By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3^rd October 2026

If a third runway is built at Heathrow, what will be the impact on the wealth of the nation? It will cost us somewhere between £23.4bn and £62.5bn. These are not my figures; they weren’t calculated by environmental groups, but by the Department for Transport.

For decades, government ministers have told us that airport expansion is essential for “growth”. As chancellor, Rachel Reeves claimed that a third runway at Heathrow would add 0.43% to GDP, figures we later discovered came from a report commissioned by the airport. The transport department’s own analysis concluded that the real addition to GDP would be between 0.03% and 0.05%: eight to 14 times less. Against this, it weighed the social and environmental costs of the project, to reveal a massive net loss. It found that a third runway would cause major harm to the health and wellbeing of up to 3 million local people.

But even these figures don’t capture it. The climate breakdown caused by the runway affects the entire planet, yet the costs to other countries aren’t counted. So again we must ask, why does the government support it?

Or does it? Though Heathrow expansion remains official policy, when asked at the weekend, Andy Burnham said the runway was “contested” and “principally it’s a matter for London and London MPs”. That sounds hopeful.

We also learned that the project has been delayed yet again. Though Heathrow announced last year that its plans were “shovel-ready”, it now admits the runway would take four years longer to build than it claimed: the estimated completion date is now 2039.

By then, or so we must hope, a government might have decided to take the climate impact seriously. If so, the new runway would need to be shuttered the moment it opened. Otherwise, according to the government’s Climate Change Committee, “almost all CO₂ emissions in 2050 will be from aviation”. Heathrow’s expansion alone, the committee says, would cause more carbon emissions by 2054 than “any other sector of the economy”.

And even this is not the end of it. The committee considers only the carbon dioxide planes produce, but the other impacts are even greater. A paper in the journal Atmospheric Environment suggests that, over 100 years, the nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, soot, volatile organic products, water vapour and other compounds released or formed in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere by planes raise the heating caused by flying by 115%. Over 20 years, they raise it by an astonishing 517%.

Given that crucial Earth systems may be approaching their tipping points, and heating today triggers further greenhouse gas releases from forests, wetlands and permafrost, the 20-year horizon is crucial. But these other compounds are considered in neither international treaties nor the UK’s Climate Change Act. The impact of flying is officially and massively underestimated.

While the heating effects of almost all other sectors can be greatly reduced by technology, there are simply no good solutions for aviation. Successive governments have justified airport expansion plans with the promise of “sustainable aviation fuel”. Mostly they mean turning biomass into kerosene, which is even worse than using fossil fuels. If this substitute is to reach any kind of scale, it will either swallow up existing cropland, driving starvation, or it will cause the expansion of cropland into forests, wetlands and other habitats, accelerating the environmental crisis. An analysis by the Royal Society found that meeting existing UK aviation demand (never mind future growth) with energy crops “would require around half of UK agricultural land”. That’s the opposite of sustainable.

“Sustainable aviation fuel” can also mean synthetic fuels made from captured CO₂ and green hydrogen. But the Royal Society found that for existing aviation, we’d need to use between five and eight times the UK’s entire renewable electricity capacity. And still, aeroplanes would release a lethal chemical cocktail – not just CO₂ but those other compounds – into the high atmosphere, so only a fraction of the problem would be solved. Worldwide, a paper in the journal One Earth found that even with a wildly unrealistic programme of technological change, in which fossil jet fuels were phased out completely by 2040, the global heating caused by aviation would more than double by 2070, thanks to rising demand.

As for hydrogen-, ammonia- or battery-powered commercial aircraft, they all fail on technical or safety grounds, even before we ask where the power comes from. The “prototypes” endlessly showcased by the airlines, which never get beyond the artist’s impression, are nothing but “perceptionware”, designed to solve political problems, not technical ones.

If Heathrow expansion goes ahead, passenger numbers in the UK are forecast to rise from 299 million in 2025 to 491 million in 2050. As other sectors decarbonise, the proportion of climate breakdown caused by flying climbs and climbs, until planes account for almost all of it.

The only effective strategy is to reduce demand. There’s a progressive means of doing so: the frequent flyer levy. Wealth and flights are strongly linked. In 2024, 48% of England’s population did not fly at all. But 5% of the population took five or more flights abroad, and these account for 33% of all journeys. Increasing demand has been almost entirely driven by frequent flyers, who are highly concentrated in the highest income quintile. The levy would not be charged on the first flight someone took in any year, but it would escalate with every additional flight.

This is just, proportionate and – unlike all the techno-bollocks – immediately dispatchable. Otherwise, we continue to subsidise a wealthy, selfish minority with our money, our health, our wellbeing and the degradation of the living planet. How is that fair?

What government support for airport expansion shows is that “growth” is simply an excuse for giving powerful lobby groups what they want. When asked whether growth was more important than net zero, Reeves replied: “Well, if it’s the No 1 mission, it’s obviously the most important thing.” That’s another way of saying money is more important than human life. But, as the figures show, it was never about growth at all. It was always about meeting the demands of the airport lobby and wealthy passengers.

Now we wait on Burnham. Will the flight of reason continue? Or will human and planetary welfare at last outweigh the lobbyists?

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24^th September 2026

I’ve spent my working life covering neglected issues. But few are neglected like the devastating chronic condition ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome). In severe cases, the illness shuts down people’s lives almost entirely, causing an extreme loss of energy and a wide range of physical and cognitive symptoms that can prevent patients from working, socialising and, sometimes, even moving or eating. Yet these people have been more or less airbrushed from our minds.

To find out what this neglect looks like in practice, this week I put out a call on Bluesky asking people with ME/CFS about their recent experiences of treatment. I was immediately inundated with horrifying testimonies. “I’ve just been completely abandoned”; “a 10-year waiting list for treatment”; “we’ve given up seeking medical support”; “stuck in limbo”; “I just felt utterly unheard, invalidated”. I’ve been sent hundreds of shocking and heart-rending accounts.

Exact numbers are hard to establish, but in the UK alone, an estimated 400,000 people live with the condition. It affects women far more than men, by a ratio of about 4:1, according to a study in England. The number of people with Long Covid, some of whom meet the diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS, was estimated in 2024 at 2 million in England and Scotland.

You might have imagined politicians and the media would be all over it. Instead, this great social crisis is met with silence or worse. Some outlets, despite the overwhelming weight of evidence, have mocked or trivialised these conditions.

There’s a long, dark history here, rooted in centuries of dismissal of predominantly female illnesses as “hysterical”, and amplified in recent decades by government attempts to reduce the benefits bill and insurers’ attempts to reduce payouts. If you can establish that a condition is caused by malingering, poor self-care or a negative attitude, you won’t have to cough up.

Official guidance in many countries was informed by a series of deeply flawed studies that purported to show these illnesses could be treated with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), or graded exercise therapy (GET).

In a remarkable triumph for patients and their advocates, who, after years of campaigning, at last obtained crucial data which had been withheld from them, the dominant studies were comprehensively discredited. In 2020, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) found that the quality of all the research promoting these therapies as curative treatments for ME/CFS was either “low” or, in most cases, “very low”. In 2021, it stopped recommending these therapies as primary treatments. We now know CBT cannot treat the condition (though it can sometimes help patients to come to terms with it), while GET is not only useless but actively dangerous, as exercise can trigger one of the most devastating ME/CFS symptoms: post-exertional malaise (PEM). PEM robs people of their remaining energy, rendering many patients bedbound, sometimes incapable of almost all movement.

Since then, two other things have happened. At the inquest into the death of a young ME/CFS patient, the coroner ruled that provision in the health service for patients with severe ME “was and is nonexistent”. Something would have to be done. And a number of potential scientific breakthroughs, some very recent, have begun identifying possible biological causes of both ME/CFS and Long Covid. Now, or so we should hope, it’s undeniable.

So what has changed as a result of these shifts? Alongside the horror and heartbreak in the testimonies of the people who emailed me, I was struck by the sense of sheer relief that someone, anyone, was asking the question.

Many said they are still being treated as if they have a psychological illness, and still being pushed into GET and CBT. One patient told me: “I’ve gone from relatively mild to now mostly house- and bedbound, largely thanks to repeated attempts at graded exercise and ‘pushing through’.” A few days ago, an NHS clinic told another patient to undertake “graded exercise” and “simply to walk, despite the fact I’m a wheelchair user”.

One mother told me “the consultant cardiologist recommended a graded exercise programme” and “a treadmill test” for her bedbound son. When she told him this contradicted Nice guidelines, he replied: “Well, what do you want me to do?” Another made the same challenge to her GP, but the doctor “denied this strongly and reiterated to my daughter that she should do the exercises”. This is very common: many doctors, I’m told, seem unaware of the new guidelines and react defensively when challenged. In many practices, GET has simply been rebranded as “building tolerance” or “pacing up” or “a little more activity each day”.

Patients report being treated with “contempt and derision”. Loads are still being offered CBT. Some have been propelled by NHS doctors towards quack private “cures”, now offered by a growing industry that preys on people’s desperation.

Others tell me they’ve not been pushed into inappropriate treatments, but “that’s only because I receive no treatment for it whatsoever”. Some have had to explain to their doctors what ME/CFS is. And it gets worse. I’ve been contacted by parents who have been accused of fabricating and inducing illness and even referred to social services, because doctors who seem to know nothing about ME/CFS believe they are making up their children’s symptoms.

It’s as if nothing has been learned. Perhaps that’s not surprising. A freedom of information request to NHS England found that, of the tens of thousands of practitioners who would benefit from it, after a year, only 74 had completed the new learning module on ME/CFS guidance. Meanwhile, as recently as last summer, the Department for Work and Pensions was still teaching its trainees elements of the old, discredited view of the condition. And, as the Liberal Democrat MP Tessa Munt, a hero of this story, tells me: “The piecemeal offerings in the government’s final delivery plan are not going to touch the system-wide failings.”

It’s not only the UK. I’ve been contacted by patients from around the world. In Sweden and Australia, official guidance still recommends GET and CBT. In Switzerland, I’m told, treatment is spiralling backwards, with a new wave of psychologisation. Norway, Finland and the Netherlands, despite their progressive medical reputations, sound like a waking nightmare for ME/CFS patients.

Of course, as there is no effective treatment, it’s a difficult situation for doctors as well as patients. But even worse than no solutions is false solutions, and a dangerous, gaslighting, even punitive approach to a terrible disease.

Across the decades, millions of people have been neglected, dismissed and mistreated, and still it goes on. We need to ask why so many patients have been abandoned, why discredited and dangerous treatments continue to be prescribed and why ignorance and neglect still dominate, in the health system and beyond. In other words, there has seldom been a stronger case for a public inquiry.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17^th September 2026

Where is lawbreaking not just visible, but designed to be seen? Where is antisocial behaviour worn as a badge of honour? Where is pleasure gained directly from causing distress? And where is reckless endangerment often ignored by the police or treated with the mildest of punishments? The answer is on the roads.

Last month, three men in the West Midlands were convicted of street racing. Two were driving at over 80mph in a 40mph zone. The third clocked over 90mph in a 30mph zone. The West Midlands has long been blighted by organised racing, sometimes involving 200 cars or more and hundreds of spectators. The result is a long catalogue of deaths and life-changing injuries, including some caused when racers have left the road and ploughed into onlookers or pedestrians. And there are plenty more accidents where the police have little idea whether racing is to blame, for as soon as they happen, the drivers disperse.

The West Midlands is one of the few places in the UK where the police are actively trying to stop antisocial driving. An injunction bans street racing and dangerous tricks such as “drifting” (long sideways skids) and “doughnutting” (making the car spin on the spot). The local police commissioner has warned that reckless drivers “will face the full force of the law … including seizure of your vehicle and imprisonment”. But are the courts listening?

