However, that understates the import of her promotion. Energy will be a vital component of Andy Burnham’s premiership. Net Zero has become a defining element of Labour’s offering. Consumers and businesses desperately want energy bills to come down.

Meanwhile, Fahnbulleh is anything but an underling. A child refugee from war-torn Liberia, she made her way to Oxford and proceeded to a doctorate at the London School of Economics. Here, she established her bona fides as a scholar with well-elaborated and nuanced academic publications on industrial policy and the climate crisis. Moreover, her strong vision for localism, rooted in the cooperative tradition, has earned her the moniker of Burnham’s brain. It’s therefore safe to say she assumes her position with both authority and clout.

That’s all for the better, because she will immediately face two big decisions: how to bring down energy bills about which consumers and businesses alike have been screaming; and how to reconcile that imperative with her commitment to Net Zero and the phasing-out of fossil fuels at a time of extreme volatility, when a rebel group in Yemen can push the price of oil to over $100 a barrel .

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To a considerable degree, this task comes down to balancing short-term with long-term goals, and strategy with tactics. In the short term, scrapping green levies and allowing for further exploration of Britain’s oil and gas reserves in the North Sea, as called for by both Reform and Conservative parties, would appear to be an obvious win: not only could the measures create jobs, advocates argue, but they would reduce energy bills and allow the country to substitute cheap, local gas for imports.

However, such benefits would be largely short-term, while the gains can be exaggerated. In the first place, it isn’t renewable energy that is driving up British electricity bills — it is the pricing model and the high cost of natural gas (a price which is itself set on international markets). Indeed, the most effective way to bring down bills in the long term would be to double down on renewables and completely eliminate gas from the energy system. As for green levies, these make up only a small share of total electricity bills, and in any case, the programs these levies fund, such as the Warm Home Discount for vulnerable households, would otherwise have to be paid for through general taxation. Distribution costs count for more, and one of the reasons electricity bills are rising so fast is that infrastructure must be upgraded to deal with increasingly severe weather events, itself a product of the climate change caused by carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, as an investment proposition, the fossil industry’s benefits are immediate, but possibly no more than that. Oil companies pay large dividends — but that’s because it’s an industry which appears to have a finite life and so their capital expenditure tends to fall below that of growth industries. This, indeed, has been a source of Donald Trump’s frustration with the sector: he wants the companies to drill, baby, drill to bring down prices, and they understandably reply: why bother? We’re happy to keep supply limited and make money off higher prices while the good times last.

Most of the future growth in demand for energy will come from the developing world, much of which is leading the way in the transition away from fossil fuels. Developing countries are not necessarily pursuing this path out of concern for climate change. What is driving this is instead energy security — that is, the eminently practical consideration that renewable energy relies on entirely local resources. Countries with abundant renewable energy reserves are not so vulnerable to foreign suppliers or the vagaries of the market — let alone price shocks like the recent interruption caused by the Middle East war. When the price of your input can leap in a week or its supply can suddenly get cut, as we’re seeing  now in both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, the attraction of relying on home-grown energy only grows stronger.

Meanwhile, renewable energy has turned out to be one of the most dynamic sectors of the UK economy, with a vibrant startup ecosystem that is riding on the back of Government policies and growing much faster than the overall economy. Investment in the sector has grown 20 times over in just the last decade and London is now Europe’s leading climate-tech hub. To roll back Net Zero would be to cripple a sector that could potentially be at the vanguard of a new industrial revolution — a spectacular economic own goal.

So, when it comes to industrial policy, which both Burnham and Fahnbulleh favor, there is much to commend Net Zero. In principle, it might be possible to partially reconcile the competing demands by allowing an expansion of oil and gas production — the windfall tax may come in for reconsideration — and then using the Government’s share of the revenues to support the energy transition. (This is the approach used by Norway and some of the Gulf states). But long-term, it makes sense for the Government to put its eggs in the basket of this rising sector rather than a legacy industry.

However, this is where the real challenge to the country’s energy policy will lie — namely, does the Government have any eggs to play with? Burnham has entered Downing Street with the same set of fiscal constraints that felled his predecessor, and there is little reason to expect those to ease much. Burnham has said that while he might look for a little flexibility, he will abide by the same fiscal rules Rachel Reeves had set for herself.

In truth, he doesn’t have much choice: if he doesn’t bind John Healey, the new Chancellor, this way, the bond market will do it for him. And while investors have greeted Healey favorably, with gilts moving in line with the bonds of Britain’s G7 partners, those rates have been rising across the board, and look set to keep doing so.

Meanwhile, given that Healey resigned from the Starmer government over its failure to adequately fund the country’s defense budget, it’s a safe bet that doing so was a condition for his taking his new job. So, in addition to having to find more money to pay rising debt costs, Burnham will need to find more money to pay for defense spending.

