By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18^th April 2026

Donald Trump has done more to accelerate the energy transition than anyone else alive. Fossil fuel companies bankrolled his presidential campaign to stop the transition in its tracks. But when you back a volatile narcissist, unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, you shouldn’t expect to control the outcome.

It’s not that the fossils are suffering yet. As prices have soared since Trump and Netanyahu attacked Iran, oil executives have been selling shares at gobsmacking prices: the CEO of Chevron, for example, has cashed $104m so far this year. Vladimir Putin has also received a massive boost to his Ukraine invasion budget. As promised, Trump has gutted clean energy rules and programmes, green alternatives and environmental science. A fortnight ago, he stated, with the usual quantum of evidence (zero): “The environmentalists, I mean, they are terrorists … I call them environmental terrorists.”

But Trump’s illegal war, waged at terrible cost, is also focusing minds in governments around the world. It’s a demonstration not just that the orange emperor cannot be trusted, but also that fossil fuels cannot be trusted. Concentrated in certain regions, in the hands of either unreliable allies, potential opponents or outright enemies, dependent on long supply lines that can easily be disrupted, subject to price volatility that can trigger regime change in almost any country that relies on them, they now look less like a lifeline than a liability.

Again, it is true that the short-term response of some governments has been to favour fossil energy, through cutting fuel taxes or raising subsidies to help ease the cost of living crisis. But at the same time, many are now seeking to reduce or break their dependency. The logic of switching to renewables looks ineluctable.

This is certainly how their voters see it. The war has triggered a global surge in demand for electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, heat pumps and other fossil-free technologies. Inquiries about buying EVs have risen 23% in the UK since the attack on Iran began, by 50% in Germany and by 160% in France. There’s similar interest in India, south-east Asia and South Korea. Even in the US, where Trump has done everything possible to stymie the technology, there’s 20% more interest than before the war.

The same goes for domestic solar panels and heat pumps. People in this country aren’t nearly as ignorant of their own interests as the Mail and the Telegraph like to pretend.

Rising enthusiasm for green tech coincides with some remarkable breakthroughs. Battery technology, as the climate advocate Bill McKibben points out, is advancing at astonishing rates, defying even recent predictions. Through grid-scale batteries, we could quickly eliminate the need for fossil fuel plants as the power source of last resort. This would greatly reduce the price of electricity. Solid-state batteries could before long enable the super-fast charging of everything, everywhere, with far longer storage times and (in cars) much greater range. Quantum batteries, now beginning to look like a realistic possibility, could transform the system all over again.

We are on the cusp of vast, cascading shifts in energy supply and storage. Any country that fails to respond will remain trapped in the fossil age, facing high bills and insecurity, while others transform their economies. Last week, the Chinese vehicle maker BYD announced plans for a network of super-fast chargers in the UK, which can power up a car battery from 10% to 70% in five minutes. Petrol and diesel automakers developing new models might as well be investing in typewriters and rotary telephones.

Governments should seek the electrification of everything that can be electrified, and the retirement of much that cannot. Rather than – as the gasbags insist – trying to extract the last dregs of fossil fuel from moribund North Sea fields, which could supply only a fraction of future demand, while keeping us locked into foreign dependency, the UK should now go all-out for grid batteries, heat pumps and induction hobs.

Half-measures offer nothing but delay and wasted costs. It makes no sense to keep selling new hybrid cars after full-fossil vehicles are phased out in 2030. An electric typewriter is still a typewriter.

This is also a great time to invest in energy conservation and energy efficiency. One of the remarkable legacies of Anne Hidalgo, former mayor of Paris, has been to enable, through the 15-minute city programme, people to meet their needs more cheaply, more conveniently and with greatly reduced emissions and air pollution. It is one of many examples of how we could do more with less. Instead of seeking to extend the long fossil century, we can, by switching to 21st-century technologies and solutions, not only protect ourselves from price shocks and dictators, but also improve our lives, create jobs and help prevent climate breakdown. But today we scarcely need to point it out, as Trump is making the argument on our behalf.

I believe his attack on every possible green measure is motivated as much by billionaire nihilism as by the demands of his sponsors. As a recent post of his suggests, he might actually believe he is divine. How can he prove it to himself? By terminating the lives and living conditions of mortals, either with a stroke of the pen, or with a thunderbolt from a B-1 Lancer bomber plane. Destruction is not just the means to an end. It is also the end.

The consequences of his mad-emperor phase ripple outwards. Trump’s support for Viktor Orbán might have contributed to the fall of the Hungarian autocrat’s regime. With it goes a vast infrastructure of funding, channelling the profits from Russian oil into propaganda networks across Europe and the UK. We are just beginning to understand how much of the anti-green campaigning in this country might have been financed this way.

Greens who were long dismissed as “idealistic” and “unrealistic” now look like hard-headed pragmatists and true patriots. They are years ahead of their rivals in demanding a transition that makes sense on every level: environmental, economic and political. And unlike the far right, the hard right and much of the rest of the political spectrum, they have not been seduced by the foreign money corrupting our politics.

The attack on Iran is not the way any of us wanted this to happen. But the unintended consequences of Trump’s pointless war could help sink Trumpism everywhere – and the corrupt and filthy industry that props it up.

www.monbiot.com

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

This country’s a dump. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. From the point of view of criminal waste gangs, it is one big potential landfill. The chances of being caught range between minimal and nonexistent, and the penalties are mostly laughable. Successive governments have given criminals a licence to print money.

Last week, the Commons public accounts committee reported that illegal waste dumping is “out of control”. The UK is now blighted with between 8,000 and 13,000 illegal waste sites. Most consist of a few lorry loads. Some contain tens of thousands of tonnes of waste, which might incorporate everything from household products to asbestos, heavy metals and highly toxic, flammable and explosive organic chemicals. The rubbish blows through local neighbourhoods, flows into rivers and seeps into soil and groundwater. And, in most cases, nothing is done.

This is no glitch, but the inevitable result of a sustained ideological assault on regulation. Governments treat essential public protections as “red tape” that must be slashed, and regulators as “checkers and blockers” who must be vanquished. But ministers cannot simply delete protections from the statute books, for fear of provoking public fury. So instead they cut the funds for monitoring and enforcement: deregulation by stealth. The result, over the past 15 years, has been to build a whole new industrial sector almost from scratch: organised waste crime. It is perhaps our most successful growth industry.

It’s great business. Someone who wants their waste removed pays you a fee to cover transit, landfill tax and the gate charges at an official disposal site. But instead of taking it to a registered landfill, you dump it on farmland, on nature reserves, in ancient woodlands, across country lanes or even, as in Bickershaw, near Wigan, on the green space next to a primary school. You pocket the difference: about £2,500 per articulated lorry load. Anyone can play, as I discovered when I registered my deceased goldfish with the Environment Agency as an upper-tier waste dealer.

The chances of being caught are so low and the profits so high that waste dumping, as the House of Lords environment and climate change committee reports, has become a “gateway” to organised crime, creating networks that then branch into drugs, guns, money laundering, fraud and modern slavery. Waste crime is changing the character of the country, socially as well as physically.

So underfunded, demoralised and utterly useless have the regulators become that, even in some of the rare cases in which they’ve begun investigations and prosecutions, the dumping has continued. This is what has happened at Bickershaw, where a 25,000-tonne illegal tip has forced closures of the primary school, filled the neighbourhood with rats and flies, damaged local people’s businesses and ruined their lives. Locals first reported the dumping in late 2024. Eventually, the Environment Agency launched what it called a “major criminal investigation”. But in mid-February this year, drone footage showed that activity at the site continued: the agency, council and police had failed to secure it.

It’s the same story almost everywhere. When the first trucks began arriving on the banks of the River Cherwell, north of Oxford, in summer 2025, local anglers, neighbours and landowners reported them. The Environment Agency’s response was to issue “a cease-and-desist order”. But that was it. Not only did it fail to block the entrance, it didn’t even install a trail camera to monitor the activity and identify the culprits. Unsurprisingly, the lorries kept coming. Only months later did the Environment Agency secure the site, by which time a 20,000-tonne waste mountain, slipping into the river, had become a “critical incident”.

At Hoad’s Wood in Kent, a “strictly protected” ancient woodland, locals reported in 2020 that several acres of trees had been illegally cleared: the dumpers were preparing their site. The authorities failed to respond. Between 2020 and 2023, the gangsters deposited more than 30,000 tonnes of construction and household waste there. Local people supplied the authorities with footage of the dumping and even the names of the companies involved. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until January 2024 that the Environment Agency imposed a restriction order on the site, and it was only in February 2025 that three men were arrested.

As Kent’s police and crime commissioner told a House of Lords inquiry, people “report it to the borough council, which will tell them to report it to the police, who will tell them to report it to the Environment Agency, which will tell them to report it to the council, which will tell them to report it to the police. They will just keep going round and round and round, and no one cares.” Now the cleanup operation will cost taxpayers £15m.

That’s deregulation for you. It’s yet another instance of successive governments’ bizarrely lopsided version of “fiscal discipline”, which counts the costs of action, but not the costs of inaction. On a conservative estimate, illegal dumping costs the economy in England £1bn a year. The cost of cleaning up all the criminal dumps that have accumulated over the past 15 years will, if it ever happens, amount to tens of billions. This is before we take into account the potential contamination of aquifers by toxic waste seepage, whose costs and impacts could be many times greater. And it’s all because of the cuts, saving a tiny fraction of these costs, inflicted on regulators in the name of “efficiency”.

A fortnight ago, the government published its “waste crime action plan”. Some of the measures are welcome, but they in no way match the scale of the crisis. It allocates an extra £15m a year for waste crime enforcement: a mere wooden sword to wield against the vast organised crime networks that have grown in the regulatory vacuum. This also happens to be the cost of cleaning up just one of the 8,000 sites: Hoad’s Wood. Everything this plan proposes is undermined by the prime minister’s ongoing deregulation agenda, which also appears to be “out of control”.

Underfunding and deregulation, now in their fifth decade, are destroying our country. They ensure we cannot solve our problems, spreading hopelessness and passivity. They open the door to economic mafias and to political profiteers exploiting misery and despair. There could scarcely be a more potent symbol of dysfunction and neglect than the waste piling up around us. The literal dump becomes a metaphorical one.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 25^th March 2026

The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.

Drawing on years of scientific data, I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists – and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security, with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.

While some MPs got it, governments as a whole simply don’t seem to understand what we’re facing. It’s this: the global food system is systemically fragile in the same way that the global financial system was before the 2008 crash.

It’s easy to see potential vulnerabilities, such as a fertiliser supply crunch caused by the closure of the strait of Hormuz, or harvest failures caused by climate breakdown. But these are not the thing itself. They are disruptions of the kind that might trigger the thing. The thing itself is the entire system sliding off a cliff. The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.

Recent data suggests that every part of this system is now highly concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, which have been consolidating both vertically and horizontally. One recent study found that the US food system has “consolidated nearly twice as much as the overall economic system”. Some of these corporations, diversifying into financial products, now look more like banks than commodity traders, but without the same level of regulation. They might claim that financialisation helps them hedge against risk, but as one paper remarks, “it is nearly impossible to differentiate between hedging and speculating.” We don’t know how exposed to risk they might be, but it doesn’t look great. Partly through their influence, the world has shifted towards a “global standard diet”, supplied by the global standard farm.

These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the use of just-in-time supply chains and the funnelling of much of the world’s trade through a number of chokepoints. Some people have long warned that the strait of Hormuz, alongside the Suez canal, Turkish straits, Panama canal and straits of Malacca, are critical chokepoints, whose obstruction would threaten the flow of food, fertiliser, fuel and other crucial agricultural commodities. A year ago, I listed “military attacks on … straits and canals” as a major interruption risk exacerbated by Donald Trump’s antics. The thought that Houthi rebels in Yemen, backed by the Iranian government, might simultaneously resume their attacks on Red Sea shipping keeps me awake at night.

What all this means is a reduction in the key elements of systemic resilience: diversity, redundancy (a system’s spare capacity), modularity (its degree of compartmentalisation), backup (other ways of providing food), asynchronicity (which prevents shocks suddenly compounding) and circuit breakers (mostly in the form of effective regulation). A loss of any one of these properties should be a flashing red light. But the whole dashboard is now lit up.