Of the three men convicted at Birmingham magistrates court, one received a suspended sentence, a £272 fine, 150 hours of community work and a two-year driving ban. Another was handed a £1,275 fine and seven penalty points: in other words, he could step out of the court and back into his car. The man who did over 90mph in a 30mph zone got a £253 fine and a 56-day driving ban. He’ll be back on the roads in November. All appear to have kept their cars.

If these men had caused the same level of endangerment by any other means, it’s hard to believe they would have got off so lightly. But in dozens of ways, driving gets special treatment.

There’s a similar racing culture in mid-Wales, where I lived until 2012. Night after night, a convoy of cars with exhausts modified to be as loud as possible would race past, at 50mph or more in a 30mph zone. They would start at around 10pm and continue some nights until 2am, going round the nearby roads in a loop. As soon as I’d got my infant daughter to sleep, they’d roar past and wake her up again.

Calls to the police were useless: they told me to take down the number plates and “report the incident”. When I did so, they explained, in effect, that I was wasting my time, as I couldn’t prove the drivers were breaking the speed limit. In fact, their advice was counterproductive: when I went outside to take the plates, the young men jeered, gave me the finger and accelerated. It seemed that shock and disgust was what they craved. And this was before TikTok, where drivers can achieve much wider notoriety.

The first young man to “do a ton” (100mph) down my high street in Wales on his motorbike became a local hero. Soon afterwards, he rode into a wall and died. Other drivers killed their passengers, hit pedestrians or forced other cars off the road. When people were killed or injured, the drivers were prosecuted and lightly punished, but there was little effort to address the underlying culture. Some men went straight back into the convoys when they regained their licences. I’m told that nothing has changed, despite the default 20mph speed limit now applied to residential areas across Wales. Every year a new cohort of young men joins the local urban racetrack.

Now I live in Devon, where there’s a different culture of antisocial driving. Here it’s mostly middle-aged men in “lifted” pickup trucks, which have been modified to be as loud and smoky as possible. Two local SUVs have been refitted to “roll coal” from twin exhaust towers mounted behind the cab, releasing a dense black cloud of soot when the driver hits the “smoke switch”. Adapting your truck for this purpose means buying a “delete kit” to bypass the vehicle’s emissions control system, retuning the engine and fitting bigger injectors. The practice emerged in the US, both as an anti-environmental protest and as a form of amusement. It is largely deployed against cyclists, pedestrians and electric vehicles. I’ve seen these two trucks doing it, blinding the drivers behind and choking everyone around. Of course it’s illegal. But it doesn’t seem to be a priority for the police in my area.

What we see here are manifestations of petro-masculinity: a violent, misogynistic, climate-denying version of manhood, expressed through an antisocial driving culture. Some of the modified trucks have decals saying “Stop the Boats” or “Save Our Children” (who are apparently being brainwashed by LGBTQ+ cultural Marxists). This is the Magafication of transport – a vehicle that carries some of the worst aspects of US culture and politics into the UK.

It’s the extreme end of a much wider trend. In the UK last year, 52% of the new cars on sale were SUVs. Not only do the ever-rising bonnets of these trucks make it harder for drivers to see pedestrians and cyclists, especially children, but higher and heavier cars are also more likely to cause deaths or serious injuries when they hit people: children under nine are three times more likely to be killed if they’re hit by an SUV than by a regular car.

And what are they for? On narrow country lanes round here, tourists in these “off-road” vehicles won’t back up if it means touching a hedge, in case the high-gloss finish on their Wankpanzer Childkiller gets scratched. In one of the poshest parts of London, the Chelsea Truck Company advertises “iconic urban 4x4s”. “Iconic” appears to mean huge. But what the hell is an “urban 4×4”? And why is it legal?

Isn’t it obvious that selfishness on the road changes us as a society? The belief that drivers should be allowed to do whatever they please, regardless of the impact on others, mounts the pavement and travels deep into our lives. If this is to be a decent, inclusive country that values human life, then the law and its enforcement should match that aspiration. But when the roads are used to amplify and celebrate a dangerous, antisocial culture, we are driven towards a very dark place.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 10^th September 2026

Pinch yourself, it’s happening again. Here is a Labour government spending a vast amount of political capital to earn tiny material gains, while risking huge political losses. It occurred repeatedly under Keir Starmer, and now – with the impending decision to approve further gas and oil drilling in the North Sea – it is happening under Andy Burnham. You rack your brains to explain it, but no rational explanation comes.

Burnham is studiously cryptic about his reasons. His clearest statement to date goes as follows: “There is a resource there. When people are struggling, we can’t ignore that.” Does he mean that oil and gas workers are struggling? If so, this decision will be of little use to them. The Jackdaw gasfield, likely to be approved this week, will generate a grand total of 27 direct full-time jobs. The Rosebank oilfield, whose approval is likely to follow soon, will support 450 UK-based jobs during its lifetime. Yet the UK’s net zero economy directly employs 300,000 people, and a further 400,000 jobs are planned. The rest of the green economy employs more than 600,000. A just transition for fossil fuel workers, securing jobs in the green economy, is better for everyone.

Or does he mean energy consumers are struggling? The gas in the Jackdaw field will make a tiny contribution to our supply and no significant difference to either our energy bills or our energy security. Switching to renewables makes us far better off in both respects. Any oil produced by the Rosebank field is unlikely to be refined in Britain, as we no longer possess much capacity for handling oil of that kind. And as for the national accounts, a recent estimate suggests that the climate damage caused by the fields’ extra emissions would outweigh any economic benefits several times over.

In fact, the two greatest threats to the global economy might now be climate breakdown, which, as a wide range of economists and eminent organisations forecast, threatens comprehensive economic collapse, and the AI bubble, which the governor of the Bank of England warns could burst with dire consequences. Then people will really be struggling. Yet our government and others cheerfully accelerate both forces – claiming, as ever, that the industries driving them will unleash “growth”. Growth in repossessions, perhaps.

While the small amount of fossil fuel these two fields will produce allows politicians to argue that their climate impacts can be ignored, the diplomatic implications are considerable. The only chance of preventing climate catastrophe is international agreement based on mutual trust. To its credit, the UK – while falling short of what many of us would like to see – has been a leader in these efforts. But when our government refuses to leave fossil fuels in the ground, its credibility diminishes – leaving its negotiating position weakened.

Burnham might believe this decision will get Reform UK and the Conservatives off his back. Of course it won’t. He might imagine it will appease Donald Trump, but you can’t appease Trump. Whatever you give him, he will always want more.

As for the political implications, here the disparity between gain and pain becomes truly enormous. The approval of these fields is a defining issue for many Labour MPs and the voters they fear they might lose. The policy could scarcely be better designed to give the final push to voters who are minded – after so many disappointments since 2024 – to abandon Labour for a progressive alternative.

If Zack Polanski, the Green party leader for England and Wales, wins the seat Keir Starmer has just vacated, this could be a major reason why. Burnham’s North Sea policy is the kind of battle Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney would have urged him to wage – let’s stick it to the Labour left, mwahaha – which is a major reason why Starmer is no longer prime minister.

Few in power seem to understand the fire they are playing with. Last week, the environment secretary, Angela Eagle, appeared to acknowledge that we face the risk of potentially catastrophic environmental breakdown and urged us to store some extra food in our homes. The way she put it suggested that either she hasn’t grasped the magnitude of what we face, or she is trivialising the issue: “If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven’t.”

Right. So let’s imagine one of several possible disasters some of us have long been warning of arrives. As a result of harvest failures caused by climate breakdown, severe transport disruptions or – and this now looks alarmingly plausible – sudden systemic collapse in the food sector, the supermarket shelves empty, more or less overnight. We know that the UK government refuses, without explanation, to maintain strategic food reserves. So there are no government supplies, either. As our beans and crackers run out, the emergency services visit all 29 million of our homes. With what? Tea and sympathy? Sorry, no tea. Another slice of sympathy?

Certainly, those of us who have the money and capacity to store food should do so: after all, no one else has our backs. But the idea that such individuated solutions would be any use in the face of societal catastrophe is neoliberal nonsense. As always, it is the poor and excluded, with neither the cash nor the space to lay down significant supplies, who will be hit first and worst. Social breakdown would happen in days. The UK government, then, is being serious about neither the measures required to prevent climate catastrophe nor the measures required to survive it.

The sense in almost every nation is of governments failing to take seriously the most serious of issues, while spending immense political resources on topics that scarcely affect our welfare (such as a few thousand people crossing the Channel in small boats). Or even – as is the case with North Sea oil and gas – using their scarce political capital to make things worse for everyone, including themselves.

Our government is not a doomsday cult like the Trump government, creepily fascinated by the “end times”, as the US vice-president seems to be. But in terms of outcome, is there much difference?

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 2^nd September 2026

Damn the electorate. They’re so impatient. No sooner do they get a new leader than they want another one. Those ingrates are already starting to grumble about Andy Burnham. Maybe the country is becoming ungovernable. Perhaps it’s social media. Or a consumerist culture, always picking the next shiny thing. Perhaps we’re addicted to drama. As we’re on our sixth prime minister in 10 years, and as similar levels of discontent surface in many other countries, these claims are recited across the media. What’s wrong with us?

Yet our disgruntlement is entirely rational. We give up so quickly on our prime ministers because they give up so quickly on us. Though it may involve different issues, it is always the same betrayal: the public interest is sacrificed for the sake of a tiny number of immensely wealthy people. And it tends to happen almost immediately.

The latest example, which has triggered both fury and grim resignation, is Burnham’s backtracking on his intention to cap political donations. It was hardly a radical policy: he proposed that no person would be able to give more than £500,000 to a political party in one year. That would still have granted the very wealthy disproportionate influence over our politics.

I have long believed that the only fair system is one in which there should be no private donations at all beyond a standard, fixed membership fee. Otherwise voters will always take second place to money. But at the moment there is no cap, which ensures that billionaires can buy political parties and their platforms. So a £500,000 maximum, pathetic as it is, is at least a start. In a subsequent pledge, Burnham suggested that it could gradually be lowered.

Now, we are told, even this high cap has been abandoned: the representation of the people bill will concentrate instead on introducing Keir Starmer’s risible proposals, which are intended to limit donations sent from abroad but not from within the UK: as if billionaire donors and their wealth managers have no expertise in transferring money from one account to another. The loopholes are designed in.

Burnham’s buckling on this issue is not a small matter. It cuts to the quick of what this country is and how it works. It has immense implications for democracy, for policy formation and for every other aspect of civic life. What it means is that the ultra-rich will continue to own our politics and our country. Succumb to the power of money and you will find yourself, like Starmer, tongue-tied and immobilised, unable to rise to any challenge that requires a confrontation with oligarchic might. In other words, get this wrong and every other wrong thing follows.

The official reason for Burnham’s U-turn is that trade unions objected: they have long channelled large sums into the Labour party. I doubt this is the real explanation; most of the donations Burnham received for his leadership campaign came from large private donors. Almost half was supplied by Lord Sainsbury, who was also a major funder of the Starmer project. Union money scarcely featured.

But even if Burnham has retreated from his promise for the sake of the unions, I believe trade union funding is also problematic. It ensures that sectoral interests are elevated above the general interest. For example, Labour governments know they can safely bash benefit recipients, who aren’t unionised, while they tread very carefully – far too carefully in my view – around the interests of oil workers. And if the unions believe that an uncapped system works for them, they are deluded. They can never match the spending power of billionaires, whose interests in most cases are diametrically opposed to those of their members.

The power of the ultra-rich is now manifest in every policy governments do adopt and don’t adopt. We see it in the new protest laws and their applications, which become more absurd by the week. A few days ago, seven protesters who painted “Gaza is not 4 sale” on Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course in Scotland were charged with malicious damage “having a terrorist connection”. Labelling protesters “terrorists” is part of a long-running programme to ensure that no one dares protest about anything any more. This programme has been rolled out across the world, through model legislation drawn up by junktanks funded by some of the richest people on Earth. Just as it did in the 18th century, an ever more extreme defence of property keeps pace with a growing concentration of wealth.

