The fundamentals here are not hard to grasp: the earth is warming at an alarming rate thanks to our prodigious appetite for fossil fuels. What follows, then, is not climate denialism, but a reminder that the green transition has a class system. At its upper reaches everything is agreeably frictionless. From the edgier neighborhoods of Western chancelleries, its future can look positively convivial: solar panels on the roof, an electric car at the curb, an oat cortado in hand and a bottle of pét-nat chilling for later. Consumption becomes cleaner, the carbon footprint contracts, and modern life proceeds much as before, only with improved appliances. At Davos, the same transformation is rendered in the more desultory language of targets and taxonomies. Yet it is somewhere farther down the class pyramid that the gigawatts are actually made. There, at the bottom of the pecking order, the lower orders drill tunnels, pour concrete, mine copper, string transmission cables, drive trucks in interminable nocturnal capers, and climb inside power stations when rivers rise.

Decarbonization appears in prospectuses bedecked in green; but the labor behind it remains blue-collar. Émile Zola, whose coal mining opus Germinal (1885) ends with miners drowning underground, would have instantly recognized the arrangement. Nearly a century and a half since its publication, the fuel has changed and the carbon ledger has improved, but the laborer is still in the tunnel.

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In Nepal last week came a grim illustration of this new class divide. On 26 August, near the Tibetan frontier, a sizeable chunk of Himalayan ice detached itself from the mountainside, plunging with such violence that the impact seismically registered on the Richter scale. Rock, ice, water, boulders, and pulverized mountain were funneled through Nepal and Tibet, where, in scarcely half an hour, the swollen Trishuli River began consuming the valley around it. Roads disappeared, then bridges, and helicopters were obliged to perform duties ordinarily entrusted to highways. An impressive rescue operation managed to save 11,800 people, even as over a thousand perished, with a further 4,500 missing.

Farther down the valley, a rather more hopeless story was unfolding. A dozen hydropower projects were struck, and, at the time of writing, around 900 workers remain unaccounted for. Reports say that 500 of them are still in tunnels, awaiting rescue. Indian specialists have joined Nepali soldiers, while China has sent drones and DNA-testing kits. Meanwhile, some 700 megawatts of generating capacity, roughly a tenth of the national total, has been lost. Nepal has spent two decades transitioning to clean energy, in the main by turning Himalayan water into electricity. It is a bleak irony that the men building this green future have now been buried under it.

For Kathmandu, hydropower was never simply an environmental policy. The dream long pre-dated the climate transition. In 1966, the Nepali engineer Hari Man Shrestha, armed with a Moscow doctorate, calculated that the torrents tumbling off the Himalayas contained some 83,000MW of theoretical generating capacity. Later estimates reckoned roughly half of it commercially exploitable. Here was an intoxicating proposition for a poor, landlocked country with few conventional energy resources and an energy-hungry giant to its south. So it was that in 1992, the government formally opened hydropower to private and foreign capital, explicitly envisaging electricity for export. A power-trade agreement with India duly followed five years later. By the following decade, politicians and developers were talking of Nepal as the “hydropower battery of South Asia.”

As it was, for decades, the battery remained uncharged. As late as last year, Nepal’s installed capacity was roughly 3,400MW, still a fraction of the old 42,000MW dream. Now, however, the dams are going up quickly. India has agreed to buy as much as 10,000MW over a decade, while Nepali electricity already travels through the Indian grid to Bangladesh.

This was no minor achievement for a small nation, wedged between two capricious giants, chronically deficient in merchandise exports, and accustomed to its best workers emigrating to more hospitable economies. Clean energy was a ticket out of poverty and dependency. The rivers promised electricity and reindustrialization, foreign exchange and domestic jobs. Some of the more utopian Nepalese mandarins even imagined that, after sufficient megawatts, the old hierarchy of landlord and peasant would give way to the more benign modern compact of engineer and technician. In short, the green transition was industrial policy, foreign policy, and class conciliation all rolled into one.

The latter, in particular, was a big deal. Nepal has spent the past generation accomplishing political revolutions rather more efficiently than economic ones. The Maoist insurgency began in 1996 among the impoverished populations of the western hills, where feudalism was still very much a lived reality; by the time the guns fell quiet a decade later, some 17,000 people were dead. The Maoists finally entered government in 2008, abolishing the 240-year-old Shah monarchy and installing their former guerrilla commander Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known by his revolutionary sobriquet Prachanda, “the Fierce One” – as prime minister.