When a system has lost its resilience, it’s hard to predict just how and when it could go down. The collapse of one corporation? The simultaneous closure of two or more chokepoints? A major IT outage? A severe climate event coinciding with a geopolitical crisis? The next step could be contagious bankruptcy and cascading failure across sectors. Then … well, it’s beyond imagination. The chain between seller and buyer – as fundamental to our food supply as the production of food itself – could suddenly snap. Shelves would clear as people panic-bought. Crops would rot in fields, silos or ports. Rebooting a system whose financial architecture has imploded might prove impossible on the timescale required to prevent mass starvation. As complex societies, we’re looking at a potential termination event.

We know what needs to happen: break up the big corporations; bring the system under proper regulatory control; diversify our diets and their means of production; reduce our dependence on a handful of major exporting countries; build strategic food reserves, accessible to people everywhere.

But there’s a problem, and it’s not just Trump. Almost all governments are beholden to corporate and financial power. The measures required to avoid catastrophe are those they are least prepared to implement. The chances of a global agreement on this global problem are approximately zero.

The best we can hope for is that braver politicians in our own countries seek to insulate us from the worst impacts. A crucial step is to encourage a shift to a plant-based diet. People struggle to see the relevance, but it’s simple. A plant-based diet requires far fewer resources, including just a quarter of the land a standard western diet requires and much less fertiliser and other inputs.

Just as we make ourselves more energy-secure by switching from fossil fuels to renewables, we make ourselves more food-secure by switching from animals to plants. Don’t take my word for it: it’s a key message in the national security assessment, which the government sought to withhold from public view – probably because it would upset too many powerful interests. Chinese researchers have come to the same conclusion about their own country: its food resilience is now dangerously compromised by the rising consumption of animal products.

But policy in the UK is nothing short of moronic. In response to warnings about our food vulnerability, our environment secretary, the former financial lobbyist Emma Reynolds, remarked that she wanted to boost domestic poultry production. Given that this sector largely depends on imported feed (such as soya from Brazil and maize from the US), her plan would make us more vulnerable. But she proposes scarcely anything else: no strategic reserves, no alternative supply chains, no useful defensive measures of any kind.

Policy here and across most of the world appears to consist of allowing “the market” (namely a few huge global corporations) to decide what happens next. There’s another way of putting it. Our governments are leaving a group of ruthless speculators to play dice with our lives.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19^th March 2026

I realise this is a serious breach of etiquette. But could we perhaps abandon good manners and contextualise Donald Trump’s attack on Iran? The intense western interest in the Middle East and west and central Asia, sustained for more than a century, and the endless attempts by foreign governments to shape and control these regions, are not random political tics. They are somewhat connected to certain fuel sources situated beneath the ground.

Trump’s war aims are typically incoherent: apparently incomprehensible even to himself. But Iran would not be treated as an “enemy of the west” were it not for what happened in 1953, when Winston Churchill’s government persuaded the CIA to launch a coup against the popular democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The UK did so because Mossadegh sought to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company: to stop a foreign power from stealing the nation’s wealth. The US, with UK support, tried twice to overthrow him, and succeeded on the second attempt, with the help of some opportunistic ayatollahs. It reinstated the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1954, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became British Petroleum, later BP.

Fury about the 1953 coup, combined with ever-more vicious repression under the shah’s dictatorship, triggered the revolution of 1979, which was captured by the ayatollahs, with horrible consequences for many Iranians. They would not be running the country were it not for our governments’ violent crushing of democracy for the sake of oil.

Take a step back from this history, and you see something else that should be obvious. The conflation of capitalism with “free markets” is one of the most successful lies in human history. The historical and ongoing plunder of resources; the police, armies and death squads deployed against those who resist; the shifting of profits from less powerful nations to the major powers; the intimidation of labour; the conning of consumers; the extraction of rent; the dumping of costs on the living planet: all this is the opposite of “free”. It’s highly coercive and extremely expensive.

Much of the time there’s little sign of a market, either. Land, commodities and labour are, in many cases, simply stolen. Public resources, whether oil reserves, forests, water systems or railways are given (or sold at a fraction of their value) to private monopolists. The rich are bailed out by the state when they run into trouble, while the poor must sink or swim. “Free market capitalism” is a contradiction in terms.

The world’s military power exists in large part to deliver the profit from resources – especially oil – to banks and shareholders, commodity traders and asset managers, hedge funds and private equity companies. For the same purpose, the infrastructure of persuasion – lobbyists, media, social media algorithms – is mobilised to ensure the most amoral, sadistic and bellicose people are selected as leaders, as they will keep oil and other commodities flowing for the benefit of capital, whatever the human cost may be. Their opponents are demonised, alternatives dismissed as “unrealistic”, “unpopular” and “unaffordable”.

This is why we consistently underestimate other people’s desire for change. For example, one study shows that 89% of the world’s people want more action to stop climate breakdown. Yet the same people believe they’re a minority. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, surveys consistently showed that a vast majority hoped to emerge into a better world, where health, wellbeing and environmental protection took precedence over economic growth. But governments spent billions on restoring our dysfunctions.

As the hydrocarbon industries and their financial backers find themselves threatened by green technologies, their grip on governments and the media has tightened. They’ve poured vast sums into climate denial and public dissuasion campaigns. Politics has become harsher, less open and less tolerant. The democratic recession is in large part driven by fossil fuel interests. The entire planet suffers from the resource curse.

Oil did not cause capitalism, but it has massively extended and empowered it. Reduce our dependency on oil, and we disrupt some of the world’s most violent and exploitative relations. We defuel dictators and war machines, coups and assassinations, invasions and nuclear threats. It’s not everything of course: there will still be water wars, land wars and mineral wars to be fought: after all, the military machine can’t just sit there rusting. But it’s a lot.

We would also defuel the greatest violence human beings have ever waged against each other: the degradation of all our lives through climate breakdown. The two emergencies – political and environmental – are one. We need to put ourselves on an anti-war footing with the urgency that nations have traditionally put themselves on war footings: an emergency programme to get fossil fuels out of our lives, faster and further than any government is currently planning.

A crucial intervention is the National Emergency Briefing, whose forthcoming film, hosted in cinemas by volunteers across the country, will press the government to explain our predicament properly, and mobilise for full-scale action. If you worry about the cost, consider this. The government’s Climate Change Committee estimates that the additional expense of a single fossil-fuel price spike on the scale of 2022’s is roughly the same as the entire cost of net zero by 2050. The price shock caused by Trump’s attack on Iran is likely to be even greater. We get nothing in return for oil spikes, but we get a new, more secure and cheaper energy system in return for the net zero programme.

I don’t mean to suggest that defeating the fossil fuel machine is easy. Capital will use everything it has to stop us. This is what Extinction Rebellion discovered in the UK, as vicious new protest laws were drafted to shut it down. This is what the Standing Rock campaigners in the US found, when they sought to stop an oil pipeline from crossing their land. It’s what Earth defenders in the global south discover even more brutally, as paramilitaries gun them down. Control over resources is the driving force of politics. Democracy, at the moment, is the lightshow played on the castle walls.

Concentrated fossil power leads to concentrated political power. Had we been less dependent on fossil fuels, there might have been no President Trump, no President Putin, no ayatollahs, no Prime Minister Netanyahu. Fossil fuels push the world towards autocracy. Overthrow our demand for them, and we overthrow much of the current tyranny. Greener, cleaner, cheaper, kinder, fairer: what a beautiful world we could have.

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

These are burning, smoking lies. As oil and gas prices soar, thanks to the US and Israel’s attack on Iran, the UK’s opponents of climate policy become even shriller. Rightwing politicians, Tufton Street junktanks and the billionaire press tell us our energy security will be enhanced and our bills will fall if we abandon net zero policies, ditch renewables and reinvest in North Sea gas. These claims are not just a little bit wrong. They are the exact opposite of the truth.

Two things have indeed happened in recent years. The price of electricity has soared, contributing greatly to the cost of living, and the proportion of the electricity we receive from renewables has simultaneously boomed: from 3% in 2000 to 47% today. So, they claim, one has caused the other: more renewables means higher prices.

Not a bit of it. By far the cheapest component of our energy supply is the electricity produced by renewables, principally wind and solar. It’s the same story worldwide. But the price of electricity does not reflect the mix of sources. It is set at almost all times by its most expensive component. And what might that be? Oh yes, fossil gas. Even before the current war, gas prices were astronomical, and had been rising in leaps and bounds. This, overwhelmingly, is the reason for our high energy bills.

Why does it happen this way? Because of a system called “marginal cost pricing”. This means that, while the majority of what comes through the wire is supplied by renewables and nuclear power, electricity is sold on the wholesale market at the price (the “marginal cost”) of the power source of last resort, which fills the last remaining gaps in supply: fossil gas.

Though the contribution of fossil fuels to our electricity supply in the UK has fallen from 73% in 2000 to 27% today, gas still sets the price to a greater extent than in almost any comparable country. In the UK, this happens 98% of the time, while the EU average is 39%. That’s because the backup power sources in much of the EU are not gas but hydroelectricity or nuclear. Better electricity storage would provide us with a cheaper, more secure and less volatile source of last resort. It’s one of the things the government, in the face of media fury, is developing.

Ironically, in Norway, which supplies 76% of our gas imports, gas sets the price only 1% of the time. In fact, the Norwegians scarcely use it for electricity production: hydropower provides 89%, wind 9% and fossil gas 0.9%. Norway’s trade in fossil fuels is like the British opium trade in the 19th century: a curse to be dumped on other countries.

These inconvenient facts caused a magnificent self-own by that gruesome junktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, which demands North Sea drilling and fracking. It claimed that, as gas here costs no more than elsewhere, “it cannot be gas prices that are driving UK electricity prices so much higher” than in countries such as Norway. Norwegian industrial electricity, it notes, costs less than half of ours. Yup: because it scarcely uses gas. Google first, comment after.

Such idiocies abound. On X last week, Claire Coutinho claimed that our energy resilience depends on “maximising the North Sea”. She seems to have forgotten that, as energy secretary two years ago, she boasted “we spent over £100bn protecting the economy and households across the country” from the effects of the gas price spike caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some resilience, that.

We’re told that if we extracted more gas at home, electricity would be cheaper. Hello, basic economics. The price of gas is set on international markets and dominated by conditions affecting the biggest suppliers, such as the US, Iran and Russia. The UK’s remaining reserves are especially difficult and expensive to extract. The industry here depends on a very generous tax regime: most of the time, it receives more money than it returns to the Exchequer. Even so, it doesn’t offer this gas to UK customers at special rates. The companies sell it, as everyone else does, on the international market, at international prices. Extracting every last cubic metre from the North Sea would not shift the price by one penny.

And there’s another trifling reason why “maximising the North Sea” will have no impact. We’ve used almost all of it already.

The money from this extraction could have financed a sovereign wealth fund, like Norway’s, which would have funded social care, railways, sewerage – any of our long-term costs. Instead, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s “liberalisation” (a fancy word for looting), private companies walked away with the profits. Another victory for neoliberalism.

The same nonsense prevailed last year when the steel industry was on the rocks. The rightwing press insisted the problem was net zero climate policies. Had journalists spoken to the industry, they would have heard a different story. Steel is exempt from most environmental levies. Its problem is the one we all face: as UK Steel puts it, “higher UK wholesale prices are now responsible for nearly three-quarters of the price disparity between UK, French and German industrial electricity prices”.

The rest of us do pay green charges, but these account for a far smaller portion of the rise in our bills than the price of gas. The indispensable CarbonBrief estimates that “‘green levies’ and network charges account for just 6% and 20% of the rise in bills since before the energy crisis, respectively, against 53% due to wholesale prices driven by gas”. These charges enable investment in the transition to a carbon-free grid, resulting in much lower future bills. You might have imagined that people who obsess about money and not much else could spot the difference between current and capital spending. Apparently not.

What explains this epidemic of idiocy? It’s simple. What the owners of newspapers and politicians want is what their entire class demands: a world in which resources are controlled and prices harvested by those who own them. You can do this with fossil fuels, whose reserves are concentrated and under the exclusive control of the companies licensed to exploit them. You cannot do it with renewables, because sunshine and wind are everywhere.

