But now the kids are back in the public domain, in the form of Greta Thunberg and her ageing entourage. The future is back on the table. Our 95-year-old monarch has urged world leaders at COP26 to make sacrifices “not for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children, and those who will follow in their footsteps”. The wrinklies gluing themselves to roads for Insulate Britain claim they want to “protect future generations everywhere”, while their nihilistic godparent Extinction Rebellion says its goal is “creating a world that is fit for generations to come”.

Yet none of this talk about future generations is really about children, or the future. Rather, it is better understood as a highfalutin form of presentism; the projection of a state of emergency into the years ahead, to provide moral cover for political and economic decisions made by global elites above the heads of their citizens. Forget the present day, and the choices of the current demos. All that matters is action — and the only people who can act are those with the power to do so. Otherwise, as Greta says, it’s all just “blah blah blah”.

Such rhetoric might be widespread. But it cannot mask the fact that questions such as what to do about climate change are ripe for democratic decision-making — particularly because they involve weighing up the costs and benefits of policy measures in the context of our lives today and our children’s tomorrow. Indeed, rather than engaging electorates in a long-term debate, we see a global elite hell-bent on wrapping up international commitments in a two-week conference, egged on by protesters demanding that they “talk less and do more”.

Unfortunately, this call to bypass citizens in the project of ‘the future’ has some appeal — not least among young people, who have been socialised into the idea that that democratic power counts for little, and that if they want change to happen, they need to look to those with the power to bring it about. “We can’t be the ones that will make that change, we can just show that it needs to happen,” a participant in the COP26 ‘school strike’ protests told the BBC, speaking to the infantilised assumption that meaningful solutions can only come from the top down.

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Implicit within this, climate activists express the sentiment of living in a ‘risk society’, in which human experience is framed by a magnified sense of threat and uncertainty, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The concept of risk society was theorised by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in the late 20^th century, to capture an ‘end of history’ situation in which globalised modern threats render human agency obsolete. From this perspective, the problems confronting our society are insurmountable. When confronted with the threat of a climate emergency, to which the only possible solutions presented are swift, global, and significant measures, democratic decision-making by citizens in separate nation states seems ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst.

And yet our current state of crisis has exposed a contradiction in this denial of human agency. During the Covid pandemic, and now with the climate emergency, a fatalistic accommodation to the survivalist mentality of the risk society has accompanied a fantastically hubristic narrative offered by world leaders in politics, science, Big Tech and other globalised entities. An insistence on the unprecedented, super-infectious deadliness of Covid ran alongside proclamations that humanity could eradicate this virus; that, as in a war, we can win. With the climate emergency, however, overwrought claims of standing on the brink at “a minute to midnight” are offered as excuses for the idea that we can, in a few short years, stop the warming and turn the whole thing around.

What is offered, in this vision, is a ‘new normal’ starting from actions made today, designed to undo the damage caused by actions of the past and start again. It is a form of techno-survivalism that can only be achieved by citizens, acknowledging their powerlessness and demanding that elites use their power to make a change.

This situation was elegantly anticipated by Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, in his 2011 book Collateral Damage. Discussing the “divorce between power and politics”, Bauman noted that “the discrepancy between available means and postulated objectives of action takes the form of a perpetual confrontation between politics afflicted by a chronic deficit of power, and power freed from politically imposed limitations”.

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Bauman suggests that in our perpetual state of global emergency, the nation state is written off as insignificant, with national democracies either unfit, or incapable, of enacting the change that needs to happen. Voters are consigned, by their chronic deficit of power, to shouting at each other on the sidelines, while global elites enjoy the freedom to do whatever serves their interests according to the mandate of saving tomorrow. While consent is marshalled, or manufactured, through the spectacle of campaigners demanding that political elites do whatever it takes, techno-survivalism offers an enormous opportunity for the powerful to exercise their interests.

And yet it also creates significant problems for the elites themselves. Take the interminable sleaze scandal dogging our Tory government. With a majority of 80, Boris Johnson’s lack of opposition, both in terms of its size and its ideas, combined with its extraordinary power grab over the course of the pandemic, has handed the Executive huge latitude to do whatever it likes — something for which it is now being punished with unflattering newspaper front pages every day.

If Bauman is right, and politics has ceased to count for anything meaningful, what does that mean in practice? Ultimately, in detaching themselves from the demos, our political elite has detached themselves from the means of working out what they should be doing. And this could ultimately be their downfall. As Christopher Lasch noted in The Revolt of the Elites, by isolating themselves from their societies, elites undermine the foundation of their legitimacy.

As much as they benefit from wielding their power, an untethered elite also finds itself buying into the fantasy that the world will keep turning without human agency — of any sort. But it clearly won’t. During the pandemic, initial ‘work from home’ orders were swiftly counteracted by a swathe of exceptions, as governments were forced to acknowledge that ‘essential’ jobs required people to do them; while later attempts to cajole the WFH crowd back to the office was met with a sullen resistance. Likewise, the ‘green revolution’ planned by COP26 can be imposed from above, but will require a buy-in, with people choosing to replace their cars and boilers while calculating what this means for the quality of their lives.

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As trust in politics declines, people find other means to exercise their interests; and these are less susceptible to mediation and control. For elites, legitimacy is the thing that enables them to retain authority. And that requires building a relationship with the past and present, rather than annihilating it in the name of ‘the future’.

Edmund Burke — hailed as an inspiration by the ‘intergenerational equity’ crusade — explained this rather well in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Society, he argued, should be understood as a “contract” to be looked upon with reverence, because it was not only about the needs of the present day. It is a “a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection”, which transcended the contribution of any particular generation, thus becoming “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.

Yet today’s modern conservatives are guilty of a spectacular misreading. For them, the intergenerational contract can only be honoured by ripping up the past and legislating on behalf of the future. This free-wheeling power-grab might yield some short-term gains; but at some point, the wheels will come off. It won’t just be the future generations of the apocalyptic imagination that will bear the consequences, but those of us who are living with them right now.

Then, last year, it gave up. By February the buds which had begun to swell along the branches turned brown and desiccated, like abandoned chrysalises. After the blossom failed, a few leaves unfurled, then dropped early. On a gusty day last spring, a main branch fell, cleaving the privet hedge below it in two.

As the gardener charged with pruning that tree — having shaped its canopy and enjoyed its blossom for a decade — I felt bereft, in that pull-yourself-together way one might experience at the demise of an aged pet. But I’m not sure I was mourning the tree so much as lamenting what it symbolised.

