Seven weeks ago most people would have struggled to find the Strait of Hormuz on a map. But if you worked in energy or geopolitics you’d know it for what it was: an exposed jugular of the global economy for the past 50 years. 20% of the world’s exported oil and natural gas and 25% of the world’s fertilisers have to travel through that 33 km-wide mouth of the Gulf (1 km more narrow than the English Channel).

That vulnerability has been baked in for so long that few people really gave Hormuz much thought. It’s fixed, an accident of geography, like a few other crucial choke points around the world that the British Empire consciously built itself to control. In 1890, US Navy captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History and raised the importance of strategic maritime choke points so much it inspired future US president Theodore Roosevelt to seize Panama in order to create one that he could control.

Now, 236 years later, former British diplomat Arthur Snell is about to publish a book that explains how climate is rapidly changing the geographic assumptions on which geopolitics is built.

Buy it now — Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive It.

But first, check out my conversation with about his new book, the first comprehensive account of the geopolitics of climate change.

In this conversation:

00:00 Arctic Ice Wake Up
00:45 War Crowds Out Climate
02:32 Chokepoints Aren’t Fixed
04:08 Meet Arthur Snell
04:22 Why Climate Is Geopolitics
08:05 Alps Collapse Story
11:01 Skiing Lobbies And Emissions
12:40 Geopolitics Map Gets Redrawn
14:59 Arctic Shipping Routes Open
18:37 Trump Greenland And Minerals
22:46 Panama Canal China Leverage
24:20 Panama Canal Leverage
25:56 Who Shapes Strategy
28:24 Migration as Hard Reality
34:55 Greenland Plans Accelerate
39:27 Russia China North Shift
42:28 Wine and Adaptation
44:36 Book Plug and Farewell

And check out our previous conversation with one of Arthur’s sources, :

“ There is no hope in multilateralism, unfortunately, left in the country where I live because as been we’ve been witnessing so far over three and a half years, the international order has been quite outdated and it needs complete renewal,” she told a conference in Rome I attended last October.

Targeted Russian attacks on civilian energy infrastructure, an unambiguous war crime, have been more prominent as they ramped up in an attempt to freeze Ukraine into submission through a bitter winter. More prominent again as experts warn that Europeans need to urgently prepare for Russian hybrid warfare against energy infrastructure across the continent - as a former CIA analyst told Semafor’s Kyiv-based Tim McDonnell:

In late December, a wave of Russian cyberattacks hit energy facilities across Poland, a sign that Moscow may be willing to expand its energy campaign beyond Ukraine as a means of testing NATO cohesion, Chelsea Cederbaum, now a senior threat intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, said. And as Russian President Vladimir Putin grows frustrated by slow progress in Ukraine and anticipates a post-midterms political landscape in the US that may be less inclined to favorable dealings with Moscow, “there’s a high risk of escalation by Russia over the next two years.”

But as Romanko recounted to me in our conversation, the four-year conflict has taken an incredible toll on Ukraine’s ability to keep providing energy to its people:

 “In 2021, Ukraine had 54 gigawatts of energy with different types of energy production. And next year we just only have left nine gigawatts. Because everything else was significantly damaged or destroyed by Russian attacks, which were quite hard.

So for households, that meant that we had, uh, power supply, just, it could be two hours per 24 hours.”

She’s clear-eyed about what has kept Vladimir Putin’s war going - something related to the inability of the multilateral international system to stop it: dependence on fossil fuels. As she told me in an interview, the “ global fossil fuel addictions that feeds Purin War machine, but also other war vehicles around the world” are central to the problem.

Another type of faith has kept her going. When Russian troops surged across the border in February 2022, Kyiv-based Romanko was managing the Zero Fossil Fuels Campaign for the Laudato Sì Movement - a global, faith-based coalition founded in 2015 to mobilise Catholics and people of goodwill to tackle the climate emergency and ecological crisis, prompted by the publication of the “Laudato Si: Care for our Common Home” encyclical published by the late Pope Francis that year.

I met Romanko after seeing her speak at their conference in October at the papal summer residence Castel Gandolfo south of Rome marking the 10th anniversary of Laudato Sì. She shared a panel discussion with Tuvalu climate minister Dr. Maina Talia. He also spoke with us:

Climate Pilgrim

Who is my neighbour? 1.5°C is about neighbours, not numbers.

“What have we done wrong, to make God angry at us? We have no military power. It’s just communities living peacefully on their home islands. But we face this existential threat. For us, the difference between 1.5°C and anything beyond is the difference between survival and erasure…

Listen now

6 months ago · 1 like · Richard Delevan

A professor of climate and environmental law who had already developed deep expertise in the financial flows created by fossil fuels and having worked for several NGOs including 350.org, Romanko was better prepared than most to understand how the war was being funded.

She founded Razom We Stand, a Ukrainian-led climate campaign that aims to pressure the fossil fuel industry to cut ties with Russia, but also calls for accelerated transition to renewables across Europe to lessen the demand for and dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

“ We need to expand on renewables because this is the energy of peace,” she told me. “This is the energies that can’t be targeted by military attacks because it’s very much distributed, it’s owned by many, and it’s very affordable.”

As AFP reported this week from Ukraine, ordinary people in the conflict zone - like people in Pakistan or West Africa - are outpacing policymakers in putting solar and battery to use in adapting to their circumstances. In Ukraine’s case the enemy’s deliberate targeting of the grid. People who might otherwise have to flee their tower block and their city have found ways to keep things going using cheap solar and battery:

The back-up supply in Biletsky’s block meant the lift -- unlike in many buildings -- was still shuttling up and down, and electric pumps were able to send water to the top floors.

Without it, there would be none above the ninth floor, said Biletsky.

“After the inverter was installed, we have constant heating, hot and cold water,” said Tetyana Taran, who lives on the 20th floor.

The inverter is the device that automatically draws supplies from the battery when the mains switch off.

“The fact that I also get to use the lift is great,” the 47-year-old added.

Razom We Stand this week pointed to research suggesting that Europe has, since the February 2022 invasion, spent roughly as much each year on Russian energy as the equivalent of everything Ukraine spends annually on defence (about $44bn). And that, with the replacement of a pipeline that crossed Ukraine with another pipeline via Turkey and into Bulgaria, certain European countries have scaled up Russian energy imports:

Trump administration efforts to force the Europe to replace Russian gas with American LNG are another trap.

“ There is no good gas and bad gas,” she said. “All gas is bad. All fossil gas is bad.”

Romanko sees it as just another aspect that “populist” political movements, whether in the US, Europe, or Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK are acting to try and reverse the move away from fossil fuels. As Desmog revealed in 2024, Reform has been highly dependent on funding from fossil fuel and climate-denial sources.

She is confident, though, that right-wing “populist” successes in preserving the status quo on behalf of fossil fuel allies will be temporary.

“I believe governments will follow because — the populist populism era that we are unfortunately entering in every country where we can see the rise of far rise, it’s very temporary.

They have nothing to offer. They have nothing to really offer to decrease the cost of energy, of electricity to support people.”

By tomorrow morning the voters of Gorton and Denton here in the UK will either make that point and clear - or we’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Repairer of the Breach

For the past year, and longer, I’ve spend time re-engaging with the faith tradition I grew up in. I’m writing about that experience and process and how it’s affected how I view climate action at climatepilgrim.com. But I couldn’t help sharing a quote some people may have heard in the past week:

If you lavish your food on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; Then your light shall rise in the darkness, and your gloom shall become like midday;

Then the Lord will guide you always and satisfy your thirst in parched places, will give strength to your bones and you shall be like a watered garden, like a flowing spring whose waters never fail.^g

Your people shall rebuild the ancient ruins; the foundations from ages past you shall raise up; “Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you, “Restorer of ruined dwellings.”^h

Here’s hoping, for Svitlana and for Ukraine.

Back soon.

So which country is winning Fash Gold? In a few hours Donald Trump will deliver what promises to be a State of the Union that will make Fidel Castro crawl out of his grave to scream, ¡BASTA! ¡NO MAS!

It will cap 55 days of 2026 in which his regime has kidnapped Venezuela’s head of state and seized control of its oil exports; threatened to invade Greenland; told former Allies that climate action is a threat to US interests; his ICE paramilitaries have murdered at least nine people including shooting US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretty in cold blood in broad daylight in Minneapolis; reversed the EPA endangerment finding about CO2 on which US climate regulation rests; all while deflecting attention from the millions of pages of Epstein Files. While behind the scenes FBI begins systematic targeting of climate activists, knocking on the doors of people who haven’t been near a protest in almost a decade, never mind a can of soup.

Professor Dana R. Fisher of American University returned to the pod to talk about all of that, and about her new Apocalyptic Optimist podcast and newsletter.

Green vs. Brown (or Turquoise) is the New British Politics

Meanwhile, here in the UK a crucial by-election in a formerly overwhelmingly Labour seat in Greater Manchester is framed as beginning of a political contest that will define the next decade and more: dark money-funded Reform vs the surging but less experienced Greens.

Britain has already jailed nonviolent climate protestors and restricted defenses in court, with ongoing debates about protest trials and labeling Palestine Action a terror group. The Gorton and Denton by-election seems to be between Reform, seeking to import Trump’s climate and migration agenda, and the surging Green Party, treating climate, inequality, and migration as realities to face without losing humanity. The show notes a single constituency poll with Green candidate Hannah Spencer ahead of Reform’s Matt Goodwin, with Labour (which has held the seat for a century) behind;

as Labour is consumed by Epstein-linked arrests and scandal involving Peter Mandelson and former Prince Andrew.