And yet for all that urgency, he has further tied his hands by making it impossible, at least for now, to tackle the one Government bill that everyone agrees has got out of control: welfare spending. Burnham campaigned on the pledge not to scrap the triple-lock that is the principal driver of that portfolio’s ever-rising price tag. As a result, we saw how tricky he made his task the moment he crossed the threshold of No. 10. The Prime Minister announced he would eliminate VAT on energy bills and fund it from the savings he’d make by scrapping the digital ID scheme, only to have a former minister point out that scheme was unfunded.

If Burnham is to proceed with his ambitious plans to remake Britain and shift the economy to renewable energy, effecting a new industrial revolution in the process, he will therefore need to make some very tough choices, lest he end up making lots of promises that his Chancellor nixes. Since the Labour manifesto did not ask for a mandate for such hard choices, he may have to secure one of his own.

But that poses a rather large dilemma. To secure his own mandate, Burnham would need to call an election, something for which there appears to be little appetite among either the public at large or his own backbenchers, many of whom would probably lose their jobs, given the scale of Labour’s current majority. But to make the sort of bold decisions that might underpin his attempt at national renewal — such as serious welfare reform, raising income taxes or reintegrating with Europe — Burnham would effectively have to tear up the manifesto Labour campaigned on.

On the upside, he comes to office with some advantages over his predecessor. He is, obviously, a more gifted communicator, and he also has a clearer message to deliver — a more fully-formed vision of government based on devolution, local action, and a constructive state presence in daily life. He also takes power with an evident plan to make government more effective, placing more power in the Cabinet Office rather than maintaining Starmer’s approach of relinquishing decision-making authority to a Chancellor who often gave the impression of looking at a computer spreadsheet before reciting “Treasury says no”.

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But he’ll need all these skills and powers, because his task isn’t enviable. He is shackled with the albatross that sank the Starmer premiership, bequeathed to him by Starmer and Reeves — a set of fiscal constraints, resulting from careless election pledges, which still make it impossible to do anything more than incremental tinkering — like ostensibly temporary VAT cuts, or £2 bus fares. His new energy secretary has the potential to assist him in his goal of transforming Britain — but only if he can figure how to pay for it.

He must therefore find a way to offload the weight of his inherited burden. If he doesn’t, he will join the lengthening list of short-term premiers that Britain has begun compiling.

The takeover in Venezuela brings under US control the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Under Trump, Washington saw Venezuelan energy bolstering hostile countries, especially oil-import-dependent China. For now, the Venezuela coup deprives the Middle Kingdom of upwards of 800,000 daily barrels, while taking away a valuable customer as well as an intelligence asset for the Russians and their Islamist allies.

This naked neo-imperialism could prove beneficial, not least for the hard-pressed Venezuelans. American supermajors like Chevron are also natural beneficiaries, with huge resources being placed to modernize the country’s shambolic energy industry and thus to restore its once proud relative prosperity.

The larger point is that successful economies either have fossil fuels or need easy access to them. Gas reserves, and the revenues they generate, grant places the Persian Gulf monarchies far more influence than populous Arab states like Egypt, which lack oil and gas. Russia has been able to underwrite its invasion of eastern Ukraine and withstand severe Western sanctions thanks to its hydrocarbon reserves. China and India look to secure imports of the same wherever they can, especially at bargain prices. Core European powers like Britain, France, and Germany, meanwhile, could punch far above their weight if they would but tap their own plentiful supplies of shale gas, but their governments refuse to do so owing to irrational green phobias about hydraulic fracturing.

Beyond Europe, however, the recognition of fossil fuels as a key element of geopolitics puts a stopper on decades of green campaigns designed to instill fear of emissions and promote wishful thinking about how to reduce them. In academia and the media, dissenters from the narrative, even academics who accepted anthropogenic climate change, are hounded if they fail to submit to the green papacy’s encyclicals.

But the green doomerism has failed to meet the reality test. We now know that predictions of climate crises, some of which date back to the 1970s, have turned out to be exaggerated or even plain wrong. For example, both ABC and NBC boldly predicted in 2008 that New York would be under water by 2015; last time I visited my familial home town, however, it seemed very much on dry land. Extinction rates, often blamed on climate change, have slowed, with even the polar bears continuing to thrive in somewhat warmed temperatures.

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A 2021 paper by Carnegie Mellon University researchers David Rode and Paul Fishbeck tracked apocalyptic predictions dating from the first Earth Day in 1970. Across half a century, 61% of the forecasts of planetary collapse have come and gone (and the planet is still here, chugging along). Even the committed climate sirens at Nature journal have been forced to retract a study that claimed the world economy would contract due to climate change.

The collapse of the worst-case scenario goes hand-in-hand with the continued strength of fossil fuels, which remain the dominant source of energy; even coal is ascendant. Despite billions spent by Western taxpayers to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use is 30 times bigger than wind and solar combined, as the energy analyst Robert Bryce notes; in the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar, but 13,000 from fossil fuels.     

Fossil-fuel energy remains “the blood” that wins economic battles, including the drive to build data centers for artificial intelligence. For a while, China was catching all the upside from the fossil-fuel resurgence by going on a coal-plant building spree (this, even as the People’s Republic invested heavily in green technologies). Meanwhile, the West, including the United States under President Joe Biden, hamstrung itself.