“Of course the trees are dying,” I thought, when I arrived at work to see that bough nestling in the hedge. It was just more fodder for my personal spiral of climate anxiety.

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By Paul Kingsnorth

Any gardener will tell you that one of the great pleasures of the pursuit, whether amateur of professional, is the sense of connection it engenders between you and the seasons. Stewarding a patch of ground from spring to winter and back again plugs you into something ineluctable and constant.

In the decade or so that I have been doing it for a living, I’ve come to understand why people often talk of gardening in therapeutic terms. Once stricken with Seasonal Affective Disorder when the clocks go back, I now reconcile myself to winter as a necessary stage in the wheel. Most of what we do at this time of year involves “putting things to bed”, chopping back the wilted summer growth. But this isn’t death so much as dormancy, a prelude to inevitable rejuvenation. Spring rolls around like a gift. Whatever clamorous stupidities might be afflicting the human story, the garden, this earth, moves to organic rhythms deeply etched in time. Gardening, then, becomes an act of self-reassurance.

At least, that is how it used to feel. As the years pass, the drumbeat of alarm around climate change has begun to shake the foundations of this happy psychological refuge. The meteorological cues which dictate the behaviour of our garden plants and wildlife have gone haywire. The energy that plants expend on negotiating weather patterns for which they haven’t evolved is making them more vulnerable to blights and pests. The first frosts land later, which means the window for the spread of fungus and foliar pathogens has widened. There are fewer insects, meaning less pollination. There is, too, just a general tenor of capriciousness — the sense that conditions are less hospitable, more violent, and incrementally less predictable. The rain falls in torrential bursts. The summer sun feels that bit too harsh. The garden’s cheering constancy has been fatally disrupted.

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At a practical level, this demands certain adjustments. The wealthy homeowners who comprise the majority of our client base, fluent in western guilt and self-exonerating gestures, are starting to think about ways to make their gardens more environmentally friendly. Add some wildflowers for the bees. Let the grass grow longer, acknowledging the writer Michael Pollan’s colourful assertion that “a lawn is nature under totalitarian rule”. Like many landscaping firms, we wait impatiently for the performance of battery-run tools to catch up with our current petrol-driven machinery, and calculate how much to increase our rates by to cover the outlay (around three grand, in case you’re wondering). These transitions are fine and good. Gardeners, like people generally, are an adaptable species.

What is less easy to process, however, is the impact this horticultural uncertainty might be having on our wellbeing. It is increasingly clear that the kind of discourse we have seen around COP26 in Glasgow is precipitating an epidemic of “eco-anxiety”, especially among the young. That this anxiety is prompting me and others to draw alarming extrapolations upon witnessing the struggles going on in our herbaceous borders reveals something profound about the impact of climate change — not so much the terrifying existential threat of it, but the proximate emotional cost.

Of course, we continue to take solace in whatever mitigation we can find. I can’t be the only person who found a guilty, and frankly perverse, respite in the recent study which claimed that the UK ranks among the five countries best placed to ride out “societal collapse”. (Hooray?) Maybe, we think to ourselves, maybe my little corner will escape the worst of it. Perhaps my kids will be OK.

Meanwhile, and perhaps ironically, growing awareness of our unsustainable relationship with nature has only increased our recognition that communing with nature is good for us. Such old wisdom, as no end of recent self-discovery memoirs detail, has come to be seen as an antidote to the artifice and alienation of the western lifestyle.

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But anyone who spends a lot of time among the shrubbery will tell you that what we are faced with, at minimum, is a world so discombobulated, so shorn of its old certainties, that contentment itself becomes forfeit. A world in which gardening — the uncomplicated pleasure of cultivating a plant from bulb to flower, stem to trunk — becomes freighted with the very temporal and political concerns that its practitioners are trying to escape.

On the spectrum of climate change’s ramifications, this might seem like trifling stuff. Amending a planting scheme because the flowers aren’t unfurling at the expected time in the calendar is self-evidently not in the same league as a million-hectare wildfire, or a hundred contiguous miles of coral bleaching. And I’m the first to admit, as someone inclined to believe that climate change is every bit as bad as its most adamant Cassandras claim, that this reflex is toxic for the soul. In this way, it is a microcosmic analogue of the apophenia we now see pervading so much of our political culture.

For the climate change denier, this tendency to connect the dots in support of pre-existing convictions can mean that the sight of some snow appears as categorical proof of the great global warming con. Conversely, for the accepter, it becomes tempting to see evidence of accelerating catastrophe in every incongruous sunburst and drop of rain. Corroboration has largely been supplanted by intuition. Gripped with this tendency, the skeleton of a once-bountiful cherry tree becomes a portent of doom.

The truth is that I don’t know whether it was climate change that did for the old cherry or whether it is simply a tree whose time has come. But the owners have opted to leave it standing in the vain hope it will reanimate next year. It stands there now, a shadow of its former self. I’d swear it is trying to tell me something.

Back then Diana — always channeling the popular mood — called him “the boy wonder”, “killer Wales”, and “the great white hope”. She laughed at his medals; she said he’d never succeed his mother. When he tried to pray before bedtime, she’d hit him on the head, and shriek. This was the man’s wife. Imagine what Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun was saying about him.

Not just the Sun in the Eighties. In more recent times, Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the “puppet of sinister gurus”, dismal, a “sower of division and contention”, and “way too grand” — and that’s one article in the Spectator.

Foreigners found this legal national blood sport irresistible too. They joined the hunt. Charles, chuckled a New York Times editorial in 1994, existed for the world’s “amusement”. Perhaps the blackest day for him that year was when the Italian press reduced all those titles to… “Il Tampaccino”. Being embarrassed for the primitivity of your sexploits by a nation that invented a sophisticated cinematic genre called ‘commedia sexy all’italiana’ would have pushed lesser Royalty over the edge. Not the heir apparent. Nor England. Letting the world ridicule our Prince was the one post-war export drive that actually seemed to work.

Other Royal Charlies had it better, didn’t they? A swift release from his troubles on the scaffold. A convenient hiding place in an oak tree. Ours has endured life as a dangling, slow-twirling, impossible to miss piñata. It would be human to feel sorry for him, if he didn’t feel so sorry for himself.

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Centrism always fails

By Will Lloyd

Even his mother baited him. “Charles is hopeless” was her crushing verdict. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,” Shakespeare makes Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough sea tried. And tried.

Now that sea is washing out at long last. Finally, Charles is respected, admired, and — most shockingly of all — listened to. His balm is pristine again. It’s not the crown he possesses. Rather it’s an apparently merited authority, derived less from his birthright than from the time-weathered correctness of his views on composting.