Republican Nepal had its achievements. Extreme poverty fell precipitously — the share of Nepalis living below the World Bank’s $3-a-day poverty line falling from 22% in 2011 to 3% in 2023. Caste discrimination was outlawed, representation widened and public services improved. Nepal also developed an Italianate — or dare one now say, British — appetite for changing governments. By 2024, there had been fourteen prime ministers in about as many years. Meanwhile, far-Left factions multiplied with a fecundity to rival Marx (father of seven). Maoists joined Marxist-Leninists; Marxist-Leninists embraced their centrist enemies of old, discovering the novel attractions of cabinet office. At one point, the country counted 25 different communist parties — all very People’s Front of Judea versus Judean People’s Front. As the Nepali political scientist Krishna Khanal observed: “Ironically, there are no communists in Nepal even with an abundance of Communist parties.” With the revolution over, the new political caste settled into the more temperate business of coalition arithmetic, familiar enough to any observer of the South Asian scene.

For all these Communists, however, the lower orders remained obstinately lower. Nepal had abolished its king, survived a civil war, and installed former revolutionaries in the Singha Durbar, Kathmandu’s neoclassical seat of power. But what failed to materialize was sufficient productive work for the working classes in whose name all this had taken place. Capitalism here appeared with peculiarly Nepali characteristics: the country’s most dependable export is its own proletariat. After a decade-long People’s War, the people are still obliged to go look further afield for work: at the 2021 census, 2.2 million Nepalis were living abroad, representing around 7.5% of the population. Remittances — money that foreign-based workers send back home — still supply around a quarter of GDP and reach well over half of households. Youth unemployment has hovered above 20%; many find work in the black market. The IMF calls the resulting dispensation a “low-trust, low-investment equilibrium.” Put less decorously, Nepal cannot employ enough of its people, so they leave at a rate of roughly 1,700 per day to earn poverty wages building stadiums in the Gulf and operating factories in Malaysia, which they then send home to their pensionless families. Hydropower was meant to break this cycle. If the Maoists had failed to emancipate Nepal’s proletariat, perhaps the megawatt would.

This is not an appealing social contract and something eventually had to give. It did so last September, when Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli — of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) — decided to ban 26 social-media platforms. Nepal’s Gen Z had spent years unemployed or watching friends depart, while the offspring of Communist grandees displayed designer handbags and holiday snaps. On 8 September, security forces opened fire on protestors marching on parliament, killing nineteen in the first crackdown. The people of Kathmandu answered the following day with riots and attacks on politicians’ homes. By the time the upheaval subsided, at least 76 people were dead, and some 2,300 injured. Oli duly resigned. Having successively tried kings and communists, Nepal plumped for a rapper. Balendra “Balen” Shah — engineer, hip-hop artist, independent mayor of Kathmandu, scourge of illegal buildings, and habitual wearer of dark glasses — had spent his musical career rapping about corruption and unemployment. He cannily declined the interim premiership, waited for elections and, in March, demolished the septuagenarian Oli in his Jhapa-5 constituency. His Rastriya Swatantra Party duly swept parliament.

Six months later, the rapper-ruler has inherited a disaster, and, with it, an uncomfortable lesson in political economy. Contrary to liberal assumptions, decarbonization does not abolish class relations merely by altering the fuel. To be sure, a dam may emit less carbon than a coal-fired power station; yet it still has owners, creditors, contractors, engineers, and laborers, and they do not share its attendant dangers equally. It is Nepal’s hydropower proletariat who drill and blast through unstable Himalayan rock, working underground among explosives and sleeping beside the river systems being harnessed for Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese electricity.

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Shah has responded vigorously enough, mobilizing the army and hospitals while accepting Sino-Indian assistance. His government has also, understandably, reached for the language of climate justice, seeking compensation from the richer, heavier-emitting powers for the costs of a catastrophe Nepal did vanishingly little to cause. Yet the workers entombed in Nepal’s hydropower tunnels expose a less convenient injustice: the fault line runs through Nepalese society as well as between Nepal and the carbon-rich West.

The green transition promises to transcend carbon. But, as Nepal shows, it cannot quite transcend class. As trillions are poured into dams, grids, batteries, mines, and transmission lines, the old question of who profits, and who is placed in harm’s way, merely acquires new terrains.

The independent producers who now generate roughly two-thirds of Nepal’s hydroelectricity are the toast of the Kathmandu financial press. Their workers understandably occupy the less photogenic end of the boom. At the Tanahun project, a 2025 study found barely two-thirds observing adequate safety practices, amid reports of electric shocks, musculoskeletal disorders, and skin disease. Meanwhile, at Upper Tamakoshi, injuries were significantly more common among men working inside the tunnels than among those above ground. None of this, of course, caused last week’s glacial collapse. Yet once a warming and geologically unstable mountain range becomes a workplace, natural hazard acquires a class dimension: someone must be sent underground; some regulation decides what protections follow him there; and some state authority must possess the machinery to retrieve him when the mountain moves.