In an interview recorded late in 2025, Harriet Lamb, CEO of the Green Party of England and Wales, describes rapid growth following Zach Polanski’s leadership, with membership doubling to over 150,000 at time of recording - much increased since.

Lamb connects her background in international development and environmental and social justice to party politics, argues the UK has shifted into a multi-party system creating both dangers and opportunities, and emphasizes a “people and planet” platform focused on the cost-of-living crisis, inequality, wealth taxes, and strong public support for climate action. She discusses candidate development through a “Greens to Parliament” program aimed at building a diverse slate for 2029, and says coalition politics must protect Green principles and public trust, citing German coalition negotiations and the Scottish Greens’ Bute House agreement as examples.

00:00 Confrontation and Repression

01:35 Wicked Problems Returns

04:11 FBI Targets Climate Activists

07:42 Low Hanging Fruit and Autocracy

19:18 UK By-Election and Green Surge

29:32 Hope Surge and Outreach

31:28 Broad Coalition and Core Values

36:28 Vetting New Recruits

38:39 Road to Parliament and Coalitions

45:24 Milestones and Closing Reflections

No matter what happens, by the time the votes are counted in Gorton & Denton we may well be in a very different political world.

Wicked Problems will be back soon.

Starting before then, ramping up through having an opportunity to visit Rome for Pope Leo presiding over an event marking the 10th anniversary of Laudato Sì, and reflecting through the dark weeks since COP30, it would seem I’ve become one of those people I found slightly off-putting when I was young. The sort who carries around a saint’s medal. In this case, a souvenir made in 1865 that I found on eBay after learning more about Francis de Sales.

Let me come back to him in a minute. But just to quote the man briefly, from the preface to his Introduction to the Devout Life:

 …you will find very little precision in the work. But rather a collection of well-intent…

Read more

Amid the political choreography inside the COP halls, one force has been impossible to ignore: people power. Inside the venues, in the streets of Belém, and in cities across the world, tens of thousands have marched, spoken out, and stood in solidarity. And their demand is clear: leaders must adopt an uncompromising roadmap to end fossil fuels, while tripling renewable energy and rapidly scaling wind and solar.

This is not just an energy transition; it is a justice transition. It is about rights, access, and ow…

Read more

Welcome to Belém, where the world1 has gathered to talk about saving the Amazon as if it weren’t already on fire.

Cataloguing the chaos leading up to COP30 Ben Cooke of The Times. His team’s reporting makes clear why the mood isn’t exactly jubilant: the clean-power alliance with zero members, the rainforest pledges with little progress, and the renewed swagger of fossil petrostates.

Even potential bright spots, like the Tropical Forest Forever Facility announced last week, were somewhat dimmed by the spectacle of UK prime minister Keir Starmer reversing an earlier decision not to go to COP, only to make the trip to then announce his government wouldn’t be part of the hoped-for signature initiative out of this event.

Which, for Green Party leader Zack Polanski, begs the question, why Starmer bothered to make the trip:

COPs are ‘a bit of theatre’, as Baroness Bryony Worthington has said, quoted by Ben in a recent piece. The question is — in a world that has failed to keep its Paris Agreement promise to try and keep global heating under 1.5°C, does that theatre still have a point, if it ever did?

Or are they distractions from the real work required, creating the false impression that some of the worst effects of climate change can still be avoided?

Or worse, are they about to become — foreshadowed by the US going to unprecedented lengths to undermine the International Maritime Organisation’s plan to reduce emissions2 — a theatre of despair, where opponents of climate action see their chance to shred what remains of consensus about the need for, and viability of, a transition away from fossil fuels that only two years ago finally made it into a COP communique.

Ben and I get into that and more, including some things to watch for in this COP:

1. Financial Initiatives: Success will partly be measured by progress on climate finance initiatives like the Baku to Belèm roadmap, crucial for scaling investment in green infrastructure across developing countries, and whether new schemes like the TFFF to protect rainforests get off the ground.

2. Adaptation: Paris Agreement made mention of the need to figure out how to talk about measures to adapt to the changes in climate that would not be avoided, even at 1.5°C warming. The Global Goals on Adaptation have been discussed for years, only to find that it’s such a hyper-local problem, and one that is so difficult to discuss that things like managed retreat are so politically toxic3 that no one can talk honestly about them.

3. Walkout? Delegates from climate-vulnerable states are in a double-bind. The COPs are an essential forum to draw the world’s attention to the perverse reality that the people most likely to suffer from the effects of climate change had the least to do with creating the problem. The International Court of Justice made clear that failure to curb emissions and deal with the effects of historical emissions violates the basics of international law.

4. Walk-in? While the US is notably not sending any major officials to Belèm - Trump having already signalled the intention of the US to again withdraw from the Paris Agreement - will that just be a US absence? Or will the Administration, as it did during the IMO talks, find a way to actively undermine further discussion? A consensus-based decision-making process of the COPs has always been a fatal flaw, if a major state actor is determined to wreck it.

We’ll be keeping tabs on COP throughout the next two weeks so check back for more. But this conversation with Ben really helped me reset as we head into it.

1

Well, with some notable exceptions like the United States - which sorta matters:

Shipping is one of those things that’s just supposed to work. Post-Titanic, people decided they didn’t want maritime transport to be particularly sexy or interesting (also known as ‘dramatic’). So we created a set of rules that currently are taken care of by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), which successfully removed a lot of drama from shipping - so successful that Britain’s ‘shipping forecast’ that was once life-or-death information for critical workers in a strategic industry is now the soothing stuff of ASMR go-to-sleep appointment listening.

That late-night BBC ritual of calm voices and cryptic geography — “Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire…” — has lulled generations to sleep. It’s also a kind of secular prayer: proof that somewhere, someone is still keeping watch through the storm.

So it’s a bit disconcerting when President Donny Six-Fingers bursts into studio to disrupt the forecast. But that’s more or less the equivalent of what happened last month at the IMO.

According to a Financial Times investigation, U.S. officials under the Trump administration didn’t just lobby against a global carbon levy on shipping — they threatened, intimidated, and blackmailed diplomats in the organisation’s normally tasteful and cozy London corridors. Delegates from Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean were reportedly warned their ships might face higher U.S. port fees, their officials denied visas, their trade punished, even their families restricted from travel, if they didn’t abandon support for the Net Zero Framework that the UN-affiliated IMO endorsed only 6 months earlier.

“It was like dealing with the Mob,” one diplomat told the FT. Another said simply: “They went from delegation to delegation, threatening them.”

In the end, it worked.

The deal — which would have created the world’s first carbon-pricing mechanism for global shipping — was postponed for a year. The IMO, normally the most technocratic of international bodies, was left “in a state of complete shock.”

For the uninitiated, this may sound arcane. But shipping matters — a lot. Roughly 90% of global trade moves by sea. The sector accounts for about 3% of global CO₂ emissions — more than Germany — and it’s been largely outside the reach of climate regulation - excluded, for example, from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The Net Zero Framework was meant to change that: a multilateral attempt to finally bring the shipping industry into the decarbonisation mainstream. It had already been provisionally agreed by a majority of countries in April. But by October, something had changed.

Countries that once supported the deal — including China, India, Panama, Liberia, and even Greece and Cyprus, who broke with the EU line — suddenly voted to adjourn.

The shift didn’t come from nowhere. It came from pressure. From a U.S. administration that now defines climate policy not as a global necessity, but as an existential threat to American interests.

On this extended episode of Wicked Problems, we spoke with three people trying to make sense of the wreckage.

Ariane Morrissey of Ship.Energy was there in the building as the talks imploded. She describes the mood as surreal, with delegates who came to discuss fuel standards suddenly fielding threats of sanctions and visa bans.

Professor Tristan Smith of UCL, who’s been involved in these negotiations for over a decade, gives the longer view: that this is not just a failure of climate diplomacy, but a warning shot about the fragility of the multilateral system itself.

And Carly Hicks of Opportunity Green explains how the IMO had been one of the last truly global forums where climate ambition could meet technical reality — until political interference capsized the process.

Smith points out that while the U.S. may have succeeded in buying time, it may also have accelerated something else: the rise of regional regulation. The EU’s carbon trading scheme now covers shipping. Others — from Singapore to Japan — are exploring their own carbon levies. The patchwork world is arriving, faster than the ships can adjust.

Multilateralism was supposed to make it simpler. Now it’s every bloc for itself.

Department of Not-Terrible-News

Quite frankly it’s been a torrid few weeks. There were, and remain, many reasons to be pessimistic going into the COP30 climate talks in Brazil.

Fortunately Zohran Mamdani has been elected mayor of New York City, so everything is fixed.

OK fine it’s not but give yourself a minute to be happy.

Exit Music

We couldn’t resist including the best radio ever conceived.

You’ll find all our exit music here:

Back soon.

We are not ready for what’s coming. Worse than that, we’re deliberately making sure we don’t think about what’s going to be required to adapt to the climate we’ve created and is becoming clear. No amount of tax revenue will be sufficient to build flood defences high enough to prevent some towns washing away. Our hard infrastructure - rail, road, energy, buildings, heating and cooling, water (both for getting it and getting rid of it) - is built for a benign climate that is already in the rear-view mirror. And few people want to talk about that. 1

If civilisation is a ship, and we’ve been dithering and arguing about how to avoid the storm in our path or who set the course to hit it, we’ve now entered the edge of the storm. Some people have realised that, and that we’re entering a different phase. And tentatively they’ve started to speak up.