This week, whether addressing the G20 in Rome, or handshaking dignitaries at COP26, the Prince has been accorded the kind of fulsome respect that he lavishes on the plants at Highgrove. A sedulous, loving attention. Why?

Since 1970 the Prince has issued warnings about climate change. Unlike his jet-age father, he had no faith in a technological future. He rhapsodised about bees and gazed into hedges. He wanted to protect the elephants and conserve the Botswana Bushmen, seeing them in approximately the same way. He experimented with vegetarian diets when the only other person in beef-dripping England to do so was Morrissey. “At the beginning everyone thought he was crackers… They wrote him off completely,” his biographer Penny Junor told the Washington Post. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up to Charles hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a crank.” Even Donald Trump admitted a few years ago that he “totally listened” to Prince Charles’s eco-views.

While he waited for his mother to abdicate, Charles yearned to do the right thing. He did this through thoughts, not actions. Winston Churchill told the Queen in a letter that Charles, at the age of two, was “young to think so much”. At a luncheon, Edwina Mountbatten told the eight-year-old Charles that he shouldn’t pluck the stalks out of strawberries. He should hoist the fruit up by the stems and roll them in sugar. Moments later his cousin Pamela Hicks observed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.” Charles’s entire outlook can be reduced to this desire to put stalks back on strawberries. “All I want to do,” he once dolefully told Jonathan Dimbleby, “is to help other people.”

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He believed this desire to save and serve was sharpened on the grindstone of reality, rather than the unintended consequence of an artificial upbringing. “I have come to realise,” he wrote in 2002, “that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal — to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.” Modernity could be escaped and replaced with… him, in a temple, lighting a flame. More alluring, I suppose, than cutting the ribbon on yet another community centre.

On and on he went like this for decades. The self-image was radical: Red Shelley in an Anderson & Sheppard blazer. He referred to himself, his ex-private secretary Mark Bolland said, “as a ‘dissident’ working against the prevailing political consensus”. All that dissent was collected inside a two-volume, 1,012-page treasury of speeches and remarks, retailing for over £320, illustrated with his own watercolours, and bound in stiff bottle green buckram, published in 2015. These heavy volumes appear designed to trouble the shelves of libraries, not their readers. What they reveal, once multiple introductions, glosses, prefaces, preludials, throat-clearings, and fanfares have been macheted through, is a vehement man hostile to the world as it is.

Charles never changes. But the world always does. When he was born in 1948, wars and revolutions had levelled everything. There was a ‘Great Compression’; inequality was suppressed, by accident, bloodletting, and design. For 30 years there were high taxes, good novels, middle-class successes, and an operational meritocracy.

By the Nineties, Tory politicians in Britain could dream of a “classless” society. Charles was most-lambasted in this midlife period, not merely because of the “War of the Waleses”, but because this socially democratic mood made the monarchy itself look ridiculous. “Who knows what fate will produce?” Diana said, ominously, at the time.

Fate dispatched her, then produced a vastly more unequal world. Meritocracy calcified into an aristocracy. It treats national and international institutions as outdoor relief for its favoured families. After Iraq, the financial crisis, and 2016, this elite, viewed from below, began to look like an Ancien Régime. With their fabulous wealth, estates, yachts, villas, servants, and elaborate sex lives, this class resembles the Windsors, just with stronger chins.

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Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

Charles looks at ease with them all. Being admired by Jeff Bezos; being hailed by the Prime Minister as a “prophet without honour”. Hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Drinking with Bill Gates, whose ratio of wealth to the average US citizen is roughly the same as the richest Roman aristocrats to the plebs in 400 AD. How right it looked. Those who have taken the glitziest prizes from industrial civilisation now, like Charles, believe it is sick.

So the dissident Prince is accepted at last. A fairytale to replace the old one, about the Princess dying in a tunnel. He believed he had waged a guerrilla war against scientific expertise all his life. Now it agrees with him about hedges and bees, so he gives it his blessing. Typically, his victory is Pyrrhic. All it has taken for Charles to be vindicated is the prospect of the near-term extinction of the human race.

Here are the facts: in Europe, emissions in 2020 were 26% below 1990 levels. In the United States, emissions in 2020 were 22% below 2005 levels. Emissions are likely to start declining, too, in developing nations, including China and India, within the next decade. Most nations’ emissions will be bigger this year than last, due to post-Covid economic growth. But global emissions are still likely to peak within the next decade.

And the result will be a much smaller increase in global average temperatures than almost anyone predicted just five years ago. The best science now predicts that temperatures are likely to rise just 2.5-3°C above pre-industrial levels. It’s not ideal, but it’s a far cry from the hysterical and apocalyptic predictions of 6°C, made just a decade ago. A 3°C increase is hardly an existential threat to humanity.

Not that you’d know it, if you had half an eye on the headlines this summer. The floods, fires and heatwaves that plagued the world were, for many observers, proof that the impacts of climate change have already become catastrophic. In Europe, more than 150 people died in flooding. In the United States, wildfire season started earlier and lasted longer, razing hundreds of thousands of acres. Around the world, hundreds died from heatwaves.

But again, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the facts: there has been a 92% decline in the per decade death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did. Globally, the five-year period ending in 2020 had the fewest natural disaster deaths of any five-year period since 1900. And this decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled — and temperatures rose more than 1°C degree centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

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But then, 1°C is not that much. What determines whether people die in heat waves is not whether temperatures rose to 110°F — or even 115°F— instead of 109°F. It is whether or not they have air conditioning. Heat-related deaths have halved in the US since 1960 — even as the population expanded and heat waves grew in frequency, intensity, and length — because more and more people did.

Though climate alarmists steadfastly ignore it, our capacity to adapt is extraordinary. We are very good at protecting people from natural disasters — and getting better. To take just one example, France in 2006 had 4,000 fewer deaths from a heat wave than anticipated thanks to improved health care, an early-warning system and greater public consciousness in response to a deadly heat wave three years earlier. Even poor, climate-vulnerable nations like Bangladesh saw deaths from natural disasters decline massively thanks to low-cost weather surveillance and warning systems and storm shelters.

And today, our capability for modifying environments is far greater than ever before. Dutch experts today are already working with the government of Bangladesh to prepare for rising sea levels. The Netherlands, of course, became a wealthy nation despite one-third of its landmass being below sea level — sometimes by a full seven meters — as a result of the gradual sinking of its landscapes.