Renewables are highly competitive and, for this reason, low-profit. Fossil fuels are uncompetitive and high profit. Media proprietors, like almost all billionaires and hectomillionaires, gain exceedingly by investing in them. If it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between fossil-fuel lobbyists and the billionaire press, that’s because there isn’t one. For the sake of the ultra-rich, we are all being gaslit.

www.monbiot.com

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

Our political memory fails us. We treat government policies as if we’re seeing them for the very first time. But much of what appears to be novel has deep historical roots. If we fail to understand those roots and the soil in which they grow, we will fail to resist the assaults on our humanity.

The home secretary’s new attack on the rights of immigrants and refugees is shocking and disorienting. Shabana Mahmood wants to raise the qualification period for immigrants to achieve indefinite leave to remain in the UK from five years to 10 (and up to 20 for refugees). It looks outlandish. So does her wider assault on asylum seekers, denying them permanent refugee status even if their claims are successful. But both are eerily familiar.

Just over a century ago, in 1924, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, sought to appease rightwingers by appointing Sir William Joynson-Hicks as home secretary. As Martin Pugh notes in his 2005 book, Hurrah for the Blackshirts!, Joynson-Hicks had “established himself as an unapologetic antisemite”. As home secretary, he “raised the hurdle” for immigrants to achieve “naturalisation” (equivalent to indefinite leave to remain) “from five to 10 years, and to 15 years for Russians”. “Russians” tended to mean Jewish refugees, fleeing pogroms and other oppressions.

Joynson-Hicks made it as hard as possible for refugees to settle in the UK. As the historian David Cesarani has noted, the home secretary “issued instructions to immigration officers to increase their vigilance and never to give the benefit of the doubt to an alien attempting to enter the country”. He visited the ports “to examine the tighter procedures and encourage officials to greater zeal”. In other words, while there is no suggestion that Mahmood is an antisemite like Joynson-Hicks, his policies uncannily prefigured Mahmood’s.

The same goes for the context. The rightwing press, led by the Times, the Daily Mail, the Express, the National Review and the Morning Post, had spent the preceding 20 years whipping up paranoia about a “flood” of “aliens” and “undesirables” entering the country. “Aliens” and “undesirables” tended to be code for Jews. Jews in Britain were widely accused of “tribalism”, of refusing to “assimilate”, of being “un-English” and unpatriotic and of “leeching” off the state. The Imperial Fascist League issued stickers with the slogan: “Britons! Do not allow Jews to tamper with white girls.” Jewish immigrants were blamed for the housing shortage and unemployment.

Joynson-Hicks spoke disparagingly of Jews, who, he claimed, “put their Jewish or foreign nationality before their English nationality”. He maintained that left wing politicians “would like to see England flooded with the whole of the alien refuse from every country in the world”. Many rightwingers believed there was a conspiracy to create a Jewish world order.

In other words, the stories being told about Muslims and immigrants today are the same stories that were being told about Jews a century ago. Both Muslims and immigrants are now accused of tribalism and a failure to assimilate, of hostility to “British values” and of “tampering with white girls”. They are blamed for the housing shortage and unemployment and for “leeching” off the state. Rightwing conspiracy fictions claim that Muslims in Britain are seeking to create an Islamic world order in the form of a “global caliphate”. Figures such as Suella Braverman and Matthew Goodwin suggest that people from ethnic minorities cannot be truly English or truly British. Braverman proposes a literal blood-and-soil definition of Englishness, “rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity” with “generational ties to English soil”.

Just like the age-old generalisations about Jews, these characterisations are entirely false. To give one example, a poll last month found that Muslims in both the UK and the US are more likely than non-Muslims to believe that “democracy is the best system of government” and to express loyalty to the country.

So why all the hatred? Well, the primary source is the same as it was a century ago: the media. Still the Daily Mail (now owned by the 4th Lord Rothermere), the Express and other newspapers pour division and bile into our lives. Today they are supplemented by outlets such as GB News and the social media site X. But just as they did 100 years ago, governments will blame anyone and anything else for polarisation and hate. Last week both Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage, apparently reading from the same script, took this blame-shifting in a remarkable new direction by accusing the Green party of “sectarianism”, which appears to mean that it attracted Muslim votes. Is “sectarian” now code for Muslim?

If you want to stop hatred, polarisation and division, stand up to the rightwingmedia. This, too, is a lesson from the past. The alliance between the first Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists could have led to disaster. But in 1934, soon after Rothermere published his notorious Hurrah for the Blackshirts! article and Mosley held his monster rally in London’s Olympia, one of the Daily Mail’s biggest advertisers, J Lyons & Co, owned by a Jewish family, threatened a boycott unless the newspaper dropped its support for fascism. When the Mail caved and withdrew its blessing from Mosley, his movement began to wither. I write this with pride, as the family were my ancestors, and the Lyons chairman at the time my great-great uncle Sir Isidore Salmon.

Of course, it shouldn’t have been left to advertisers. Then and now, it’s the government that needs to confront the lies in the media. Instead, it endorses them and grovels to the oligarchs.

One result is that governments are constantly behind the curve. Net migration might turn negative this year, with dire consequences for crucial public services, especially hospitals, care homes and universities as well as many private employers. In political terms, the government’s rightwing policies are equally destructive. Not only does the latest polling put the Greens ahead of Labour for the first time in history, it also shows that of those who voted Labour in 2024, only 37% intend to do so now: an astonishing collapse. To appease the billionaire press, Starmer’s government has burnt its house down.

“Scheming aliens undermining our values” is a narrative built across a century and more, originally by antisemites. It has been drilled into our heads as if it were an incontrovertible truth. It creates an environment in which every minority becomes less safe – not just Muslims, recent immigrants, refugees, Black and Brown people, but also Jews and everyone else who has suffered at the hands of the far right. Learn it or repeat it: that is, and has always been, our choice.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 25^th February 2026

NB: This article was published before the by-election it refers to. The Greens won by a mile.  

Every barb Labour has directed at the Greens can now be returned with interest. “It’s a wasted vote.” “Do you want to see Reform in power?” New polling ahead of the crucial Gorton and Denton byelection this week, while by no means decisive, puts the Greens first on 22%, followed by Reform UK (20%), then Labour (18%), with 31% undecided. But still Keir Starmer falsely claims that “only Labour can beat Reform”. Does he want to see Reform in power?

I’m not a party person. I subscribe to the old-fashioned belief that journalists should have no political loyalties. But I see the Greens stepping into the howling void Labour has vacated and becoming everything you might have wanted Labour to be. In their byelection contender, Hannah Spencer, they have a brilliant candidate: a working plumber and plasterer with first-hand experience of the cracks and leaks in our social fabric and bright ideas for fixing them. Here and in many other constituencies, the Greens now appear to be the most plausible opposition to take on the extreme right.

YouGov’s voting intention polls show that since January 2025, Labour’s national share has declined from 26% to 18%, on a steady downward cruise that no rhetoric, U-turn or reboot has been able to jolt. The Greens, in contrast, on an equally steady trajectory, have risen in the same period from 8% to 17%. Throughout the Gorton and Denton contest, the gambling companies have judged them the best bet. So if, as Labour claims, the key aim is to stop Reform UK from gaining power, it should stand its candidate down and let the Greens walk home.

Of course, I’m not being entirely serious: I know Labour would never entertain the idea. But I’m using this outrageous proposal to highlight two things. The first is the way its rhetoric that suggests clinging on to nurse for fear of something worse backfires the moment a better nurse arrives. The second is that its claim to be laser-focused on stopping Reform rings hollow the moment it falls behind another contender in the polls. This is not and has never been Labour’s primary aim. If it were, it would have introduced electoral reform. I cannot emphasise this enough: the only thing that would allow Nigel Farage’s party to take power is our unfair and undemocratic first-past-the-post system – and Starmer’s determination to maintain it.

If stopping Reform were the overriding aim, Labour would also deploy what research shows is the killer attack line against that party. A survey of 6,000 people by the group Persuasion UK found that by far the most effective message of five options was focused on corporate interests and went as follows: “Nigel Farage says he’s on people’s side – but when you take a closer look it’s pretty clear who he’s really fighting for, isn’t it? It’s the rich, the powerful, his mates in big business.” It explained that Reform UK has taken vast donations from fossil fuel investors and climate science deniers. This, Persuasion UK said, is why Farage wants to cut public services, workers’ rights and taxes for the richest. “He’s not smashing the system. He and his rich friends basically are the system.”

None of the other attack lines came anywhere near this for efficacy. So why doesn’t Labour use it? Because that might alienate the people Starmer seems keenest to appease: Labour’s own corporate backers and the billionaire proprietors of the rightwing press. The leadership’s key objective is not stopping Farage, but frightening people into voting Labour. Quite frankly, it has nothing else left.

One by one, it has destroyed the hopes that people vested in it, alienating potential voters on everything from Gaza to benefits to its self-destructive apeing of Reform’s rhetoric on immigration; from its vicious factional warfare against leftwingers in the party to its tearing up of environmental protections and attacks on wildlife, which, in a country of nature lovers, is utter, self-defeating madness. Disgust and disillusionment among former supporters is everywhere palpable.

This byelection should have been a stroll for Labour. Not only was Gorton and Denton among its safest seats, but the Reform candidate, Matt Goodwin, is among the most unprepossessing people I’ve ever met. I was up against him on Question Time a year ago. We were picked up in the same car from the station; then I watched how he interacted with others, including a political ally, in the green room. He came across as utterly charmless and squirming with discomfort. When he tried to smile, his lips stretched, but no other part of his face seemed to move. This could explain why he has been seen so little in the constituency he’s contesting. For God’s sake, don’t let him near the voters!

He presents a target a mile wide. He has suggested punishing women who don’t have children through the tax system, while removing income tax “for women who have two or more children”. First the punitive right in this country, in the form of the Conservative chancellor George Osborne, penalised women for having more than two babies through the two-child benefit cap. Now, in the form of Goodwin, it proposes to whip them the other way. As ever, women’s reproductive choices must yield to culture wars waged by power-hungry men.

Last week the Guardian revealed that Goodwin was accused by a young woman working at GB News, where he presents a show, of making inappropriate comments that she took to be sexual harassment, causing her great distress. He apologised after she made a complaint. A source at GB News remarked that Farage believed “that is just Matt being Matt”. Ah yes, like “Boris being Boris”: the endless licence granted to the most obnoxious men in politics, while denied to everyone else.

As for the 44% of people in the constituency with minority ethnic backgrounds, Goodwin has claimed “it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’”. You have been warned.

What could be easier than trouncing him? But I have the feeling that if Labour stood unopposed, it would still manage to lose. Had it set out to alienate its base while infuriating voters everywhere, it could not have done a better job.

I’m delighted to see how well the Greens are doing. But we also need a strong and sincere Labour party. It’s tragic to witness how Starmer and his moral bypass of a government have ruined it – and opened the door to something much worse.

www.monbiot.com

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

History is being rewritten. The story we are told is that an evil man called Peter Mandelson, pursuing his own interests, went rogue to collaborate with a serial abuser of girls and women, undermining the good work of people seeking to defend the public interest. All this is true. But – and I fear many will find this hard to accept – it is only half the story.

The much harder truth is that Mandelson’s disgraceful dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were less a betrayal of his brief than an unauthorised extension of it. In 2009 – just as, we now know, Mandelson was passing sensitive information to Epstein – I argued that the government department he ran, called Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest”.

BERR was a smaller and less chaotic version of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (DOGE). Its purpose, I suggested, was to bypass the House of Commons on behalf of capital. It allowed Gordon Brown’s government to create the impression that it was defending the public interest while simultaneously, but more quietly, appeasing powerful lobbyists. In contrast to other government departments, BERR was largely run by unelected lords, who had either been corporate executives, corporate lobbyists or, like Mandelson, members of a concierge class operating on their behalf. I wrote that these ministers, appointed by Brown, “appear to have formed their own lobby group within government”.

BERR sought to part-privatise Royal Mail, breaking a manifesto commitment. It succeeded. It tried to block the EU working time directive: UK government filibusters delayed and weakened it. It attempted, less successfully, to undermine the equality bill, whose aim was to ensure equal pay for women (Mandelson’s simultaneous dealings with Epstein were not the only respect in which he spat on women’s rights). It undermined environmental legislation. It was “quietly building a bonfire of the measures that protect us from predatory corporate behaviour”.