Baroness Brown, who heads up adaptation for the UK Climate Change Committee, the official body telling government whether it’s on track to meet its objectives, sent a letter to the UK government overnight with a simple message: the best case scenario is that at a minimum, we can now expect the world to warm at least 2°C by 2050. And that it makes no sense now to plan for anything other than a world that is up to 4°C warmer by 2100.

Even then, the message is hard to articulate in a way that people are ready to hear. When Baroness Brown told Justin Webb on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, he had two questions. 1) So that means bigger flood defences? 2) And how does that fit into the Government’s ‘growth agenda’.

The target to stay under 1.5°C was in the Paris Agreement for a reason. Back in 2015 it was thought that’s the maximum temperature rise we can endure while things proceed more or less as normal - some bigger storms, some damage, some loss, but with a rapid transition away from fossil fuels and other modest changes life for most will be familiar.

We now know that 1.5°C itself isn’t “safe”, that above 2.0°C we can expect huge disruption. And in a 4°C warmer world we can expect catastrophic impacts on human systems that are hard even to model.

That one of the BBC’s top journalists can muster no more reaction than “so…sea walls? Sounds expensive” when Baroness Brown - severely limited in what she can say by the Climate Change Committee’s own rules - is telling you that literally every part of life in the UK needs to be rethought in light of adaptation and we have 20 years to do it? That should chill your blood. Because we seem not to know how even to start talking about what's already happening.

Hitting the Overshoot Alarm

Fortunately some people have been doing more than others to get ready for these conversations. Overshoot, a new four-part documentary series from climate strategist and Wicked Problems alum Laurie Laybourn—goes further than nearly anyone has before. And he came back to unpack some of the key ideas in Overshoot and what he hopes people will do with it.

In Overshoot the story starts with the fact that we can no longer avoid the storm, we’ve enetered it. How to survive and steer through it—generation after generation—is the conversation we urgently need to have now.

Drawing on interviews with diplomats, scientists, and communities on the frontlines, Laybourn dismantles the win/lose logic that has dominated climate politics since Paris and asks what it means to live in an age of overlapping crises and hard adaptation choices.

Our conversation ranges from the myth of Easter Island to the politics of “carbon sucking,” from managed retreat in Wales to the legal aftershocks of 1.5°C’s failure. It’s a clear-eyed look at what comes next—and why, even at the moment of “net zero,” we’ll be living in the most dangerous period in human history.

Listen/watch the interview, and listen to the three episodes out now - beautifully produced with loads of voices you’ll find familiar if you’re a Wicked Problems regular - the fourth instalment drops Monday 20th October in all the good places including overshootpod.com.

Breaking Through

Overshoot is a crucial effort in trying to get reality into our conversations. But consider - Brown’s letter comes a day after this Guardian headline:

“Towns may have to be abandoned due to floods with millions more homes in Great Britain at risk

Every constituency projected to be at greater risk, with many areas likely to be uninsurable, Guardian investigation finds”

But this isn’t new, of course. We’re 12 years since it was decided that the village of Fairbourne in Wales, sitting on reclaimed wetlands between the mountains and the Irish Sea, would not be defensible with expected rise in sea level and in storm intensity. So the 700 residents of the village would need to be leave within a few decades.

But there would be no support to residents to relocate. And as the news trickled out, the market reacted. The Guardian in 2019 reported from Fairbourne on what happened next:

As word of the council’s decision spread, house sales fell through and prices collapsed. Some residents simply stopped maintaining their homes and gardens. Others formed a campaign group, claiming that the reporting of the plan was misleading, and that the village had been unfairly singled out by Gwynedd. They argued that flooding was much worse in Aberystwyth, Barmouth and Borth in 2014.

The campaign petered out when key members moved away, but much of the bitterness remains. Wilkins, one of the original campaigners, feels the village has been badly treated. “There are hundreds of residents in Fairbourne,” she says, as we talk in her living room. “We’ve got the little railway. We’ve got the shops. We’ve got a post office. We are a thriving community, and that’s all going to be wiped out. I don’t like to think about it.”

Houses have started to sell again, but only to cash buyers looking for bargains; some calculate they can make a profit from rental income in the time Fairbourne has left. However, many of the villagers cannot drop their asking prices £40,000 or £50,000 below the already depressed market rate for the area, because they could not afford to buy anywhere else.

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Fairbourne became synonymous with a failed attempt at grappling with reality. It is the ghost that haunts every planner and decision maker and insurer who are warned that they might be the one to start a collapse. Will we adapt our politics? Or is the lesson people learned from Fairbourne that there is zero upside in being honest.

The problem is a lot older than 2013, of course. On the day Laurie and I were speaking, there was reason to be reminded of the story of Jonah and the whale. Jonah could easily slot in as a character in a 21st century prestige drama as a complete anti-hero who keeps trying to do anything they can to avoid having to do the right thing. He’s told to go to another city to call out the things they’re doing wrong, and instead works on a ship headed in the opposite direction to get as far away as possible. But the ship he’s on hits a storm - and the crew freak out. Eventually they find out that it’s basically Jonah’s fault, because he’s failed to do what he was supposed to do - confront the thing going wrong. And to appease the gods, they throw him over the side. Cue whale and three days spent in its belly.

The whole experience of being eaten by the whale and getting vomited out takes up just two lines. The rest of the story is about how far people will go to not look squarely at a problem - fooling themselves and fooling others into thinking it’s not something they have to deal with.

So we brought Laurie back for an extra few minutes, where we talk about Jonah, Greta Thunberg, and how far we have to go to face the future we’re in for.

SAFER (amended)

We were trying to do too many things at once and meant to include a mention here - as we do in the episode - of the work the Climate Majority Project (cofounded our friend ) has been doing that provides an answer to the “wtf do we do now?” prompted by Laurie Laybourn’s Overshoot documentary series and Baroness Brown’s letter from this morning warning that 2°C is the least warming we should be planning for.

They’ve started a petition - months before Baroness Brown broke cover - calling out the fact that in the UK we’re way behind the curve. And the UK is ahead of most other places on Earth - so that should freak you the f out if you’re paying the least bit of attention.

Sign their petition.

If you’d told me two years ago that Wicked Problems would one day involve hanging out at the Vatican with the Pope, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bill McKibben – talking climate politics – I’d have asked what you were smoking.

Then again, if 20 years ago you’d told me an American Pope would lead the Catholic Church as a staunch defender of climate science against a fossil-fuelled global authoritarian reaction led by Donald Trump and a Catholic vice president whose views on Catholicism are so odd he’s been rebuked by two popes in a year, I’d have moved to a different seat on the bus and get off at the next stop.

But here we are.

This is the first instalment of Climate Pilgrim, our new project under the Wicked Problems banner: an invitation to come with me on a walk through the borderlands of faith, moral imagination, and climate reality.

Wicked Problems started as a public way of asking people a lot smarter than me to help make sense of the tangle of technology, finance, politics, economics and culture that got us into this climate mess and also offers ways through it. Climate Pilgrim will be, I hope, a good-faith effort to explore the deeper questions of meaning and our relationships with each other and our relationships with nature.

Thankfully that week in Rome - sparked by my conversation with Dr. Lorna Gold of the Laudato Si’ Movement - gave us plenty to think about and a head start with a raft of conversations with people I think you’ll want to hear from.

So: episode one. A crossover special. With a sampler of conversations we had in Rome at the Raising Hope conference marking the tenth anniversary of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical on “care for our common home.” Only this time the speaker is his successor – Pope Leo XIV, formerly “Bob from Chicago,” – delivering his first major climate address. And standing beside him on stage? Arnold Schwarzenegger, declaring there are “1.4 billion Catholics out there who can help us terminate pollution.”

The Pope, for his part, was calm – but pointed. Quoting his predecessor, he warned against those who “deride the increasingly evident signs of climate change to ridicule those who speak of global warming, and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most,” and urged citizens to pressure governments for “rigorous regulations and controls.” It was continuity with Francis, but recognising that we’re 10 years into knowing what we have to do but still failing to do it:

 We must shift from collecting data to caring and from environmental discourse to an ecological conversion that transforms both personal and communal lifestyles. For believers, this conversion is in fact no different to the one that orients us towards the living God.

We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures.

That stayed with me, but I wondered how new or different it sounded to a veteran Vatican-watcher who also could give a sense of how those comments from an American pope went down back in the US. So I asked Colleen Dulle, Vatican correspondent for America Magazine, co-host of the Inside the Vatican podcast, and author of the memoir Struck Down, Not Destroyed, to join me for the kickoff episode. No one alive is better at translating Vatican nuance into plain English – or holding onto faith while reporting on its failings. Our talk ranged from papal climate diplomacy to why New Orleans memes its way through apocalypse, and why a generation raised on scandal might still be searching for meaning.

Colleen reminded me that when Laudato Si’ appeared in 2015, it measurably shifted U.S. Catholics’ views on climate. Two Princeton researchers found that after reading it, American Catholics were more likely to see global warming as real – and as a moral issue. Words from a pope still matter. And Leo XIV, she noted, seems to know that: he switches into English when he wants American media to pay attention.

If he turns up at COP 30 in Belém next month – as Brazil’s Marina Silva urged him to do from the stage, to cheers – expect headlines. He would, after all, be the most senior American on site.

Our conversation also dug into how “structures of sin” – a term the Church uses for systems that have made virtues of selfishness and alienation – mirror the systems driving ecological collapse. The Church now calls the climate crisis and the neglect of the poor two faces of the same failure to love. That moral framing lands differently than talking parts per million or gigatonnes of CO₂. It cuts closer to the bone: business as usual isn’t just unwise. It’s wrong.