Americans and Europeans suffered. Living standards in the de-industrializing West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe, especially, has endured a decade of stagnation. Americans laboring under the joint rule of green capital and green government likewise suffered.

In my adopted home state of California, electricity rates have surged a staggering 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. Once a major oil producer, the Golden State now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign sources in South America and Saudi Arabia.

High energy prices most hurt those in California’s less temperate, heavily Latino interior. The crisis has driven an erosion of industrial jobs; since 1990, one-third of California’s manufacturing jobs — 1.3 million of them — have disappeared. The disparate class impacts have been confirmed recently in a study by the California Air Resources Board, which projects that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

If they stick to the climate agenda, the only way places like Europe and California can get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China put off for at least another decade — is by squelching future growth. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes that such policies would have  catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West. But China’s leaders won’t sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost.

But America under President Trump is pulling in another, better direction. And even some Democrats are going along in recognition of geopolitical reality. In the United States, Axios recently reported, Democratic lawmakers have all but abandoned use of the Green New Deal, even amid their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump. “Today,” notes longtime Democratic policy expert Will Marshall, “the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality.” Among Democrats in Congress, mentions of the once-hyped program have fallen to a bare handful, down from more than 1,000 citations in 2020.

Only 6% of Americans rank climate as a top concern, a sliver of those who see inflation as their major problem. As these concerns have faded, even ultra-green California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been begging refiners to stay in the state.   

The prospects for greens are even worse in the developing world. In Africa — the only continent whose population is growing strongly; also now home to five of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies — governments generally recoil from adopting net-zero ideologies. Leaders choose to ignore the scolding of Greta Thunberg and the green nonprofits. Instead, they prioritize bringing electricity to the roughly 600 million in sub-Saharan Africa who do not have it now.  

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Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, for example, has warned that the climate policies favored by Western nonprofits and aid agencies could precipitate a continent-wide energy crisis. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, launched a scathing attack on European climate policies in November 2022, declaring it “morally bankrupt” for Europe to use African fossil fuels while denying Africa the same right. Museveni accused Western nations of imposing “one rule for them and another rule for us”, while expecting Africa to sacrifice development for climate goals Europe has failed to meet.

“The climate-industrial complex,” as Bjorn Lonborg has put it, is, well, running out of energy. Even before the return of Trump, many green companies, despite subsidies, were failing, the product of high costs and poor delivery. 

Yet it is far too early to proclaim the permanent demise of the climatistas. They remain deeply entrenched in the universities and the mainstream media and are busy grifting in the massive nonprofit sector. A generation of children who have already been schooled in climate-change science, however exaggerated, may help them resurge. Also, those who have invested in “renewables” will be interested in recouping their losses under Trump.

Rather than ruin the basis of our prosperity and hopes for the developing world, humanity needs to adapt, much as our species has done during previous, and often more dramatic, climactic changes. In the coming years, the world must muddle through reducing emissions through practical steps like adopting natural gas over coal and restoring nuclear power.  Trump’s successors may not fully embrace these realities. But for the immediate future, at least, fossil fuels are back, for better or worse, shaping history much as they have for the past century.  

He made similar comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast in the run-up to his re-election, asserting he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”. Rogan remarked on the “dystopian” aesthetics of a wind farm in South Texas. Whether the concern is whale psychology or landscape aesthetics, there seems to be something visceral, even vibes-based, in the Right’s disdain for renewable energy.

In his second term in office, Trump has intervened on behalf of the whales — or, at least, against renewables. While Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was uniquely generous in using tax credits to support electricity from solar and wind, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) is equally ruthless in repealing them.

What distinguishes the OBBB is its exacting focus on solar and wind energy: increasingly the object of an emerging culture war. On one side, the Right argues solar and wind are “expensive and unreliable”, to use the words of Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright. Increasing reliance upon these intermittent power sources has led, Wright insists, to grids that are “less stable”.

On the other side, many on the Left see climate change as solvable only through the vast expansion of solar and wind energy — entailing a huge increase in the supply of batteries. Several high-profile commentators, including the activist Bill McKibben and the engineer Mark Jacobson, argue that the world can solve its decarbonisation needs by focusing exclusively on solar and wind, along with hydroelectric power — with, of course, more batteries. “100% renewables!” is their rallying cry.

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Granted, the Right downplays the real value of these energy sources, which are already making huge contributions to energy capacity in places such as Texas and California. But the Left is wrong to imagine that wind and solar will be a cure-all. Decarbonisation is complex, and will rely on a wider variety of energy sources and technologies to not only clean up electricity, but also deal with harder sectors like steel, cement, aviation and shipping.

Intermittency, of course, remains a real challenge for renewable energy — particularly in regions not blessed with a robust supply of sunshine or wind. The problem is not only geographical, but temporal. To deal with the recurring phenomenon of “winter”, renewable-heavy grids would need better “long-duration” batteries than those that exist today. To its credit, the IRA actually did enact a very broad-based set of support for not just solar and wind, but also nuclear power, carbon removal and green hydrogen. 