Marx, whose ideas have enjoyed a rather eventful afterlife in the Himalayas, would have found 21st century Nepal a familiar place. His account of commodity fetishism turned on the way relations between people come to assume the appearance of relations between things. It followed that the finished commodity confronts us as an object complete in itself, while the social relations, not to mention the labor that produced it, recede from view. Something similar afflicts the modern imagination when it comes to clean energy. We see the turbine, the solar panel, the electric car. Less visible, however, are the Congolese cobalt miner, Chilean copper worker, Chinese solar-factory hand, and Nepali tunneler beneath the Trishuli — until, that is, disaster strikes, making the class relations concealed inside the innocent abstraction of the “green transition” suddenly impossible to miss.

Yet five years after Katrina smashed into this fabled city, President Barack Obama’s respected education secretary hailed the storm as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”. Arne Duncan’s words were crass. But — as we can see clearly two decades later — they were true. For the winds and rain that lashed the city also shattered the systemic inertia and stifling bureaucracy that had betrayed generations of children, unleashing a schools revolution unmatched anywhere for its radicalism and scale.

New Orleans had one of the worst-performing public school systems in America before Katrina. Young lives were being betrayed by low expectations, dreadful teaching, incompetent officials, crumbling infrastructure and corruption.

Today it is still a struggling city in one of the nation’s poorest states. It is shedding jobs in its biggest industries including tourism, despite the throngs of visitors out partying on Bourbon Street or munching beignets in the French Quarter, and its population is shrinking. Yet it offers important lessons about education involving parental choice, school autonomy and accountability that extend far beyond the Big Easy.

The breaking of those levees smashed a mindset that sanctioned failure. Surveying the devastation that left just 16 out of 128 schools intact, and about a third of school buildings destroyed, state legislators took a massive gamble: they sacked all 7,000 teachers, side-lined unions, invited ambitious all-comers in to run their schools, and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children. This drastic move was backed by rigorous assessment of their performance, resulting in at least 50 of the remaining 75 schools being shut down or handed to new operators over the following years.

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Now, a new report by experts at Tulane University has analyzed scores of studies conducted over more than a decade into this bold experiment. And it concludes this daring act of liberation from local bureaucrats, converting all New Orleans schools into charter schools — publicly-funded, but with freedom and flexibility to set curriculums in line with contractually-agreed goals — was a huge success. “It’s the largest, broadest and most sustained improvement we’ve ever seen in a US school district with substantial improvement everywhere we have looked from test scores and parental satisfaction through to college access and reduced involvement in crime,” says Doug Harris, professor of economics and director of the Education Research Alliance.

That sounds pretty definitive. Yet Harris admits that when he started to study the reforms and track their outcomes with colleagues, back in 2012, he was a skeptic. But the data — which includes the value-added metrics vital for a city where almost one-third of children grow up in poverty — was persuasive. Before Katrina, New Orleans sat at the foot of most key rankings in Louisiana, the second worst US state for education. Almost two-thirds of its schools were judged failing. And the city ranked near bottom nationally in reading and math, with 19 out of every 20 high school seniors testing in school exit exams below basic proficiency in English and math.

Yet things quickly changed. New Orleans has gone from being one of the country’s worst school districts — with graduation rates 18% below the national average — to middle of the pack with graduation rates rising nearly 20 points in the scheme’s first decade. Improvements have plateaued, but they have been sustained, dipping in Covid amid school closures before recovering sharply. “We’ve leapfrogged thousands of school districts,” Harris says, “which has never been seen before.”

As the professor points out, the reforms were courageous, controversial, and “ugly” at times — imposed, as they were, by legislators in the state capital Baton Rouge. “It was not pretty to see them put in place on a majority-black city in a majority-white state,” says Harris, pointing to the history of voting disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South. There was a decline in the number of African-American teachers — who fell from 71% of the workforce to fewer than half a decade later, before rebounding slightly — while the number and pay of managers soared. Rehired teachers faced longer hours and lower salaries.

Initially, critics on the Left said “the rhetoric of reform often fails to match the reality” with advances coming at expense of disadvantaged students. Then they claimed the city’s undeniable improvements resulted largely from extra cash pouring into the system. The Tulane report accepts money was a factor, but argues the reforms fueled public support for higher spending on education, since local people could see the results at last. It adds that, before 2005, when the system was infamously dysfunctional, schools were “ineffective in converting school resources into improvement” — meaning that increasing education spending without the post-Katrina reforms would likely have failed.

Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me five years later how he moved to Louisiana from New York at the age of 26 to set up a school, starting out in a refurbished building with 120 pupils aged between 11-15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests, and won a national medal in recognition of its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents,” explaining how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.

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Kleban was far from alone. After Katrina, New Orleans became a magnet for ambitious educationalists, innovative entrepreneurs and idealistic philanthropists seeking to improve lives of disadvantaged children. And many of those teachers who lost out in the post-hurricane purge ended up being offered options to return.

Among them was Deanna Reddick, a single mother starting out on her teaching career when Katrina struck, resulting in evacuation with her daughter to Baton Rouge followed by closure of her school. Today, she is the school leader in charge of almost 1,000 pupils at KIPP Morial — one of nine campuses in the city under the umbrella of the Knowledge is Power Program, a network of 278 public schools in 21 states. When first hired there in 2006, the algebra teacher was struck by the transformed educational atmosphere, vastly different from her previous school.

“You could tell when you walked in that everybody was on the same mission,” she says. “Everybody was working towards the same thing for every single student in that building. My lens expanded — I wasn’t just concerned with what was happening in my own classroom. There was a team dynamic. We are only as strong as our weakest classroom.”

Reddick admits she feels under constant pressure to deliver, knowing her school, which has a strong emphasis on creative arts, might close or be handed to a new provider if she stumbles. Yet she says she never wants to rest on her laurels. “I want to feel that sense of urgency when I walk in the building every day. We have no time to waste.” And her emphasis on results and the pressure to perform on pupils does deliver change. The Tulane report found that enrollment of non-white pupils increased in higher-performing schools, while — against expectations — there was also an increase in the diversity of school options available for parents and pupils.

Kleban left his three-school group in 2016, after winning an election to join the city’s school board. Seven years later, it wound down operations after their charters were withdrawn. Curiously — and despite often-strong cultural ties to communities — such rapid churn in schools isn’t having the deleterious impact one might expect, suggesting that the closure of bad institutions can be a wise move. “In America — and probably in Britain too — there is often strong local attachment to schools, yet if they’re not working they need to be replaced,” argues Professor Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “Sometimes even parents stay loyal to a school failing their kids. But a school district has a duty to provide the best schools by whatever means it can.”

Harris and Hill — having both followed the New Orleans experiment closely — believe it shows why the Left should be much less in hock to demands of teaching unions and the Right far more cautious about the idea that vouchers alone can lift school standards with their absolutist faith in the market. Indeed, the Tulane report suggests Louisiana’s embrace of vouchers actually had a “negative effect on school outcomes”. It argues that they may have drawn students out of the city’s publicly run charter schools, now a proven success story, and into private schools that may be less good than generally thought with “positive outcomes driven by the demographics of those who can usually afford them”.

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Given the successes, should the NOLA experiment be replicated elsewhere? Even before Katrina, there were thousands of charter schools across America, including five in New Orleans. But no other district has been desperate enough to push the idea quite as far (although an elected school board was given back overall control again in 2018). There have been sporadic attempts to mimic the New Orleans revolution in places such as New York, Chicago and Indianapolis, but most efforts were either experimental, pusillanimous or petered out after the ouster of their political patrons. A similar — if much less drastic — approach based on choice, autonomy and accountability, with academies and free schools, was adopted successfully to drive up standards in Britain. Sadly, though, Labour’s education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, seems determined to undo 30 years of political consensus, which has again shown the benefits of devolving decision-making to schools, in a bid to suck up to the unions.

Local politics remains messy, to say the least, in New Orleans with the mayor LaToya Cantrell indicted last week over wire fraud, obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury after an investigation into her alleged affair with a former police officer. And the city has some of the worst urban poverty rates in America. But its radical and largely unique school experiment does offer hope for the future. As Reddick puts it, “‘I am a true believer that every one of my students — no matter where they come from, no matter where they live, no matter what trauma they might have suffered — that they can be successful.’” And since Katrina, she says, there has been a new urgency around education. Then Reddick echoes the infamous words of Arne Duncan all those years ago. “When I think about education — and it sounds horrible to say — Katrina was one of the best things that happened to New Orleans.”

In Appalachia, one of the poorest regions in the country, the common belief is that the mountains protect the locals from storms. Unfortunately, this is true only up to a point: when a hurricane like Helene hits — bringing once-in-a-thousand-years levels of rainfall — the mountains become a curse rather than a blessing. Helene has brought the mountains down, triggering mudslides and rockfalls that have destroyed entire towns and obliterated almost every road in a vast radius.