So when Brown, who was prime minister at the time, expresses his shock and betrayal, please forgive me a small gasp of frustration. In his interview on the BBC’s Today programme, Brown claimed that in 2009: “We were solving a major financial crisis … all my thoughts were on how we could save people’s jobs and savings and their livelihoods.” But not only did he allow Mandelson to attack the public interest on behalf of business, he greatly increased Berr’s budget. This was despite the fact that, as I noted at the time, Mandelson “was partly responsible, both in Blair’s government and as European trade commissioner, for promoting the culture of deregulation that catalysed the economic crisis”. On one hand, Brown was trying to solve it. On the other, at the behest of corporate lobbyists, he was setting up the next one.

Brown also told the BBC, in justifying his appointment of Lord Mandelson, that the man had “an unblemished record as the [European] trade commissioner”. An unblemished record of what, exactly? Neocolonialism, perhaps. While Mandelson was in that post, he sought to impose draconian trade provisions on some of the poorest countries on Earth. He put pressure on them to let EU corporations muscle out local firms and make privatisation legally irreversible, threatening people’s access to health, education and water. He sought to force African countries to hand over crucial resources at the risk of widespread hunger.

Yes, when Mandelson was a minister in Brown’s government, he betrayed the national interest. But this is what, by other means, he was appointed to do. His treachery, while it went way beyond his official mandate, was not a bug, but a feature. The corrosion of democratic values was institutional. And this spirit has prevailed ever since. Keir Starmer’s government of all the lobbyists is no exception.

Brown, in proposing remedies for the secretive machinations Mandelson conducted, writes: “Conventions about commercial confidentiality should no longer prevent public service contracts delivered by private companies being subject to reasonable freedom of information requests.” I could scarcely breathe when I read that. It is exactly the demand some of us made when Brown rolled out the private finance initiative (PFI) across the public sector, enabling businesses to get their hooks into every aspect of state provisioning. When we tried to see the contracts, to understand what was being done in our name, Brown’s Treasury repeatedly blocked our information requests on the grounds of “commercial confidentiality”.

The sense of betrayal that Brown quite rightly feels is the same sense of betrayal some of us felt towards the governments in which he served. Yes, Brown had and retains some great qualities, and did much good. But he is also a remarkable escapologist. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten how his PFI programme planted a timebomb in public services, enabling corporations to take the profits while leaving the risks with the state: one of the reasons why they are now in so much trouble. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten his crucial role in the Iraq war: standing with Tony Blair and financing it. He rightly called for Vladimir Putin and his “enablers” to face justice for their crime of aggression in Ukraine. Yet it’s the same crime that Blair and his enablers (including one G Brown) committed in Iraq.

But it is not just Brown who is rewriting history. The media are 50% of any problem, and the story most of it loves to tell is of one bad apple. Heaven forfend that we see the systemic problems. There is a reason why Mandelson kept returning to government, despite sackings for his over-enthusiastic relationships with plutocrats. He was brought in to do the dirty work. The governments in which he served could loudly claim to be doing something, while subtly and simultaneously undoing it.

Mandelson’s treachery is an extreme instance of the dominant mode of UK politics over the past 45 years: the subordination of democracy to the demands of the ultra-rich. Abuse and exploitation – of women and children, of poorer countries and their people, of workers and contractors, renters and customers – are baked into the system.

If you cannot diagnose a problem, you cannot fix it. We urgently need to see this for what it is. Mandelson’s grovelling to the sinister rich is disgraceful, disgusting, deceitful, a crushing of women’s rights and of democracy. But it is not a deviation from the system. It is a manifestation of it.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4^th February 2026

Don’t let the Labour party say one more word about “splitting the vote”, in the forthcoming byelection or at any other time. With proportional representation, no one would ever need to worry about splitting the vote again. No one would need to choose the lesser evil to keep the greater evil out of office. We could vote for the parties we actually wanted. But the Labour government won’t hear of it. It insists we retain the unfair, ridiculous first-past-the-post system, then blames us for the likely results.

This is not because proportional representation is unpopular – far from it. Last year’s British Social Attitudes survey showed that 36% of people want to keep the electoral system as it is, while 60% want to change it. But as we are not allowed to vote on how we should vote, the decision is left in the hands of the corrupt old system’s beneficiaries.

In 2022, the Labour party conference voted in favour of proportional representation. At the end of 2024, so did a majority of MPs, including a majority of Labour MPs. Keir Starmer himself, while vying to become party leader, pointed out how unfair the current system is. But from the moment he was chosen, he refused to countenance any attempt to change it.

Why? For the very reason he highlighted: that the system is unfair. First past the post allows the two traditional parties of government to threaten and cajole us, warning that we’ll split the vote if we don’t support them. The splitting-the-vote argument is not a result of the system. It is the point of the system.

But now of course, as the old alliances shatter, first past the post has a different effect. An analysis in October suggested that on just 27% of the vote (roughly in the middle of its polling over the past year), Reform UK would win 48% of the seats, allowing it to take power with a small coalition partner. If Reform UK forms the next government, it will be for one reason and one reason alone: our electoral system.

So why is Starmer’s government so determined to keep it? Before the last election, the reason was obvious. In 2024, Labour gained just 33.7% of the vote: the smallest share for any party winning a general election since the second world war. Yet it took 63% of the seats in parliament: a massive majority.

But now the reason has changed. Thanks to Starmer’s Merdas Touch, which has turned the golden opportunity (grossly unfair as it is) of a 174-seat majority into a great steaming pile of excrement, Labour knows it is highly unlikely to win the next election. But it also knows this: that under proportional representation, it would be more or less wiped out.

This is what we’re seeing in the opinion polls ahead of May’s Welsh Senedd vote. That election will be conducted under a new and much fairer voting structure, called the “closed proportional list system”. The number of seats will be quite an accurate representation of the number of votes. What do we learn? That in Cymru, where Labour has been almost hegemonic for a century, it will, on current trends, end up with about 10% of the seats. Cast into the outer darkness, in other words.

But under the existing system, in a general election in 2029, Labour could channel its efforts into particular constituencies and emerge – despite a very small share of the total vote – with a respectable minority. It could be the official opposition. It might even be able to cobble a coalition together and limp on in government for a while. In other words, the difference between a fair system and an unfair one is the difference between Labour being booted into the Kuiper Belt, and Labour continuing to look like a serious player.

There is no way Reform UK could, on current trends, win a general election under proportional representation. The last election was tilted unfairly against that party: it took just five seats, despite winning 14.3% of the vote. Nigel Farage complained bitterly about it. Now, he has changed his tune. Last year he pointed out that “first past the post can be your enemy, but there comes an inversion point at which it becomes your friend”.

So this is how the real horror show begins: with Reform UK taking office on an even smaller share of the vote than Labour received in 2024. The only reason the UK did not become ungovernable after the grotesque results of the last election is that Keir Starmer’s government is so elusive and so bland. We might detest many of its works, but not so fiercely as to occupy the capital, refuse to pay our taxes, call a general strike or use the other tactics deployed by people in countries where their will has been thwarted.

But if Farage’s extreme and divisive party were to win on a similar proportion of the votes, the response would not be so muted. We would find ourselves in a country in which the great majority of people adamantly did not want to live under a Reform UK government, voted to ensure they did not, but found themselves doing so anyway. If that happens, it will be entirely on this Labour government, and its self-interested refusal to change the electoral system. So much for “country before party”.

But hey-ho: this horrific prospect grants the current government leverage over us. It can use the existing system to threaten that if we don’t vote Labour, we will get Farage. In our panic, we might forget that it is this system, and this system alone, that makes the threat real. As the Gorton and Denton byelection approaches, Labour is getting its excuses in early: if Reform wins, it will be the Greens’ fault, for “splitting the vote”. It warns us that “only Labour can beat Reform”. This isn’t true: the bookies currently think the Greens will win. If so, it will be because, while Labour offers disappointment and frustration, and Reform offers hatred and division, they offer hope and inspiration.

There’s only one way we are going to get the electoral system we want, and that is to vote for the parties we want. Organise. Defy the threats. Vote in hope. Recognise that the situation has changed. And then we might never need to make a depressing choice again.

www.monbiot.com

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

I know it’s almost impossible to turn your eyes away from the Trump show, but that’s the point. His antics, ever-grosser and more preposterous, are designed to keep him in our minds, to crowd out other issues. His insatiable craving for attention is a global-threat multiplier. You can’t help wondering whether there’s anything he wouldn’t do to dominate the headlines.

But we must tear ourselves away from the spectacle, for there are other threats just as critical that also require our attention. Just because you’re not hearing about them doesn’t mean they’ve gone away.

Why are they not salient? Partly because countries – and not just Trump’s – seem determined to keep us in the dark. The most important document published by the UK government since the general election emerged last week only through a freedom of information request. The national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse was supposed to have been published in October 2025, but the apparatchiks in Downing Street sought to make it disappear. Apparently there were two reasons: because its conclusions were “too negative”, and because it would draw attention to the government’s failure to act.

When the report at last appeared, thanks to an FoI request lodged by the Green Alliance, The Times reported that it had been significantly “abridged”, I expect by the same goons. Some of its starkest conclusions had been omitted. Even so, the assessment – believed to have been compiled by the joint intelligence committee (on which the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ sit) – is not exactly reassuring.

It echoes warnings some of us have made for years, only to be dismissed as nutters, doomsayers and extremists. It tells us that “ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).” This presents a threat to “UK national security and prosperity”. It says “the world is already experiencing impacts including crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks. Threats will increase with degradation and intensify with collapse.” The results will include geopolitical and economic instability, increased conflict and competition for resources. “It is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.” It also warns that “conflict and military escalation will become more likely, both within and between states, as groups compete for arable land and food and water resources”.

It provides a powerful vindication of certain messages that, when voiced by environmentalists, have been greeted with hatred, fury and denial. For example, it tells us that “food production is the most significant cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss”, that “animal farming at current levels is unsustainable without imports” and that “the UK does not have enough land to feed its population and rear livestock: a wholesale change in consumer diets would be required”. I’d be lying if I wrote: “I hate to say, ‘We told you so.’” After years of insults and abuse, I say it with pride.

But what was cut from the report is, according to The Times, even graver, including a warning that the shrinkage of glaciers in the Himalayas, causing declining river flow, would “almost certainly escalate tensions” between China, India and Pakistan, leading to the possibility of nuclear war. Again, some of us have been trying to persuade governments to focus on this threat with little success.

It’s almost reassuring to know we’re not alone in being stonewalled. If even the security services are gagged when they tell the government what it doesn’t want to hear, perhaps our communication style, or our modes of protest or our dress sense, are not, as we keep being told, the problem. The report, notably shorter than most of its kind, gives every appearance of having been hastily and crudely truncated.

I wonder whether the full assessment might also have named some other pressing security threats. One is the way in which fossil fuel, meat and livestock producers have been funding far-right movements, to stifle environmental protection measures that would reduce their profits. Such funding is a major driver of the fascistic politics that we now witness in the US.

It’s not hard to see how inconvenient this report is for Starmer’s government, which has repeatedly sought to invent a conflict between prosperity and environmental protection. Its war on the living world (a world it reduces, according to the “cauldron principle”, to bats, newts, spiders and snails) is a major element of its appeal to the “hero voters” on which it believes its success depends. Never mind that these voters might not actually exist: we’ll bring our ghost army back from Reform UK by attacking wildlife, which everyone in Britain famously hates. That’s bound to work. So when the security services say that environmental protection is in fact essential to prosperity, their report must be suppressed.

Against the assessment’s advice that tropical forest ecosystems are crucial to the UK’s security, our government has decided so far not to invest one penny in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, despite helping to establish this global funding mechanism. But rest assured: it tells us it’s “incredibly supportive” of the initiative. It seems determined to dump the international climate finance programme that the Tories established – to help poorer countries protect themselves and halt the collapse of ecosystems – when the current fund expires this year. Let’s ignore not just those eco-loons but the former military leaders arguing that climate finance is an essential element of national security.

At home, the government appears to have quietly given up on the target set by the Conservatives of “30 x 30”, which means 30% of our land and sea protected for nature by 2030. The national security assessment lists this as one of the essential measures needed to avert catastrophe. Labour’s new target? 30 x never.

And, as the Office for Environmental Protection points out, Starmer’s government is on track to miss even the dismal, risible targets for protecting and restoring wildlife established in the 2021 Environment Act, when George Eustice was environment secretary. Yes, the situation is actually worse than in the darkest days of Tory rule.