We see it in the way that datacentres have been labelled “critical national infrastructure”, enabling the government to bypass the usual planning process and impose them on communities, regardless of their impacts on local people’s quality of life, on water resources, energy supply and climate breakdown. Again, similar measures are being imposed in other countries at the behest of the same billionaire-funded groups. The role of governments appears to have been reduced to nodding them through.

We see it in the Burnham government’s insistence this summer, in the midst of shattering droughts, heatwaves and fires, on launching a consultation that proposes radically curtailing the transition to electric vehicles. I believe there is only one possible explanation for this policy: lobbying by corporations and their shareholders. Their interests appear to outweigh those of the living planet and its 8 billion people.

If our country and many others are becoming ungovernable, it is not because of the people. It is because the ultra-rich have smashed the system. The electorate and the MPs who might seek to represent us pull the political levers, but nothing happens. They might replace the leader, but the new one promptly repeats the “mistakes” that caused the eviction of the old one. It makes you wonder: what threat do the oligarchs present that outweighs even the threat of losing power?

Whatever the reason may be, disillusionment is an inevitable result of such betrayals. I think most people want stability. I think most people want to be able to trust their governments. We don’t like in-built obsolescence in our leaders any more than like it in our phones. I don’t want to see Burnham go the way of Starmer. But I know he will succeed only if he defends the public interest against the power of money. So what’s stopping him?

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 13^th August 2026

When a business makes long-term plans, they call it prudence. When a government makes long-term plans, they call it communism. Any sustained state intervention attracts the prefix “Soviet-style”, and triggers vicious attacks across the billionaire media. So governments have developed a bias against long-term thinking. This may explain why we no longer maintain strategic food reserves.

In Britain, where soils have parched, market analysts warn that we’re facing the most severe food security crisis in decades. In normal years, crop failures at home don’t threaten our security, thanks to global trade. This is one of the reasons why hunger and famines are rarer and less deadly than they used to be. But this is not a normal year, because the problem is now global.

Similar impacts are hitting farmers across Europe and in the US, whose wheat production this year is forecast to be lower than at any point since 1971. Until a few weeks ago, harvest forecasts in Canada were excellent, now its spring wheat is also shrivelling in hot and dry conditions.

Ukraine has had a good growing season, but export forecasts have been cut as a result of Russia’s attacks on its ports. At the same time, crucial global pinch-points for food and farming supplies are tightening: Donald Trump’s aimless war with Iran has caused major reductions in shipping through the strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea and the Suez canal. These have become essential trade routes for fertiliser and, more recently, food, thanks to the Middle East’s emergence as a major re-export hub.

One impact of these disruptions has been to divert more shipping through the Panama canal. But the canal is now afflicted by drought, which has led to restrictions on ships’ draught (depth under water). The global circulation on which our food security depends no longer looks reliable.

It’s not just that these impacts can immediately restrict the availability of food, even in wealthy importers such as the UK (poorer nations in the Global South are, of course, hit much harder). It’s that they also land on a global food structure that has become systemically fragile. It is now highly exposed to the risk of cascading collapse that nearly brought down the financial system in 2008. In fact, it suffers from very similar dysfunctions. The government knows this, because a report by its own security advisers warns that our food supply is “at strategic risk of catastrophic failure” by 2030. It responded by suppressing the report.

As with all potential system failures, it’s impossible to say where the tipping point may be. But what we can say is that if such an event occurs, the impacts would be beyond contemplation. It could be the most deadly global crisis in modern history.

A world in which governments hold strategic stockpiles has a better chance of weathering either a temporary shortfall or a systemic failure. If food reserves were big enough, they would buy us enough time to rebuild the system. In their absence, if the food system collapses, so does society.

The UK once held strategic food reserves, albeit very limited. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, our governments decided they were no longer necessary, as private retailers would maintain sufficient stocks. As the National Preparedness Commission points out, this policy coincided with decisions by the big retailers to stop holding stocks and switch to a just-in-time system: goodbye warehouses, hello logistics. No subsequent government appears to have noticed that its food-security assumptions are based on conditions that no longer exist. Perhaps they looked away out of the fear of being labelled interventionist. Perhaps they fear criticism more than crisis.

Today, as far as I can tell, the government’s sole food storage intervention is a single unpublicised paragraph on its Prepare website. It instructs us to “Put together an emergency kit of items at home. This could include: Non-perishable food that doesn’t need cooking … how much you need will vary based on your own circumstances.” Invaluable advice, I’m sure. That scarcely anyone has seen it, that many people have no space for an emergency food store and no money to buy it with is just bad luck. Perhaps we don’t deserve to survive.

I write as though I’m confident that the UK does not maintain stockpiles. For several years, I have been asking the environment department this simple question: does it or does it not hold them? The Conservatives were honest enough to say “no”. But since Labour took office, it has repeatedly failed to answer. When I asked again last week, it sent me a long disquisition on related subjects, but signally failed to answer the question. I then asked why it hadn’t answered, and received no reply to that either. I find this response more eloquent than a candid “no”. It tells me two things: “the answer’s still no” and “we know the policy is wrong”. Otherwise, it would be happy to tell me about it.

The government also told me: “The UK has a highly resilient food system, drawing on both strong domestic production and international trade and we do not expect the recent dry weather to have any impact on national food security.” This claim, which defies warnings from the security services, market analysts and the food trade itself goes beyond complacency. It’s denial.

As far as I can tell, since he became prime minister, Andy Burnham and his office have not said one word in public about the climate crisis.On Wednesday he chaired an emergency Cobra meeting to discuss the extreme heat, the drought and the wildfires. But, at the time of writing, there has yet to be a public statement about what has caused this crisis, and how we might cause less of it.Yet No 10 did find time last week to intervene on Westminster council’s plan to limit vertical drinking in Soho. Good to know it is laser-focused on the crucial matters of state.

The government’s disregard and denial sustains our proud tradition of heroic failure, from the charge of the Light Brigade to Brexit. Food reserves are for losers. Prudence is for suckers. Somehow the words “British” and “invulnerable” have become muddled up.

In good times, government stockpiles look like a waste of money and effort. But the role of governments is not to prepare for the good times. Governments exist to defend us from harm. And this isn’t possible without long-term plans.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  5^th August 2026

Can’t you leftists understand? Mass death is good for you. Reject the woke love of life! Welcome civilisational collapse! Watch it all burn, then dance in the ashes! This, roughly speaking, is how the dismissal of climate action is now being justified: the argument has shifted from science denial to outright nihilism.

The new incendiary spirit is exemplified by that serial arsonist Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. In a column in the Daily Telegraph last week, originally titled “Britain can’t stop climate change. Scrap net zero and embrace Mediterranean life”, he argued that “climate change is real” but “the war against global warming has been lost”.

This is a classic progression among those who seek to prevent a shift away from fossil fuels: first deny the problem, as the Daily and Sunday Telegraph have done for many years, then accept the problem but claim it’s now too late to act. If it is too late, it’ll be in no small part because of the deniers. So, Heath continued, we in Britain should “ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with … a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate, if that is indeed to be our fate”.

Seeking to cut our emissions, he argued, shows that we suffer from an “advanced case of suicidal empathy”. I’m not qualified to diagnose people, but as a general rule, a lack of empathy, alongside callousness and an absence of guilt, is a strong indicator of a psychopath. Yes, he continued, “there will be plenty of losers, but it is pointless seeking to prevent the inevitable … Many in Britain would enjoy the kind of warmer climate predicted by modellers”.

His timing was impeccable: extolling a Mediterranean climate just as the Mediterranean region goes up in flames. Amid general derision on social media, the editors changed the headline.

Heath’s column also happened to land on the day drought was declared across half of England. Nevertheless, he argued, we need universal irrigation and should construct more swimming pools. Where will the water come from? Oh, don’t get all empirical with me. He maintained we should “trust that the free market will deliver the goods on clean energy and zero-carbon transportation, but only when they are better and cheaper than existing alternatives”. But renewables are already cheaper, and better for us, than fossil fuels in almost all situations. It is only through resistance to the “free market”, led by the Trump administration – which has spent billions trying to kill clean energy and sustain coal burning – that fossil fuels retain such a share of consumption. As a result of the plunging price of renewables, far from having lost the climate war, we could be about to witness a rapid turnaround. So quick, give up now, just in case we win.

He dismissed cutting carbon emissions in the UK as a “moral act, an ethical imperative”, by which he appears to mean unhinged: “Down that road lies madness.” Yes, cutting our own emissions is a moral act and an ethical imperative. It is also pragmatic. Global action on climate breakdown depends on mutual trust. If some countries refuse to play, others are also likely to refuse, and an effective global response collapses in a circle of finger-pointing. This risk is all the greater when rich nations, which tend to have the biggest fossil fuel legacies, seek to behave as free riders. If we don’t step up, why should anyone else?

As for the “warmer climate predicted by modellers”, it could go quite the other way, as rising temperatures, some models suggest, could cause the Atlantic current system to stall, plunging Britain into extreme cold. Well, you’ll just have to learn to adapt to that instead.

Heath’s defiance of reality is so well established that it has spawned an “Allister Heath headline generator”, which pumps out bonkers statements not easily distinguishable from the originals. In a close field, I think he takes the prize for being more wrong more often than anyone else in British journalism. This, after all, is the man who described Kwasi Kwarteng’s fiscal catastrophe as “the best budget I have ever heard a British chancellor deliver, by a massive margin”. It’s a reliable rule: if Heath believes something, the opposite is likely to be true.

But it’s not just him, and it’s not just journalism. The radical right moves as a pack, and Heath is just one of many now insisting that climate catastrophe is something we should simply suck up. Those grammar deniers Reform UK, for example, insist: “We are better to adapt to warming, rather than pretend we can stop it.” Of course the same political tendency also defends austerity and privatisation, both of which severely hamper our ability to adapt.

To their credit, two Telegraph columnists, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Tim Stanley, last week broke the nihilist consensus, arguing we should rise to the challenge of climate breakdown. But they now belong to a minority, in the Telegraph and across the rightwing press.

Why? Because most of the media, most of the time, provides a platform for people who say things that serve capital, whether or not they are true, whether or not they are coherent, whether or not they may hasten disaster. While renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels in nearly all circumstances, fossil fuels are more profitable, because useful reserves are limited and can each be monopolised by a single corporation, while prices can suddenly take flight in times of war or chaos. Almost all the very rich are heavily invested in them. The result is that any attempt to restrict the use of fossil fuels is perceived as class war. Nonsensical justifications for the status quo then follow as automatically as the Allister Heath headline generator.

So “embrace Mediterranean life”. But without the wine, which, as another Telegraph column laments, is becoming “smoke tainted” by all those fires triggered by some unmentioned and mysterious force. And without the food, whose production, thanks to the drought and heatwaves, is at grave risk in southern Europe, as it is here. And without your lovely gite, which might have been incinerated. Or the lush green landscape, also lost to the flames. Or the balmy summer temperatures, now replaced by murderous heat. Oh go on then, you know what I really mean: embrace death.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  31st July 2026

No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.

Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency.

At a global summit convened by the US government earlier this month, the Trump administration officials Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent explained that they were redirecting counterterrorism efforts away from Islamic jihadism and towards “the political left”. Most of the examples they cited to justify this shift were more than 30 years old. Several times they had to dig down to the 1970s to find a sufficiently menacing threat. You could hear the barrel being scraped.