This is not the first time that energy policy has been shaped by antagonistic cultural politics. The oil shocks in the Seventies led to a wave of anti-Arab xenophobia in the United States — leading one country singer to suggest that America should cut off food supplies to the Middle East by way of retribution. Fifty years later, energy provision remains affected by culture. Germany has a significantly more carbon-intensive grid than its neighbours because it voluntarily dismantled its nuclear power plants at the behest of a vocal and powerful anti-nuclear movement. The country has spent billions on renewable energy, but these investments have not yet broken Germany’s dependence on coal and gas. 

But Biden did not have a culture war in mind with his energy policy so much as an audacious political theory. With many of its investments targeted for red states, Biden bet the IRA would create a durable political coalition that would help ward off attacks from Republicans. It was an attempted enactment of the neo-Marxist theory that clean-energy jobs and investments would appeal to the material class interests of Republicans, thus securing political support for the Democrats. 

The theory has many flaws, one of which was the reality that most of the investments had barely broken ground prior to the 2024 election. Worse, the Democrats’ theory of material interests fell prey to the larger culture war. It’s notable that, during the negotiations of the OBBB, a vocal faction in the Republican Party rose up to attempt to save some of the IRA tax credits and investments. But they were drowned out by a wider GOP that was scornful of renewable energy. Reporting suggests that, at the eleventh hour, Trump himself entered the negotiations, assuring many in his party that the OBBB would repeal the subsidies for solar and wind specifically.

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To explain their defeat, the Left has reached for another class theory. In this telling, the passing into law of the OBBB is just another example of the power of the fossil fuel industry. Likewise, the legislation could be seen as a defeat for “green capital”. Indeed, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, Abigail Ross Harper, claimed it was time to “storm the Hill” upon reading the Senate version of the bill.

At its core, though, the energy culture war is being waged not between industries so much as between classes. For the new populist Right, whose most prominent figures include JD Vance as well as Chris Wright, the class enemy is not green capital per se, but the wider “professional class”: the liberal academics, journalists and bureaucrats who, of all Americans, are the most enthusiastic about the transition to renewable energy. Although the OBBB does the bidding of fossil fuel capital, its most significant appeal to MAGA is in its broader culture-war project of “owning the libs”. Beyond solar and wind, the repeal of electric vehicle tax credits for liberal consumers plays into this larger cultural class war.

It helped that Trump and his allies in Congress could call on some supportive evidence. One striking revelation of the political fight over energy policy was that Republicans on Capitol Hill were reportedly swayed less profoundly by energy capitalists, or even energy engineers, than by a philosopher, Alex Epstein. Epstein is the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and is one of the more powerful energy “influencers” on the Right engaging in online polemics against renewable energy. On his Substack, “Energy Talking Points”, he argues solar and wind power are “not real energy” and “unreliable parasites of reliable energy”, and if the US were to embark on a “renewables-only policy”, the consequences, “…would quickly turn America into a third-world country”.

This is a battle, then, that transcends energy sectors. It is also a battle that maps precisely onto the increasingly geographical contours of political polarization. Pro-renewable liberals live in cosmopolitan, blue cities where climate change is an overarching concern. In these areas, solar and wind power appear as an unalloyed good on spreadsheets and in newspaper charts.

In rural areas, where the vast majority of these projects are constructed, people see things differently. Wind and solar farms take up a significant amount of land. This is a boon for landowners, who receive lucrative lease payments, but it is of less obvious benefit to the broader swathe of rural residents. This concern, coupled with the aesthetic problem of landscapes covered in solar panels and wind turbines, has contributed to significant resistance to these projects in rural areas all over the country.

The culture war over renewables cannot obscure the reality that the challenge of climate change is much broader than simply swapping solar and wind power for fossil fuels. It’s a civilizational infrastructure challenge, encompassing housing, transit, agriculture and energy, and will require something akin to a new, green industrial revolution reshaping entire geographies of life and work. The Trump administration’s attack on solar and wind is as superficial and unserious as Biden’s gambit that it would be enough to use tax credits to incentivize the right investments and consumer choices. 

The irony is many climate liberals have been insisting for years that renewables have become incredibly cheap and cost-competitive with fossil fuels. If that’s the case, they shouldn’t need the subsidies. Their theory is about to be put to the test. 

When Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism in 1979, well into the post-war wealth boom that turbocharged the industrial era, he argued that narcissistic tendencies develop partially as a result of industrial society. He identified phenomena as disparate as the modern school system, sport, psychotherapy, advertising and consumer culture as playing a role in the development of widespread, unchecked narcissism. But he didn’t go far enough: it was a glut of energy resources that instilled in us the belief that we could control nature as if we were gods.

For decades, our standard of living in the developed world seemingly increased without end. The improbable access to energy coupled with crony capitalism turned wealthy societies into pure consumers, swallowing anything and everything the economy could imagine and manufacture. Our system was unrivalled in history. Our inner Narcissus was unleashed.