When the lowlands flood, that is bad enough: in 2005, New Orleans stopped being a vibrant city and turned into one big, murky lake. But with storm surges and flooding, you can often navigate much of the disaster area by boat. Up in the mountains, it is the earth, not the water, that becomes your worst enemy. With the roads gone and bridges smashed, driving is impossible, travel by foot is next to impossible: isolated settlements can often only be reached via helicopter. Those I have spoken to in North Carolina describe a disaster of “biblical dimensions”. The only thing that comes close to it in recent history is the “Great Flood” of 1916 in North Carolina, but Helene has easily beaten the river gage measurements from back then.

The death toll of Helene is currently inching closer to 200, already making it the second-deadliest storm after Katrina. But this number will rise and then rise again in the coming days. In truth, with the reality of unnavigable mountain terrain, an obliterated road network, and massive power, cell phone and water failures, nobody knows how many are dead. Without sufficient rescue efforts, more Americans might end up succumbing to the lack of water in the wake of the flood. But despite all of this, and despite the fact that the clock is ticking for many Americans trapped without food, water, or means of communication, coverage of Helene has been strangely muted. This silence has, in turn, masked a far darker problem: the lack of resources and manpower going into the rescue effort.

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Bush’s response to Katrina was criticised at the time for being lumberingly slow and ineffective. But the relief effort being mounted now is a pale shadow of what was done a mere 19 years ago, and that makes the silence around this disaster even more ominous.

In 2005, significant planning and resourcing was being carried out days before the storm even made landfall. Ten thousand members of the National Guard had gathered from several states to deal with the damage Katrina was about to cause. The final number who helped with the effort measured closer to 20,000. But those guardsmen did not stand alone: the US Army was preparing to assume overall command of the entire rescue effort through US Northern Command, where its battle staff coordinated response forces over various state lines. The regular Army helped too, including forces from the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army Corps of Engineers.

This time, things are very different. At the time of writing, fewer than 7,000 guardsmen are helping with Helene disaster relief, and there was no equivalent preparation before the storm actually hit. US Northern Command, which can only assume responsibility if it is asked to do so by other government authorities, is not coordinating the overall effort. During Katrina, more than 350 military helicopters were involved with the rescue efforts. This time, in a mountain disaster zone where many more helicopters are needed than in a coastal area, well below 100 helicopters have currently been committed.

The Katrina response had its fair share of problems. But the criticism it attracted had less to do with a lack of helicopters and more to do with the bureaucratic inertia that dogged the relief effort. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proved to be slow, inflexible and often hostile to efforts to circumvent red tape or unrealistic rules in favour of things that were practical and simply worked. In one case, the supplier of bottled water that FEMA had on contract failed to turn up on time. Local rescue crews then went to pick up water from local Wal-Mart stores, which could track every litre of water entering and leaving its stores. The water was right there, sitting on the shelves; people needed immediate help, so why not distribute it now and have the government simply pay Wal-Mart for it later? Wal-Mart was more than happy to go along with this arrangement, but FEMA was horrified that someone had circumvented their own chosen contractor. Grudgingly, they accepted the deal already struck, but then acted forcefully to shut down future ideas of dangerous and unauthorised innovation.

So while it can be said that Bush’s administration fumbled parts of the Katrina relief efforts, they at least did so in the context of America as it existed back then. The planning wasn’t always good, but there was planning. The helicopters didn’t always go to the places they were most needed, but at least they were there in large enough numbers. This is worlds apart from the reality of America in 2024. Today, the institutions are weaker, the deficits are bigger, and the US empire itself — then at the height of unipolarity — is critically overstretched. There aren’t enough helicopters, nor enough troops. A decent portion of the Tennessee National Guard, rather than helping rescue Americans in their own home state, are currently deployed to bases in Kuwait. In 2024, the only way for the US military to source enough men for its various far-flung bases and military commitments is to lean heavily on the National Guard. The Guard is supposed to be the primary muscle when it comes to domestic disaster relief, but as the regular Army is falling apart, there simply aren’t enough resources available anywhere in the system anymore.

This means that even though the victims of hurricane Helene have found themselves stranded within a stone’s throw of some of the US military’s more significant military bases — Camp Lejeune and Fort Liberty are both located in North Carolina — very little help has been forthcoming. There remains a belief in the West that, despite various recent reversals and losses, the US military is a machine with near-godlike powers: if it really wanted to, it could fill the sky and blot out the sun with an uncountable number of helicopters and planes, whenever and wherever it wants.