Without producing a shred of evidence, Rubio, the secretary of state, claimed that the Cuban government is “inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the west”. The following week, his department sought to justify this claim with a report containing a long list of leftwing legislators, journalists and activists that attempted to link them to Cuba in ways that ranged from the tenuous to the hilarious. This is a well-honed tactic, used prolifically by the Nazis among others: they claimed dissenters, by definition, were part of an international communist conspiracy. They insisted, as Rubio did, that “it is time to crush this evil for ever”.

That wasn’t the only crude reminder. Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, maintained that when you see antifascist protests, “not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism … their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.” I’m just surprised he didn’t say “untermenschen”. The US government, by contrast, promotes “normal, healthy, ordered living”.

But what hit me even harder was Miller’s attack on “jury nullification”: jurors acquitting people who, he said, were “obviously guilty”. Shutting down this possibility has been an aim of illiberal governments and conservative judges around the world. We saw it in the UK in the prosecution of Trudi Warner and others for holding signs that state an ancient principle in English law: “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience.”

We see it in the astonishing prosecution, being pursued at the moment, of Rajiv Menon KC, who reminded jurors of this right at the trial of the Palestine Action campaigners he was defending. He became, as a result, the first lawyer in English history to be charged with contempt of court for a closing speech. If convicted, he faces up to two years’ imprisonment and will be struck off. Prosecuting lawyers for defending their dissident clients is more or less the definition of authoritarianism.

We also saw it in the assault Keir Starmer launched on jury trials as a whole, greatly curtailing, without any coherent justification, our strongest defence against injustice.

Starmer was a weak man, without a clear vision of his own, who was rolled by any powerful state or corporate lobby. He was no match for a well-funded and highly effective international campaign. A network of groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded by corporations and billionaires, has been producing “model legislation”. The groups test these laws in sympathetic jurisdictions. If they are found to work, they then press for their adoption elsewhere. The result is a sustained assault on our rights to protest, to political equality and to a habitable planet.

The globalisation of this attack on our fundamental rights is a key conservative aim. As capital operates everywhere, so should its ability to crush our objections. The long series of vicious anti-protest laws in the UK is an outcome of sustained lobbying by junktanks, the media and other governments. The result is a country that now keeps hundreds of political prisoners, a country in which you can get six months in jail for marching slowly down the street.

These oppressive laws have culminated – so far – in an act of parliament passed in April that enables the police to shut down any protest they deem to have a “cumulative” impact on the community. The only protests that have ever succeeded are those with a cumulative impact. Protest is acceptable as long as it’s useless. Let the people have their say, but only if we can’t hear them.

The new laws have been accompanied by that age-old trick, traditionally associated with fascist regimes, of smearing leftwing dissidents as terrorists. As the rights group Liberty has pointed out, the definition of terrorism here has greatly expanded, to incorporate tactics formerly regarded as civil protest. This is what enabled Starmer’s government to ban Palestine Action.

The judge who referred Menon for contempt, Mr Justice Johnson, was also the first – at the same trial – to use the extraordinary powers quietly inserted by the Conservatives into the Sentencing Act 2020. These enable someone tried for one crime to be sentenced for another. The four Palestine Action protesters were convicted of ordinary crimes. But, without informing the jury, Johnson marked the case as having a “terrorist connection”. He then sentenced them for terrorist offences, which means much more prison time.

Already, his example has been followed by another judge: a different group of pro-Palestine protesters, who sprayed red paint and broke some windows of a branch of Barclays Bank, are about to be sentenced as terrorists, though neither they nor the jurors were told of this possibility during their trial for criminal damage. This means, of course, that they were unable to defend themselves against this far more serious charge.

Nothing is safe from the billionaire assault on humanity. None of our rights, however ancient and familiar, are impregnable. Fight for them now or lose them, perhaps for ever.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23^rd July 2026

There’s a slightly mean question I often ask British people with an interest in the living world: can you name the Environment Secretary? I don’t intend to show them up: it’s not them I’m testing. I watch the brows knit, a finger go up, the mouth open and close. “It’s, you know, the one who … no, they went, didn’t they? That other one …” It’s been like this for seven years.

Why? Because throughout this period, we’ve not had environment secretaries. We’ve had portals through which corporate lobbyists may pass. The last incumbent to represent the wider public interest (and I can scarcely bring myself to type these words) was Michael Gove. In his other roles, he’s widely remembered with loathing and disgust. Out of office, he continues to poison public life, as editor of the Spectator. But in this role, to general astonishment, he placed the public good above special interests.

Standard operating procedure, by contrast, is exemplified by the final acts of the outgoing secretary, whose name, to put you out of your misery, is Emma Reynolds. To give just one example – which could be seen as an embodiment of everything that has gone wrong here – she spent her last weeks in the post trying to remove the brakes on industrial chicken farming.

In front of a parliamentary committee this month, she railed against the planning constraints holding back yet more giant chicken factories (let’s not grace them with the name of farms). If only these obstacles were demolished, she mused, “there is great investment out there waiting to be made … I want to bring down these barriers as much as you do”. She said she had spoken to other departments to ensure permission for new chicken factories was easier to obtain.

Neither she nor the MPs questioning her gave any hint of why these buildings have run into trouble with the planning system. In fact, there was no mention of any of the problems the factories cause: the MPs’ only apparent interest was in what the industry wanted. What’s the point of MPs if they simply channel corporate demands? But these factories are killing some of our most beautiful rivers. They generate far more dung than the surrounding fields can absorb. The surplus washes downhill into the nearest stream.

The only decision that counts is the planning decision. As soon as permission for a chicken unit is granted, the local tributary, and possibly the main stem of the river it drains into, is as good as dead. It’s not even as if these factories support jobs and growth: by killing the rivers, they help to destroy local economies.

I thought we’d won this argument. But argument, it seems, is no match for economic power. Reynolds’s loyalties appeared to lie not with the ecosystems she was meant to protect, but with the lobbyists threatening them. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising: before she joined Keir Starmer’s government, she worked as a lobbyist, representing the financial sector.

Disturbingly, it was the new environment secretary, Angela Eagle, while working as Reynolds’s deputy, who sought to drive through the “planning reforms” the poultry industry is demanding, telling chicken lobbyists “planning should enable ambition, not stifle it”. Will she now take Burnham’s “circuit breaker” promise seriously, and junk this appeasement of one of our most destructive industries?

At a recent farming festival, Reynolds claimed that boosting the poultry sector would enhance our food security. I don’t know how many times we need to point this out, but isn’t it bleeding obvious that it has the opposite effect? The feed sustaining chickens in these factories must be either imported or grown on land that could otherwise directly feed people. There could be more soya in chicken than in tofu: one report estimates that it takes 109g of soya to produce 100g of chicken breast. Yet this is just one of several components of their diet.

The chicken business in the UK is also controlled by a handful of giant companies: another security red light. If food security were the objective, the government would encourage us to eat fewer chickens and other animals, and more plants. But in parliament, Reynolds also proudly announced that she was disregarding the targets set by the government’s Climate Change Committee to reduce livestock numbers. I find myself asking, over and again: “Are they trying to harm this country?”

To advance their dismal agenda, Reynolds and Eagle set up something called the Farming and Food Partnership Board. Its aim is to encourage “closer collaboration between farming, industry and government”. How could it possibly be closer? The environment department, Defra, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the farming industry. The only members of this new board are government ministers and corporate representatives and lobbyists. Among its objectives is a “poultry sector growth plan”, to address the issue of “planning barriers”.

This chickening out is just one of many examples of how, by working for special interests, the environment department has harmed the ecosystems and the people it is supposed to protect. Another is the government’s “delivery plan” to restore nature, released by Reynolds just before she left office. It’s not a plan, and it won’t deliver: just a catalogue of vague hopes and blandishments. It could be summarised as “do nothing, for fear of offending landowners”. Far from meeting its promise to protect and restore 30% of the land in England by 2030, Reynolds’s department has presided over continued decline. That’s her legacy: less nature, less resilience, less security.

Much worse is planned: Starmer’s government proposed a “regulating for growth bill”, whose text we haven’t yet seen, but which appears to threaten even greater assaults on nature protection. It may contain one of his government’s most alarming proposals: creating a system that could be described as pop-up freeports, in which companies all over the country would be able to operate in temporary “sandboxes”, where the usual rules don’t apply. We should see this as a key test of Burnham’s promise to end neoliberalism: will he drop this nonsense?

I’ll keep asking the question, regardless of who occupies this office: do you know the name of the environment secretary? The answer is likely to depend on one factor: whether they are ready to break the grip of corporate power, and defend us and the rest of the living world. Whether, in other words, they want to do their job.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8^th July 2026

The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.

Sorry, did I say £21.7bn? That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project. The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets, and discovered that the projected cost of the full CCS programme between now and 2050 is £264bn.

Yes, £264bn. More than a quarter of a trillion. This cost will be divided between the public and private sectors. Given the record of CCS programmes so far, we can expect the public to carry most of it.

An investigation by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found that roughly 25% of the public costs of CCS will be borne directly by the government, while the remainder will come from extra levies on our energy bills. The government should explain to the electorate that it intends to slap up to £198bn on our bills. Then see how that lands.

Even this might not be the end of it. Buried in an arcane side document is a government commitment to pay a “premium” for the hydrogen produced by the CCS programme for 15 years. This commitment is uncosted, but could run to tens of billions more.

But surely CCS is essential for cutting carbon emissions? That’s how the government has pitched it. On the contrary, this programme will massively increase them. The Climate Change Committee claims that the role of CCS is “limited to sectors where there are few, or no, alternatives”. But this is simply untrue. Its own data shows that only between 5% and 6% of the CCS deployment in the UK will be used to address the emissions of industrial sectors such as chemicals and cement, whose impact is hard to abate (though even here there are partial alternatives).

The great majority of CCS will be attached to new fossil fuel-burning power stations, wood-burning power stations and hydrogen production from fossil gas. In fact, almost all the projects in the government’s first tranche are for fossil fuel-based schemes. But there are abundant alternatives to these highly destructive plans. Given the speed at which battery technology is evolving, enabling a balanced and reliable electricity supply without any use of fossil fuels, the committee’s claim is bunkum.

Its insistence that we need hydrogen made from fossil gas is also baseless. Its own figures show that producing hydrogen from gas with CCS will cost twice as much by 2050 as producing it from the electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity.

The new CCS plants will mean massively more gas use than the UK would otherwise have required. Ultimately, that means more imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). We now know that, thanks to methane leakage along the production and transport chain, LNG has higher emissions than coal. Two-thirds of its greenhouse impact occurs before the gas arrives in this country. So that’s all right then – it doesn’t count towards our national figures.

If the real aim were to cut emissions, we would push fossil fuel use in the electricity sector down to zero, and scale up renewables and battery storage instead. The net effect? Much lower climate impacts and much lower bills. Instead, the programme will greatly ramp up both. Why?

Well, the whole thing has been built the wrong way round. It appears likely to be the result of massive lobbying by fossil fuel companies. In 2023 alone, as the key decision on deployment loomed, the oil companies Equinor, BP and ExxonMobil attended 24 meetings with Conservative ministers to discuss CCS. Why? Because they know it’s the only way they will be permitted to keep burning gas. Governments have sought to find a way of meeting their demands while adhering to the climate budgets, so lo, a £264bn white elephant is born. As the Climate Change Committee admits, “gas with CCS accounts for around half of the remaining demand for fossil fuels in 2050” in the UK. In other words, this is their lifeline.

And now we know something else: that the scientific credibility of CCS as a climate solution was shaped by the oil company BP. Investigative work by ProPublica and Drilled discovered that BP both financed and helped steer one of the most famous of all climate papers. The “Wedges” paper, published in 2004, became a foundation of government policy around the world. It purported to show how climate stabilisation was compatible with continued fossil use. And one of the major policies its plan relied on was carbon capture and storage.