Two major trends influenced our narcissistic tendencies in this energy-rich universe: we developed personal meaning in consumption, turning what we wear, where we eat, and where we shop into our religion. Consumption became a signal of belonging in a world breaking apart any semblance of community.

We also developed a collective philosophy of progress that told us we have won history: we had conquered all the resource and material challenges of the past. We believed that our collective wealth as a species was only going to keep growing. No wonder, then, that progressivism, in its traditional sense, became the widespread political psychology exactly as the upward slope of oil consumption looked almost exponential.

These two widespread psychological outcomes unveiled the worst of our egocentric propensities. On the one hand: we identified with what we chose to consume, an inward-looking narcissism, displaying self-worth through ostensibly corporate fandom, a religion of the self. On the other, we displayed an optimistic faith in human limitlessness.

Fusing the two together, the abundance of cheap energy lumbered the developed world with a narcissistic psychosis. You can see this in everything from the overvaluation of an individual’s salary and power as measures of success to the denigration of caring roles and familial obligation. In each case, the focus is on the individual thriving while ignoring the interdependence that makes life possible.

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But look at the world today: the seemingly constant upward trajectory of humanity is faltering. On the far side of industrial development, we have begun to reach a peak — in affluence, in meaning, and now in access to resources and position. Increasingly, there is widespread social disorganisation and political dysfunction as our high-energy society reaches its material limits. Economic theorists call this the crisis of capitalism; energy analysts call it peak oil; social commentators call it the meaning crisis; Weber called it disenchantment; Marx called it alienation. Whatever we want to call it, we have fewer resources now and it is changing how we think.

According to relative deprivation theory, as individuals in a society achieve a certain level of affluence and sense of security, any lowering of that standard leads to a feeling of entitlement and a sensation of being robbed. Sociologists suggest this sense of loss can often foment social movements and result in society wide outbreaks of deviant behaviour.

But this general sense of malaise and unease has also created a widespread culture of victimhood. Similar to Lasch, who relied on the clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder to explain societal narcissism, I believe that these tendencies are manifested in borderline personality disorder, or BPD. The characteristics of BPD include a sense of paranoia, the feeling that you are on the receiving end of unfair treatment, and a sort of mental witch-hunt against the individual or group believed to be behind it.

The political factions we now see arising out of various forms of social disorder — environmental, economic, financial — demonstrate just this trend: a widespread cultural outbreak of borderline personality disorder, centring around victimhood. Just as the seemingly endless exploitation of cheap energy caused us to once see ourselves as gods, our now-dwindling resources have us seeing monsters lurking everywhere in the shadows.

Consider the class of overproduced elites, the neurotic radicals of our current era. Working on the assumption that cheap energy and growth would maintain its trajectory forever, our institutions oversaw the creation of more white-collar positions. But today, at the end of the hyper-industrial era, these positions are becoming scarce. And what follows is not just a sense of deprivation-fuelled entitlement, but also a kind of bitter in-fighting with victimhood as its currency.

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Take the madness of our universities as an example. Individuals prepare their whole lives to go into academia, only to graduate into a cratering job market with nearly-impossible-to-land positions. In certain fields, PhDs work for years as low paid adjuncts or postdocs, often moving around the country with young families in the hopes of one day finally landing a tenured position. But instead of recognising the end of limitless white-collar growth as the proximate cause, frustrated would-be academics turn to those gaining the limited positions as both the enemy and the cause. In a dark psychological twist, victimhood politics have now become a means to secure a scarce position.

Similarly, those suffering from clinical BPD have been known to use their sense of victimhood as a way to control situations or achieve desired ends — such as when privileged white women pretend to be women of colour, or when activists attempt to dethrone existing “privileged” elites under the pretences of racism, sexism or some other victimisation of underprivileged groups.

But while this trend might be most immediately apparent within leftist, or “woke”, identity politics, there is also a parallel strain of victimhood politics in something like the red-pill movement made up primarily of young men. Frustrated by the lack of healthy male role models, opportunities to experience coming of age rituals and meaningful work, these men have now turned to women as the proximate cause of their ills, like early-modern peasants blaming witches for their misfortunes.

They bemoan the gynocracy, haunted by memories of mothers and teachers who have controlled and scolded them throughout their lives. And as a result, they seek out strong and often toxic role models who feed into their victimised self-perception and encourage misogyny. Fundamentally, this is just the same kind of aggrieved politics as the derangement of late-stage liberalism: this is not the life I was promised, I must find a nearby scapegoat to pin the blame on.

These are just two examples from the Left and Right, but this broader culture of BPD is widespread and growing. Radical feminists blame men, ecomodernists blame Luddites, vegans blame ranchers, environmentalists blame climate change deniers — the list goes on. But while this culture is clearly unhealthy, it’s also a natural and understandable psychological response to the sense of powerlessness fostered by an increasingly constrained material world.