Almost a week into the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, those endless helicopters have failed to appear. And as America readies to surge more troops to the Middle East to potentially fight Iran, it’s clear that they can’t appear, at least not without seriously breaking something somewhere else. Troops and aircraft busy in Tennessee or North Carolina can’t be deployed to Jordan, Iraq or Syria. In theory, the US military exists to protect the lives of Americans — that’s why it falls under the Department of Defence. In practice, Americans have largely been left to fend for themselves, 50 miles away from their own military bases, just in case those soldiers and helicopters are needed on the other side of the world.

Trying to get a sense of the attitude in Washington, D.C. about the very worrying state of the Helene relief effort, I asked friends there to tell me what people were saying about it. Without exception, the response from everyone turned out to be the same: there was no talk. Helene wasn’t even on the radar; it was, after all, just a storm. Besides, hadn’t the situation already been handled? There were 6,000 guardsmen on the scene; that ought to be more than enough.

All of this is becoming eerily reminiscent of Chernobyl — and the accident that in many ways defined the last days of the Soviet Union. That too was just a minor accident that at first seemed like nothing more than a blip to the complacent authorities in Moscow. Only over time did people start to realise that this was truly serious. Chernobyl has since come to be seen as one of the proximate causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, though the reason why has often been misunderstood. Chernobyl wasn’t actually that lethal: approximately 30 people died as a direct result of the reactor explosion, with maybe 4,000 people dying years or decades later from illnesses related to radiation exposure. Hurricane Katrina, by contrast, led directly to 1,392 fatalities.

The real reason Chernobyl looms so large in stories about the last days of the Soviet Union was because of all the lying, the governmental incompetence, and the shared sense that the Soviet Union itself was a senile construct that no longer had any real point. A healthy society, one in which people still feel a sense of purpose and common belief, could have endured far worse disasters than Chernobyl. But by 1986, the Soviet Union was a place where neither the rulers nor the ruled believed the system still had a reason to exist. By the end, talk of socialism, Karl Marx and historical materialism seemed like nothing more than an absurd joke.

What happened to Russian Marxism, is now happening to American patriotism. Consider the lyrics to “Over There”, one of America’s more famous military-themed songs:

Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere!
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware! –
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there!

Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, a song like this would have been the embodiment of American patriotism and martial pride. Then, the song had real meaning to it; people felt it. Don’t mess with our proud America, the song warned — if you do, we’ll come over and make you regret it.

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America will have to dodge the draft

By Malcom Kyeyune

If you were to sing those words today to a mother stranded without water in North Carolina, or a Tennessee guardsman in Kuwait who still doesn’t know if his parents back home are even alive, the lyrics will appear like a particularly cruel joke. Indeed, that guardsman won’t come back to help Tennessee, not until “it” is over, over there in Kuwait. What that “it” is, nobody yet knows. The yanks are coming, the yanks are coming: they’re coming to bases in Iraq or Syria, they’re coming to Romania, to Bulgaria, to Poland, to Korea. They’re coming to endless gruelling deployments overseas that the US can’t afford, that talking heads in Washington insist are the most important thing in the world even as America slowly falls apart.

When Iraqi militias fired missiles that killed three servicemen stationed in Jordan, the reaction from most Americans was not patriotic fervour and hunger for revenge: it was exhaustion. Why are they even there? Why can’t they just come home?

Contrary to popular belief, Hurricane Helene is not “just a storm”, in the same sense that Chernobyl was not “just an accident”. Beyond all the destroyed roads, the flooded towns, the ruined electrical networks and the stranded American families, Helene is also an indication that the US political system, followed by its military, is very close to the point of moral and physical exhaustion.

Appalachia has always been forgotten; the people there are used to being treated like dirt. Talking to locals whose families were still stuck in the disaster area, the common refrain was that the help wasn’t arriving because the elites simply hate the people now in need of help. Talking to people in D.C., however, quickly dispelled that notion. What is going on right now isn’t malice, it’s somehow even worse: it’s senility. People weren’t enjoying the suffering of fellow Americans; they were simply so oblivious and zoned out that they couldn’t even notice a problem.

Currently, a hurricane disaster that is significantly more challenging than Katrina is being serviced by something like a third of the resources that Louisiana called upon. And yet few people in Washington even think this is a problem. At the same time as Congress has borrowed another 10 or 20 billion dollars to hand over to Ukraine and Israel, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced that the victims of Helene will be able to apply for $750 in relief assistance to help them get back on their feet.

As Chernobyl was, Helene is now becoming: a point at which the sheer absurdity and uselessness of the machine becomes too obvious to ignore. Looking at the disaster unfolding in Appalachia, the winners of the Cold War are now starting to ask the same question that eventually brought down the Soviet Union: what the hell is even the point of all of this anymore?

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.

