, building “the summer equivalent of the winter machinery”. That refers to collaborative approaches that bring together social services, emergency responders, housing and community organisations. This already happens in winter to keep people safe, and we need the same for the summer. Not just for the 40C days that make the news, but the ordinary hot days in a warming city.

BlueCity is a business hub for the circular economy, with 55 different businesses operating out of the building. Because there are so many people researching and innovating around sustainability on one site, there’s no better place for entrepreneurs to set up and work amongst like-minded folks. There are architects, materials researchers, a company working on recycling solar panels. There are small ideas, like the start-up reducing marine micro-plastic with sustainable glitter. At the other end of the scale, another company is working on making Rotterdam container port sustainable.

Some of the businesses are complementary, such as the firm growing mushrooms on the used coffee grounds from the cafe. Another firm develops industrial applications such as dyes made from fungi. A brewer makes beer from purified rainwater collected off the roof, and the excess heat from the brewing vats is piped through to provide heating to the offices.

All of these businesses are working out of a building that is itself spectacularly repurposed. The Tropicana beach pool opened in 1980 with water slides and swimming pools under a big glass dome. It closed and sat empty for a few years before being overhauled in visionary fashion, initially by squatters and formalised over time. Some businesses are in rooms such as the salon or the changing rooms. Others are in spaces created within the dome, using reclaimed windows from building sites elsewhere in the city.

Obviously it’s best seen rather than described, so here’s a video from Biosphere Solar showing us around when they moved in:

Given this kind of track record, all big announcements on climate should be taken with a pinch of salt. But perhaps that’s a smaller pinch than it used to be. Last week Germany published a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. Some parts of that will be easier than others. Electricity generation has already made good progress. The trickier bit is the 36% of final energy consumption that is oil, and the 24% gas. Together that’s 60% of the country’s energy transition still to go, and it’s likely that the easiest stuff happened first. So it is realistic?

One reason for optimism is that the technologies to deliver lower emissions have fallen in price and improved in reliability. Saying you were going to phase out fossil fuels today is a whole lot more feasilble today than it was 15 years ago. Those early runners in 2008 and 2009 were betting on technologies that weren’t yet mature. It was a statement of hopeful intent more than a strategy. At that time the list of unanswered questions was much longer, with no good solutions for energy storage, and electric cars still an expensive sideshow.

Today the price of solar power and onshore wind have fallen so far that they are cheaper than fossil fuels. They’ve moved from alternative energy to the default choice, provided the grid can integrate them fast enough.

Other technologies are being adopted faster too. 2025 was the first year that saw more heat pumps installed in homes in Germany than gas boilers, marking a tipping point towards electric heat. That moment will come for electric cars too, currently running at around a third of new car sales.

Demand has shot up this year as people worry about the price of fuel, which brings us to this graph from the roadmap and another compelling reason for taking the target seriously.

Looking at fossil fuel imports, 95% of gas is imported, and 98% of oil. Renewable energy, on the other hand, is 100% German.

That’s a major dependency, and a clear motivation for the government. Now that other options are possible, the shift to clean energy isn’t just the right thing to do for the environment. It isn’t just a climate change policy. It’s an energy security measure. It always was, but that fact is now highlighted and underlined.

“It is not just extreme weather events around the world that demonstrate how urgently we need to do more to protect the climate,” Environment Minister Carsten Schneider said recently. “If the situation in the Strait of Hormuz determines whether people can still afford their commute to work, that is not a good state of affairs.”

This is another example of how the Trump’s wrecking ball to global climate action has swung and missed. The US may have been set back, but the chaos caused by his war in Iran has spurred everyone else to get off fossil fuels as fast as they can. All imported energy is vulnerable to disruption, and with Trump in charge, your supposed allies are just as likely to wreck your economy as your enemies.

Moving your economy off fossil fuels isn’t a bold and visionary thing to do any more. It’s the obvious thing to do, and more and more countries will do it.

I have heard points like this made by friends and relatives, often on lower incomes and in working class towns, unaware that this is a story told by the richest. Chris Goodall demonstrated that in his Climate Commentary newsletter this week, quoting exactly these points in articles from the Financial Times, the Telegraph and the Spectator. The latter was written by Matt Ridley, a Viscount who has a huge open-cast coal mine on his inherited estate.

In Ridley’s case, the conflict of interest is visible from space. Other wealthy people hide behind their newspapers. They use their tabloid mouthpieces to shape public opinion and protect their investments in the fossil fuelled status quo. Day after day, the drip-feed continues. Every mention of environmentalists is negative – doom-mongers, obsessives, fanatics, cultists. Climate action is never being suggested and rolled out, it’s being pushed, imposed, “rammed down our throats”. Everything is ramped up to hysterical extremes. ‘Net zero is a national suicide pact’, is the headline of the aforementioned Telegraph article.