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The ultimate destination of this narcissistic fantasy is ridding the world of all its evildoers — a kind of gnostic apocalypse in which only the truly righteous will enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet this is the exact opposite of the cultural approach we’ll need to survive. In the previous era of increasing resources, we had the riches to increase our independence; we no longer needed one another to survive. Today, however, as resources and stability begin to wane, we must rely on one another again.

The antidote to the individualistic culture of narcissism created by the upswing of energy resources, as well as the culture of victimhood birthed by its painful downswing, is a culture of interdependence, an acceptance of limits, and a reliance on mutual care. Historically, humans living within material constraints were forced to rely on one another to get by, with some of the worst impulses of human nature constrained by mutual interdependence. Our greatest moderating force is the experience of being relied upon, and relying upon others.

Fossil fuels drove us all crazy: perhaps the collapse of man’s brief age of energy abundance can make us sane again.

Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.

What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.

Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.

Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a report for Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.

Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals” — the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.

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Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.

Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.

And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.

Such moves have, unsurprisingly, attracted robust criticism. Professor Jun Arima of Tokyo University, one of Japan’s Cop26 negotiators, told me that allowing China to benefit from cheap, coal-fired energy will only consolidate its industrial domination. Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that China’s leaders have repeatedly shown they are not “men of their word”.

Yet those in attendance at the meeting in September have been unified by their reticence. Why?

Last year, in their book Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg revealed how China influences Britain and other Western democracies by seducing their elites. Its ‘useful idiots’ often believe they are acting for the common good, but become blind to Xi’s avowed ambition: for China to achieve global supremacy by 2049, the 100^th anniversary of the Maoist revolution.

Nowhere is this more effective than in the climate movement. I asked a specialist researcher fluent in Mandarin to examine open-source material from the Chinese web. The results suggest Western greens have become prime targets. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising: before he was a climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua helped run the Party Discipline Commission, which operates a secret prison network where torture, according to Human Rights Watch, has long been rife.

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I asked Hamilton if China’s wooing of Western environmentalists explains why the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has aroused so little protest? He believes it is likely: “They’ve fallen for what the Party calls ‘discourse control’ — to shape the way the rest of the world thinks and talks about China, presenting the Chinese government in a favourable light. Toadying to the Party leadership is letting them off the hook.”

For Lord Stern, this is nothing new: his environmental record is littered with papers saying CCP leaders are making great progress, and suggesting — prematurely — that their coal use and emissions have already or will soon peak. In 2014, for example, he claimed in a paper for the World Economic Forum that China was “emerging as a global leader in climate policy”. His co-author was He Jiankun, a ‘counsellor’ to China’s top administrative body, the State Council, and the director of the Energy, Environment and Economy Institute at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Three years later, following the the annual WEF jamboree at Davos, Stern said: “The world is looking for a climate champion. In China, it has one.”

Has Stern been naïve and let himself get too close to the CCP? Certainly for the Party, Tsinghua University has a special role: it is Xi Jinping’s alma mater, and home to multiple labs conducting secret research for the People’s Liberation Army. Yet the pair still work together: Stern’s spokesman told me that Tsinghua and the LSE are joint leaders of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, which held two international meetings before Cop26 with contributions from Alok Sharma, US climate envoy John Kerry, and — of course — Xie Zhenhua.

This year, for what it’s worth, Stern has called on China to stop building new coal-fired plants. But he still spoke at this year’s CCICED, while his spokesman told me that China remained “keen to learn from the UK’s example of world-leading action on climate change” and said the rate of increase in its emissions had slowed enormously. While this may be true, China’s emissions continued to rise even through the pandemic, and now exceed the total produced by rest of the developed world.

On paper, at least, you might argue there’s no harm in that. After all, the CCICED’s “mission” is to build “a more beautiful China and a green and bountiful world”. Who could possibly object?

Hardly anyone, I suspect, until they learnt that, the CCICED’s Chinese members include not only top Party bosses but officials who work with China’s United Front Work Department, one of the CCP’s main instruments for exerting influence abroad. Among them is Li Xiaolin, a top party cadre and the daughter of China’s late president Li Xiannan. Until recently, she was the chair of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries — which, as Hamilton and Ohlberg show in their book, is one of China’s most important foreign influence organisations.

What does this mean in practice? According to Patricia Adams, director of the Toronto-based environmental think tank Probe International, in 2017 a new Chinese law forced foreign NGOs there to submit to “close supervision” by the Ministry of Public Security, responsible for crushing dissent and controlling China’s secret police. Any organisation deemed to have “harmed the national interest” risks having its assets seized, its staff jailed, and being permanently banned.

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Adams knows this fully well: in 2014, when the new law was being discussed, two Chinese academics she was working with were arrested and later jailed, and Probe International named as co-conspirators. Their crime? “Picking quarrels and provoking troubles” for speaking out on issues such as the rule of law. After that, Adams tells me, “it was no longer safe for us to work in China”. As for the Western environmentalists who still do, she adds: “They hope they can influence China’s leadership. But they are also aware that for them, to publicly criticise China’s policy would be suicide.”