BP’s chief executive suggested the “wedges” concept. Another BP executive was so heavily involved that the scientists suggested he should be named as co-author. He declined: the industry tries not to leave fingerprints. The paper greatly oversold CCS, presenting it as “already deployed at an industrial scale”. In reality, it had barely been tested. Yet it underpinned three of the 15 climate actions the paper proposed.

Since then, there has been a long record of shiny promises followed by partial or total failures. In the UK alone, three attempts (the 2005 Peterhead plan, a 2011 demonstration project and a 2012 funding competition) have been abandoned, thanks to cost escalation and infeasibility. As the Public Accounts Committee remarks, the government “is taking a high-risk approach by backing first-of-a-kind, unproven technologies with large amounts of taxpayer and consumer funding”.

But success is not the point. The point is to provide a gigantic, publicly-funded reason for the fossil fuel industry to stay in business. Guess who the lead operator of the government’s first CCS cluster is. Hello, BP.

So we come round full circle. From cradle to grave, this programme appeases the world’s most antisocial and destructive sector. The wasted money, the lost years, the lost lives: for how much longer will this farce continue? And how many more warnings will the government ignore?

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 1^st July 2026

Every time you think the idiocy has hit rock bottom, it discovers a new level. It turns out there’s an even deeper hole you can dig for yourself than climate-science denial: heat-stress denial. Across the billionaire press last week, columnists and leader writers minimised the health impacts of the heatwave, particularly in schools.

An editorial in the Telegraph (which represents the newspaper’s view) titled “Hot weather alarmism treats the public like children” maintained that “unlike in the seventies, when people were largely trusted to look after themselves, officialdom now feels the need to lecture the public about the risks of hot weather at every opportunity”. Extreme heat warnings are issued and weather maps are “painted in an alarming red”. Outrageous! Instead of issuing warnings, the government should just trust people to “take the appropriate precautions”. We should all “learn to live” with it. Quite right too: whatever happened to the bulldog spirit of ignorance and needless death? Cricket, warm beer, excess mortality: these are the markers of national character.

Also in the Telegraph, under the headline “Heatwave hysterics wouldn’t have lasted a day in 1976”, the columnist Ysenda Maxtone Graham insisted that during the heatwave that year – which she remembers as “two months of blissful messing about” – “common sense was applied by most without the need for nannying intervention”. Now, however, “health messages range from the patronising – tube announcements imploring travellers to carry a bottle of water – to the preposterous, as if a healthy adult is liable to drop dead from a little bit of sun exposure”. Never mind the unhealthy adults. Or disabled people, or elderly people, or children, all of whom are likely to be more vulnerable. She claimed that in 1976, “schools didn’t close because of the heat”, and that children and teachers heroically “sweltered in 30-degree classrooms”.

Maxtone Graham’s column was remarkably similar to Jane Moore’s in the Sun, titled: “Why on earth do schools need to CLOSE in hot weather? Forget today’s nannying, alarmist state – let’s go back to ’76.” Moore remembers 1976 as “the best summer of my life”. Apparentlythere was a “gung-ho spirit” that “should be used as a standard benchmark for common sense”. The Daily Mail ran an article whose subheading claimed “in 1976 … the schools DID stay open”.

In fact, as Leo Hickman of Carbon Brief points out, schools DID at least close early during the 1976 heatwave, even though June temperatures never reached the records set last week. And in 1976 the heat was dry, whereas last week humidity was high, compounding the health risks. But as soon as such a hole is dug, the entire rightwing media seems obliged to jump into it. It’s often said that the left preaches solidarity and fights like cats in a sack. But the right preaches individualism while reciting daft and unevidenced claims in unison.

There is a powerful body of evidence showing that warnings and advice save lives. The Red Cross discovered in 2023 that there’s a strikingly poor understanding of the health risks of heatwaves in the UK, where they used to be rare. A survey reported in the journal Energy Research & Social Science last year found that 49% of participants had “little to no knowledge on how to cope with extreme heat”. Nevertheless, government warnings, doubtless to the delight of the Telegraph, remain vague, hard to interpret and unsupported by effective action. Let the bodies pile high.

Fondly recalling the halcyon days of your youth is never a great basis for empirical comparison. But what accentuates this issue are the unacknowledged class politics. There’s nothing new about feather-bedded columnists in nice homes in leafy streets or air-conditioned offices instructing other people to tough it out. But the class disparity in heat shielding is especially acute in Britain, where homes and public buildings are woefully unsuited to extremes.

The paper I mentioned above also found that 82% of households reported difficulty in keeping at least one room cool during the summer. The rate of overheating for the poorest half “was twice that of householders in the top half of higher-income earners”. Many other studies have produced similar findings. Steady temperatures are the preserve of the rich.

Extreme heat hits children – who have higher metabolisms and lower sweating rates – harder than most adults. Their thermal comfort levels are, on average, 1.9-2.8C lower. There are many reports of children vomiting and losing consciousness in class during heatwaves. Temperatures above 25C limit their cognitive performance. The government’s Climate Change Committee finds that “taking an exam on a 32C day leads to around a 10% lower likelihood of passing compared to a 22C day”. Yet another advantage for private schools, which can generally afford better buildings and air-conditioned exam rooms.

But, as the government confirms to me, it sets no maximum temperature limit for schools. Otherwise it might have to do something. Instead, it advises schools to open and close doors and windows and minimise heat from equipment: advice that leaves teachers with sealed windows and impossible heat loads in despair.

A new study of schools in Hampshire finds that 66% of classrooms present a “cognitive impairment risk”. If action isn’t taken, this will rise to 92% by 2050. Already, “heat strain” – physiologically dangerous temperature levels – afflicts 6% of classrooms. Many school buildings, especially the “lightweight, overglazed, single-sided” models favoured from the 1950s onwards, are grossly ill-suited to hot summers.

Thanks to years of austerity, many classrooms are in a terrible state. School buildings that should have been replaced decades ago are still in use. It is unlikely to have escaped the Conservative architects of the programme that declining public provision further privileges their class. No wonder they fetishised competition, which they so blatantly rigged in their favour.

So now, as ever, the rich lecture the poor, and demand the removal of the feeble protections that might enhance and defend their lives. Their claim that “we need to be tough” seems always to translate into “they need to be tough”, while our lives become only cushier. Performative ignorance is the default state of such journalism. But I can’t help wondering whether there’s also an element of gleeful, snobbish cruelty: I’m all right, so let the great unwashed get what they deserve.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17^th June 2026

“If you are targeting people on the basis of the colour of their skin,” the Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, asked last week, “how else can you describe them? That is racist thuggery.” It is. But there is another way of describing the actions of the rioters burning people out of their homes in Belfast, though ministers somehow cannot bring themselves to say it. Terrorism.

The violence there clearly meets the government’s definition: “the use or threat” of actions designed to “intimidate the public” for the purpose of “advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. Among these actions are “serious violence against a person” and “serious damage to property”. I happen to believe that the property clause blurs the issue. But either way, in what possible world do the Belfast attacks not fit the definition?

Instead, the term is largely reserved by ministers for those who challenge Israel’s actions in Gaza. Matching the official definition to the Palestine Action protests is a far tougher call than matching it to the Belfast riots. But while more than 3,000 people have now been arrested for holding up signs in support of the banned group, and many face terrorism charges, no one in Belfast or Southampton has been charged with terrorist offences. Nor have those who whipped up the riots online. In fact, the latter group hasn’t yet been charged with anything. If you say “I support Palestine Action”, they might put you in jail. If you incite a racist riot, they put you on TV.

On Monday, the court of appeal upheld the government’s ban on Palestine Action, in a ruling that seems to me to highlight both the dangerous breadth of the government’s definition and the inequality of its application. As the human rights group Liberty points out, the judgment fails to clarify which direct action targeting property would not be terrorism. The former home secretary, Yvette Cooper, decided to ban the group after some of its members spray-painted two warplanes. Damaging military equipment in the hope of preventing its deployment, especially in illegal wars, has long been treated as an act of civil disobedience motivated by conscience, and some juries have acquitted on this basis.

The court of appeal judgment managed to cast protest as terrorism and terrorism as protest. Palestine Action “is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open”. What??? Did the suffragettes plan their bombings, arson and assassination attempts – far more extreme than anything Palestine Action has contemplated – in open meetings in Parliament Square? The entire judgment seems to me to be based on fairytales: about democracy and how it evolves, the benign nature of the state, the efficacy of polite, invisible protest, and the untroubled course of English history.

The judges stated that banning Palestine Action “will not prevent any or all demonstrations targeted at Elbit”, an arms manufacturer supplying the Israel Defense Forces, whose factories in Britain have been a primary focus for the group. Well, two days earlier, John Woodcock, the government’s former anti-extremism tsar, called for the ban to be extended to the protest group People Against Genocide, which has blocked the gates of Elbit factories. The slippage had already begun.

It could go much further. At Woolwich crown court at the end of last week, four Palestine Action protesters who broke into an Elbit factory were sentenced as terrorists. The astonishing aspect of this case? They were not charged, tried or convicted as terrorists.

In fact, the prosecutors decided not to pursue terrorism charges against them, presumably because they reckoned the jury wouldn’t convict. But never mind: the Sentencing Act 2020 allows judges to send people down for crimes for which they have not been tried, with far longer sentences and more onerous conditions.

As Amnesty International explains, until recently the conscientious motivation of protesters was treated as a mitigating factor in sentencing. Now it is treated as an aggravating factor. What makes this even worse is that such defendants can no longer explain their motivations to the court. But, once the jury is dismissed, the judge can decide why they did it, and sentence them accordingly. This is not justice.

The action for which they were convicted happened before Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist group. What this means is that any protesters engaging in direct action could now be sentenced as terrorists, whether or not their group has been banned.

Astonishingly, the judge, Mr Justice Johnson, possibly for the first time in history, also sought to have legal proceedings taken against the barrister representing the Palestine Action protesters for contempt of court for his summing up of the defence case. Johnson claimed that Rajiv Menon KC had defied his instruction not to tell the jury it had the right to acquit the defendants regardless of his directions: an ancient and fundamental principle of English law.

The government has leant heavily on the assault of a police officer with a sledgehammer by one of the protesters, Samuel Corner. But, reckless and severe as the attack was, he was convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent: he panicked after being sprayed in the face with the incapacitant Pava and,unable to see clearly, lunged forwards to help another protester. In other words, violence against people was not the intent of the sole perpetrator, let alone of Palestine Action.

By contrast, some of the rioters in Belfast and Southampton clearly intended to hurt police officers and others. Some were highly organised. Investigative journalists have identified several groups helping to incite or organise the violence. Good luck finding them on the government’s list of proscribed organisations.

So, in considering Benn’s question – how else can we describe what we are seeing? – there is a second relevant answer: one rule for the right, another for the left. In other words, two-tier justice. The far right’s appropriation of the term, which has been used by Black activists for at least 45 years, should not stop us from seizing it back. Two-tier justice is real and ever present. But the last people who will ever find themselves on the wrong side of it are rightwing white men.

The government and judicial system treat far-right terrorism more leniently than leftwing dissent. So perhaps this should lead us to another answer to the question of how best to describe what we are seeing. It might be a nominally Labour government. But this is rightwing authoritarianism.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 10^th June 2026

Really? You want to destroy a million jobs? Vote Reform UK for mass unemployment: is that your pitch? Hammer these questions home whenever you meet a supporter of the party. Or, for that matter, a Conservative, as their party now takes an almost identical line.

The figures are stark. They were compiled not by Just Stop Oil or the Green party, but by that bastion of conservatism, the Confederation of British Industry. They show that the net zero economy now directly employs more than 300,000 full-time workers, while supporting the jobs of 1.1 million. The net zero sector is worth £100bn to the UK already, and is likely to grow by hundreds of billions more. The rest of the green economy directly employs a further 600,000.