Global sea levels rose a mere 0.19 metres between 1901 and 2010. But the IPCC estimates sea levels will rise as much as 0.66 meters by 2100 in its medium scenario, and by 0.83 meters in its high-end scenario. Still, even if these predictions prove to be significant underestimates, the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation.

Where the secondary effects of climate change do cause catastrophe, it’s often due to failures on the part of authorities. The extent of the devastation wrought by wildfires on the West Coast of America was, for instance, preventable. California has mismanaged its forests for decades — including by diverting money that the state’s electric utilities could and should have spent on clearing dead wood.

Given how good we are at mitigating the effects of natural disasters, it’s ironic that so many climate alarmists focus on them. It’s perhaps because the world’s most visually dramatic, fascinating events — fires, floods, storms — make their cause stick in the minds of voters. If it were acknowledged that heat deaths were due to lack of air conditioning and forest fires were due to the buildup of wood fuel after decades of fire suppression, alarmist journalists, scientists and activists would be deprived of the “news hooks” they need to scare people, raise money and advocate climate policies.

And not all climate alarmists are altruists. Elites have used the cause to justify efforts to control food and energy policies for more than three decades. Climate alarmists have successfully redirected funding from the World Bank and similar institutions away from economic development and toward charitable endeavours — which don’t power growth.

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By Doug Coupland

This is part of a common pattern: the people who claim to be most alarmed about climate change are the ones blocking its only viable solutions, natural gas and nuclear. This year’s increase in coal production is a case in point. China has been widely criticised for waiving environmental and safety regulations on its mining recently, in a mad rush to meet winter heating demands. But less attention has been paid to the fact that the increased demand is mostly due to climate activists’ efforts to prevent oil and gas development in Europe and the United States. Lack of natural gas is what led directly to China having to reopen coal mines — and to Europe, North America, and the rest of Asia having to burn more coal. Had climate activists not fought fracking in America and expanded oil and gas drilling in Europe, then we would not be experiencing its worst energy crisis in 50 years.

Meanwhile, the organisations claiming that climate change dooms poor Africans to war, drought and poverty — including the WWF, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations — are the ones seeking to deny poor Africans life-changing natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, and funding for fertiliser, roads and tractors. It goes without saying that all those organisations are dominated by rich, white Westerners.

The truth is that prosperity and environmental progress go hand in hand. Reductions in carbon emissions came from fracking and off-shore natural gas drilling; both lowered electricity prices, too. Technological innovation like this lowers energy prices, which reduces natural resource use, moving humans from wood to coal to natural gas to uranium. So it’s better to see growth — such a bogeyman to Team Green — as a solution, rather than a problem.

Instead of putting the brakes on, we should be facilitating more innovation, prosperity and wealth. For instance, the melodramatic UN’s own Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) concludes, as do all reputable analysts, that future food production, especially in poor African nations, will depend more on access to technology, irrigation and infrastructure than on climate change — these are the things that made all the difference, last century, in today’s rich nations. Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25% surplus. And even the FAO suggests that we’ll produce even more, under a wide range of climate change scenarios.

Indeed, the best available economic modelling finds that, by 2100, the global economy will be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4°C) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product by just 4.5%. Why kill ourselves trying to eliminate a problem that just isn’t that severe?

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Consider the other threats humankind has recently been forced to cope with. In July 2019, NASA announced it had been caught by surprise when a “city-killer” asteroid passed by — just one-fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon. In December 2019, a volcano unexpectedly erupted in New Zealand, killing 21 people. And in 2020 and 2021, four million people died from coronavirus.

While nations take reasonable actions to detect and avoid asteroids, super-volcanoes, and deadly flus, they generally don’t take radical actions — for the simple reason that doing so would make societies poorer and less capable of confronting all major challenges. Richer nations are more resilient, which is part of the reason why disasters have declined. When a hurricane hits Florida, it might kill no one, but when that same storm hits Haiti, thousands can die instantly through drowning — and thousands more subsequently, in disease epidemics like cholera. The difference is that Florida can afford to prepare properly, and Haiti can’t.

The richer the world gets, the better it will cope, then. But the climate alarmists have taken against economic growth. According to their holy scripture, the industrial revolution, powered by fossil fuels, was our fall — and the consequence is, according to the United Nations, “extinction.” The only alternative is puritan: don’t eat meat and don’t fly. There are even indulgences, for the wealthy who feel guilty, in the form of carbon offsets sold through the airlines.

This is the heart of the matter: climate alarmism is powerful because it has emerged as the alternative religion for supposedly secular people, providing many of the same psychological benefits as traditional faith. It offers a purpose — to save the world from climate change — and a story that casts the alarmists as heroes. And it provides a way for them to find meaning in their lives — while retaining the illusion that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy.

Naturally, as a religion, climate change has a fraudulent aspect. Some offsets pay rich landowners not to cut down trees they could not profitably cut down anyway. Exposed, the climate religion seeks to censor. The American government’s Forest Service has repeatedly silenced one of California’s most published and respected scientists, Malcolm North, who stressed to me and other reporters that the cause of high-intensity forest fires is not climate change, but rather wood fuel. The Center for American Progress, which raises tens of millions from natural gas, renewable energy, and financial interests, has been pressuring Facebook to censor critics of renewable energy.

It’s working: few people have a realistic understanding of climate change. Few consider whether, at its current rates, it might be less dangerous than efforts to mitigate it.

Are things quite that bad? Well, if you read the headlines, yes: we’re on course for disaster and we don’t seem to be turning. “Business as usual” will lead to a catastrophic collapse of Himalayan glaciers; and devastating heatwaves in the southern United States, according to the New York Times. What’s more, the same newspaper said last week ahead of COP26, “If we continue with business as usual, by the end of the century, it will be too hot to go outside during heat waves in the Middle East and South Asia.”

But all these stories share one thing: they are based on the IPCC’s RCP 8.5 scenario. It’s not an exciting name, but 8.5 is often described as “business as usual”. Hence the headlines.

RCP 8.5 is not business as usual, though; it’s an unlikely worst case. This means a large fraction of the public debate on climate change mitigation is driven by an increasingly implausible scenario, which was unlikely when it was proposed, and is even less so now. The more we focus on this scenario, though, the more pessimistic — and the more hopeless — the situation will seem.

Back in 2007, after the fourth IPCC report was published, climate scientists wanted to create new emissions scenarios, imagining how they might change in the coming decades and what impact they would have on the climate. But while there was a plan to make in-depth scenarios ahead of the fifth report in 2013, scientists would need to start running models for that report as soon as 2010. They needed something that could be used in the meantime.