Take, for example, the aforementioned CIFF, whose Chief Executive attended the CCICED gathering in September. Along with the WWF and ClientEarth, it has a branch in China which is subject to CCP control. There, the CIFF employs one Wang Yi as its “independent adviser on climate projects”. As chance would have it, he also happens to be a high-ranking member of China’s puppet parliament, the National People’s Congress.

To what extent that compromises his impartiality is anyone’s guess. But it is striking that the CIFF — a registered UK charity — gives away millions of pounds to projects in China. These include an £18 million grant to “help contribute to peaking China’s emissions”, £14 million to give China “evidence-based recommendations” for renewable energy, and, most astonishingly of all, £8 million to assist China “in global climate governance”.

This might not matter quite so much were Sir Christopher and the CIFF not prominent funders of green causes in Britain and Europe. He has personally given £50,000 to Extinction Rebellion, with a further £150,000 from the CIFF. When these payments emerged in 2019, Hohn said: “I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.”

But not, apparently, to China’s role in it. When I asked an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson why they never said anything about China, she told me: “It would be divisive to put pressure on one particular nation. It would be hypocritical.”

Yet the CIFF’s China connection extends well beyond Extinction Rebellion: it is also the biggest funder of the European Climate Foundation, based in Brussels but with an office in London, to which the CIFF donated £29 million last year. Strikingly, the ECF’s deputy chair is a familiar figure: the CIFF’s Kate Hampton.

Like the CIFF, the ECF website provides few details of the groups it funds. But its UK ‘grantees’ include ClientEarth and the Conservative Environment Network, an alliance of more than 100 Tory MPs and peers set up by environment minister Zac Goldsmith and his plutocrat brother Ben.

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Its ‘global ambassador’, meanwhile, is the Prime Minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, a self-declared “Sinophile” who said last year that China “will come over to our side”, and it was vital “not to raise the temperature” by criticising them. He added he had recently enjoyed “a wonderful, wonderful meeting with the Chinese ambassador”, at which, after discussing global warming, they had sung the Flanders and Swann song ‘Mud, Glorious Mud’ together, inspired by mud’s supposed ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

And yet for all the pledges made in recent years by China and Western environmentalists, the evidence suggests that any future action will be strictly on China’s terms. For many years, Chinese leaders avoided trying to promote the Communist system in the West, but since Xi took power in 2012, this has changed. China, says Clive Hamilton, now touts the ‘China model’ as superior to the West’s.

Anyone doubting this had only attend yet another Beijing meeting, held in June at a Chinese government office by the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Centre, part of China’s environment ministry. The meeting’s attendees included staff from the CCICED, and discussed “the building of ecological civilisation and the community of common destiny”. One leading participant was Chen Xiangyang, the Director of China’s Total State Security Outlook Research Centre — an arm of the Ministry of State Security, which has helped to direct a regime of surveillance against Chinese citizens.

Meanwhile, Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.

None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.

An ECF spokesperson told me: “Climate change impacts every country and so we work with every country, and of course that includes China.” A CIFF spokesperson added: “China is the world’s largest emitter and its transition to a net zero economy is therefore of utmost importance to the entire world. CIFF’s work in China aims to accelerate this transition.”

ClientEarth said: “As a result of our work delivering legal training, the legal system in China is now used to hold Chinese government bodies to account… We are focused on reducing pollution and bringing down emissions both in China and from its overseas investments.” And a WWF campaigns chief added: “All countries need to contribute towards reducing emissions to net zero by 2050. By promising to stop building coal plants abroad, China had ‘given an important signal’.

Ultimately, however, the meaning of that “signal” remains unclear. Is it a sign that President Xi is seriously committed to saving the planet? Or is it a sign that he understands how to fool an influential group of Western environmentalists, with the intention of making that planet his own?

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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The great climate change fallacy

By Tom Chivers

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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Is this the end of the world?

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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Eco-fascism is our future

By Paul Kingsnorth

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.

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.

For the far Left, it is the free market system itself that has created this existential crisis. If ‘Capitalism is killing the planet’, as the placards at radical eco-protests proclaim, then what other choice is there but to overthrow the system?

Yet to believe that anti-capitalism offers a panacea for climate change is to ignore twentieth century history. The destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union was unparalleled in Western democracies. By the time of its collapse, 40% of Soviet citizens lived in areas where air pollutants were three to four times the maximum allowable levels, nearly half of the children in Leningrad (St Petersburg) were suffering from intestinal disorders caused by drinking contaminated water, and a fifth of the population lived in ecological disaster areas.

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Blazing Arizona: why adapting to climate change is deeply immoral

By Peter Franklin

The market may not guarantee an optimum allocation of resources, but the price mechanism is essential in determining resource scarcity. No bureaucrat or communist idealist – whether Stalinist or Libertarian – has yet found a way to replicate this function.

This does not mean the state has no role to play in encouraging better choices (more on that later), but knowledge about resource availability is fragmented and fluid, and is not something that can be slotted neatly into a government database.