This is just the start. In October, the government announced plans to create another 400,000 jobs through its green energy plan, particularly for people leaving the fossil fuel industry, school leavers, ex-offenders, veterans and the unemployed. Training centres and colleges will be built in places badly hit by deindustrialisation. It’s the first realistic plan for a vast increase in skilled manual jobs in many years.

By contrast, in 2023 the UK’s oil and gas industry provided 27,500 jobs, and supported a total of 205,000. In other words, depending on where you draw the line, oil and gas provided between one-tenth and one-fifth of the employment generated by the alternatives. These figures are likely to be even lower today, as they’ve been tumbling rapidly for years. Despite the new licensing rounds and tax breaks the Conservatives gave the industry, it shed 70,000 jobs between 2016 and 2023. The Rosebank oilfield, a cause célèbre for Reform and the Tories, would, if extraction is approved, directly generate a grand total of 255 jobs over its lifetime.

Rail against these numbers all you like, you’re up against geology. A fortnight ago, Reform UK’s deputy leader and energy spokesperson Richard Tice claimed “there is decades and decades and decades of gas in the North Sea”. In reality, even if further licences are granted for the North Sea’s potentially viable fields, by 2050 our gas output will fall by 97% from 2025 levels. New licences scarcely affect this trajectory, as so little is left to be extracted. It takes, on average, 28 years between approval and production (by contrast, large-scale wind and solar take around four). Far from meeting UK demand for “decades and decades and decades”, there’s likely to be less than a year’s worth of extractable supply. Reform promises fake jobs in a fantasy industry.

They and the Tories are now competing to discover the outer limits of imbecility. Some Reform candidates simply deny climate science. Tice goes even further, peddling outright conspiracy fictions: “There are loads of scientists who are terrified to speak, because they won’t get any research funding if they tell it as it is.” Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, has been ripped to shreds – by the former Conservative prime minister Theresa May, among others – over false claims she has made to support her abandonment of net zero.

Even in opposition, these parties are seeking to sabotage the net zero economy. Last year, Tice wrote to eight major energy firms, threatening that Reform would “strike down” renewable energy contracts signed under the current government. If you bid for a contract, “you do so at your own risk … the era of unquestioned liberal progressive orthodoxy across the Western hemisphere is over. Prospective investors in the UK’s Net Zero economy would be wise to take note.”

Labour MPs retorted that realising this threat would mean ripping up contract law. They could also have questioned whether the UK is in the western hemisphere. But geography, geology, physics, law: who gives a monkey’s? The world will do as we say. God himself will cower in our shade.

Within the first three years of a Reform government, Transition Economics estimates, it would destroy 500,000 jobs. This would rise to 1.4 million by 2040. Who would suffer most? Oil and gas workers, who are being supported by the current government to move into renewables and advanced manufacturing. But throwing people out of work is something Reform seems to contemplate gleefully: last year Nigel Farage told Durham council workers with climate-related jobs, “you all better really be seeking alternative careers very, very quickly”. After all, why should multimillionaires care about other people’s employment?

Reform and the Tories like to pitch their attack on climate policy as the triumph of hard-headed pragmatism over those woolly boffins and tree huggers who don’t care about the “working man and woman”. But they are the ones trashing the jobs of practical people. They are the romantics, the fantasists, dreaming of an impossible world. Of course, the question in politics is not what the facts say. It is whether the facts can be made to matter.

Even if you set aside the trifling issue of human survival, and the local pollution, noise and damage fossil fuels cause, and the vast costs they already inflict through both energy bills and climate impacts, the case is inarguable. To choose the dying industry over the growing one is simply, in terms of jobs and income, to inflict immense harm on the people of this country.

On whose behalf do they make this choice? Not their own voters, who strongly support renewable energy and net zero policies, and would much prefer renewables to the fracking that Tice demands. Despite the barrage of nonsense, support for green policies among Reform voters seems only to be growing. Tice’s constituency, Boston and Skegness, is the most flood-prone in England, and some of those who suffer as a result are incensed by his stance.

But there is one group with whom the party seems to align: its funders. Two-thirds of the money it has received, according to one analysis, comes from very rich people with interests in oil and gas. I see Reform as a party of millionaires working for billionaires.

The polls show that Reform’s achilles heel is the perception that it’s working not for the “ordinary people of Britain”, but for the rich and powerful: billionaires and fossil fuel companies. So spread the word: for the sake of their elite chums, they will throw you out of work.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 5^th June 2026

Bring your suitcase, your bin liner, your dumpy bag. They’re handing out money faster than you can stuff it in a sack. All you need do is join the market in what may now be England’s most lucrative commodity. A commodity with arms and legs, hearts and brains, thoughts and feelings. Children.

Two years ago I stumbled into this issue after discovering that children in care who were being helped by a local charity I’m involved with were suddenly being whisked away, terminating the amazing progress they had been making, breaking their relationships, their sense of home, stability and security. When I began exploring why this was happening, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing: a highly lucrative trade in highly vulnerable young people. Children in “care” were being exchanged between private equity companies for £100,000 apiece. That figure is now wrong. Today they are worth far more.

A few days ago, the Financial Times published an investigation that I defy you to read with anything but open-mouthed horror. The average charge to the state by a private provider for a child in “care” is now £384,020 a year. That’s six times what Eton charges. Some providers now levy more than £1m per child per year, rising in a few cases for children with complex needs to more than £3m.

So everyone is cashing in. Alongside the big companies, which might invest in oil, gilts or crypto one day and children the next, the reporters found that “plumbers, hairdressers and Airbnb landlords with no experience in care” are opening “homes”. There might also be links to organised crime, as you can now make more money from children than you can from drugs. The police are concerned that gangs running children’s “homes” can not only harvest state money on a spectacular scale but also harvest highly vulnerable young people, who can be recruited and exploited. I guess you could call that vertical integration.

While there is a shortage of provision in the south of England, there’s a glut in the north-west: Lancashire has 17 places for every local child needing care. Why? Because property is cheaper there. Houses can be bought for a song and roughly converted. The cheapest buildings are in places where economic and community life has collapsed, high streets are deserted and facilities shuttered. Where better to send highly vulnerable children?

This is why our young people in Devon are being swept up to 300 miles across the country. A paper in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect finds a consistent association between profit-making and the placing of children outside their local authority area. It also finds that commercial provision is associated with them being moved more often, which means greater disruption and instability. Shifting children out of their home area makes them “more vulnerable to exploitation and grooming”. Yet the children with the greatest needs are often, under this system, those placed furthest from home.

Because councils, which have not been given the capital budgets to make their own provision, are so desperate to find places, they are sending children to providers who are not only unqualified but also, in some cases, unregistered. In other words, they are breaking the law by using “homes” which haven’t even met the basic requirement to register with the regulator. These are private oubliettes – places beyond easy reach of the authorities, where children can be dumped and forgotten. They might as well throw them in a pit and be done with it.

An investigation by LBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that in one of these illegal “homes”, two of the “care” workers had seven convictions between them when they were recruited, including four for violent offences. They persuaded a 15-year-old girl, who had been moved by her local authority in south Wales to the house in County Durham, to take so much drink and drugs that she became stupefied, then they sexually assaulted her for several hours. The local authority’s rationale for moving her to that “home”, the investigators found, was that she was “at risk of sexual exploitation”.

A report by the Children’s commissioner reveals that unregistered placements are on average even more expensive than legal ones. She estimates that 669 young people, mostly with special needs, including some of preschool age, are now in unregistered “homes”. In reality the figure is probably much greater, as many are likely to have fallen off the records altogether.

While in France only 5% of places are run for profit, in England, the FT tells us, the figure is 84%. The reason is simply stated: ideology. Successive governments have failed to provide local authorities with the capital needed to house children themselves because they think public is bad and private is good: the foundational belief of neoliberalism. In reality we pay far more for a much worse service. Then we wonder why, though they comprise less than 1% of the total population of children, 62% of the people in young offender institutions have been in “care”.

In Wales, all new profit-making in this sector was stopped in April, and the practice is being phased out altogether. But in England, the government seeks only to tweak this immoral and dysfunctional system. As Hettie O’Brien shows in her book The Asset Class, when private equity delivers public services, chaos and disaster follow as night follows day. But Labour, like the Conservatives, seems ideologically committed to the model.

The issue is profit. Instead the Westminster government blames the problem on a shortage of foster carers. But as Martin Barrow, a journalist and foster carer who has specialised in this issue for many years, points out: “Foster care, children’s homes, supported accommodation and adoption are not interchangeable. Each can be the right option for different children at different times in their lives.” Children’s homes remain essential, but the government must regain ownership of them. As we’ve discovered the hard way with water, energy and railways, public ownership of public services works better and costs less.

There is no place for a “market” here. Children are not a commodity to be bought and sold. Private profit and public service are always oil and water. But if there is one service above all others that capital should never be allowed to get its filthy hands on, it is children in care.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27^th May 2026

We will not persuade. We will not explain. We will not listen. We know best and we will force you to comply. This, I’m sorry to say, is how the government’s climate policy works. Or rather, how it doesn’t. Because nothing could be better calculated to alienate the people you need to reach than climate authoritarianism.

Three astonishing things are happening simultaneously. One is the government’s utterly baffling failure to communicate with us on this existential issue. Where are the public information videos? Where are the televised emergency briefings on climate breakdown, like the emergency briefings on Covid-19?

This is the reasonable demand of the National Emergency Briefing campaign, whose film is now being shown in more than 1,000 cinemas and other venues in the UK: a remarkable achievement. Why are scientists, activists and journalists – faint voices in the storm – being left to explain this defining issue and the societal transformation we need? The great majority accept a call for action only when it comes from government. When it tells us “this is our national purpose and we want you to be part of it”, people tend to heed the call.

That is what happened when the government belatedly responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Despite the deep distrust of Boris Johnson’s administration, despite the prime minister’s own fecklessness, we came together to take responsibility (even if he didn’t). This is what happened when the government rallied the nation against the threat of Nazi invasion and bombing. Yet, faced with the current emergency, successive governments act as if no one needs to be mobilised, despite the great societal changes we need to make. They treat it as a purely technical challenge with purely technical solutions.

Now comes the second strand: coercion. Last week, the government proposed to curtail the public’s legal right to object to the new energy infrastructure it deems “critical”. If it gets its way, development consent orders (planning permission) for “critical” projects would in effect gain the status of acts of parliament. This means they could not be legally challenged by local people, except on human rights grounds – an almost impossible hurdle. This measure, landing on top of previous curtailments of the right to object, represents yet another centralisation of power. A planning system based on consent is becoming a planning system based on decree.

But surely there’s a case for stopping what Keir Starmer calls the “blockers”, the “zealots” and the “time-wasting nimbys”? His supporters point to the judicial review case that delayed approval of the massive Vanguard offshore windfarm in the North Sea. As the Centre for British Progress (yet another “thinktank” that won’t tell me precisely who funds it) states: “Permission … was challenged by a single private individual, who succeeded in delaying the project by two years.” They list it on their page discussing “frivolous cases”. But it was about as far from frivolous as you can get.

“A single private individual” might suggest the challenge was cranky and vexatious. But every case needs a claimant, and this one, Raymond Pearce, had massive support from local communities in Norfolk as well as 85 parish and town councils. He is strongly in favour of wind power, but objected on the grounds that the government had not taken into account the cumulative impacts of the substations and cable corridors that the Vanguard scheme and its sister project, Boreas, would inflict on the landscape when the windfarms were connected to the grid. Objectors to such schemes have long argued that the UK should follow the lead of other North Sea nations and build its transmission hubs offshore.

Mr Justice Holgate’s judgment that the government’s decision was unlawful could not have been more straightforward. Though the project’s environmental statement identified “significant cumulative effects” on the landscape, the government failed to take them into account when making its decision. The state’s reasoning, the judge said, “even on a generous view, could only be described as cursory”. It was “perfunctory “, “flawed” and “perverse”.