So four “representative concentration pathways”, RCPs, were developed: RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5[1.  The numbers refer to the amount of “radiative forcing”: that is, the change to the Earth’s energy balance, in watts per metre squared. So under RCP 6.0, each square metre of the earth’s surface would absorb six more watts of energy than it would lose to space, relative to pre-industrial times.]. They were, roughly speaking, a highly optimistic scenario regarding emissions, two middling scenarios, and a highly pessimistic one. RCP 8.5 was there as a realistic worst case. Even at the time, it was viewed as unlikely. But two unfortunate things confused that picture.

First, of the four RCPs, only 8.5 imagined a world with no climate policy. And second, its authors described it as “a high-emission business as usual scenario” – meaning that it was at the high end of emissions for business as usual, but which was taken to mean in some quarters that high emissions were business as usual.

So RCP 8.5 became synonymous with “business as usual”. There are dozens of studies published every year describing it as such: this one says that “Business-as-usual will lead to super and ultra-extreme heatwaves in the Middle East and North Africa”. It is a mainstream part of climate science.

“The problem isn’t that people study these scenarios,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute. “It’s that they frame them as the most likely outcome in the absence of policy. That was probably never true, but I’m sure it’s not true now.”

Most obviously, we don’t live in a world without climate policies. The Paris protocols commit signatories to goals of keeping warming below 2°C and aiming for below 1.5°C. So “business as usual” is a global effort to reduce emissions.

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Why climate change isn't the end of the world

By Tom Chivers

Second, and most important, the world has changed its energy mix far faster than RCP 8.5 expected. Hausfather points out that “current solar prices are below what the models think they’ll be in 2050”, and coal use has dropped in recent years. In order for emissions to reach what RCP 8.5 imagined, we’d need to increase coal use per capita by about 700% from today’s levels, spectacularly reversing the recent decline.

And this means that the really devastating levels of warming envisioned by RCP 8.5 are even less likely: we’re probably looking at a situation of 3°C warming above pre-industrial levels, compared with the 4°C, 5°C or even 6°C that RCP 8.5 predicts. As Hausfather said in a Nature piece last year, 3°C is still “a catastrophic outcome”, but it’s a heck of a lot better than it used to be.

It’s worth noting that while the emissions that get the world to RCP 8.5 are highly unlikely, the outcomes that 8.5 predicts are still plausible. One of the uncertainties in the climate is the feedbacks. For instance, as the world gets hotter, ice melts. Ice reflects sunshine, while dark earth absorbs it. So the less ice there is, the faster the world warms, reducing ice. That’s a positive feedback system: it tends to accelerate changes.

On the flip side, the more CO₂ there is in the atmosphere, the faster plants grow, and the more they suck from the atmosphere. That’s a negative feedback system, and it tends to moderate changes.

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Can we trust the climate scientists?

By Tom Chivers

The exact magnitude of the many possible feedback systems in the atmosphere is uncertain. As the Siberian permafrost melts, will it release gigatonnes of CO₂? It is possible that even under more optimistic emissions scenarios, the feedback systems will push more carbon into the atmosphere, so we end up with the same CO₂ concentrations as we would have done under RCP 8.5. And there’s another layer of uncertainty, which is “climate sensitivity”. It’s not precisely known how much warming a given increase in CO₂ concentrations will cause; perhaps even if the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is relatively low, the warming will be greater (although that now looks less likely).

So really bad outcomes are possible even without RCP 8.5-level emissions. We’d have to get “incredibly unlucky” with feedbacks for the world to end up warming that much, says Hausfather, but we can’t eliminate the possibility.

As a result, there’s an ongoing row among academics about whether RCP 8.5 (and its equally pessimistic successor[2.  In the latest IPCC report, the RCPs have been replaced with something else, called SSPs. Only one of the new SSPs, SSP5, is compatible with RCP 8.5. Research using both is combined into a scenario called SSP5-8.5. I’m going to refer to RCPs throughout, for simplicity.]) should be used at all. Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of public policy and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that it essentially has no place: that it’s based on an implausible scenario, even if you could end up somewhere similar because of uncertainties elsewhere. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he says.

But Richard Betts, a climate scientist at Exeter University and the Met Office, and one of the authors of the UK government’s climate change risk assessment, argues differently. We need to be aware of the risks of these 4°C worlds that we could – plausibly – still find ourselves in, he says. And there’s been lots of research done on worlds like that, mostly using RCP 8.5.

Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, adds that using extreme scenarios allows modellers to tease out causality in a way that more narrow ones don’t. “It allows you to see non-linearity, allows you to look for thresholds,” he says. “You get a stronger signal to noise ratio.” The actual emission scenarios are less likely, he agrees, but studying them helps us understand the climate system better.

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The trouble is that if a journalist sees two graphs in a study, one of a plausible RCP 4.5 world and one of a much more dramatic RCP 8.5 world, they’ll probably want to run the RCP 8.5 graph, “because it’s more impressive,” says Hausfather. “And they’ll say scientists predict this much sea level rise, or this many heat deaths. And it’s not accurate because you’d need to add ‘but only if we burn all our coal or get very unlucky’.”

There’s also a risk that RCP 8.5 will crowd out research into other areas. For instance, Our World in Data’s recent efforts to understand human impacts on biodiversity have been hampered because almost all the research into coral reef collapse has been carried out using RCP 8.5. Predictably enough, all the coral dies in that scenario. But what would coral reefs look like under 2°C of warming, or 3°C? We don’t really know.

(People have got in touch to suggest that recent studies have looked into the other pathways, and they do seem to show severe impacts on coral even at lower concentrations.)

The RCP 8.5 debate is heated. Pielke Jr and Schmidt in particular have a longstanding mutual animosity, and Schmidt feels Pielke Jr has “spent 20 years trying to elbow out scientists from the centre ground” on climate change. So it’s hard for a journalist to get involved without taking sides.

But it’s important, because the more we associate the worst-case scenario with business as usual, the more pessimistic the public debate will be. “It might demotivate people,” says Hausfather. “It’s much easier to see the Paris goals [of no more than 1.5°C warming] as achievable if you know we’re on course for a 3°C world, rather than a 5°C one.”

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I disagree with Pielke Jr: RCP 8.5 has its place, because as Betts says, there’s a whole range of research into unlikely but plausible scenarios using it, and if you’re doing risk assessments, you need to look at outcomes that probably won’t happen but which would be disastrous if they did, so you can try to avoid them. At the moment the papers looking at those scenarios all use 8.5.