Colleen’s own story brings that tension home. She began covering the Vatican during the 2018 abuse crisis – a front-row seat to betrayal – and yet somehow still believes. Her book is about staying on the tightrope: yelling at God one minute, praying the next, and reporting in between. That kind of honest faith feels like what this moment needs – not piety, but persistence.

In Climate Pilgrim we’ll be talking with people of all faiths and none who share that spirit: the ones turning hope from words into work. Future episodes will bring you South Africa’s Kumi Naidoo on the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty; Tuvalu Climate Minister Maina Talia; Bishop Martin Hayes of Kilmore, Ireland on climate obligations as official Catholic social teaching - not a passing fad; Ukraine’s Svitlana Romanko on faith versus fossil-fueled authoritarianism; Ireland’s former environment minister Eamon Ryan on his post-politics climate career; and Graham Sinclair - an LSE-trained Anglican priest breathing new life into church properties to turn around inner cities.

With tons of other conversations that started in Rome and I plan to come back to.

You can start checking out those conversations with this one with Kumi Naido:

Climate Pilgrim

Should Pope Leo endorse a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty at COP30?

If the majority of the world’s countries follow the same development path the Global North did, says Kumi Naidoo, “it’s game over…

Listen now

6 months ago · Richard Delevan

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So no, Wicked Problems hasn’t gone all holy. We’re just following the story where it leads. And right now it leads through Rome, Belém, and every other place where people are re-examining what they owe each other and the world they pass on as an inheritance. You can call that faith, or politics, or just reality.

PS - I did bring home a bottle of the melted Greenland ice Pope Leo blessed – “Pope Juice,” my wife calls it. I keep it on my desk as a reminder that even the most ancient institutions are melting into something new.

PPS - We do still love some exit music. This one we’re taking back from the fash.

We Start at the End

Today’s exit music is nearly as unhinged as Cheez-Whiz Mussolini after walking up a United Nations escalator but considerably more fun, and 52 minutes less time to make better points, thanks to Post Malone.

It is, if anything, underappreciated how cheap batteries are radically changing the game for renewables. But because the places that stand to make the most dramatic gains tend to be at lower latitudes than where a lot of global climate and energy punditry originates, even people who should know better - like me - can be surprised to hear how far things have gone.

And why the political equivalent of Spinal Tap (but evil) gigging at the UN can get away with playing all the old hits of “green energy scam” and “climate change con” and only get the occasional gasp.

[We’ll come back to that historic Stonehenge-level faceplant on the world stage.]

EMBER analyst Kostantsa Rangelova and co-founder Dave Jones, recently co-authored a series of reports for the energy think tank and show how, around the world from Mexico to West Africa to Muscat and beyond, tech and cost are no longer a barrier to achieving a proportion of electricity generation from solar (made dispatchable thanks to ever-cheaper, ever-more-reliable, battery setups) that asymptotically approaches 100% - the Holy Grail of the energy transition away from fossil fuels.

Just two examples should whet your appetite.

Mexico generates just under 7% from solar. EMBER models show that, thanks to batter + solar, that could conceivably be well over 90% — day or night, across the year.

Sierra Leone, on the other side of the Atlantic, in just 12 months imported so many Chinese solar panels that they could generate more than 60% of the existing grid’s official output. That. Is. Nuts.

While it’s early days compared to the data documenting the solar boom in Pakistan detailed by, among others, friend-of-the-show Jenny Chase of BNEF (watch our July chat here), the signs that Africa is on the runway and heading for takeoff - with transformative consequences for African economies and societies - are clear and real, according to EMBER.

So check out our conversation. It’s worth it.

In Conversation

01:33 24/7 Solar Power: A Game Changer

01:54 Advancements in Battery Technology

02:51 Economic Competitiveness of Solar and Battery

04:38 Challenges and Innovations in Battery Production 0

8:17 Global Adoption and Market Dynamics

15:20 Grid vs. Battery: The Trade-Offs

21:05 Solar and Battery in Different Climates

24:27 Implications for Policy and Future Outlook

26:09 Evolution of Battery Storage

27:29 Africa’s Solar Boom

27:59 Chinese Solar Exports to Africa

28:52 Utility Scale Solar in Africa

37:50 Challenges and Opportunities in Mexico’s Solar Sector

47:26 Global Solar Trends and Future Outlook

Keep tabs on their work at EMBER - and you will find Dave Jones a wise oracle on that platform of the Elect - BlueSky.

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Coming Up

We’ve got more coming on that UN thing, and plenty besides. So subscribe and check your inbox.

Outros

If you’re enjoying our outro track curation, you can find the rest here:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. That feels true lately, more of the time than we’d like. Witness a British Prime Minister mildly looking on as a visiting American president trashes his climate and energy agenda, renewable energy (especially wind), and in a deranged rant of dozens of calumnies calls for the PM to use the UK military to “stop the boats” of migrants - a non-zero percentage of whom left home for reasons aggravated by the already-here effects of climate change.

It’s wild:

We’ll have more to say about the whole thing - preceded by the “Grand Tour” of Europe by US Secretary for Energy Dominance Chris Wright.

Hope vs Optimism

As our friend Jenny Chase of BNEF said on BlueSky, celebrating the Ws on climate no matter how small are essential to avoid despair, even if the line between optimism and delusion is a fine one.

Another take on this might be the old-fashioned term “hope”. Which isn’t a passive wish but a serious discipline, some would argue.

So I thought this is a perfect moment to bring you a conversation with Dr. Lorna Gold.

Lorna is the executive director of the Laudato Sì Movement, which was inspired by the late Pope Francis’ 2015 letter. That document, considered pretty radical for the leader of the Catholic Church to issue at the time, was credited by former Irish president Mary Robinson and others with influencing the Paris Agreement - and you can hear echoes of it as recently as the advisory opinion issued this summer by the International Court of Justice.

On its 10th anniversary, Francis’ successor Pope Leo will lead the Raising Hope Conference, 1-3 October in Rome - but also available via livestream - talking about the relevance of its ideas for the situation we’re in now. More than a “Catholic” thing, it will feature people as diverse as Brazil’s climate minister Marina Silva (in the runup to COP30), climate scientist Dr. , , Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tuvalu climate minister Dr Maina Talia, Bianca Pitt of SHE Changes Climate, Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty president Kumi Naidoo, and more.

Somehow, Lorna was able to take a break from organising the event to speak to us.

Lorna earned a PhD in economic geography from Glasgow University before becoming a policy analyst working on climate at the Irish NGO Trócaire. In her 2019 book, Climate Generation: Awakening to our Childrens’ Future, she recounts a moment when - launching a report on climate impacts more than a decade ago at the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont - it really hit her that all children, including her own, were being condemned to a much worse future. And she decided to fight.

It’s a great chat and we think you’ll enjoy it. We get into:

In This Conversation

01:22 Introduction to Dr. Lorna Gold

02:21 Personal Tragedy and Resilience

05:29 Hope vs. Optimism

09:17 Relevance of Laudato Si'

13:01 International Court of Justice Ruling

15:21 Economic Systems and Climate Action

21:51 Pope Francis, Pope Leo and COP 30

22:31 Upcoming Conference and Call to Action

24:25 Personal Reflection on Climate Impact

27:56 Discussing Future Conversations

28:40 Mother's Role in Climate Action

29:39 Women of Faith for Climate Justice

31:37 The Raging Grannies and Activism

33:12 The Sharing Economy and Climate Generation

34:42 Sufficiency and Economic Inequality

41:17 The Role of Storytelling in Climate Education

44:34 Hope and Action in Climate Movements

47:31 Pope or Nope Quiz

On that last part, we thought the ICJ Opinion and Laudato Sì sounded so similar we put it to the test to see if Lorna could tell the difference.

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Exit Music

In honour of the Raging Grannies activists Lorna wrote about and we discussed, today’s outro is from the legendary Bill Withers:

Check out all our Outros on Spotify:

Tomorrow we’re headed out to the Make Them Pay demo in London, bringing together a coalition of groups fighting for climate, workers, migrants, and more, including faith groups.

We’ll be back with reporting on that and - it has been a while - some catching up on tech stories that also offer a bit of hope.

These violent delights have violent ends. So it’s a bit heavy today. That said, in our interview with author Hanna E. Morris we do try to keep it a bit lighter.

The imagery we use, the stories we tell, especially the ones we get caught up in without even realising why — have a lot more power than we often consider. And when we see them wielded so crudely, they’re easy to dismiss. But it’s worth noting that there’s a massive asymmetry between people who consciously work those narratives and those who don’t.

People working on climate, at least in my experience, stereotypically have displayed a belief that if you simply show people the facts they will act in their own self-interest, even if the potential suffering of others doesn’t move them. If - as Covering Climate Now’s 89% campaign argues - surely if we see that the vast majority overwhelmingly recognise the need to combat climate change, that will move policy, investment, and votes in the right direction. To do otherwise would be irrational, right?1

But some other people - often highly paid and skilled - working to stop or slow that effort, are playing a different game entirely.

As observers like Naomi Oreskes have documented for decades, a certain “heterodox” science type can find it quite profitable to do some sophistic sleight-of-hand to move the goalposts, finding reasons why it’s simply not necessary to “risk” changing things. The costs for change are concrete, but the benefits of change are harder to quantify. So do nothing for as long as possible. But still, these rely on appeals to reason.

Amy Westervelt has spent much of her career reporting on how those types were made profitable (or at least influential) by well-thought out campaigns to amplify doubts about the science and those advocating for it. But that influence box has plenty of other tools in it. Going back to Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, through WW2 propagandists on both sides to Mad Men to millennial spin doctors, practitioners had plenty of ways to shape public opinion and action that rely on appeals to emotion and symbols.