The existence of private property can also act as a bulwark against the destruction of the environment (though it by no means guarantees it). When nobody owns something – a plot of land, say, or a forest – it tends to fall into disrepair or be exploited to destruction.

All of which disproves the idea that capitalism is the root of the climate change problem – the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the radical environmentalists is the equivalent of standing atop a sand dune and grandiloquently declaring ‘If I were king’.

It is also a myth to think that liberal democratic countries are a bigger obstacle to climate action than autocracies. So far, democracies have taken a stronger stand in climate change mitigation than non-democratic regimes. The only exception is in democratic states where corruption is high.

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By John Gray

The problem, then, is not liberal democracy, but liberal individualism. In a finite world, the demands of 7.7 billion people for a comfortable life will inevitably crash up against the planet’s limitations, whatever the economic system. In the face of a rapidly warming planet, liberal individualism is unsustainable. In Patrick Deneen’s words, it “undermines the virtues and cultural norms needed to enable humans to live together in harmony”.

Deneen is a Right-wing Catholic thinker who rejects many of the freedoms that liberals should defend (like gay marriage), but when applied to untrammelled markets, rather than to cultural questions, his argument stands. Without common forms of life there can be no freedom for the individual, and catastrophic climate change – prompting huge migrations of people and the potential submergence of great cities such as London under water – poses an obvious threat to this common life.

There is, therefore, something to be said for critiques of neo-liberal capitalism – even if calls on the far-Left to reject capitalism in toto and replace it with central planning are misguided. In Naomi Klein’s 2014 book on climate change, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, she writes:

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.”

This is a pertinent critique of a particular strain of capitalism, rather than capitalism itself. As the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott has written, the struggle to combat climate change “brings out the best and worst of capitalism”. It is because of capitalism, and the market incentives it creates, that great strides have been made in developing clean alternatives to dirty fuels such as oil, coal and gas. It is now cheaper to produce solar and wind energy than most fossil fuels.

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$10 a barrel for oil? The age of the electric car is closer than you think

By Michael Liebreich

The problem is when a particularly polluting resource is abundant, which is true of oil and gas. A decade ago peak oil theory was fashionable. It claimed that because oil was a finite resource demand would soon overtake supply, leading to the terminal decline of the industry in the foreseeable future.

The flaw in the theory is that new technologies are constantly being developed to extract resources from untapped sources, be it shale or mining deeper wells – also driven by capitalist incentives. Peak oil may become a reality one day, but we still have enough oil and gas to fry the planet many times over.

And that is why expecting the market alone to solve global warming is as much a mistake as believing that an end to markets will solve it. As long as fossil fuels remain relatively abundant they will be cheap enough to use profligately. Some government intervention is needed to change consumer behaviour. This is perfectly compatible with capitalism: the state shapes the context in which markets can operate, from defending property rights to regulating to protect consumers. But over recent decades we have become reluctant to use the state to defend the rights of the commons – that needs to change.

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Camus' rejection of tyranny is worth remembering today

By James Bloodworth

A practical example of this would be getting rid of internal flights in Britain. Few of these flights are essential – it takes around half an hour longer to get to Manchester from London by train than it does to get there by plane. And this doesn’t include the extra hour it takes to pass through airport security. Yet the cost of train travel in Britain is so exorbitantly expensive – and trains are so unreliable and uncomfortable – that people regularly choose to fly.

The unwillingness of the state to restrict the use of inefficient and environmentally damaging transport brings us back to the belief in liberal individualism: that a person should be free to travel how he or she pleases, regardless of the consequences.

On climate change, as with much else, the public good is not always synonymous with the interests of private, wealthy individuals. Indeed, the two are often opposed. Yet it needn’t take any large-scale coercion to reconcile these competing interests, just a greater willingness on the part of the state to move people towards sustainable choices.

Our politicians appear to re-learning this lesson, albeit slowly. Prime Minister Theresa May vowed to intervene in “broken markets”, and the 2017 Conservative Party manifesto rejected what it termed the “cult of selfish individualism”. However we still have some way to go: which politician will call for a ban on private motor cars within our congested cities, as Peter Franklin asked on UnHerd last week? No prospective candidate for the mayoral seat in London – ranked as one of the world’s worst commuter cities – has yet dared propose the idea.

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Who'll have the guts to ban cars from our cities?

By Peter Franklin

As climate change ramps up, we can expect massive price-hikes for basic foodstuffs due to crop failures and severe flooding in coastal areas. As it prompts waves of migration from draught-stricken parts of the world, social tensions are likely to increase as populists stir up resentment against newcomers. The resulting tide of national chauvinism risks unravelling the social fabric that makes a country like Britain worth living in. There is still time to ward off the worst-case climate scenario, but as the IPCC put it, it will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.

Those who have traditionally resisted the state taking any action at all to moderate human behaviour – typically in the name of classical liberal ideology – thus face a paradoxical choice: accept that liberal individualism means death for the common life, or acquiesce in the destruction of the very freedoms they purport to be defending.