But on the other hand, if the IPCC puts out RCPs without explicitly saying which are the most likely, then policymakers and journalists will take whichever scenario most suits their needs, whether that’s pretending there’s no problem, or magnifying the problem for the sake of a headline. This isn’t the fault of climate modellers. But no one involved in the IPCC is explicitly saying “RCP 8.5 is pretty unlikely,” and that fateful phrase “business as usual” is still attached to it.

Hausfather has a solution for this: attach explicit percentage likelihoods to the different scenarios – say that RCP 4.5 is 45% probable, or RCP 8.5 is 5% probable. They’d be necessarily subjective but at least it would show that no one thinks they’re all equally likely, or that RCP 8.5 is the course we’re already on. Betts agrees.

There’s a risk that climate sceptics will leap on ideas like this, and say that climate scientists have systematically overstated the risk of climate change; Betts says that this already happens. But climate change is an unhedgeable risk, and we need to pay attention to even unlikely outcomes if they’re very bad, in the same way that you wouldn’t play Russian roulette even if it’s only a 17% chance of death. Besides, even the less dramatic 3°C worlds involve dangerous levels of sea level rise, heat waves, and millions of unnecessary deaths a year. You’d think that’d be worrying enough.

Every week, people see headlines, based on RCP 8.5 scenarios, that say things like three billion people could face “near-unliveable conditions” by 2070. Understandably, people are rattled; and some are even saying they’re not having children. People are more scared than they need to be.

Climate change is extremely bad. But we’re not in the “last chance saloon”, if that means that we face some inevitable catastrophe, or 5-1 down and facing ruinous defeat; and the politicians at COP26 are not guilty of facilitating a worse genocide than Hitler’s. Archbishop Welby apologised for that. But it’s an understandable mistake if he’s always being told that “business as usual” means a march to doom.

Since then, things have improved. But smogs are still a feature of everyday life, serving as a potent reminder of the toll that four decades of rapid industrialisation have taken on the Chinese environment. This is far from a modern problem. Historian Mark Elvin, in The Retreat of the Elephants, plots an almost continuous process of environmental instability in the People’s Republic of China. He traces today’s crisis back almost 2,000 years: to deforestation during the Han dynasty, which accounts for the lack of trees in large parts of central China today.

Certainly my own experience of how this looks in China extends beyond 2012. Seventeen years earlier, while living in Hohhot, inner Mongolia, I remember smogs every bit as dramatic, caused by the high use of coal and fossil fuels. A few years later, one April in Beijing, the skies grew dark in the middle of the day; a severe sandstorm had arrived, and people were forced to flee indoors. Desertification, over-building, lack of water, poor soil quality, destruction of species, appalling air quality — all have been the cause of deep concern to the Chinese Communist Party for decades.

Faced with this weight of evidence, it would be strange if the Chinese government adopted the kind of sceptical attitude that, for instance, some Australian leaders have about any links between human activity and climate. Indeed, much has been written in recent weeks about President Xi’s expected absence from COP26 next week, but it would be reductive to take that as a sign of climate change apathy. China, after all, is situated in a region that has been historically affected by earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters. And in recent decades, let alone months, these have grown more severe.

But China’s politicians find themselves in a quandary: how should they balance these concerns with the country’s imperative to grow at whatever cost, just as the West did during the high phase of industrialisation? Most Chinese citizens seem, even today, to know about the smogs that blighted London in the late Forties and early Fifties. The tactic seemed to be that this sort of occurrence was inevitable, and could be cleaned up once industrialisation had been achieved.

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That’s partly why, at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, the Chinese delegation, along with 76 other developing countries, largely insisted that the greatest number of carbon emission cuts needed to come from the US and Europe. Most of these places had outsourced much of their most polluting industries to China; per capita emissions comparing an American with a Chinese made the latter pale into insignificance. Looming over all of this was a suspicion among some in China that the whole climate change negotiation was just another attempt by Washington and its allies to put a break on Beijing’s economic development.

By 2015, and the next major conference in Paris, things had changed. Smogs such as those in Beijing in 2012, along with a rising sense of frustration and concern among Chinese citizens, meant a more proactive stance had become necessary. But the most important development had been the appointment in late 2012 of a new national leader, Xi Jinping.

Xi’s politics were focused on appealing to the new middle class — those who lived in cities, worked in services, and were concerned about the cost of living and their quality of life. For them, water, food security and clean air that didn’t kill them were priorities. Yet Xi was by no means an environmentalist for convenience’s sake; earlier in his career, as party leader of the huge, eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, he had been unusual in often talking about the importance of care for the environment.

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And so, “Greening” China has become a major policy preoccupation, with Xi’s announcements becoming increasingly bold. After supporting, and then signing up to, the commitments to cut emissions made in Paris in 2015, China’s stance was enhanced by the withdrawal from the deal of America under Trump in 2017. Biden may have later rejoined the Paris agreement, but the damage to America’s image had already been done: Xi was able to claim he was doing more to save the environment than the US. Indeed, this is one of the few issues where China has managed to improve its reputation in the last few years.

A series of pledges to be carbon neutral by 2060, and to aim for peak emissions by 2030, culminated in Xi’s surprise announcement at the UN General Assembly last month that China would no longer build coal-fired power stations abroad. Despite all their perpetual arguments in other areas, in this one, Europe, China and the US at least have some common ground.

Yet paradoxically, China still needs to grow and remains fundamentally reliant on fossil fuels, which constitute the source of two thirds of its energy. The aim to focus on quality of growth rather than quantity is clearly stated by the Xi government. But just how far they can go in squeezing people’s material development by demanding higher costs for energy, and use of more expensive alternatives, is another question. On top of this, it remains unclear whether the targets referred to above — particularly having emissions peak in 2030 — will be sufficient, let alone achievable.

That isn’t to say there aren’t any positives. However critical we might be of the Chinese government, and the political system it operates under, and however sceptical we might be about its real commitment to combat climate, it is surely better that we start from the position we are currently in: one of broad alignment. China led by climate change deniers would be a disaster.

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And even if it is self-interest that motivates Beijing, it is also reassuring that, in this area, that self-interest works in the rest of the world’s benefit. It is also hugely important that Xi has committed, through the 14^th Five Year Plan passed earlier this year, staggering amounts on research and development. With approximately 7% of GDP — more than 500 billion US dollars — being spent on different forms of research, much of it dealing with environmental sciences, China has placed its formidable financial resources in an area where, once more, the benefits will flow to the rest of the world, particularly if it succeeds in finding carbon capture technologies, or other forms of energy that can quickly and safely replace coal.