And as the evidence (and the lived experience of climate effects) mounted, the efficacy of tactics to deny climate change or fuzzy up the facts or just bamboozle people hit a wall. For a few years, accelerating following the Paris Agreement and subsequent waves of protest like the school strikes led by Greta Thunberg or mass mobilisations via Extinction Rebellion, something like consensus broke out among elites. Lining up behind Net Zero came bankers rallied by Mark Carney, big businesses who saw reputational advantage in pledging their support, even parts of the fossil fuel industry itself. A wide political agreement on the need to avoid catastrophe achieved, in hindsight, remarkable degrees of consensus - especially in the UK and Europe.

Yet, starting at least as early as 2016, something else was brewing. Brexit, Trump, name your local factor, fed into a feeling of “total crisis” - the idea that real end-of-civilisation stuff might be around the corner, but we could still prevent it, might scare people straight.

It looked like that might be how it played out. Trump’s announced decision to quit the Paris Agreement in 2017 was telegraphed as controversial even amongst his own inner circle. Reactions to it accelerated a desire to get back to consensus.

But at the same time, others saw an opportunity. What if, instead of the End Times/Apocalypse being a thing we must avoid - it came to be seen as inevitable. A final, twilight struggle in which some wondrous/genius visionary sages would guide a worthy elect few to be saved from the fire and flood. Or that the supposed climate crisis was really a mask for the deeper potential crisis of deracinated modernity devoid of meaning.

Globally, it’s the story of endless growth and material progress. In the American context, it plays out as “Manifest Destiny”. And anyone who stands in the way of that salvation is an Enemy, an Other, who are subject to unlimited force to stop.

Hanna E. Morris started seeing some of this play out in Berkeley 15 years ago during the Occupy Movement. Like me she had a ringside seat here in the UK for the Brexit “we’ve had enough of experts” vote shot, followed by the Trump chaser back in the US just a few months later. And she crystallised her thoughts into a PhD thesis at U Penn, which has been reworked into her new book - Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power. I was super-excited to get her on the show and the chat is - perversely - even more timely than I thought when we started recording. When we finished recording I found out about the murder of Charlie Kirk and saw the online Apocalypse rhetoric off the scale.

Her work is, no pun intended, a Revelation2 and her work seems to promise her a place alongside Oreskes and Westervelt as one of the keenest minds helping to make sense of what we’re seeing.

As she painstakingly demonstrates, that Apocalyptic framing has two effects:

1. Climate journalism3, with its efflorescence of 2019-2023, found itself reaching for that narrative of avoiding the Apocalypse through a very centrist and nostalgic view of progress. Especially in the US, triumphant narratives of a return of the grownups to save the planet through tech and capitalism animated coverage (and were hoped to be advertiser-friendly into the bargain). Inflation Reduction Act moderate/centrist/good, Green New Deal radical/extreme/bad.

2. Less savoury actors, with an appreciation for the power of grand narrative and mythos and faith that more normie types find embarrassing to even think about, gradually came to see the Apocalyptic framing (with its Manifest Destiny escape clause - at least for the elect, pity about the damned) as a way of justifying an explicit return to old, hierarchical, centralised, patriarchal forms of power.

The first set of people are charitably thought of as unwitting in how they wind up breaking up . I’ve certainly been in that camp now and then - and was relieved to be let slightly off the hook by Morris in our chat.

The second set are a very different kettle of fish. Morris’ contribution to understanding our current moment is to pull back the curtain on what is not an accident - apocalypse framing, leveraging real-world evidence of that looming threat whether it be in political assassination or fire and flood or climate migrants, is being consciously deployed to pull politics and discourse in a direction that ends in dissent.

On the more esoteric end of that second group where you’ll find people like Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Curtis Yarvin - cerebrally kicking around Rene Gìrard4 and Patrick Dineen and West Coast Straussians. On the thug end you can find Stephen Miller and Trump, with their groyper Chipocalypse Now/Pentagon-produced Venezuelan immigrant boat snuff video/Alligator Alcatraz/let’s rough up some Korean battery factory worker stuff. Somewhere in the middle you can find things like Senator Eric Schmitt speaking at the Thiel-founded/funded National Conservative conference, using “destiny” 7 times in a 20-minute speech that America’s most astute observers immediate recognised as an anti-Gettysburg Address.

All of whom seem determined to prove Morris’s points, over and over and over again.

If this sounds a bit familiar, it’s reminded me of Stephen Markley’s crucial novel, The Deluge. Like Markley, Morris is a bit freaked out that the world seems determined to follow her warning as a script.

I’d love to tell you our chat is a laugh riot from beginning to end, but she’s a great listen as well as a great read. Do check it out and tell us what you think.

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At the risk of being cancelled we decided to keep in the outro music on the episode, in honour of the Sen. Eric Schmitt speech that probably sounded better in the original German. Enjoy:

Catalysts Are Back

It’s been a while since we had a full interview and got to Catalysts from the guests but Morris was kind enough to share her three:

• A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit

• The works of Stuart Hall

• Barbie Zelizer, Morris’s mentor

And get Apocalyptic Authoritarianism at Bookshop.org

Cruel Summer

It’s been a long summer and a delayed re-entry into what passes for reality these days. We’re well used to being slightly out-of-phase, and we’ve tried to make it a strength to let us look at things from that slightly different POV.

So we’re already waiting for The Fall, that feeling of being in the interstices between seasons. And Maxwell’s syncopated, out-of-joint take on it is our outro track for today’s episode:

Climate Deaths > Murder Deaths

Researchers led by Dr. Rupert Stuart-Smith - deputy director at the Sustainable Law Programme at the Oxford Smith School - released a new study this morning showing some 1,700 deaths in Zürich between 1969 and 2018 attributable to climate change. From heat deaths. In Zürich.

We got the chance to speak to Rupert yesterday, before publication. Our conversation hits on the study, how it came about, and what it means for the wider field of climate attribution science - and how that’s applied in law and policy.

It’s a first-of-its kind city-level attribution study, with implications that go far beyond Switzerland.

Notably, a pre-print of the paper was cited by the European Court of Human Rights in its reasoning for the landmark Klima Seniorinnen ruling - itself one of the precedents that led to the International Court of Justice advisory opinion about state obligations to protect against harms from fossil fuel-caused climate change.

One of the most striking elements of the study is that many of the deaths, compiled using all-cause mortality data and analysed using long-standing epidemiological methods not rooted in climate, took place outside of the headline-making heatwaves that now take an annual death toll.

It’s not in the study, but I thought it’d be interesting to try and work out a comparison. Zürich isn’t generally thought of as being a particularly hot city. (Though I did think to bring portable fans to a workshop in a Zürich office building this summer, which made me a lot more popular.) It’s also generally not thought of as high-crime. So, just out of curiosity, I wondered how the homicide rate compared.

Did more people in Zürich die from murder or from climate-change-aggravated heat deaths?

Switzerland’s homicide rate over 1969-2018 ranged from .6 to 1.5 per 100,000, usually staying around 1.0. The canton of Zürich makes up about 17% of population. Over that period, you could expect to find some 520 reported homicides in Zurich, using that logic.

Which means that, even if it’s back-of-the-envelope numbers, it seems reasonable to conclude that more people died because of climate change in Zürich over that period than from homicide.

“They Don’t Want You To See This”

Few people in climate solutions journalism are more respected than Akshat Rathi of Bloomberg. He is rigorous, sober, thoughtful, and more known for his warm and gentle wit (disarming his subject before the rapier-thrust followup question) than sounding the alarm.1

A sign of how times have changed is that Akshat of late has more frequently been hitting that klaxon. Posting about a magisterial piece by Team Bloomberg Green that documents the more than 400 anti-science actions taken by the Trump Administration in its first six months, Akshat pointed to one particular takeaway, that the US has just stopped adding to its official data about natural disasters causing $1Billion+ in damage.

That Bloomberg feature is about the most comprehensive list of official vandalism and sabotage around - from the laughable anti-science used as a pretext to try and overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment” finding that is the basis for most US climate regulation since then to the steady decimation of the capacity to measure and forecast weather, emissions, pollution, and other harms. In short, the US has put out its own eyes like some nation-sized Oedipus on meth.

That none of this comes as a great surprise to people paying attention does not make it less shocking to see it catalogued in one place. It’s one thing for people to threaten a murder-suicide pact of public health and climate science. It’s another to actually watch it happening.

Attribution science, the idea that it is possible to quantify - to a “balance of probabilities” standard used all the time in civil litigation - the influence of man-made climate change on specific extreme events like floods and heatwaves, isn’t exactly new. But the fossil fuel industry and its lackeys have been fighting tooth and nail to try and prevent its acceptance.

Near the end of the first Trump Administration, weather startup meteorologist Ryan Maue was named chief scientist at NOAA. Maue, the sort of heterodox thinker who nonetheless could be taken seriously because they retained at least patina of credibility, was exactly the sort of winking sceptic popular pre-2021 in those circles. He was also smart enough to be one of the first to see the threat attribution science posed to the project of climate scepticism.

As Science reported in September 2020 on the announcement of his new role at NOAA, Maue has long targeted attribution science. They quoted his Twitter feed:

“If you question the efficacy of attribution science, then you risk being smeared and censored.”

If Ryan Maue has a nemesis, Rupert Stuart-Smith comes closest to fill the role. He literally wrote the rulebook for guidance on best practices for climate attribution science, released earlier this year.

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Adaptation

Another interesting findings in their study is that over that 50-year period, some 700 lives that would otherwise have been lost to climate-change-related heat deaths were avoided in Zürich because of adaptation measures. The slow adoption of air conditioning, general rising awareness of the need to consider heat safety for vulnerable populations and people in their home or work who now need to behave differently than they had for centuries.