If the government gets its way, there will no longer be legal correctives to such perverse and flawed decision-making. It will be able to hoodwink the public without consequence. Shoot the messenger, then ensure there are no more messengers.

As it happens, once the two windfarms received new consent, their developer, the Swedish company Vattenfall, decided to shelve the second one (the Boreas scheme) as it was too expensive. Why? Partly due to “the lack of a shared offshore ring main, which meant windfarms needed to run separate cables to onshore substations”. In other words, exactly what the objectors were calling for. Public engagement does not damage decision-making. It improves it.

The government has also been briefing against Britain’s membership of the Aarhus convention, which, as interpreted by the UK supreme court, limits the costs objectors face if they challenge decisions on environmental grounds. Otherwise, someone who seeks to protect their local landscape or wildlife habitat could lose everything they possess. Cost limitation is a fundamental aspect of access to justice.

At the same time, however – and here we come to the third element – woe betide you if you protest for the state to raise its climate ambition. A series of laws and restrictions, continued by this government, has created a new class of political prisoner: people put away for months or even years for demanding that an existential crisis is treated as such.

It’s all coercion, no persuasion. Leave it to us. We know what’s good for you. We don’t need your help. Don’t try to challenge us, in either direction.

Just as we need broad public consent for the green transition, Starmer’s team treats it as a holy war against the landscape-loving infidel. Far from accelerating climate action, it generates anger, resistance and resentment, a gift to the fossil fuel industry. Just as Reform UK and the Tories seem to act in the interests of fossil fuel companies, Labour seems to act in the interests of green infrastructure developers, letting them ride roughshod over people’s legitimate concerns.

We are being bludgeoned into accepting a deeply flawed climate strategy that is neither fast enough nor fair enough. The vast response that climate breakdown necessitates must, like a war effort or a pandemic effort, be a joint endeavour, that happens with us, not to us. But “with us” is not a concept this government seems to understand.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 20^th May 2026

The biggest Brexit donor was the stockbroker Peter Hargreaves. He gave £3.2m to the leave campaign. He justified his enthusiasm as follows: “We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.” If you are wondering, “Fantastic for whom?”, the current television ad for the company he co-founded, Hargreaves Lansdown, could supply an answer. It presents itself as a safe haven in times of disruptive change. Among the examples it provides? Brexit.

Perhaps our most poignant political folk tale is the notion of accountability. Those who hurt and undermine us will be punished, while those who help us will be rewarded. In reality, little in either business or politics could be further from the truth. A more reliable rule is that those who generate insecurity profit from it.

In early 1915, a newspaper owner called Benito Mussolini fomented riots in favour of joining the first world war, and threatened revolution if the government refused: Italy’s neutrality, he claimed, brought shame on the nation. Few warmongers were as vocal or visible. Disastrously unprepared and ill-equipped, Italy joined the war in May. The resultant sense of national humiliation and loss – the “mutilated victory” – provided an opening for the fascists … led by Benito Mussolini.

In spring 1940, chaotic planning and extreme indecision by Britain’s first lord of the admiralty caused disaster in Norway, when the Allies could not prevent an invasion by Nazi Germany. The failure of the military campaign triggered the resignation of the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. He was replaced by … the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. It might have been the right decision, but it was achieved by peculiar means.

Though the current sense of national decline in the United Kingdom has many parents, few carry more blame for our reduced and chaotic state than Nigel Farage. He was to the decision to leave the EU what Mussolini was to the decision to join the first world war. Like that other slightly rightwing figure, he promised miracles with a policy that instead delivered misery and retreat.

Has he been punished by the electorate? Not a bit of it. Austerity enabled Brexit, as popular fury caused by a sense of decline and loss encouraged people to aim a massive kick at the system. Austerity plus Brexit enabled the rise of Farage’s Reform UK. Further decline and insecurity are a boon for those who can channel our rage towards scapegoats: immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, woke “elites”. If Farage becomes prime minister in 2029, his Brexit disaster will be a major reason why.

The harsh truth, as Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue in their book Democracy for Realists, is that we possess almost no capacity for attribution. The theory of “retrospective voting” – the idea that we judge candidates on their records and vote accordingly – is a fairytale. While we might vote on the basis of changes in our wellbeing, we “consistently and systematically punish incumbents for conditions beyond their control”. Achen and Bartels estimate that 2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet. Among the states where weather appears to have been decisive was Florida, on whose count the election turned. In view of the contrast between the climate policies of Al Gore and George W Bush, who won the presidency, that was quite ironic.

I fear that Farage will succeed in shrugging off the undeclared £5m he was given by a crypto billionaire just before he decided to stand for election in 2024. Nor will people punish his party in a general election for what will almost certainly be its dismal failures in local government. It’s not that voters don’t care. We have a powerful sense of justice, and political cynicism and anger are driven by the idea that “they always get away with it”, even if it’s poorly defined who “they” are. The problem is that, busy with our lives, our attention yanked from one crisis to another, we don’t have the mental space to keep receipts.

One result is that the more crises we face, the less accountable politics becomes. Boris Johnson sometimes appeared to trigger new crises to distract people from the old ones. Donald Trump seems to do the same. And the more dysfunctional and turbulent life becomes, the more he can claim to be the nation’s saviour and redeemer. It’s like pushing someone into a pond to enact a dramatic rescue.

Our entire political system is premised on the idea of accountability. Brilliant theory: just a shame it bears no relation to reality. Those who believe the fairytale tend to lose elections. The winning formula is not listing your achievements and explaining what a schmuck the other person is. It is demonstrating hope. You flatter your existing voters while attracting new ones by telling a powerful story of transformation. If you’re already in government, you should spend big on public services: demonstrating in deed as well as word that life is improving.

In other words, you do the exact opposite of what the UK’s government does. With its self-defeating fiscal rules, which suppress the “growth” Labour claims to prioritise and damage the perception of wellbeing on which success depends, it reinforces our sense of hopelessness and decline. The current leadership certainly flatters a political base, just not its own. Instead, it appeals to what it calls “hero voters”: people it thinks it can lure away from the right. In reality, such voters are almost entirely mythical. By sacrificing itself to these wraiths, Labour alienates its own base.

It reinforces this alienation with its deliberate policy of “hippy punching”: demonstrating its macho, pro-capital credentials by ripping down environmental protections, banning protests, cutting benefits and launching performative attacks on immigrants. There’s a basic rule in politics and in life: hate people and they will hate you back.

The animating force of Starmer’s team is its extreme and irrational hostility to the Labour left, a hostility it brought into government as a national programme. Instead of inspiring, igniting, delighting, it points to Farage’s record and threatens that if we don’t vote Labour, we’ll get what’s coming to us.

In other words, it subscribes to a mythic conception of politics, a belief system that describes a planet other than our own. When Starmer goes – and after two wasted years, he must – we should hope his replacement has some idea of how this business works.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 14^th May 2026

The media’s message appears to have cut through. At the crucial rally against antisemitism in London on Sunday, Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of the Green party of England and Wales, was not invited to speak, on the grounds that he had not done enough to root out antisemitism from the party. But Nigel Farage was invited, on the grounds that his party, Reform UK, has “expressed very broad support for the fight against antisemitism”. More than two thousand Jews saw things differently and signed a petition arguing that the invitation to Farage “fundamentally undermines” the message of solidarity in defence of Jewish safety and dignity. I agree with them.

Antisemitism must be stamped out everywhere. “Never again” means zero tolerance for this age-old hate, wherever it occurs and whoever voices it. It is indeed a problem on the left, and I’ve often found myself in dispute with those who downplay or minimise it.

Two Green candidates for the council elections have been arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred on social media. The Labour party’s researchers dug up disgraceful remarks by 25 Green candidates for the recent council elections. Never mind that it’s 25 out of 4,500: it’s 25 too many. Polanski’s response when asked about the numerous arson attacks on synagogues and on Hatzola ambulances – “there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety, but neither are acceptable” – seemed dismissive of a horrifying escalation of antisemitic assaults.

So where is the equally urgent concern about antisemitism on the right? It should begin with the media. In the approach to last week’s elections, leading rightwing British newspapers published cartoons of Polanski that could have come from the pages of Der Stürmer, the hate-filled propaganda rag published in Germany from 1923 to 1945.

In the Times and the Telegraph, Polanski was portrayed with a hooked nose (which he does not possess). The Times’s cartoon also gave him the jug ears, receding chin, thick lips and baggy eyes of the Stürmer caricatures, none of which resemble his features. In the Mail, he was shown with an enormous nose, whose shape, again, had been grossly changed.

Worse still was the Sun’s caricature. It turned Polanski into a version of Slimer, a spook from Ghostbusters. It gave the apparition heavy, pitch-black eyebrows, a large bulbous nose, thick lips and a forked tongue, none of which distinguish either Polanski or the original ghost, but all of which figured in Nazi portrayals of Jews. Whether or not this was the cartoonist’s intention, a slimy green monster with red eyes, prehensile fingers and forked tongue comes across as about as crude an antisemitic caricature as you could imagine.

None of these newspapers have issued an apology. The Times’s only acknowledgment of the issue was a column attacking Polanski for complaining about the cartoon. It claimed that “caricature is an accepted part of the cartoonist’s stock in trade”. For sure. But, as cartoonists for liberal newspapers have discovered to their cost, this never excuses antisemitic imagery.

Otherwise, its response appears to have been to double down on its attacks against him, charging him with “unwillingness to confront the antisemitism staring him in the face”. In truth, he has moved swiftly to try to root out antisemitism in the Green party, with an accelerated disciplinary process. That seems to be more than can be said for parts of the rightwing press.

The Telegraph has berated Polanski for what it calls his refusal to apologise for that “perception of unsafety” remark. Fine. And shouldn’t the Telegraph also apologise for the way it portrayed him?

The Daily Mail quoted Farage stating: “The Greens will take us to sectarian hell … No Jew will be safe.” One can only marvel at the sheer brass neck of the man. The Sun has accused Polanski of a “refusal to root out” racists in the party: a “refusal” for which it provided no evidence. So how about rooting out the apparently antisemitic imagery in its own pages?

Where is the storm of protest obliging these newspapers to face their own issues? Where is the Labour dossier on antisemitic comments by Reform candidates? Why does the fury seem mostly to flow in one direction?

I can only imagine what a concerted search would reveal about Reform’s representatives. Comments that have sporadically come to light are just as terrible as the odious remarks of those Green candidates. Far from being rooted out, some of the perpetrators are now elected councillors.

Concerning Farage himself, there are many complaints of claimed antisemitic tendencies (denied by him), beginning at school, where he is alleged to have sung “gas ’em all”, to have given Nazi salutes and to have engaged in antisemitic bullying. Much more recently, he has claimed that “in terms of money and influence”, Jews in the US “are a very powerful lobby”, and repeated classic antisemitic tropes about George Soros and “globalists”, on shows hosted by people viewed by many as virulent antisemites.

To judge by the coverage in the British media, however, you could honestly believe there is unquestionably a bigger antisemitism problem on the left than on the right. The issue is not – and must never be – that the left should get a free pass on antisemitism. The issue is that no one should get a free pass. Yet perversely, the right, the hard right and far right often get away with it.

This reinforces the concern that much of the media might be campaigning against antisemitism not because they care about Jews, but because it’s a highly effective means of attacking – even stopping – the left.

Are charges of antisemitism to be reserved for those who challenge power, or who oppose the genocide in Gaza? If so, this is deeply disturbing. Using antisemitism for political purposes devalues the meaning and urgency of this terrible ideology. It may encourage people to dismiss the latest wave of antisemitic attacks as yet another scare cooked up by the billionaire press. Indeed, this is what I appear to be seeing among some leftwingers who ought to know better.