Xi’s expected absence from COP26, then, is far from the end of the world. He still styles himself as an environmentalist. Witness his attendance at a biodiversity summit in Kunming earlier this month: “We shall take the development of an ecological civilisation as our guide to coordinate the relationship between man and nature,” he said in his keynote speech.

Yes, recent power shortages in the northeast of the country have underlined the need for China to produce more energy. But the underlying imperative to protect the environment still holds for Xi. Achieving that while continuing to industrialise is unlikely to be easy — but that doesn’t mean cautious optimism is misplaced.

Where are our superheroes? You and I don’t make laws or trade policies or regulate the extraction of fossil fuels, or set the rules on engines or flights, or whether soy or palm oil can be shipped to the UK from destroyed rainforests. It takes gatherings like COP26 to make the big changes, gatherings where our brightest and best (hopefully) are sent to negotiate targets or binding commitments to minimise fossil fuel usage or stop trashing ecosystems.

We are sending Boris Johnson to represent us in this vital juncture in human history. It’s like being in grave danger and needing Spiderman to rescue you, and Mr Bean turning up. You take one look, and know you are screwed.

It was when Boris started babbling on about “Build Back Beaver” at the Conservative Party Conference that my usually optimistic soul withered and died. There are a great many reasons for getting more nature back in the British countryside and being serious about climate change. But when politicians start using ‘rewilding’ as a Right-wing trope to mask policies that are actually making the countryside worse, then we are all in big trouble.

Our food chains are collapsing because of the mismanagement of Covid and labour shortages caused by Brexit. No problem, Build Back Beaver. 120,000 pigs to be culled and incinerated because of government mismanagement. No problem, Build Back Beaver. I have no issue with Beavers. I’m merely lamenting their being used by fuckwits.

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Britain betrays its farmers again

By James Rebanks

Climate change is pretty simple. Since the industrial revolution we have released vast quantities of trapped CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels. Agriculture is complicit in the problem, but if you think my cows burps or farts are a major cause of climate change you’ve lost all sense of proportion. Our farm has been carbon audited: it turns out that we sequester far more carbon than we release, and they measured everything down to the food I buy for the sheepdogs. Since then, we have planted close to 20,000 saplings and radically improved our soil carbon levels in our pastures.

Our farm isn’t typical, or perfect, but it shows what can be done. UK agriculture has significant problems. But 90% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions are not agricultural: 27% are estimated to be from the transport sector, 21% from energy supply, 17% from business, 15% from the residential sector and 10% from agriculture. So if COP26 overly focuses on meat-bashing, and fake food, then you should smell a rat.

Even when we look closely at agriculture in the UK it turns out that about 60% of the problem is associated with growing crops. This won’t surprise anyone who watched Clarkson’s Farm. In some plant crop systems, the ratio of fossil fuels used in a fertiliser to the amount of food energy created is sometimes as disastrous as 10:1.

The other 40% of agricultural emissions are associated with livestock — largely thanks to the massive numbers of intensively indoor-raised livestock eating human foodstuffs such as grain or corn. But if cattle graze on green (and permanently unploughed) pastures, with a healthy number of trees and hedgerows in the mix, and if those pastures are rested for long periods so plants in the soil optimise the downward flow of carbon through their roots, and (crucially) they aren’t fed grain, then it is entirely possible for the farms to sequester more carbon than they release. Such farming may result in fewer cows, and more expensive meat, but it can be done.

If we really want to solve the problems of British food and farming then we have to get real and engage with the issues properly. But agricultural illiteracy seems to be the norm among our political class. Some of them think that you can copy the American agricultural and food model and provide token bits of wilderness and wildlife around the edges, and all will be fine.

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What we actually need is thoughtful reform of our whole model of food production so farming is more mixed (including livestock and cover crops), more rotational, and with landscape design which is sensitive to the habitats and processes that British flora and fauna need. We need to gradually regulate out of existence some of the worst fossil-fuel-reliant forms of farming and raise the cost of fossil fuels in agriculture. We need to grapple with the power of the cartel of supermarkets. We need to rebuild local food systems, such as local abattoirs and food markets.

There is no such thing as an ideal global diet, Britain has a temperate climate and is brilliant at growing grass and grazing livestock. We can also change our diets to eat more British fruit and vegetables from local small-scale horticulture, as this has a small land-use and is super productive. But when we do these tricky but essential things, we then need to protect a more progressive British system from being undercut by more ecologically destructive systems overseas.

Keeping the ecological footprint of our food as British as possible is almost certainly a good idea. It is not a choice between farming or nature, but how we marry the two. To do that we need brilliant thoughtful farmers and inspired local food systems. No one at COP26 knows anything about all this, so don’t be surprised if their solutions are wrong. Sustainable farming can play a massive role in the solutions, but isn’t even on the COP26 agenda.

This summer, Matterdale, where we farm, looked surprisingly like Tuscany. Brown fields under a burning sun. Sheep and cattle panting beneath our old oak trees, flicking their ears to clear the flies. For a month or so we found we couldn’t work through the heat of the day; our sheepdogs and sheep were so hot they wouldn’t move, so we jumped in the lake instead or had forty winks in the shade. We worked earlier, gathering the fell at 6am, and later to get the work done. Heat sounds romantic in a cold wet northern place, but if the future is hotter and drier then our farming will need to change. We have had fairly regular spells of drought in recent years and have built twenty ponds around the farm, so we always have water where we need it.

We have already experienced record-breaking rainfall events. The beautiful 18^th century bridge that crumbled and was swept away from Pooley Bridge in 2015 was a very visible sign that we are already subject to pressures that our infrastructure can’t cope with. Our landscapes need to hold and store vastly more water in wetlands and ponds (and probably man-made infrastructures) to slow the flow from causing horrific damage downstream. Perhaps the best way to store lots of this water is in our agricultural soils, simply by making those soils healthy and aerated through better soil management.

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How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By James Rebanks

The politicians and activists at COP26 haven’t a clue about this. So they latch instead on to batshit dietary choices and technological solutions such as carbon capture and synthetic farm-free food. They like solutions that can be delivered by people like them, from the top down, imposed through their own lofty power and influence. Bill Gates will fix it, or Monsanto, or Prince William or David Attenborough. But the real world doesn’t really work like that; the people at ground level aren’t interested in being passive victims of a massive corporate power grab of their land and their food supply.