I know this government exists only to disappoint us. But its environmental failures are even more striking than its failures on other issues. When the ruling party compares unfavourably with the one that brought us Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, it’s worse than a betrayal. It’s a threat to our survival.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 16^th January 2026

There is one political problem from which all others follow. It is the major cause of Donald Trump, of Nigel Farage, of the shocking weakness of their opponents, of the polarisation tearing societies apart, of the devastation of the living world. It is simply stated: the extreme wealth of a small number of people.

It can also be quantified. The World Inequality Report (WIR) 2026 shows that about 56,000 people – 0.001% of the global population – corral three times more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. They afflict almost every country. In the UK, for example, 50 families hold more wealth than 50% of the population combined.

You can watch their fortunes grow. In 2024, Oxfam’s figures show, the wealth of the world’s 2,769 billionaires grew by $2tn, or $2,000bn. The total global spending on international aid last year was projected to be, at most, $186bn, less than a tenth of the increment in their wealth. Governments tell us they “can’t afford” more. In the UK, billionaires, on average, have become more than 1,000% richer since 1990. Most of their wealth derives from property, inheritance and finance. They have become so rich, in other words, at our expense.

The issue affects every aspect of policy. Trump is not seizing Venezuela’s oil wealth for the sake of the US poor. He couldn’t give a damn about them, as his “big, beautiful bill” – robbing the poor to give to the rich – revealed. He covets Greenland on behalf of the same elite interests, of which he is the avatar.

When the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, helped destroy the lives of the world’s poorest by tearing down USAID, he did so on behalf of his class. The same goes for Trump’s assaults on democracy, and his war on the living world. It is the ultra-rich who benefit most from destruction, in making money and in spending it. The WIR shows that the richest 1% of the world’s population account for 41% of greenhouse gas emissions arising from private capital ownership: almost twice that of the bottom 90%. And through their consumption, another study shows, the 1% produce as many greenhouse gases as the poorest two-thirds.

Inequality damages every aspect of our lives. Decades of research by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson shows that higher inequality, regardless of absolute levels of wealth, is associated with higher crime, worse public health, higher addiction, lower educational attainment, worse status anxiety (leading to higher consumption of positional goods), worse pollution and destruction, and a host of other ills.

Extreme inequality creates an “Epstein class” of global predators, exploiting the rest financially – and in other ways. It creates an ethos that no longer recognises our common humanity, that sees other people, as Musk puts it, as “non-player characters”, and believes that, “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy”.

This is the metric by which you can tell who in politics are your allies and who are your enemies: whether they support or oppose the extreme concentration of wealth. In fact, the matter should be definitional. Those who support it (let’s call them Group 1) are the right. Those who oppose it (Group 2) are the left.

As soon as you understand politics in this light, you notice something extraordinary. Almost the entire population is in Group 2. Polling across 36 nations by the Pew Research Center found that 84% see economic inequality as a big problem, and 86% see the political influence of the rich as a major cause of it. In 33 of these nations, a majority believe their country’s economic system needs either “major changes” or “complete reform”. In the UK, a YouGov poll revealed, 75% support a wealth tax on fortunes above £10m, while only 13% oppose it. But – and here’s the astonishing thing – almost the entire political class is in Group 1. You can search the manifestos of major parties that once belonged to the left, and find no call to make billionaires history.

Quite the opposite in fact. Even when politicians are forced to respond to calls for a wealth tax, they dismiss it, as UK ministers have done, with two excuses. The first is that it won’t raise much revenue. Maybe, maybe not: there’s a wide range of evidence on this matter. But revenue-raising is the least of its benefits. Far more important are two other issues. One is fairness. As the WIR reports, “Effective income tax rates climb steadily for most of the population but fall sharply for billionaires and centi-millionaires.” This undermines trust in the tax system and politics in general. The other is reducing the power of the ultra-rich over our lives. To restore democracy and create a fairer, safer, greener world, we must bring the ultra-rich to heel, cutting their fortunes until they can no longer bludgeon us.

The second excuse is that the uber-rich will flee the country. There are three possible responses to this claim. The first is that there’s no evidence to support it. The second is, if true, good riddance: they do us more harm than good. The third is to say: then the obvious solution is a global tax-avoidance measure. So guess what? While 125 nations supported this approach, Keir Starmer’s government was one of nine that opposed it. Our government doesn’t tax the ultra-rich enough not because it can’t, but because it doesn’t want to.

It’s not just politicians. Almost all the media belongs to Group 1. As the wealth and power of the proprietor class becomes ever greater and harder to justify, the views expressed in their outlets become ever crazier. Immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, women, transgender people, disabled people, students, protesters: anyone and everyone must be blamed for our dysfunctions, except those causing them. Ever more extreme “culture wars” (a euphemism for divide-and-rule) must be waged.

It’s also why imaginary threats (Venezuela, “cultural Marxists”, “domestic terrorists”) must constantly be drummed up. You cannot have both a free market in media ownership and a free market in information and ideas. The oligarchs who dominate the sector stifle inconvenient thoughts and promote the policies that protect their fortunes.

No one would claim that taking on extreme wealth is easy. But the battle begins with political parties spelling out this aim, clearly and unequivocally. Either they represent the great majority, or they represent the tiny minority: they cannot do both. So where, we might ask, are our representatives?

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

They are far into the lethal zone. Three people who are being held in prison on charges connected with the protest group Palestine Action have been on hunger strike for 45, 59 and 66 days. A fourth prisoner, Teuta Hoxha, ended her strike this week, after 58 days. She could suffer lifelong health effects. The remaining strikers, Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed and Lewie Chiaramello, could pass away at any time. The 10 IRA and INLA hunger strikers who died in 1981 survived for between 46 and 73 days. Muraisi, whose strike has lasted the longest, is, according to supporters, now struggling to breathe and suffering uncontrollable muscle spasms – possible signs of neurological damage. Yet the government refuses to engage.

It created this situation. The Crown Prosecution Service states that the maximum time a prisoner can spend on remand is 182 days (six months). Yet Muraisi and Ahmed were arrested in November 2024, and are not due to be tried until June at the earliest, which means they will be remanded for 20 months. Chiaramello, who was arrested in July 2025, has a provisional court date in January 2027, which means 18 months in prison without trial.

The limbo of remand is often devastating to prisoners’ wellbeing. Government figures, for example, show that the rate of suicide among remanded prisoners is more than twice that among sentenced prisoners. Extreme periods of remand like these are an offence against justice.

This is one aspect of what campaigners call “process as punishment”, an approach that now dominates the treatment of protest groups. Even if you are never convicted of a crime, your life is made hell if you dare, visibly and publicly, to dissent.

The three prisoners, and others charged with the same offences, are being held under “terrorist conditions”. This means they are allowed only minimal communications and visits. They’ve also been banned from prison jobs for “security reasons”, denied books, newspapers, library and gym visits and subjected to “non-association orders”. In October, Muraisi was suddenly transferred from HMP Bronzefield, 18 miles from London, where her family lives, to New Hall prison in Yorkshire, which is too far away for her sick mother to visit. After she had been moved, she was told it was because of the risk of association with another prisoner on the same wing at Bronzefield.

Yet none of the hunger strikers has been charged with, let alone sentenced for, terrorist offences. They have been charged with ordinary criminal offences, such as burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder. Muraisi and Ahmed are alleged to have broken into a factory run by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, and damaged equipment, while Chiaramello is alleged to have entered RAF Brize Norton during a protest in which Palestine Action sprayed warplanes with paint. These events took place before Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist group, a highly controversial decision that is being challenged in court: the decision is expected very soon. But never mind the presumption of innocence, never mind the presumption against retrospective application of the law: because the CPS says there is a “terrorism connection”, they’re being treated as if they were convicted terrorists.

On 26 December, a group of United Nations rapporteurs – the kind of people who, in days gone by, were heeded by governments – expressed grave concern about the treatment of these prisoners, which, they said, included “reported delays in accessing medical care, use of excessive restraint during hospital treatment, denial of contact with family members and legal counsel, and lack of consistent independent medical oversight, particularly for detainees with serious pre-existing health conditions”. They had “serious questions” about our government’s compliance with international human rights law, “including obligations to protect life and prevent cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”. But once you’ve labelled someone a terrorist, it seems, you can do almost anything to them and get away with it. The silence on this issue across almost all the media is something to behold.

The government bears moral responsibility for these prisoners. Yet it appears to have no intention of exercising it. Lawyers, MPs and doctors have repeatedly beseeched ministers to engage with the issue. They flatly refuse, claiming that to do so would be to “create perverse incentives that would encourage more people to put themselves at risk through hunger strikes”. There is no evidence for this, and given the extremely unusual nature of this action (it is the biggest coordinated, sustained hunger strike by prisoners since the IRA’s in 1981), it seems highly unlikely.

The government has sought to create the impression that such events are common – “over the last five years we have averaged over 200 hunger strike incidents every year” – so no unusual response is required. But what it appears to be referring to is brief refusals of food by individual prisoners, a completely different situation from an imminent risk of death by starvation.

More than 100 medical professionals signed a letter to the justice secretary, David Lammy, on 27 November warning that prisoners face a “medical emergency”, which “is being managed incorrectly”. A further letter on 17 December was signed by more than 800 medical and legal experts and others. The government has yet to respond to either.

Instead, it appears to mock the hunger strikers’ predicament. When Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the justice minister Jake Richards, in parliament, whether he would meet their legal representatives to try to resolve the situation, Richards answered with a sharp “No”, prompting laughter in the chamber. In December, the speaker of the Commons remarked that Lammy’s failure to respond to the MPs asking for a meeting about the issue was “totally unacceptable”. But the failure continues.

The hunger strikers’ demands seem reasonable to me: release on bail; the right to a fair trial (they claim the government has withheld key documents); lifting the ban on Palestine Action; and shutting down Elbit Systems – which has supplied weapons to a state engaged in genocide – in the UK. All these things, I believe, should be happening anyway. And they are of course negotiating positions. Whether all would need to be met for the strike to end cannot be known until the government engages. Its refusal to talk could condemn the strikers to death.

It should not be necessary to risk your life to demand fair treatment and just decisions. But when everyone in power has stopped listening, there are few remaining options.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27^th December 2025

Looking back on this crazy year, one event, right at the start, seems to me to encapsulate the whole. In January, recording his podcast in a studio in Austin, Texas, the host, Joe Rogan, and the actor Mel Gibson merrily dissed climate science. At the same time, about 1,200 miles away in California, Gibson’s $14m home was being incinerated in the Palisades wildfire. In this and other respects, their discussion could be seen as prefiguring the entire 12 months.

The loss of his house hadn’t been confirmed at the time of the interview, but Gibson said his son had just sent him “a video of my neighbourhood, and it’s in flames. It looks like an inferno.” According to World Weather Attribution, January’s fires in California were made significantly more likely by climate breakdown. Factors such as the extreme lack of rainfall and stronger winds made such fires both more likely to happen and more intense than they would have been without human-caused global heating.

There’s a widespread belief that people will wake up to climate breakdown when disasters affect them. It’s equivalent to the claim that “there were no atheists in the trenches” of the First World War (if you believe this, you haven’t read Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man: “Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen”). For some people, disaster seems to provoke a doubling down. If your entire worldview is challenged by events, it’s tempting to conclude the events are at fault.

Halfway through the interminable interview, Gibson, while disputing evolution, launched a typically detailed attack on the scientific method. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of money in, you know, claims, and I don’t know.” Anyway, he mused: “What difference is it going to make to me?”

Then he suddenly swerved to climate science, and started reciting one of the oldest denialist tropes. “Ever have a glass full of ice and watch it melt? Did you ever see the glass flow over?”

“No.”

“Takes up less room, you know.”

In reality, sea levels are rising not because sea ice is melting, but through the thermal expansion of seawater, and meltwater flowing off the land. But Rogan happily took up the theme. “Well, there’s a lot of horseshit that’s involved in climate change for sure … a narrative gets established and then there’s a profit attached to the solution.” He referred to a study he has since cited repeatedly, claiming it shows “the temperature on Earth is plummeting”. As the authors keep pointing out, it shows the opposite. But that seems to make no difference.

So what did they blame for the fires? Mostly Gavin Newsom, governor of California. Rogan remarked: “How crazy it is that they spent $24bn last year on the homeless, and what do they spend on preventing these wildfires?”

“Zero.”