When the same media produce what look to me like vile antisemitic cartoons, this goes beyond hypocrisy. It seems like a double-edged attack on British Jews, simultaneously instrumentalising and deploying the vicious old tropes. Who on the right will now call them out?

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 7^th May 2026

Most people have made up their minds, and nothing you can say will change them: that’s the credo of parties such as Labour and the Democrats. Don’t challenge voters on the doorstep. Use focus groups to find out what they want, and give it to them. Follow, don’t lead. But all that’s on them, not us.

It’s true that conventional attempts at persuasion fail. A meta-analysis and original experiments by the political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman found that “the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising” in US general elections “is zero”. But this says nothing about voters and everything about the useless approach of the parties trying to reach them.

Further work by the same scientists along with other people’s studies show that persuasive methods do exist. They don’t change everyone’s minds, but they can make enough difference to win elections and build a kinder, fairer, greener country. These techniques are known as “deep canvassing”.

Deep canvassing works only if you have a large army of volunteers, ideally from the community you’re trying to reach. Instead of delivering a message then scuttling away, as conventional canvassers do, their role is to connect and listen. Across conversations that might last for 10 or 20 minutes, they let people discuss their feelings. Then, without arguing or judging, they share their own experiences and ask questions (“have you ever been treated unfairly?”) that might reveal common ground.

The technique was developed by LGBT activists in Los Angeles after same-sex marriage rights were not voted into law in a state referendum. They wanted to find out why and to see whether people could change their minds. They were amazed by the response, and asked researchers to study the technique. The effects turned out to be significant.

Not only is deep canvassing persuasive but, by contrast to almost all other approaches, the change appears to be durable, at least over the course of months. It seems to have been a decisive factor in the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York.

What makes the difference is the listening. There’s a solid rule in life: if you don’t listen to other people, they won’t listen to you. I’m often told that people are “too exhausted” to engage in politics. That can mean they’re overwhelmed by work and family life. But it can also refer to the exhaustion of being unheard. The sense that no one is listening is alienating and demoralising.

Another benefit is that deep canvassing allows people to change their minds without losing face. A study in the journal Political Communication found that when someone is heard attentively and without judgment, “they are more likely to become more open-minded and process information in a less defensive manner”. Active listening creates “a sense of shared social identity”, which can build “faith in wider democratic processes”.

All this is compelling enough, but there may be an even more effective means of connection (though it awaits quantification). I’ve been following the work of a remarkable group in my own constituency, South Devon, called Common Ground. It’s not attached to any party, but seeks to prevent the far right from gaining power, to counteract division and create what it calls “a longing for kindness”. Its annual budget is under £400. Instead of going to people’s doors, the volunteers set up a board in a busy street and begin by asking people to put stickers on a chart.

That’s another solid rule in life: people love stickers. On the board are questions designed to provoke conversation on issues such as the NHS, climate, the voting system, immigration, social media, Brexit, public services and polarisation, and boxes in which you can agree or disagree by adding a sticker.

The board is handwritten. Anthea Simmons, the driving force behind Common Ground, tells me this provides a reason to read out the questions to people who may be illiterate without embarrassing them. It’s also a way of starting a conversation. Then the volunteers ask people why they’ve made their choices. They listen attentively, occasionally saying something that connects their experiences, or gently correcting disinformation. It might be quick, it might go on for half an hour.

I’ve watched them at work in two places with high levels of deprivation and social crisis: Paignton and Brixham. These are prime targets for Reform UK, as alienation can easily be channelled into fury at immigrants and other out-groups.

In both places, a small crowd quickly formed around the board and people began chatting to each other as well as the volunteers. “Climate?” one person said. “It’s not affecting us very much yet.” Another replied: “My allotment disagrees. It’s a swamp.”

What leapt out immediately was that most respondents were far to the left of their own voting intentions. The distribution of their stickers suggested a very strong commitment to the NHS, action on climate, compassion, tolerance and an end to billionaire power. But many of the same people have voted or intend to vote for Reform, which would deliver the opposite. This discovery seemed to be equally startling to the participants.

Another thing I witnessed, especially when interviewing people just after these conversations, was a sense of relief, even exhilaration. People were buzzing. Some hardly seemed to hear my questions, but carried on talking about the issues that bothered them: the lack of NHS dentistry, the state of the harbour, corruption, AI, litter, the care crisis. It was as if a bottle had been uncorked.

Being heard is valuable in its own right. Loneliness and alienation, as well as being the feedstock of fascism, are major causes of human misery. The volunteers have been told by some people that it’s the only conversation they’ve had all week. Their overwhelming conclusion? People do care about the lives of others, even when influencers and algorithms push them towards hate and fear.

It wouldn’t be quite right to call this deep canvassing. The volunteers don’t have a script and they’re engaging across a range of issues rather than focusing on one. Perhaps it could be called “radical listening”. To judge by what I witnessed, they seem to have found a way of tearing down the walls dividing us. Do this everywhere, and who knows? We could have a very different country.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30^th April 2026

How do we know whether political funding is corrupt? Mostly, we don’t. A plutocrat delivers a sack of cash to a political party. A few weeks later, it announces a policy that happens to favour the donor’s business. Are the events linked? We might suspect it; we cannot prove it. But the suspicion itself is corrosive and demoralising.

The current funding system, perhaps more than any other factor, turns us away from politics, breeding disillusionment, alienation and cynicism. A survey by the Electoral Commission last year found that only 18% of respondents believed spending and funding are transparent. A government survey in December discovered that 87% of people are “concerned about the possibility of corruption” among politicians. A further survey concluded that political donors are believed to wield the most influence of any elite faction. Disillusionment with politics drives people into the arms of the extreme right. This is paradoxical, as it tends to be highly receptive to the ultra-rich.

I’m prompted to write this column by Tom Burgis’s powerful investigation for the Guardian into Reform UK’s relationship with Christopher Harborne, who is based in Thailand. Remarkably, Harborne has provided about two-thirds of all Reform’s donations since its foundation: more than £22m altogether. The rules in Britain limit the amount a party can spend in an election year, but set no cap on the proportion a single funder can provide. In theory, one person could supply its entire budget. At what point do we decide that a political party is, in effect, owned by a donor?

I can’t prove that Harborne’s money has bought special favours from Reform, and make no suggestion of illegality. But there is also no way of proving that this funding is not connected to Nigel Farage’s enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, which appears to be Harborne’s principal source of wealth. The not-knowing is just as corrosive as the knowing.

Like the Tories, Reform has also taken lavish funding from very rich people who are hostile to climate action. Both parties now evince the same hostility. Which came first, the hostility or the funding? Does it matter? Whether a party changes its policy in response to donations or attracts big donors because of its policy, it’s equally damaging to democratic trust.

The same applies to Labour’s relationship with City donors, which might help explain its newfound enthusiasm for deregulating finance, despite the warnings of 2008. As Transparency International has documented, political parties in the UK “are increasingly becoming dependent on a small number of very wealthy donors”. “Dependent on” can easily mean “beholden to”. In very few cases has corruption been demonstrated. But that’s not the point. The problem isn’t that such relationships are illegal. The problem is that they are not.

The trust crisis was exacerbated by the Conservatives, who, without providing a coherent rationale, raised political spending caps and handcuffed the regulators. As the admirable Spotlight on Corruption has discovered, the Electoral Commission’s investigations have declined by 89% since 2019, while the police, without a dedicated unit and clear powers, do almost nothing. No one has ever gone to prison in Britain for breaching electoral finance laws. The highest criminal fine yet levied is a pathetic £6,000. The regulator’s budget in this country is about £1 per voter. In Australia it’s £24.

The higher caps set by the Tories triggered an even more intense scramble for private money: our representatives now often seem to spend more time soliciting funds than soliciting votes. Regulatory corrosion has made it even harder to spot the difference between a “permissible” donor and an “impermissible” one, and to stop foreign agents infiltrating our politics.

The representation of the people bill seeks to address this crisis. But to read the relevant sections (58-63) is to be struck by their extreme complexity and obvious loopholes. In response to the Rycroft review on foreign interference, the government has decided to cap annual funding from voters living abroad at £100,000 each, and stop donations being made in cryptocurrency. But how can anyone be sure that a billionaire based abroad isn’t channelling money through a resident, or an untraceable crypto payment isn’t turned into sterling before it lands in a party’s account? Continued regulatory chaos and public distrust are locked in.

I believe that any attempt to distinguish between “good donors” and bad, resident and foreign, is futile. Any major donor is a bad donor, as their economic power undermines democracy. Given the transnational nature of capital, distinctions based on residence become meaningless. And what’s to stop an AI program splitting a big donation into a thousand small ones that don’t need to be reported at all?

There’s a simple way of sorting all this out. It works as follows. The only money a party can receive is a standard fee (say £25) for membership. The government then matches that fee on a fixed multiple. For instance, if you have 100,000 members each paying £25, and the multiple is three, your annual budget is £10m. And that’s it: no other sources permitted. The parties would agree between themselves, with public input (perhaps a citizens’ assembly), on what the membership fee and multiple should be.

At a stroke, this sweeps away all the complexities of permissible and non-permissible donors, residence requirements, currency types, ultimate origins and spending caps. Instead of raising money, politicians would spend their time raising membership: reconnecting with the public and broadening their base. We would become equal political citizens, and our system would be transparent and intelligible. It would belong to us, not the billionaires.

The cost to the exchequer? Perhaps between £20m and £50m a year. The costs of the current system are incalculable, as the entire state is harnessed to it, creating endless dysfunction.

It doesn’t solve every aspect of billionaire influence: for instance, it wouldn’t have stopped Nigel Farage taking another £5m, in this case for his own use, from Harborne before he became an MP. But this simple measure would, I believe, do more than any other to give politics back to the people.

Democracy demands that we eliminate not only the dodgiest and most obscure sources of donor money, but all of it.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23^rd April 2026

The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.

They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.

The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.

Amoc’s shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures by roughly 6C and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating climate catastrophe.

Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK.

This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happened before. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.

The first paper proposing that Amoc might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, Amoc collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a “high impact, low probability” event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur.

Research over the past few years prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a “high impact, high probability” event. Now, in response to last week’s paper, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf – perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject – says the chances of a shutdown look like “more than 50%”. We could pass the tipping point, he says, “in the middle of this century”.

So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings. This model underpins official responses to the climate crisis.

It began with the work of the economist William Nordhaus, who sought to assess the economic effects of global heating. His modelling suggests that a “socially optimal” level of heating is between 3.5C and 4C. Most climate scientists see a temperature rise of this kind as catastrophic. Even 6C of heating, Nordhaus suggests, would cause a loss of just 8.5% of GDP. Climate science suggests it would look more like curtains for civilisation.

As the eminent economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor have argued, the mild effects Nordhaus forecasts are merely artefacts of the model he has used. For example, his modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk.

The likely impacts of high levels of heating include the inundation of major cities, the closure of the human climate niche (the conditions that sustain human life) across large parts of the globe, the collapse of the global food system and cascading regime shifts – that is, abrupt transitions in ecosystems – releasing natural carbon stores, potentially leading to a “hothouse Earth” in which very few survive. Never mind a few points off GDP: there would be no means of measurement and scarcely an economy to measure.

Bizarrely, the modelling also applies discount rates to future people: their lives, it assumes, are worth less than ours. In other words, it has taken a method used to calculate returns to capital and applied it to human beings. As the three economists point out, “it is very difficult to find a justification for this in moral philosophy.” Moreover, climate impacts disproportionately affect the poor – but under the models, their lives are also priced down.

Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by “special interests” such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it’s not just the oil companies. Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the living planet, has given $3.5m (£2.6m) to a junktank run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has built his career on promoting Nordhaus’s model, thus helping to downplay the need for climate action. Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize for economics for his pernicious nonsense – and it is deeply embedded in government decision-making.

A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity’s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It’s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.

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