For Possible, the answer lies in working with communities to deliver climate action that makes a visible difference – lower energy bills, warmer and more comfortable homes, more attractive public spaces. People don’t need to be persuaded on environmental talking points if they can see it working for themselves in their neighbourhood.

We have a similar approach at Ashden, and I’ve written before about projects like Energise Barnsley that are all about showcasing solutions for ordinary people. In my own work, I get to pursue practical climate action in schools and demonstrate the difference in energy savings, heatwave resilience, better playgrounds and cleaner air.

As Possible say, “climate action makes life better.” I wouldn’t be working on it if I didn’t wholeheartedly agree, and it’s why I’m a supporter of Possible.

Here’s their video:

End Times Fascism deserves some kind of award for the most depressing book title of the year. I’ll admit that my first reaction was ‘pass’, but I read a truly eye-watering book earlier this year called Promise me You’ll Shoot Yourself. Written by historian Florian Huber, it is compiled almost entirely from diary entries by ordinary Germans as the reality of the Nazi project dawns on them. If there’s one lesson to draw from that era it’s that you don’t look away when fascism is on the rise.

A lot of commentators have tied themselves in knots over the idea of fascism. In some circles it’s worse to imply someone is a fascist than to actually be fascist. Klein and Taylor helpfully reset the conversation by framing it as a recurring response to crisis. It’s not something we ‘go back to’, but a phenomenon that spirals through history. It re-emerges in different forms and it doesn’t look the same each time.

“If we are waiting for soldiers goose-stepping in formation, we’ll miss the venture capitalists and their automonous weapons. If we are looking for yellow stars, we’ll miss the facial-recognition databases and the algorithmic threat ratings.”

In a helpful re-framing, they argue that revolutions are an uprising of the weak, who hope to transform society. Fascism is the revolt of the strong. Their aim is not to transform but to defend – whether that is nation, family, religion, or existing wealth and power structures. They weaponise existing discontent, create alliances around it and turn it against a scapegoat.

This is a fabulous distraction technique for capitalists. People feel disenfranchised and excluded, but with the right story that anger and resentment can be directed downwards. The problem is not the billionaires but the immigrants and the Muslims, the trans folk, the weak, the woke and the empathetic.

Our present version of fascism, the book suggests, is an alliance between religious, tech and nationalist interests, and “every part of its machinery is built for profit.” While the people driving it aren’t more dangerous than some historical figures we could name, the world itself is a more dangerous place. It’s a world with nuclear weapons, with AI, with gigantic inequality, and in the throes of an ecological crisis that can only be solved with global cooperation.

To make matters worse, there are people who have not just given up on fixing this world, but want to accelerate its end.

There is a strand of Christian theology that teaches that Jesus will return to earth in an apocalytic reckoning. For those that hold this view literally, news of violence and catastrophe can be interpreted as evidence of the end times. It’s a small step to move from mourning disaster to celebrating it as prophecy fulfilled. Another small step, and you can argue for instigating the war and disaster that will precipitate the messianic age. As the book demonstrates, there are people in the highest offices of the White House and the Pentagon who make this argument. See also Israel, where Netanyahu’s campaign against Gaza is officially called ‘The War of Redemption’ and which uses an AI targetting system called ‘The Gospel’.

There is no reason to work for peace if the better world lies on the other side of Armaggedon, and religious extremists aren’t the only ones pursuing that logic. The tech industry believes a version of this too. Sometimes the alliance is direct. Peter Thiel – founder of Palantir, AI partner to the Israeli military – gives lectures on the end times and says Greta Thunberg represents the antichrist. This would be hilarious if it weren’t exactly the kind of sleight of hand redirection we should be looking out for.

As Klein and Taylor describe, there’s a strong messianic streak to the tech industry’s AI fervour, which has “more in common with an ecstatic religious faith than with recognisable corporate projections based on science, engineering or markets.” Some openly describe the creation of super-intelligence as summoning a digital god. This god will usher in a new age of abundance, which may well lie on the other side of chaos and destruction. Just as the faithful are raptured from the apocalypse, the elites will ride out the destruction on private islands, luxury bunkers, floating cities or offworld space colonies.

For us mortals, largely disposable in this vision of the future, a natural reaction is to defend what we’ve got. The result is a rising nationalism, militarised borders, and culture wars against minorities of all kinds.

It’s not the only response, and the book closes with an alternative vision of the future. Fascism may spiral through history, but so do movements towards justice and cooperation. The people of Minnesota pushed back against fascist forces on their streets, showing us that solidarity and resistance is possible. A kind and inclusive politics isn’t naive and doomed to fail, as Zohran Mamdani demonstrated in New York, and Hannah Spencer showed us in Manchester. The story told here is “not one of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed.”

Where others see an escape to a technological or religious paradise, we can practice a politics of ‘hereness’, which has just as much a claim to the future. In a pleasing echo of this website’s title, they close with an appeal to a “proudly earthbound” politics – let us live on earth as if we mean to stay.

• End Times Fascism is available from Earthbound Books