“Zip.”

“He didn’t do anything.”

Needless to say, this is completely untrue: California tripled its wildfire resilience spending between 2016 and 2024. The true figure it spent on homelessness in 2024-25 was $2.5bn. But who gives a damn? Here we see another of the grand themes of 2025: everything is now a partisan issue, and no fact can stand in the way of polarisation.

This became even starker when they turned to one of Rogan’s favourite themes, the former US chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, who has been widely and unjustly blamed by the radical right for a remarkable range of ills, from Aids deaths to the Covid pandemic. Rogan suggested Fauci’s actions were “evil”. In response, Gibson said something to the tens of millions of listeners that, in Fauci’s position, I would find highly threatening: “Well, I don’t know why Fauci’s still walking around.”

“How is that guy still walking around?” Rogan echoed.

This theme led to another of the year’s motifs: the whining self-pity of powerful men. Talking of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s wildly inaccurate book The Real Anthony Fauci, Rogan remarked: “They kept that book off bestseller lists … they hid it. That’s when you find out that bestseller lists are actually curated.”

“Yeah,” Gibson replied, “it’s censored. It’s all censored. Everything’s censored.”

In truth, depressingly enough, Kennedy’s rubbish book spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Alongside their dismissal of science-based medicine was the usual catalogue of quack cures. Gibson claimed that he had “holes” in his head, which he appeared to suggest were caused by PTSD. But he was given “a very miraculous and great remedy for it which was to eat a bunch of fish oil, vitamin B complex and get into a hyperbaric chamber for 40 sessions”. Rogan asserted that hyperbaric chambers are “phenomenal for … everything”, and can “decrease your biological age”. He gave no warning of the dangers, which can be very great. The two men promoted ivermectin, fenbendazole, “hydrochloride something or other” and methylene blue as cancer cures: premature and irresponsible claims that could cause great harm. But all very Maha.

Early in the interview, Rogan asked Gibson what he would do if his house had indeed burnt down. “Oh, I don’t know,” Gibson replied. “I got a place in Costa Rica. I love it there … it’s in a real nice spot.” For the very rich, it sometimes seems, even the consequences have no consequences.

It now appears that Gibson has decided to rebuild his house. While I feel bad for the loss of his belongings, his ability to start again contrasts with the position of many poorer California residents displaced by fire, some of whom might have swelled the ranks of the homeless. Gibson appeared to agree with Rogan that the state should not be spending so much on them.

For now, the very rich have options. They can rebuild or move somewhere they haven’t yet wrecked, while others languish in places that might come to look like the set of Mad Max, with which, of course, Gibson is not unfamiliar. Those who rack up vast impacts then walk away, and those who spread misinformation, freeload on the rest of us. They are always leaving other people to live with the consequences.

There was, however, one thing Gibson said that hit home. It was while he was dismissing evolution, and claiming that everything was “ordered” by God: “I think anything left to itself without some kind of intelligence behind it will devolve into chaos.” It could be seen as a warning for our times.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 20^th December 2025

Most of what you eat is sausages. I mean, if we’re going to get literal about it. Sausage derives from the Latin salsicus, which means “seasoned with salt”. You might think of a sausage as a simple thing, but on this reading it is everything and nothing, a Borgesian meta-concept that retreats as you approach it.

From another perspective, a sausage is an offal-filled intestine, or the macerated parts of an electrocuted or asphyxiated pig or other animal – generally parts that you wouldn’t knowingly eat – mixed with other ingredients that, in isolation, you might consider inedible. For some reason, it is seldom marketed as such.

But to the legislators of the EU, a sausage can now have only one meaning: a cylindrical object containing meat. Never mind that cylindrical objects containing no meat have been marketed under names such as “Glamorgan sausage” (selsig Morgannwg) for at least 150 years. Never mind that even Germans once felt the need to call animal sausages mettwurst, to distinguish them from other kinds. Never mind that almost everyone knows what “veggie sausage”, “vegan sausage” or “plant-based sausage” mean. A recent survey of 20,000 Dutch people found that 96% are not confused by such terms, which is probably a higher percentage than those who can readily distinguish left from right. The consumer must at all costs be protected from an imaginary threat.

For the same reason, members of the European Parliament decided, burgers must also contain meat. It happens that no one is sure why a burger is called a burger. They were once called “Hamburg steaks”, but no clear link to Hamburg has been established.Nevertheless, before the term was abbreviated, meat patties were widely known as hamburgers, whose literal meaning is an inhabitant of Hamburg. If “veggie burgers” are misleadingly marketed, so is any burger not made from the minced inhabitants of a north German city.

Last week, the European Council and European Commission tried and failed to make sense of all this. They were unable to agree a common position with the European Parliament, and bumped the decision to January, when a new council presidency will have to deal with it. I can’t blame them. You cannot make sense of a senseless policy.

The parliament’s food literalism is remarkably selective. Given the time of year, perhaps I should point out that there is no meat in mincemeat, which is used to fill mince pies. Many years ago there was, but the meat component fell out of fashion. Minced meat, by contrast, is meat – I’m sure that’s not confusing. Similarly, sweetbreads are meat, but sweetmeats are not. None of these terms appear to cause any problems for legislators, though they have insisted that the only permissible definition of meat is “edible parts of the animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004”, which is, let’s face it, how it’s commonly understood by shoppers across the EU.

If a vegetarian hotdog is to be ruled out, as the parliamentarians demand, on the grounds that it contains no meat, the meat version should be ruled out on the grounds that it contains no dog (hothorse should in some cases be permissible). They might also be shocked to discover that there is no beef in beef tomatoes, butterfly in butterfly cakes, cottage in cottage pie, baby in jelly babies or finger (mostly) in chocolate fingers. And don’t get me started on buffalo wings.

All this must be deeply confusing to shoppers. Like Wednesday Addams, who, when offered girl scout cookies, asked whether they contain real girl scouts, we puzzle every day over what such names really mean. Human beings are entirely incapable of pattern recognition, derived and secondary meanings, metaphor or conceptualisation. Language never evolves, and nor does food. This is why, when confronted with “pigs in blankets”, “toad in the hole” or “spotted dick”, people curl up on the floor, banging their heads and moaning weakly (OK, there might be other reasons). Everything can have only one meaning, and this meaning must be what legislators say it is.

If you are thinking “benefit of Brexit”, I’m sorry to disabuse you. If the European Council and Commission eventually decide that terms such as veggie burgers and vegan sausages are to be banned in the EU, they are likely to be banned in the UK as well, for fear of jeopardising trade agreements. Already, after a court interpretation of a previous European decision, terms such as oat milk, soy butter and vegan cheese are prohibited on UK labels, but not – because consistency is for suckers – coconut milk or peanut butter.

So what explains the selectivity? Lobbying. The decision in the European Parliament is a response to pressure from the meat and dairy industries, which have long been seeking to stamp out competition. It has no more to do with preventing confusion than a Rocky Mountain oyster has to do with a marine bivalve. It’s about protectionism. This is why peanut butter and coconut milk are still legal: they seldom compete directly with animal products.

These anti-competitive practices have a long history. In the 19th century, the US dairy industry managed first to get margarine declared a “harmful drug”, then had its sale restricted under the 1886 Oleomargarine Act. It’s reassuring to know that legislators made just as good use of their time then as they do now.

The livestock lobby is immensely powerful. Its campaigns are reinforced by rightwing influencers, who wage war against a wide variety of plant products (vegetable oil, soya, almonds, avocados, any plant-based meat substitute), often on entirely spurious health or environmental grounds, while conveniently ignoring the far greater impacts of animal products on human bodies and the living planet.

The food industry knows that words are a powerful weapon. If Moses had promised the Israelites a land of mammary secretions and insect vomit, I doubt many would have followed him to Canaan, though these are accurate descriptions of milk and honey. It knows that if plant-based foods have to be marketed under alien and alienating names, this will depress their market share.

The livestock lobby seeks to normalise and naturalise the cruel, grotesque, planet-wrecking realities of its industry, while casting plant-based foods as unnatural and wrong. As usual, it has made minced meat of European legislators. Though I should point out that I don’t mean that literally.

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By George Monbiot, adapted from a BlueSky thread, 16^th December 2025

This is a note about what I see as a serious breach of journalistic ethics, in the making of Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s online documentary Greenwashed. She interviewed me for the film, but neither before, during or after was I given any idea I would be its target.

Far from it. Here’s the email she sent inviting me to take part:

Hi Mr. Monbiot, 

My name is Sofia Pineda Ochoa, I’m a physician in Houston and co-founder of the non-profit “Meat Your Future”, which raises awareness about the detrimental impact of our society’s use and consumption of animal foods. 

We are currently producing a sequel to our environmental documentary”Endgame 2050″ (I have copied the trailer below). 

• Trailer: https://youtu.be/_PTtF6btAxU 

We would like to include an interview with you. We know you’ve been an outspoken advocate for many years on these issues, and would appreciate being able to speak with you about the environmental challenges the planet is facing. 

Would you have any availability for a remote Zoom interview over the next month or so?   Please let me know, as well as any questions or further information that may be helpful.

Thanks so much, 

Sofia

Nothing here suggests it would in any way be an attack on my position. There was lots of further correspondence, but none of it even mentioned the topic of the film: population growth. Had I known, I would have prepared.

During the interview, the specific criticisms the film levels were not put to me. I was asked about population, but not challenged on why she thought I was wrong. Even in the interview, I believe (it’s hard to be sure, as it was in 2022), I wasn’t told population growth was the main focus.

There are two fundamental principles in journalism: if you are to conduct a hostile interview, first you tell the target what it’s about, then you put to them the criticisms you intend to make. Greenwashed did neither. The first I knew of its real agenda was when I started getting messages of hate on social media.

By interviewing your target, you create the impression that you’ve given them the chance to respond to the points you’re making. But if you haven’t – if in fact you’ve told them something completely different – well, there are various words for that, and none of them are complimentary.

Had I been given such a chance, I would have pointed out that, while more people compound environmental problems, residual population growth is the result of things that have already happened, which we cannot now significantly change.

I would have explained that even while birth rates are falling very fast, there’s a lag caused by a larger current base population, due to the birthrate 60-100 years ago, plus increasing longevity. Hence a residual rise before the plunge. In other words, I would have discussed the crucial issue of demographic momentum. Maybe I did – I can’t remember. Either I did and it didn’t make the cut, or I wasn’t asked. Could that be because it would have destroyed the entire thesis of the film?

Incidentally, my statement that the trend of population growth has fallen massively is correct: the growth rate has dropped from 2.1% in 1963 to 1% today. But, by decontextualising my remark, Greenwashed made it look as if it were false.

Within the constraint of residual population growth, we need to find the best ways of reducing our impacts. This is why I propose “private sufficiency, public luxury” and a maximum wealth cap. Not to enable further growth, but to accommodate people who already do and will exist.

Maybe the solutions I propose won’t work. Maybe nothing will. But that’s not because I’m an evil bastard, or, as the film strongly suggests, because I’m “not honest”. It’s because our crises are very difficult to address, and there are no sure and easy answers. I’m doing my best. I know it’s not enough.

So please be aware that this film is not an accurate representation of my views, or a fair and responsible form of journalism. Hate me for what I am, by all means. But please don’t hate me on the basis of what it tells you I am. Thank you.

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By George Monbiot, published as a BlueSky thread, 15^th December 2025

Because the issue of population change is so widely misunderstood, I’ll seek to lay it out simply. This note explains why there is almost nothing anyone can do to change the global population trajectory, both as numbers rise, then as they fall.

The residual rise is due to:

A. The birth rate 60-100 years ago, which created a larger current base population. This means more children being born even as birth rates are in radical decline. The global total fertility rate, by the way, is now 2.2, just above the replacement rate of 2.1.

B. Infant mortality has declined very fast and longevity has risen very fast. Again, there’s nothing you can do about either of those things and, I hope, nothing you would want to.

All women should have total reproductive freedom and full access to modern birth control. Because it’s a fundamental right. Not because old men on other continents want them to have fewer children. Even if total reproductive freedom became universal now, it would scarcely nudge the curve, due to the factors mentioned above.

Before long, people will be fretting instead about the downwave, a very rapid decline in populations as the impact of 60+ years of falling birth rates overtakes the effects mentioned above. There’s almost nothing we can do about that either. It’s about as locked in as any human behaviour can be. As the opportunity costs of childcare rise (i.e. as prosperity increases), the birth rate declines.