That finding has - or should have - massive implications for policymakers around the world. It may finally get more attention this autumn at COP30 in Belèm, when the long-delayed “Global Goal on Adaptation” is meant to be foregrounded on the international agenda. Adaptation and resilience have been the red-headed stepchild of climate since even before the GGA’s inclusion in the Paris Agreement.

As Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans explained in conversation with Ed Crooks and Amy Myers-Jaffe on the most recent Energy Gang podcast, the reasons it has lagged are complex. Including the fact that adaptation strategies are extremely localised and hard to generalise to a global programme.

Those parts that are generalisable - like the recognition that “managed retreat” will be required in a mind-bending number of places affecting a mind-numbing number of humans, many of whom will become climate migrants, all of which has to be paid for - are politically impossible for most leaders to even acknowledge, never mind discuss openly.

And yet, as the Australia Institute points out in a new report out today, pretending that the problem doesn’t exist doesn’t prevent sane observers from, like Akshat, sounding the alarm at the growing mismatch between the geometric rate of increase in scale of the damage versus the linear rate of increase of resources available to adapt and recover:

More palatable will almost certainly be a suite of adaptation technologies that we’ve tried to keep an eye on.

But as Stuart-Smith et al point out, adaptation and resilience measures are necessary — but far from sufficient. No amount of adaptation will be sufficient to avoid the suffering that will occur is already measurable without dramatic reductions in fossil fuel emissions.

Follow Stuart on BlueSky, LinkedIn, and check out the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme.

Shot/Chaser

Days ago, as part of its immigrant scapegoat authoritarian consolidation moves, the Trump Administration swept into a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Georgia. This is exactly the kind of investment Trump says he demanded from foreign companies in the US. Arriving in armoured vehicles like they were descending on Fallujah, federal agents arrested 475 people, mostly South Korean nationals, shackling their legs to their wrists. And producing the now-traditional torture porn videos that seem to enliven and arouse Trump supporters.

Predictable outrage in Korea followed at the spectacle of fellow citizens shackled for the crime of helping build up the economy and make up for the shortage of skills of their supposed American allies. Trump, somehow, made it worse, telling a reporter:

“You know, look, it's a battery factory in that case as I'm told. And you know, when they're building batteries, uh, if you don't have people in this country right now that know about batteries, maybe we should help them along and let some people come in and train our people to do, you know, complex things, whether it's battery manufacturing or computer manufacturing or building ships. So, we're going to look at that whole situation. We have a lot of industries that we don't have anymore, and we're going to have to train people. And the way you train people is bring people in that know what they're doing and let them stay for a little while and help.

So I'm going to look at that.”

This, in the very same week American auto industry leaders GM, Ford and Stellantis - responding to Trump’s very clear direction to destroy the investments it had already made to try and catch up on those same battery technologies - announced they were further scrapping EV production (and battery tech) to focus on … internal combustion engine cars and trucks.

It is so much worse than you think.

Make Them Pay

We’ve gone on enough for today. And we’ve got plenty in the pipeline for you that we think you’ll love. But tell us what you want more of in these spaces.

If your response to all of this is a barbaric yawp or existential scream, that’s understandable. But shoutout to the plucky popular front of protest coming on London’s streets in 10 days - a coalition of unions, Palestine solidarity, climate justice, economic inequality, faith groups, migrant rights, and more. It might be a useful outlet for what you’re feeling if you’re in town.

Find out more at Make Them Pay.

Outros

As ever, we bring you the select outros from our episodes - we don’t know who listens, but we find it keeps us calmer to catalogue them.

PS

Where’s Ryan Maue now? Despite not getting an official role dismantling climate science as part of Trump 2.0, even the fatal Texas floods of the summer weren’t enough to get him out of his anti-anti pose:

Actual time spent with family - flanneuring around brocantes. Reading Graham Greene books by the small pool in a priory-turned-flats, in an unassuming working-class village a few miles from St Remy-in-Provence. Walking around Glanum, an amazing (Celto-Ligurian, then possibly Phoenician, then Greek, then) Roman city built around a sacred spring in a mountain pass, abandoned in 260 CE and forgotten for 1600 years.

We needed the break, and not just from constant climate/fascism doomscrolling. It was a bit poignant. We’d just finished burying my mother-in-law, saw one of our boys mark his 21st birthday, and saw the youngest turn 18 and nervously look forward to heading off to uni.

It’s a very down-to-earth village with few international tourists, despite its connections with painters Van Gogh and Chaubaud, and writers…

Read more

Some Personal News - RIP Pat

We’ve been off air the past week due to the death of my mother-in-law, Patricia. She was 82 and much loved by her family and pretty much everyone else who knew her. Liked a drink. Loved another. But never needed one to offer a welcoming smile and twinkle that made people want to be around her. She’d walk (or later, take a mobility scooter) to the local butcher 100 yards from her house in their Devon seaside village, and take an hour to get back because she’d be stopped for a chat by everyone she met. Because they always felt better after talking with her. Friend of red cardigans and dogs. Foe of shoes on carpets and foul language. She’ll be buried with a nice view of the estuary in a couple of weeks.

We Start at the End

Exit music for this conversation might seem a bit obvious even if the mood isn’t.

Steve Smith in Conversation

Earlier this summer the University of Exeter hosted the Global Tipping Points Conference, where nearly 200 scientists urged immediate action to prevent irreversible climate changes. We weren’t at the conference but we had the next best thing with one of its key organisers and thinkers, Steve Smith.

And while we of course talked about the tipping points of the climate system, and how to slow our race towards the edge - which no amount of wish-casting will make disappear - we also talked about ‘positive’ tipping points, and how important storytelling is in convincing policymakers and the public to go faster. For example, the UK is teetering on the brink of tipping into an EV-dominated market, Smith writes in The Conversation - not hurt by the wise UK decision NOT to follow the EU and US by applying crippling tariffs to BYD, as CarbonBrief’s Simon Evans noted:

It’s easier to slouch into despair. But in the spirit of my late mother-in-law, better to raise your ambition, put on your best face, and combine bloody-mindedness with an infectious grin.

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01:29 Understanding Tipping Points

03:44 Negative Tipping Points

04:18 Positive Tipping Points

05:12 Policy Makers and Tipping Points

06:02 Interruption and Resumption

07:03 Immediate Action Required

11:20 Real-World Example: Tuvalu

14:16 Challenges in Policy Making

17:21 Positive Social Tipping Points

18:54 Renewable Energy Revolution

22:12 Barriers to Change

27:54 Accelerating Positive Change

35:10 Hope and Final Thoughts

We’ll be back soon - on the road at the moment but been working on a few things to share.

All the Outros

Enjoy.

Exit Music

This episode’s outro is brought to you by MIA. The reasons may become clear.

Broke-Arse Island

Is Britain broken? Yes, say apocalyptic NatCon-adjacent once and future Conservative stars like Neil O’Brien MP. Poppycock, retorts FT columnist Janan Ganesh. 1

Whether it is or it isn’t as an ontological matter is probably less useful to know than whether and why so many people in Britain think and feel that it’s “broken”, “rubbish” or “shattered” - as a new report from nonprofit think tank More in Common segmenting the British public into not political party ID groups but more psychographic segments shows.

Behold, the “British Seven” as detailed in their must-read report Shattered Britain, released a couple of weeks ago:

• Progressive Activists – Left-leaning, activist-minded, pro-diversity and globalism; strong climate advocates who see net zero as urgent and non-negotiable.

• Incrementalist Left – Labour-loyal pragmatists focused on fairness and public services; support climate action but prioritise cost-of-living relief and gradual transition.

• Established Liberals – Urban, university-educated, globally oriented; deeply pro-science and pro-climate, trust institutions and favour ambitious green investment.

• Sceptical Scrollers – Young, politically detached, distrustful of institutions; accept climate change but are disengaged and cynical about policy impact, elite motives, or the prospect of positive change. And love a good conspiracy theory.

• Rooted Patriots – Older, economically insecure, socially conservative, economically left-of-centre, prototypical Red Wall types; may back climate action framed as fairness, security, and protecting "our countryside."

• Traditional Conservatives – Risk-averse, nostalgic, pro-institutions; climate sceptical about net zero costs but open to energy security and "sensible" low-carbon moves.

• Dissenting Disruptors – Anti-establishment, chaos-driven, low-trust voters; worry about climate impacts but reject net zero as elitist, potentially more open to talk about adaptation over ‘windmills’.

As Ed Hodgson, their deputy director for research, tells me in this chat about the report, this kind of segmentation is “upstream” and more useful when examining attitudes and values about things like climate, energy, cost of living, elites, and to get some insight about what might move someone from Tories to Labour to Reform and back again in their voting intentions?

And what sort of approach to comms might be motivating - Reform-lite immigration rhetoric backed with a now-discredited “deliverism”? 2

While the FT’s Ganesh doesn’t directly cite the report, he does echo in his column the definitive quality of that Dissenting Disruptors group, who according to Hodgson make up 20% of the public (but with low propensity to turnout and vote) - they are willing to “roll-the-dice” and/or “burn it all down”.

It’s fair to say that Ed and co have tapped into something very much in the Zeitgeist. We hope he’ll come back on the regular - let us know what you think.