And then, in 1906, an earthquake destroyed the fragile city. Buildings toppled. Broken gas pipes and fallen powerlines started fires. The authorities tried in vain to create firebreaks, resorting to dynamiting whole blocks of houses, but there was no stopping the fires that burned for another four days. More than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. At least 3,000 people were killed, and the majority of survivors were displaced from their homes.

It is what followed the disaster, though, that is truly fascinating. San Francisco transformed. It went from a city renowned for cut-throat competition, race riots and brothels to the site of an extraordinary upsurge of public-spiritedness. Residents who survived built impromptu health clinics and makeshift shelters.

A beautician, Anna Amelia Holshouser, recalled how she and others stitched blankets and sheets together to make a tent for children, and then set up a soup kitchen, feeding as many strangers as they could out of a few unbroken plates and tin cans. All across the wrecked landscape, groups of survivors banded together to create places of safety and mutual aid. Rebecca Solnit describes the small-scale initiatives on each rubble-strewn street of San Francisco as “little utopias” — that is, idealistic micro-societies where people lived as much for others as for themselves, spontaneously rejecting the dominant narrative of individualism.

What occurred in San Francisco was a rare thing, but it had happened before and it would happen again. Over and over throughout history, idealistic, cooperative communities have sprouted up in the wake of disasters.

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Why utopias always fail

By Mary Harrington

There are few examples as clear as the communities that followed the First World War, less than a decade after the earthquake in San Francisco. On a single day in the war — 22 August 1914 — the French army lost 27,000 men: half as many soldiers dead as the United States would later lose in the entire Vietnam War. In addition to ten million lives lost over the course of the conflict there was the wider damage: the uncounted millions scarred in body and mind; the disorienting sense of an entire social order destroyed.

People reeled under the compound effect of war and an influenza pandemic — robbed of their young, their hopes destroyed, uncertain of what the future held. But amid the destruction arose an impulse that was optimistic, energetic and humanitarian.

As in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, small groups of men and women began to rebuild, starting experimental settlements, renouncing old ways of living and trying to create new ones. Many people around the world believed the old social order was to blame for the Great War: the preoccupation with capitalist gain and nationalistic competition. Their response was to lead lives built around philosophies of non-materialistic mutual aid. In Germany, coteries of students and intellectuals took to the country to live collectively and farm cooperatively. In Japan, so many idealistic settlements were started that the conservative press reported anxiously on a “new village craze”. These post-war groups, though drastically different in style and structure, all had shades of the resilient, compassionate and communally-minded action that defined the days after the earthquake in San Francisco.

What can we learn from these reactions to disaster? Perhaps simply that adversity itself can prompt what is good in mankind — the urge to redraft the lines along which our societies are built for the better; a turn to co-operative social striving that would otherwise never have manifested.

And yet few utopias last long. In San Francisco, it was just a matter of days before thousands of soldiers were “restoring order” in the city — which included shooting those who were trying to collect food for the needy. New modes of living rarely spark large-scale social transformations, and all too often the status quo resumes.

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How Preston became a socialist utopia

By Gavin Haynes

But short-lived though most utopian communities are, they are connected in a beneficial way to the existing social order. They are in what German sociologist Karl Mannheim called “dialectical tension” with it: offering a reconfigured version of the outside world, expanding people’s sense of social possibilities, while at the same time being shaped by the mainstream’s needs. Even the communities that disintegrate quickly leave traces behind them, some of which are absorbed into the dominant social structures. And their examples gesture towards the fundamental idealism and resiliency in the human spirit, and the easily forgotten truth that it is always possible to recast the way we live.

We’re passing through another disaster now. And though the defining nature of this pandemic has been that people have been forced to live apart, it has nonetheless sparked impressive examples of idealistic activity, of cooperation and social action. Drivers in Wuhan created a volunteer car fleet to transport medical workers to hospitals when public transport shut down; young people in India mobilised to provide aid packages for those without savings; experts created the open-source library “Coronavirus Tech Handbook”, pooling knowledge on technologies and organisational methods for fighting the pandemic.

Climate change is a slower-moving crisis. Like the First World War, it has sparked in many a sense of the failure of the underlying systems of society and governance, which seem to be unable or unwilling to cope and change. Collectives experimenting with low-impact modes of communal living — ecotopias, as some of them call themselves — are proliferating.

At Old Hall Community in Suffolk, a group of 50 share a manor house, farming, cooking communally and keeping their carbon footprint as near as possible to net zero. In the mountains of Asturias in northern Spain, sixty Spanish, French, Danish and German women and men live in the remote commune of Matavenero, where they grow their own food, build their own houses and consume as little as they can. There are larger initiatives, including the community of Toyosato in Japan, where several hundred participants aim to demonstrate a fulfilling life built on sustainable farming, cooperation and minimal possessions. This settlement is one of more than 70 low-impact communities that form the Yamagishi movement, which stretches to Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and the United States.