We need to believe in farmers more, to help them to provide the complex mix of things we really need. The bad news is that the great and the good who attend events like COP26 seem almost completely disinterested in bottom-up changes, lost in a world of virtuous slogans and simplistic ideas. Or, worse, believe in solutions that are already alienating rural and farming people and creating a culture war.

Environmentalism has gone mainstream. That ought to be good news. But in reality, it is being mugged, used, abused and exploited wherever you look. The sad thing is that we have never needed good leadership so badly — yet all we get is a sinister clown blurting out ‘Bring Back Beaver’.

Our politicians talk a good game on climate policy, but are they actually doing anything about it? Well, it’s not all mood music — amid the fine words, there is action. Believe it or not, we are changing our ways. Indeed, change is happening at an unprecedented pace. A shift from one energy paradigm to another is usually something that takes several generations. But what we’re seeing now is happening much faster than that.

And Britain is leading the way. No country in the G7 — or the G20 for that matter — has done more to decarbonise its economy than we have. 

As recently as 2014, a third of our electricity came from the filthiest of the fossil fuels, but just a decade later that proportion will drop to zero. The last British coal-fired power station is due to be switched off by October 2024, setting an example to the whole world (and, as an added bonus, shaming the Germans). 

This is a great British success story, which we should be shouting from the rooftops. Actually, forget the rooftops, we’ve got a better platform: the COP26 climate summit which takes place in Glasgow starting November. 

There’s a COP conference every year — but this one’s a biggie. Under the terms of the Paris Agreement, signatories are expected to make enhanced commitments every five years. COP26 is the first of these crunch points since Paris, so what happens in Glasgow really matters.

Combined with the opportunity to show off Brexit Britain on the world stage, you’d think that the British Government would be taking this one very seriously indeed. Instead, just as the IPCC releases its latest “unequivocal” report on the global climate, Downing Street embarks on one of its periodic clown shows.

It started off with the Prime Minister making an unnecessarily divisive remark about Margaret Thatcher and the miners — a fantastic way to consolidate Tory support along the Red Wall. Meanwhile, Alok Sharma — Cabinet minister and President of COP26 — has run into difficulty over his jet-set, quarantine-dodging climate diplomacy.

This was an entirely predictable row that could have been anticipated and defused months ago, but unfortunately the media operation that should have doused the flames of controversy has only added fuel the fire. Once again, a government spin doctor — in this case Allegra Stratton — has managed to make herself the story. Following a gotcha interview, her third-hand Volkswagen Golf made headlines in place of less pressing matters like saving the world from climate catastrophe. 

Ms Stratton’s choice of car would have been of no interest if no one knew who she was. But, unfortunately, she has a starring role in Britain’s worst soap opera: the office politics of Downing Street. After quitting a glittering journalistic career to become Rishi Sunak’s director of strategic communications, Stratton was soon promoted to the specially-created role of Downing Street Press Secretary. There, she became embroiled in the power struggle between Dominic Cummings and the Prime Minister’s soon-to-be wife. As a key member of the victorious Team Carrie, Stratton’s continued rise should have been assured, but then things went sideways — and she ended up as the climate summit spokesperson instead.

The trouble is she’s much more than a mouthpiece, she’s a protagonist in her own right — and is treated as such by the press. This sort of thing will keep happening until we put the government spin doctors back in their place (an industrial unit in Basingstoke would be my preference). 

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The hypocrisy of David Cameron

By Peter Franklin

Of course, one can’t lament a media circus without questioning the media itself — and especially its sense of priorities. For instance, the DEFRA secretary George Eustice should be under intense pressure over his department’s climate policy. Globally, nearly a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, forestry and land use. As the minister responsible for this sector in a country that’s finally free to set its own agriculture policy, Eustice should be asked what Britain is doing to lead the way.

However, this week, his political fortunes rest upon the fate of Geronimo the alpaca. With all due respect for those who know and love Geronimo, surely we should be more concerned about what a billion burping cows are doing to the world’s climate than the life of one consumptive camelid?

Like other beasts, it could be argued that journalists aren’t responsible for their choices. They just instinctively respond to the public appetite for sentiment and sensation. But if so, then the denizens of Downing Street should be all the more careful about making themselves the story. If a Hollywood director kept wandering into shot, he or she would be sacked. And yet the equivalent doesn’t seem to be a problem for our political auteurs.

Part of the reason why the press is so fascinated by the spin doctors, wonks, spouses and pets of  Downing Street is that they’ve been starved of drama at ministerial level. The PM is famously averse to reshuffles, and thus the press has to satisfy itself with the below stairs gossip. However, that might be about to change, with rumours that Boris Johnson is losing patience with his Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and would like to take him down a peg or two (as I argued he should a few weeks back). 

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By Aris Roussinos

I very much doubt that the PM is an avid reader of my columns, but on the off-chance that somebody he knows is, let me offer some unsolicited advice: don’t assume that the difficult economic decisions that lie ahead will do more to damage Rishi’s popularity than your own. You may never be in a more powerful position to act than you are now. If the Chancellor really is standing in the way of what you believe the country needs, then he must be moved — or else you might as well resign and let him do your job instead. 

Either option would be preferable to the sort of deadlock that paralysed the Blair-Brown government for years. At the very least, it would be another distraction just when Boris needs to concentrate on saving the world.

In the next few months we’re going to see the most retrograde parts of the Right do everything they can to divert the Government from its climate agenda. And like the worst parts of the Left, they’re going to try and turn the environment into a culture war. But it isn’t. In this country, the fight for a greener, cleaner future is a unifying issue. It appeals to voters in the South of England — who the Conservatives risk losing to the Lib Dems and the Green Party; and it also appeals to voters in the North and Midlands who want to see investment in clean technology to revive local economies. 

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By Douglas Coupland

The awkward squad on the Conservative backbenches are threatening to make trouble over the cost of net zero, but the PM needs to remember he’s got more allies than enemies. The Conservative Environment Network has a caucus of more than one hundred MPs  — and will mobilise against any attempt to blow Britain’s big chance to lead the world on this issue. 

It’s a strange twist of fate that has placed such heavy responsibilities on the shoulders of so lighthearted a prime minister. First there was Brexit, then Covid and now climate change. Still, as a classicist, Boris Johnson should be familiar with the story of Atlas: the cocky Titan who was condemned by Zeus to hold up the sky for all eternity. 

The good news for the Prime Minister is that he only need do the same for a few more years. Indeed, a few more months would do the job.