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In this Conversation

00:55 Britain's Political Landscape

01:37 Understanding the British Public

02:26 The Rise of Reform UK

04:05 Challenges for the Labour Party

05:57 Drivers of Political Fragmentation

13:08 Impact of International Politics

25:14 The Challenge of Visibility for Kemi Badnock

25:41 The Importance of Rooted Patriots

27:36 Climate and Energy: Reform's Stance

28:18 Polarization of Net Zero

30:31 Public Perception of Climate Adaptation

37:09 Electric Vehicles and Public Sentiment

40:47 Making Climate Change Tangible

43:53 Final Thoughts and Policy Implications

All the Outros

Stipulated: all platforms are bad. That said, we will continue to add to this Spotify playlist where we keep track of our outros, which somehow are piling up even faster than our episodes - now at 158 including this one.

Have a great weekend.

And sign up for the More In Common newsletter. It’s brilliant.

Last week the International Court of Justice - the world’s highest court - issued its advisory opinion on the obligations of states under international law to prevent harms to the climate system.

Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News summarised the 15-judge panel’s unanimous decision:

The court stated that a range of international laws charge governments with legal duties to “prevent significant harm to the environment” and “use all means at their disposal” to prevent activities within their territories from causing significant harm to Earth’s climate.

Among the obligations cited in the opinion are requirements for historically high polluters to cut emissions and enhance their sequestration of greenhouse gases. Governments could be violating their international legal obligations if they continue subsidizing fossil fuels and issuing new licenses for oil and gas production, the court said during an oral reading of its key findings.

If governments breach those obligations, they could be legally liable, and potentially subject to orders from the ICJ or other courts requiring them to cease climate-harming activities or make compensation payments to climate-impacted people or countries, the opinion noted.

That the case was heard at all is remarkable. That it was the product of a student thought experiment just six years ago makes it seem like an Oscar-bait screenplay (and if those kids don’t have an agent pitching this right now I’d be amazed) that you can imagine being hyped as “the feel-good movie of the year” in the trailer.

Laura Clarke OBE, head of the climate advocacy legal nonprofit Client Earth that had (her words) “a very small role” in the case, summed up its potential importance: a “once-in-a-generation legal decision that will shape climate litigation for decades to come”.

Perhaps not surprisingly, countries that have made the largest contributions to GHG emissions - China, the US, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia in particular - argued that there are no obligations under international law to stop harming the climate or that they could be liable for harms.

The opinion isn’t a ruling against emitters. But it reminds people of something that in hindsight is so obvious and simple that every non-sociopathic preschooler tends to understand - if you break someone else’s stuff, that’s wrong, and you have to make amends, ideally by fixing it. And if you do it again, on purpose, you can expect to be punished.

Fifty years of propaganda, arm-twisting, threats, and a delusional fantasy that the most profitable industry in human history would voluntarily stop being as profitable were all deployed at scale to get people to pretend this most fundamental instinct of fairness doesn’t exist. At least, for as long as possible.

The reaction from supporters of the case’s winning arguments were jubilant - and we captured some of that from an event inside The Hague a day after the court’s decision, with voices ranging from Vanuatu’s climate envoy Ralph Regenvanu, the indigenous lawyer and writer Julian Aguon, former Ireland president Mary Robinson, and more.

The reaction from some governments that could face future cases was muted. The BBC reported official UK reaction:

A spokesperson for the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was "taking time" to look at the opinion before commenting in detail, but added:

"Tackling climate change is and will remain an urgent UK and global priority. Our position remains that this is best achieved through international commitment to the UN's existing climate treaties and mechanisms."

Fair to say the reaction from United States was the equivalent of raising a giant middle finger. Or - apropos for this side of the Atlantic - two fingers.

America (and Europe) to Earth: Screw You

Because this is The Cursed Timeline, before many of the celebrations in The Hague were finished, the United States - having emitted more GHGs than any other country, went out of its way to promise to emit even more. And to demand other countries do likewise.

Finger 1

On Sunday the US and European Union announced they had reached a “trade” deal. The EU promised to import $750 Billion of fossil fuels from the United States.

Never mind that there isn’t enough capacity for the US to actually supply that much liquified fossil gas, oil, etc to Europe, as Tim McDonnell noted in Semafor. Or that those exports would be competing with US domestic needs for generating power for all that AI-training compute that’s supposedly going to be built - thus increasing the cost of electricity for those projects and presumably for other consumers. Or that, as Bill McKibben among others points out, in fact it might be that the Europeans - who can’t actually deliver on that promise, because the EU doesn’t actually buy fuel - are playing Trump for a fool. Or that energy security won’t exactly be enhanced by replacing supplies from Russia, an increasingly authoritarian petrostate with a volatile and lawless ruler, with supply from the US, an increasingly authoritarian petrostate with a volatile and lawless ruler.

There are two options, neither of them good:

1. The Europeans mean what they say, even if how they achieve it is unclear. That, as some pointed out, would necessarily have some pretty dire consequences, including:

   "This risks locking Europe into decades of fossil fuel dependence, volatile energy bills, and accelerating the wildfires and flooding already wreaking havoc across the continent," said Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at climate group 350.org.

   In the context of the ICJ advisory opinion just days earlier, on its face that increased commitment to fossil fuels might itself violate international law.

2. The Europeans are lying and have no intention of honouring their pledge. That also necessarily has dire consequences, and they are more immediate than imports that may or may not happen: including the destruction of EU credibility on climate and being seen to appease not just Trump but Europe’s own anti-climate right wing populists.

   It certainly begs a lot of questions.
   Robert Hodgson in Euractiv: “Maintaining current levels of fossil fuel use is not an option, even in the relatively short term, unless the EU plans to follow Trump out of the Paris Agreement.”
   AFP reports other reactions, including: “Francois Gemenne, a policy expert who co-authored the UN's most recent IPCC report on climate change, in 2023, accused the EU of ‘submission’ to Trump's pro-fossil fuel agenda.”

For their part, the European Commission would like you to know they’re following the Trump playbook in comms, not just energy: “‘This agreement does not contradict our medium- to long-term decarbonisation objectives or targets at all,’ a commission spokesperson told reporters of the three-year energy pledge.”

Nothing to see here. Move along.

I’m sure that’ll wash at COP30 in Belem when it comes time for European negotiators to play their traditional role of climate hawk, pushing for more ambitious climate action.

Finger 2

In 2007, the US Supreme Court (granted this was in the Before Times) ruled that carbon dioxide could be regulated because of the overwhelming scientific consensus that it was causing harm. Two years later the US Environmental Protection Agency determined (AP): “that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The ‘endangerment finding’ is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.”

Citing a nonsensical, deeply dishonest, publication written for the US Department of Energy by five of the most infamous climate deniers, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin1 said the US would be scrapping the 2009 rule. Because everything is fine now and CO2 is just plant food and suck it, nerds.

Again, because this is The Cursed Timeline, Zeldin decided the best place to announce this wouldn’t be in a letter to Congress, EPA staff, or at the White House podium, but on the “Ruthless” MAGA podcast.

“There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” Zeldin said on the conservative “Ruthless” podcast. “They created this endangerment finding and then they are able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources, to basically regulate out of existence, in many cases, a lot of segments of our economy. And it cost Americans a lot of money.

…We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion [sic].”

As strategy, this is climatis delenda est. Not enough to quit the Paris Agreement, gut the incentives for clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act, and shut down as much Earth observation as possible to destroy further evidence of the effects of greenhouse emissions. This is to salt the earth to make it as difficult as possible to even go back to the status quo ante Trump 2.0.

Does an ICJ Opinion Even Matter?

Australian climate journalist Royce Kurmelovs, who kindly talked us through his coverage of a climate case taken by indigenous people in the Torres Strait vs Australia, detailed for Drilled how the ICJ opinion could affect future Australian cases. He quotes Isabelle Reineke, Executive director of the Grata Fund in that it, “seriously calls into question the legality of Australia’s current and past policy setting under international law, including its past and ongoing approval of fossil fuel projects”.

The US, on the other hand, is being about as clear as it can that it now wants to be the poster child for reneging on its climate commitments and completing its realignment to be a lawless, autocratic petrostate bent not even on denying climate change but accelerating it and dominating whatever world is left as a result.

So the Hollywood metaphor works perfectly - plucky Pacific Islander kids take on the world and win an impossible but symbolic victory and the audience dabs its eyes at this hopeful and entertaining testament to the human spirit. But once the lights come up, nothing actually changes.

Other than Israel, few countries have made more of a point of giving two fingers to world opinion - and specifically the International Court of Justice - than the United States.

In 1984, Nicaragua took the United States to the “World Court” (ICJ) to argue the Reagan Administration’s support for the contra rebels fighting the USSR/Cuba-friendly Sandinista government, including the covert mining of the country’s harbours, was a flagrant violation of international law. In 1986, after the US refused even to participate in the court’s proceedings, the ICJ ruled against the United States.

The US refused to acknowledge it had any obligation to follow what the court had ruled. And that could be that. But it wasn’t.

In an astute 2022 paper, California Polytechnic history professor Andrea Onate-Madrazo argued that far from having no effect on American policy or behaviour, the 1984 ICJ case from Nicaragua - and the swift refusal by the Reagan Administration to accept that ICJ had any legitimate jurisdiction - helped create a “politics of shame”. Manifest as international condemnation amongst its allies as much as its adversaries:

the matter evoked a strong reaction abroad. Media sources from around the globe took an interest in the issue and newspapers in France, Ireland, Great Britain, Lebanon, the Soviet Union, India, amongst others, ran cover stories detailing Reagan’s rejection of the ICJ’s jurisdiction.

The editorial piece “Out of Court,” published in The Irish Times on 11 April was prophetic in warning that “there can be no doubt that this treatment of the Court will fuel anti-American propaganda all over the world. Whatever the small print says, the wiser course for Mr. Reagan would be to meet the Nicaraguan complaint head-on and argue it out in public view.”