These contemporary utopias are not a replacement for long-sighted national and international legislation, or for the much-needed regulation of corporate actors. In many ways they may be less effective than change-oriented activists such as Extinction Rebellion. But ecotopians put their money where their mouths are. They live in the way they think we all ought to live.

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Inside Melbourne's eternal lockdown

By Tom Chodor

There seems to be a time limit on utopian communities. When the disasters that inspired them are forgotten, they generally collapse, or are absorbed back into the old order with its attendant oppressions and injustices. Sometimes, they mitigate that old order, demonstrating practices that can help make society a little better, a little more just. But climate change falls outside of this pattern. We are not likely to live to see the end of this global disaster. And if we insist on holding fast to the old order, to the dominant ideologies of hyper-individualism and materialism, the crisis will only deepen.

Utopian living, at its best, creates an opening in the fabric of society, allowing us to see how fragile the habits and structures which seem immutable in day-to-day life really are. “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” wrote the young reformer Dorothy Day of the San Francisco earthquake, having watched her mother give away her clothes to survivors. We haven’t quite reached the moment of imaginative, communal rebuilding that people are capable of when faced with disaster. We must hope that this moment will arrive soon.

This is all wholly unremarkable in the current crisis. Churches are the focal points of the community, places to which people gravitate in times of need – though that can be tricky when churches are among the buildings that collapse after a tremor.

But obviously the buildings are only an expression of the church; the social infrastructure is more important: a remarkably effective network that enables people to rally to each other in time of need. The dioceses are part of an organisational structure that enables churches to collect aid for other parts of the country, and the parishes are where aid is distributed at local level. The bishop can articulate the need of the community for help – from other areas, from the government and from the worldwide church through organisations such as Caritas – but he also has a pastoral function, to rally the people and pray with them. Meanwhile, local priests comfort the bereaved and injured, and local churches are where people rally round each other. What’s happening in Cuernavaca is happening around the country.

This isn’t to say that you don’t get communal solidarity and neighbourly help in secular communities, though even in London after the Grenfell Tower fire, it was the local church of St Clement’s that was the most obvious and visible place for people to come for help[1.  Jonathan Aitken wrote about the role of faith communities after the Grenfell tragedy during UnHerd’s launch week; “The fourth emergency service“, 20 July 2017]. But earthquakes are a rather greater challenge.

The famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755 – which happened on All Saints’ Day, ruined the Portuguese capital, destroyed almost every church in it and caused unimaginable loss of life – and was the defining natural catastrophe of the Enlightenment. For philosophers it was an expression of the problem of evil; famously, it enabled Voltaire to make the case against a beneficient deity who keeps humankind in his loving care. In Mexico, he would have seized on one poignant episode in which a church collapsed onto a baptism, killing the baby and all his family, apart from his father, the priest and the priest’s assistant[2.  The Scottish Catholic Observer, 22 September 2017: “According to the Archdiocese of Puebla, only the baby girl’s father, the priest and the priest’s assistant were spared, with at least four children killed when the roof collapsed.”].

Yet Voltaire wasn’t quite right. In Lisbon and now Mexico, the function of institutional religion is demonstrated in the response to catastrophe, from the intangible spiritual comfort that people derive from prayer to the organisational capacity of the church to provide practical assistance in helping the homeless and distributing relief.

This is not to say that the church in Mexico has always been on the side of the poor. Its record is, to put it mildly, mixed. In the sixteenth century, the Pueblo-Hospitals set up by Bishop Quiroga of Sante Fe in 1532-38 promoted communal agriculture, health and education and a degree of self-government. The missionaries articulated a robust stance in favour of the humane treatment of native people. Yet over the course of time the church became a parallel elite, with close ties to the military and the landowning classes, with enormous assets. The backlash against the church in the political upheavals of the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has obvious parallels with the Spanish civil war. Yet Mexico has remained an overwhelmingly Catholic country – well over 80% of the population identifies as Catholic.

In his book, Earthly Mission (Yale, 2013), on the church and development, the economist Robert Calderisi[3.  Robert Calderisi is now at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and was based at the World Bank for 24 years], concluded that:

“Despite its obtuseness on the role of the market and family planning, the Catholic Church has probably lifted more people out of poverty than any other organisation in history.”

Its role in Mexico reminds us of its value in times of natural disaster too. As Calderisi says, “social action and an essential optimism about the world… [are] at the heart of Roman Catholicism”. Both are evident in Mexico.