Of course, if economic and social life collapsed, the process might go into reverse, and birth rates could be expected to rise again. But is that really what you want? For my part, I’m heartily sick of people who think collapse is the answer to anything.

In the short run, we can survive the decline in wealthy countries by reopening the door to immigrants, which would also offer sanctuary to people fleeing from the climate breakdown and conflict we’ve caused overseas. Two wins, in other words. In the long run, we’ll steadily shuffle away.

Whether you think that’s good or bad will not affect the outcome. I see demographic change as an underlying factor, like gravity, we simply have to adapt to as well as we can. If you want to pick a fight with a mathematical function, be my guest. But it seems to me as if you’re wasting your time.

But surely there’s no harm in it? Surely we can seek, however hopelessly, to change the population trajectory while also campaigning against environmental breakdown, inequality, injustice? Some people who worry about population do. But in my experience, most fixate on population to the exclusion of other issues.

Something must be done about them breeding too fast, rather than us consuming too fast. All too often, residual population growth is used as a scapegoat to shift blame from rich-world impacts, which means that the people in places where growth is still occurring are themselves scapegoated. The result, broadly speaking, is wealthy white people pointing the finger at much poorer Black and Brown people and saying, “You’re the problem.” It’s more than a distraction, it’s a grim and sometimes racist alternative to effective action. It’s an excuse for inaction.

So yes, do both if you want to, while being aware that one activity is useful and the other is futile. But be aware that for most population obsessives, it’s either/or, and is used to avoid moral responsibility and effective citizenship.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  12^th december 2025

I know what “civilisational erasure” looks like: I’ve seen the graph. The European Commission published it in March. It’s a chart of total fertility rate: the average number of children born per woman. After a minor bump over the past 20 years, the EU rate appears to be declining once more, and now stands at 1.38. The UK’s is 1.44. A population’s replacement rate is 2.1. You may or may not see this as a disaster, but the maths doesn’t care what you think. We are gliding, as if by gravitational force, towards the ground.

Civilisational erasure is the term the Trump administration used in its new national security strategy, published last week. It claimed that immigration, among other factors, will result in the destruction of European civilisation. In reality, without immigration there will be no Europe, no civilisation and no one left to argue about it.

Of course, we’re talking about different things. The Trump administration appears to see “civilisation” as a white and western property, threatened by Black and Brown people, regardless of whether they were born here or have recently arrived. This week, Donald Trump claimed that, with the exception of Poland and Hungary, European nations “will not be viable countries any longer”, as a result of immigration. Well, Poland has a total fertility rate of 1.2, which means a rapid slide to inviability unless it allows more immigration. “Civilisation”, as it has often been over the past two centuries, is in Trump’s case a racist and white supremacist concept. The erasure the Trump government appears to fear is of “white” culture.

There is and was no such thing. Our language, science, mathematics, music, cuisine, literature, art and – thanks to the legacy of colonial and post-colonial looting – much of our wealth, originated elsewhere. Italian cooking might be unimaginable without tomatoes but, originating in South America, they were not widely used until the 19th century. The balti might have a greater claim to be the UK’s national dish than fish and chips (a Portuguese import), as it originated here. The roast beef of Old England, from an animal domesticated in the Middle East, was enjoyed by the elite: the rest derived much of their protein from dal (pease pottage, pease pudding, pea soup). This changed only when the means were found of preserving and shipping meat from animals raised in the colonies. Widespread beef consumption in Britain required the civilisational erasure of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, and the eradication of their ecosystems.

Some rulers once understood the power of pluralism. King Stephen I of Hungary, who reigned from 1001 to 1038, noted that the cultures and knowledge of foreigners enriched the realm, while “a country unified in language and customs is fragile and weak”. A thousand years later, Trump appears to have forgotten this obvious truth.

What I’m talking about, by contrast, is actual erasure: the literal disappearance of society. Once the fertility rate falls below 2.1, it keeps falling, and the slide towards zero looks inexorable. This doesn’t mean I’ve become a “pronatalist” (wanting to see rising birthrates). I’m neither pronatalist nor antinatalist, as both positions are equally futile. As David Runciman points out in his excellent summary of the science in the London Review of Books, the opportunity costs of having children rise with prosperity, leading inexorably to falling birthrates. In some parts of the world, this process began in the 16th and 17th centuries. No government constraint or incentive, it seems, can significantly alter the trajectory.

For years I’ve been arguing with people who want to reduce the human population for environmental reasons. I’ve pointed out that the growth rate today was established before most of us were born: as a UN report explains, “Considerable population growth continues today because of the high numbers of births in the 1950s and 1960s, which have resulted in larger base populations with millions of young people reaching their reproductive years over succeeding generations.” In other words, those who obsess about too many people are fighting a mathematical function. Global (and, in the UK, national) population will continue to rise for a while, before sweeping dramatically downwards, largely as a matter of demographic momentum.

The only thing the obsessives could do to change the peaking point by more than a couple of years would be mass murder on an unprecedented scale: slaughtering hundreds of millions of people. This is because the issue is not rising birthrates (the global rate has been in decline since the year of my birth, 1963), but a rising child survival rate and greatly increased longevity. Ironically, the person who might have caused the greatest depopulation is the self-professed pronatalist Elon Musk, whose dismantling of USAID could, according to an estimate in the Lancet, cause 14 million deaths. He wants to see more children born, but appears to care little about whether they survive.

Otherwise, if the “population control” advocates have any significant impact, it will – because of the long and compounding time lags involved – be to hasten the plunge on the other side of the curve. People have devoted their lives to this fatuity.

Why do they cling to the idea long after the evidence has departed? Partly, I believe, because population growth is a highly convenient scapegoat for, and distraction from, the impacts of consumption: wealthy people in the global north can blame much poorer Black and Brown people in the global south for the environmental crises they themselves have caused. Switching to a plant-based diet or from fossil fuels to renewables, by contrast to altering the size of the human population, are things we can do immediately, humanely and effectively. But blaming other people requires no change, and no confrontation with power.

Without immigration, there will, within a number of generations, be no Europe and no United Kingdom. Today’s racist obsessions will look incomprehensible to our ageing descendants, desperate for young people to look after them and keep their countries running. Before long, we’ll be fighting to attract people from overseas. But, as Runciman remarks, “There soon won’t be enough immigrants to go around.”

Perhaps this is why, in the new novel by the always prescient Ian McEwan, What We Can Know, set 100 years hence, the dominant global power is Nigeria, one of the few countries that today still has a fertility rate well above replacement, though it’s also falling fast.

Trump’s security strategy, like all far-right politics, is simultaneously preposterous and sinister. But above all, it is wrong.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 5^th December 2025

It felt like walking up a mountain during a temperature inversion. You struggle through fog so dense you can scarcely see where you’re going. Suddenly, you break through the top of the cloud, and the world is laid out before you. It was that rare and remarkable thing: a eureka moment.

For the past three years, I’d been struggling with a big and frustrating problem. In researching my book Regenesis, I’d been working closely with Iain Tolhurst (Tolly), a pioneering farmer who had pulled off something extraordinary. Almost everywhere, high-yield farming means major environmental harm, due to the amount of fertiliser, pesticides and (sometimes) irrigation water and deep ploughing required. Most farms with apparently small environmental impacts produce low yields. This, in reality, means high impacts, as more land is needed to produce a given amount of food. But Tolly has found the holy grail of agriculture: high and rising yields with minimal environmental harm.

He uses no fertiliser, no animal manure and no pesticides. His techniques, the result of decades of experiment and observation, appear to enrich the crucial relationships between crops and microbes in the soil, through which soil nutrients must pass. It seems that Tolly has, in effect, “trained” his soil bacteria to release nutrients when his crops require them (a process called mineralisation), and lock them up when his crops aren’t growing (immobilisation), ensuring they don’t leach from the soil.

So why the frustration? Well, Tolly has inspired many other growers to attempt the same techniques. Some have succeeded, with excellent results. Others have not. And no one can work out why. It’s likely to have something to do with soil properties. But what?

Not for the first time, I had stumbled into a knowledge gap so wide that humanity could fall through it. Soil is a fantastically complex biological structure, like a coral reef, built and sustained by the creatures that inhabit it. It supplies 99% of our calories. Yet we know less about it than any other identified ecosystem. It’s almost a black box.

Many brilliant scientists have devoted their lives to its study. But there are major barriers. Most soil properties cannot be seen without digging, and if you dig a hole, you damage the structures you’re trying to investigate. As a result, studying even basic properties is cumbersome, time-consuming and either very expensive or simply impossible at scale. To measure the volume of soil in a field, for example, you need to take hundreds of core samples. But as soil depths can vary greatly from one metre to the next, your figure relies on extrapolation. This makes it very hard to tell whether you’re losing soil or gaining it. Measuring bulk density (the amount of soil in a given volume, which shows how compacted it might be), or connected porosity (the tiny catacombs created by lifeforms, a crucial measure of soil health), or soil carbon – at scale – is even harder.

So farmers must guess. Partly because they cannot see exactly what the soil needs, many of their inputs – fertilisers, irrigation, deep ploughing – are wasted. Roughly two-thirds of the nitrogen fertiliser they apply, and between 50% and 80% of their phosphorus, is lost. These lost minerals cause algal blooms in rivers, dead zones at sea, costs for water users and global heating. Huge amounts of irrigation water are also wasted. Farmers sometimes “subsoil” their fields – ploughing that is deep and damaging – because they suspect compaction. The suspicion is often wrong.

Our lack of knowledge also inhibits the development of a new agriculture, which may, as Tolly has done, allow farmers to replace chemical augmentation with biological enhancement.

So when I came to write the book, I made a statement so vague that it reads like an admission of defeat: we needed to spend heavily on “an advanced science of the soil”, and use it to deliver a “greener revolution”. While we know almost nothing about the surface of our own planet, billions are spent on the Mars Rover programme, exploring the barren regolith there. What we needed, I argued, is an Earth Rover programme, mapping the world’s agricultural soils at much finer resolution.

I might as well have written “something must be done!” The necessary technologies simply did not exist. I sank into a stygian gloom.

At the same time, Tarje Nissen-Meyer, then a professor of geophysics at the University of Oxford, was grappling with a different challenge. Seismology is the study of waves passing through a solid medium. Thanks to billions from the oil and gas industry, it has become highly sophisticated. Tarje wanted to use this powerful tool for the opposite purpose – ecological improvement. Already, with colleagues, he had deployed seismology to study elephant behaviour in Kenya. Not only was it highly effective, but his team also discovered it could identify animal species walking through the savannah by their signature footfall.

By luck we were both attached, in different ways, to Wolfson College, Oxford, where we met in February 2022. I saw immediately that he was a thoughtful man – a visionary. I suggested a pint in The Magdalen Arms.

I explained my problem, and we talked about the limits of existing technologies. Was seismology being used to study soil, I asked. He’d never heard of it. “I guess it’s not a suitable technology then?” No, he told me, “soil should be a good medium for seismology. In fact, we need to filter out the soil noise when we look at the rocks.” “So if it’s noise, it could be signal?” “Definitely.”

We stared at each other. Time seemed to stall. Could this really be true?

Over the next three days, Tarje conducted a literature search. Nothing came up. I wrote to Prof Simon Jeffery, an eminent soil scientist at Harper Adams University, whose advice I’d found invaluable when researching the book. I set up a Zoom call. He would surely explain that we were barking up the wrong tree.

Simon is usually a reserved man. But when he had finished questioning Tarje, he became quite animated. “All my life I’ve wanted to ‘see’ into the soil,” he said. “Maybe now we can.” I was introduced to a brilliant operations specialist, Katie Bradford, who helped us build an organisation. We set up a non-profit called the Earth Rover Program, to develop what we call “soilsmology”; to build open-source hardware and software cheap enough to be of use to farmers everywhere; and to create, with farmers, a global, self-improving database. This, we hope, might one day incorporate every soil ecosystem: a kind of Human Genome Project for the soil.

We later found that some scientists had in fact sought to apply seismology to soil, but it had not been developed into a programme, partly because the approaches used were not easily scalable.

My role was mostly fixer, finding money and other help. We received $4m (£3m) in start-up money from the Bezos Earth Fund. This may cause some discomfort, but our experience has been entirely positive: the fund has helped us do exactly what we want. We also got a lot of pro-bono help from the law firm Hogan Lovells.

Tarje, now at the University of Exeter, and Simon began assembling their teams. They would need to develop an ultra-high-frequency variant of seismology. A big obstacle was cost. In 2022, suitable sensors cost $10,000 (£7,500) apiece. They managed to repurpose other kit: Tarje found that a geophone developed by a Slovakian experimental music outfit worked just as well, and cost only $100. Now one of our scientists, Jiayao Meng, is developing a sensor for about $10. In time, we should be able to use the accelerometers in mobile phones, reducing the cost to zero. As for generating seismic waves, we get all the signal we need by hitting a small metal plate with a welder’s hammer.

On its first deployment, our team measured the volume of a peat bog that had been studied by scientists for 50 years. After 45 minutes in the field, they produced a preliminary estimate suggesting that previous measurements were out by 20%. Instead of extrapolating the peat depth from point samples, they could see the wavy line where the peat met the subsoil. The implications for estimating carbon stocks are enormous.

We’ve also been able to measure bulk density at a very fine scale; to track soil moisture (as part of a wider team); to start building the AI and machine learning tools we need; and to see the varying impacts of different agricultural crops and treatments. Next we’ll work on measuring connected porosity, soil texture and soil carbon; scaling up to the hectare level and beyond; and on testing the use of phones as seismometers. We now have further funding, from the UBS Optimus Foundation, hubs on three continents and a big international team.

Eventually, we hope, any farmer anywhere, rich or poor, will be able to get an almost instant readout from their soil. As more people use the tools, building the global database, we hope these readouts will translate into immediate useful advice. The tools should also revolutionise soil protection: the EU has issued a soil-monitoring law, but how can it be implemented? Farmers are paid for their contributions “to improve soil health and soil resilience”, but what this means in practice is ticking a box on a subsidy form: there’s no sensible way of checking.

We’re not replacing the great work of other soil scientists but, developing our methods alongside theirs, we believe we can fill part of the massive knowledge gap. As one of the farmers we’re working with, Roddy Hall, remarks, the Earth Rover Program could “take the guesswork out of farming”. One day it might help everyone arrive at that happy point: high yields with low impacts. Seismology promises to shake things up.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1^st December 2025

How do you reckon our political system works? Perhaps something like this. We elect MPs. They vote on bills. If a majority is achieved, the bills becomes law. The law is upheld by the courts. End of story. Well, that’s how it used to work. No longer.

Today, foreign corporations, or the oligarchs who own them, can sue governments for the laws they pass, at offshore tribunals composed of corporate lawyers. The cases are held in secret. Unlike our courts, these tribunals allow no right of appeal or judicial review. You or I cannot take a case to them, nor can our government, or even businesses based in this country. They are open only to corporations based overseas.

If a tribunal determines that a law or policy may compromise the corporation’s projected profits, it can award damages of hundreds of millions, even billions. These sums represent not actual losses, but money the arbitrators decide the company might otherwise have made. The government may have to abandon its policy. It will be discouraged from passing future laws along the same lines, for fear of being sued.

Record numbers of cases are being brought, as corporations learn from each other, and hedge funds finance suits in return for a share of the takings. The result? Sovereignty and democracy are becoming unaffordable.

The process is known as “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS). The reason it is allowed to override domestic law and the decisions made by parliaments is that this provision has been written – without public consent, and often in conditions of extreme secrecy – into trade treaties.

A year ago, Friends of the Earth won a great victory at the high court. The judge ruled that plans to dig the first deep coalmine in the UK for 30 years, at Whitehaven in Cumbria, had been unlawfully approved by the Conservative government, which had accepted the bizarre claim that the mine would have no impact on our carbon budgets. The Labour government then withdrew the permission the Tories had granted. Now this victory could be reversed by an offshore tribunal answering to no one but the corporations petitioning it.

In August, a company whose ultimate owners are based in the Cayman Islands lodged a claim against the UK government. Last week a tribunal in Washington DC was set up to hear it.

The company is suing the UK for the money it might have made if the mine had been allowed to go ahead. We have no idea how much this might be. Who is representing it against the British government? The MP for Torridge and Tavistock, and former attorney-general in the Conservative government, that great patriot Geoffrey Cox. The government makes a decision, the high court upholds it, then a foreign company challenges it through an undemocratic offshore tribunal, and a member of our parliament acts on its behalf.

On the same day (18 November) that the tribunal on the coalmine case was appointed, we learned from a parliamentary answer that the UK is also being sued under ISDS by a Russian oligarch, Mikhail Fridman. We know nothing of the case so far, but it seems likely that he’ll use the tribunal to challenge the sanctions the UK levied against him after the invasion of Ukraine. He has already started suing Luxembourg for this reason, demanding $16bn (£12.1bn): half that government’s annual revenue. Among the lawyers representing him there? Cherie Blair, wife of the former British prime minister.

Legal experts believe the EU’s delay in using frozen Russian assets as collateral for its loan to Ukraine arises from Belgium’s fear that it could be sued in the offshore corporate courts, under the Belgium/Luxembourg-Russia bilateral investment treaty. This extraordinary, undemocratic power over elected governments could be blocking the money Ukraine desperately needs.

We were assured that such things wouldn’t happen. In 2014, David Cameron, promoting the biggest and most dangerous of all such treaties, told us: “We’ve signed trade deal after trade deal and there has never been a problem in the past.” The House of Lords adviser on this issue, Prof Dennis Novy, accused campaigners of “scaremongering … in reality, ISDS does not affect the UK much”. The overall message seemed to be that only poorer nations needed to fear these lawsuits. I warned, to general mockery, that “as corporations begin to understand the power they’ve been granted, they will turn their attention from the weak nations to the strong ones”.

That threat has now materialised. This year, fossil fuel and mining firms have lodged a record number of suits against nations rich and poor, challenging – as in the case of the Cumbrian coalmine – government attempts to stop climate breakdown. Corporations have so far won $114bn (£86bn) through ISDS, of which fossil fuel companies have secured $84bn (£64bn). That equates to the combined GDP of the world’s 45 smallest economies. The average payout these companies have received is $1.2bn (£910m). In some cases they threaten to suck the poorest nations dry. This is climate finance in reverse: huge payments to fossil fuel corporations from governments with the temerity to try to stop an existential crisis.

These suits also exert a major chilling effect on governments that would like to go further. France, Denmark and New Zealand have all curbed their climate ambitions for fear of lawsuits, and there are likely many more.

We gain nothing from these treaty provisions. A meta-study in 2020 found that, when it comes to encouraging foreign investment, the “effect of international investment agreements is so small as to be considered zero”. A report commissioned by the UK government in 2013 found that ISDS was “highly unlikely to encourage investment” and was “likely to provide the UK with few or no benefits”.

Yet Keir Starmer’s government shuts its ears. It has reportedly been trying to push an ISDS mechanism into the investment treaty it is negotiating with India, and into the other trade treaties it is working on. We cannot know for sure, because they’re being negotiated in total secrecy. You could almost believe there were things the government didn’t want us to see. It refuses to talk to campaigners or to offer more information.

We have twice beaten attempts to extend ISDS, through vast popular movements against the multilateral agreement on investment and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Now we will need to mobilise again: this time against our own government, which seems to care more for foreign corporations than it does for us.

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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 21^st November 2025

I began by trying to discover whether or not a widespread belief was true. In doing so, I tripped across something even bigger: an index of the world’s indifference. I already knew that by burning fossil fuels, gorging on meat and dairy, and failing to make even simple changes, the rich world imposes a massive burden of disaster, displacement and death on people whose responsibility for the climate crisis is minimal. What I’ve now stumbled into is the vast black hole of our ignorance about these impacts.

What I wanted to discover was whether it’s true that nine times as many of the world’s people die of cold than of heat. The figure is often used by people who want to delay climate action: if we do nothing, some maintain, fewer will die. Of course, they gloss over all the other impacts of climate breakdown: the storms, floods, droughts, fires, crop failures, disease and sea level rise. But is this claim, at least, correct?

The figure comes from a study using the widest available datasets to try to produce a global view. The results are, to say the least, surprising. For example, it suggests that even in the hottest parts of the world, more people die of cold than from heat. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa appears to have the world’s highest rate of deaths from cold and the world’s lowest rate of deaths from heat. The figures suggest that 58 times as many people there die of cold than of heat. While it’s true that in hot places people are less adapted to cold, can this really be so?

The paper explains that its dataset “covers 750 locations in 43 countries or territories”. But the only African country covered is South Africa. Nor are there any data from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, the Gulf states (except Kuwait), Iraq, Indonesia or Melanesia. In other words, most of the world’s hottest countries are not represented. Nor are most of the places in which healthcare is weakest, either for the population as a whole (as in some African nations) or for the most vulnerable people (as in the Gulf states, where citizens might be well covered, but migrant workers scarcely at all). This is in no way the fault of the authors – it’s simply a matter of where records are available.

A map of the global data we possess on temperature-related deaths.

From Zhao, Qi et al., 2021. Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study.The Lancet Planetary Health, Volume 5, Issue 7, e415 – e425

The study had to model global trends from places in which data exist, which tend to be richer, cooler countries, where health systems are relatively strong. There’s nothing I can see that’s wrong with the methodology: it’s just that the records are so patchy. As one of the authors, Prof Antonio Gasparrini, told me, their extrapolation “was moderate in some areas, but more extreme in others … in some cases the degree of extrapolation (especially geographical) was huge, and we cannot rule out that the model works less well in some regions”. They are currently trying to improve it. A subject that we, as the main agents of chaos, have a moral obligation to understand looks on the map like an enormous hole with a few ragged edges.

A paper published in 2020 points out that in large parts of Africa, there is no record even of extreme heat events, though they certainly happen. Heat events mean major temperature anomalies, in which large numbers of people could be expected to die. The crucial international disaster database EM-DAT records only two heatwaves in sub-Saharan Africa between 1900 and 2019. They were deemed to have caused the deaths of 71 people. The same database lists “83 heatwaves in Europe between 1980 and 2019, resulting in over 140,000 deaths”.

Even the extreme African heatwave of 1991-1992 was not reported in the EM-DAT database. Given that people in Africa tend, as the paper remarks, to have “higher levels of vulnerability and exposure” than people in Europe, is it really credible that fewer die of heat on that continent than on any other?

Far from the improvement in data we might expect, there has been a rapid and catastrophic decline in the number of weather stations measuring conditions across Africa. There are now blocks hundreds of miles wide in which not a single station is recorded. As the climate scientist Tufa Dinku points out: “Coverage tends to be worse in rural areas, exactly where livelihoods may be most vulnerable to climate variability and climate change.”

This is to say nothing of weather radar stations, which observe and forecast weather patterns and are essential for early warnings. In the US and Europe, where 1.1 billion people live, there are 565 of these radar stations, while in Africa, where 1.5 billion live, there are 33, according to the World Meteorological Association. Without weather warnings, many more people die.

As for heat deaths, the epidemiologist Prof Kristie Ebi points out that even in the US the official estimate, of about 1,200 a year, “is probably at least a tenfold undercount”. The great majority are recorded as heart attacks, kidney failure or other conditions. But epidemiological data show how deaths spike during heatwaves. Heaven knows how much underreporting there may be in countries with much sparser records.

The same applies to other impacts of global heating. A paper published in Nature last week revealed that the deaths caused by rainfall in Mumbai “are an order of magnitude larger than is documented by official statistics”. Most afflicted are slum residents, especially women and children. People, in other words, who are deemed not to count.

We could see the global underfunding of data collection as an index of how little powerful governments give a damn about human life. It reminds me of the statement the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld made during the 2003 Iraq war, that came to stand for the Bush administration’s bloody insouciance: “We don’t do body counts on other people.”

How can vulnerable nations be compensated for the “loss and damage” caused by climate breakdown if we haven’t the faintest idea how great that loss and damage might be? So far, rich countries have pledged just $788.8m to the UN’s fund. That’s 44 US cents for each of the 1.8 billion citizens in the Climate Vulnerable Forum nations: the sum total of our “compensation” for the disruption, disaster and death we have caused.

The Cop30 summit could be represented as a vast shrug of rich-world indifference: we neither know nor care, so why should we confront our populations with the need for change, with all the political difficulty that involves? Turn your face from the void, for fear of the moral challenge it presents.

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