The case, and the international reaction, helped fuel domestic opposition to the US policy on Nicaragua, leading to a series of legal restrictions on sending aid to the contras collectively known as The Boland Amendment. That in turn led the US administration to embark on an arcane scheme to avoid the law that wound up as the Iran-Contra scandal.

As Onate-Madrazo argued this underscored the Court’s real power:

The World Court lacks mechanisms to enforce its rulings or punish defectors. The Court’s real power rests in its ability to sway world opinion and “mobilize the politics of shame.” In the case of “Nicaragua v the United States of America” this reality had important policy implications to the extent that opinions, swayed by the ICJ case, affected the United States Congress and helped shape its legislation.

The Reagan administration had hoped that by not participating in the ICJ’s proceedings it would limit the impact of the case upon domestic and global opinion. Not participating, it hoped, would thwart public attention away from the entire matter. The strategy backfired as rejection of the Court merely added an additional layer of opposition to what the administration already faced on account of the mining incident. News of CIA involvement in the mining coupled with the White House’s snubbing of the World Court produced a strong bipartisan opposition in Congress. This opposition would prove to be the main impetus behind the Boland Amendment II.

You can argue - and many will - that the judgement is something of a farce. And that it says something that if anything the current US administration has even more contempt for the opinions of the rest of the world than their predecessors 40 years ago.

That’s also why it will be fascinating to see how this plays out.

Telling the rest of humanity “go f*ck yourself” and gleefully condemning whole countries like Vanuatu to be “sacrifice zones” just as much as “cancer alley” communities in Louisiana affected by the newly-energised projects like Venture Global’s LNG export project may not be cost-free, even for the United States.

If the current US president has a super-power it would be his seeming immunity to any “politics of shame”. But the danger is he very much understands how it works on non-sociopaths. The point of getting Europe to submit and appease his demands on trade by promising to buy fossil fuels isn’t random. It was chosen because it will cause the people who caved in to him by publicly renouncing their own values to feel exactly that sort of shame that will make them less able to resist his demands in future. It is the politics of the abuser.

But by forcing the issue out of strategic ambiguity and diplomatic wiggle room into stark relief, the US is now to climate as Israel is to Gaza - a lawless and criminal actor that leaves even its friends no choice but to eventually walk away and seek to end its crime spree. Like Gaza, this will probably demonstrate that most of the Global North is willing to be complicit with extreme levels of suffering before it will be willing to say, ‘enough’.

The ICJ opinion likewise removes space for strategic ambiguity. In its 80-year history the ICJ has issued just four unanimous rulings, in this case including an American among its 15 judges. No other case has attracted anything close to the 130+ submissions this did. No other case has so directly recognised stakes so existential for the future of the entire species. No other case has created a predicate on which an entirely new set of court cases worldwide could be based.

The Other Cases

There are thousands of cases of climate litigation working their way through courts worldwide. Some are human rights cases. Some are consumer-protection cases that call out fossil fuel firms for lying about the risks they knew their products would cause. And some are pure good aul-fashioned torts that argue, thanks to attribution science, that it’s possible to hold individual firms legally liable for damages resulting from their reckless disregard. As friend-of-the-show and Climate Confident host Tom Raftery wrote:

the next wave of lawsuits may go beyond delay and reputational damage. We’re talking fines, asset write-downs, and forced divestitures. Climate risk is now legal risk.

I’m not a lawyer but I will be asking some on the show in the coming weeks to tease that out.

As Laura Clarke of ClientEarth said to Akshat Rathi on Bloomberg’s Zero:

the ICJ is about state responsibilities and state obligations, so it can't directly hold companies or businesses to account. But what it did say, and I talked earlier about this question of states having a due diligence requirement to take action, that states have an obligation to regulate private actors. If a private company is producing huge amounts of emissions, then the state has a responsibility to regulate them and stop that harm. So I think that's a really important development. So if, for example, you have a fossil fuel company that's polluting with abandon, the country has to, under international law, regulate them and stop that. It's again. It's just another tool, I suppose, to drive corporations to do the right thing.

So here’s a fun thought experiment. Perhaps Julian Aguon or Laura Clarke could help flesh it out.

Let’s say Vanuatu residents successfully sue one of the many subsidiaries of ExxonMobil operating in a relatively climate-sane jurisdiction, in that country’s courts, with the assist from a local NGO. Maybe citing the Peruvian farmer suing German utility RWE as precedent. In response to the judgment, Vanuatu, citing the ICJ ruling, sues that government for compensation.

The government of the climate-friendly jurisdiction in turn ‘discovers’ that ExxonMobil has been lying for 40 years about what it knew about the effects of its products on the climate, and that the government of the United States had been in possession of that information for at least as long - while publicly saying otherwise. That government then in turn sues the United States.

The ICJ rules that the United States is liable to pay compensation for its failure both to curb emissions or to regulate ExxonMobil to prevent it from causing harms suffered by that Vanuatu resident.

What happens then?

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In this Conversation

Prof. Elizabeth Holland was teaching the University of the South Pacific around the time that some of their students conceived of the legal action that led to last week’s ICJ opinion. She kindly shared her reactions to the ruling, and started out citing this NY Times op-ed, ‘Climate Science is Now the Law’.

00:16 The Court's Advisory Opinion

00:54 Human Impact and Cultural Struggles

01:14 End of Impunity and Legal Obligations

02:03 Interview with Professor Elizabeth Holland

02:43 Reactions to the ICJ Ruling

05:22 The Role of Small Island States

05:50 Challenges in Climate Negotiations

08:01 Legal Frameworks and Obligations

09:43 Implications for the United States

12:33 Personal Reflections and Contributions

14:34 Celebrating the Youth Movement

18:17 Art and Culture in Climate Advocacy

21:21 Generational Promises and Songs

26:38 Conclusion and Call to Action

Outro and Outros

Normally we start these posts with our outro for the episode. In this episode we have a couple of pieces in addition to our usual insanely good intro track we got from Suncharmer.

And there is also a very topical intermezzo from Mia Kami, whose Hague performance after the ICJ ruling we share:

All the Outros

Like figuring out the perfect wine pairing for a book (weird, right?) we do enjoy trying to figure out what exit music would be best with the episode’s content. Here they are:

Been a roller-coaster of a month, and we haven’t slept on it - even if we’ve felt a bit at sea. Who can sleep when you’re toggling between existential doomscrolling and manic moments of hope like the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion?

Tacking between those may be the best we can do right now. Fortunately today’s guest has exactly the requisite experience to help.

We Start at the End

Today’s exit music is brought to you by The Pogues. Seems an unlikely choice until you reckon with the reality that Shane is the best frontman Tunbridge Wells [sic] (look it up) ever produced1, with an unaccountable flair for adapting sea shanties. The reasons might become clear.

Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, CB (retired) had a storied Royal Navy career before becoming a diplomat on climate and energy issues for the UK, and now heads the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy at University College London.

He is the first flag officer we’ve had on the show, and has as clear-eyed perspective as anyone I’ve spoken to connecting climate change with national security.

You might not expect a career Royal Navy officer, former aircraft carrier commander, and former UK climate envoy to be among the most nuanced thinkers on climate resilience. But Admiral Morisetti’s been out in front of this conversation for over a decade, and stressed its importance to The Guardian in advance of the release of the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review.

In recent months we’ve seen governments in Spain and other places start to re-classify essential climate adaptation spending as defence. And in a hybrid security/climate/humanitarian arrangement the government of Australia yesterday selected by lottery its first 280 climate resettlement visa recipients from Tuvalu - after 80% of the population applied.

Climate was named first amongst the persistent challenges global powers need to reckon with, ahead of terrorism and other factors, in the summary for that same Strategic Defence Review.

As Morisetti puts it: “There is no security solution to climate change. If the military gets involved, it means society has failed to act.”

In our conversation, we explore:

• How the UK’s most recent Strategic Defence Review quietly ranked climate and environmental degradation as the first of its persistent threats.

• Why net zero is struggling to maintain political consensus — and what kind of narrative could help rebuild it.

• And how military procurement — from solar on forward operating bases to sustainable aviation fuel — could do more than reduce emissions: it could build markets.

Because here’s the thing: Western militaries are among the biggest institutional buyers on Earth. When NATO states agree that military aircraft should be able to operate with an increasingly concentrated mix including Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) that’s not just logistics — that’s market-making. Morisetti argues that defence ministries shouldn’t just be consumers of low-carbon technology — they should be some of its most effective incubators.

In other words, climate tech needs to be mission-capable.

We also talked about the parts of the world where these intersecting threats — food shocks, climate migration, conflict — are already unfolding. And how the Arctic thaw is setting the stage for new flashpoints and opportunism — in both geopolitics and extraction.

What I took from this conversation is something I’ve been turning over ever since: that the old lines between defence, diplomacy, development, and decarbonization are disintegrating faster than most institutions can adapt. But there are people — like Morisetti — who’ve seen it coming, who’ve worked inside the system, and who are now trying to bend it toward something that might still hold.

He ends on a note of optimism. And I believe him.

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In this Conversation

03:49 Military's Role in Climate Adaptation

04:44 Evolving Conversations on Climate Security

09:48 Military Innovations and Energy Efficiency

19:02 International Cooperation and Policy

28:29 Future Challenges and Strategic Planning

31:52 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

All the Outros

In this double-header ep, we’re looking at what happens when people and technologies move faster than the systems meant to support them—and what happens when governments are told the truth, but decide they don’t have to act on it.

We End Twice

Sometimes we do a Marvel bonus ending, but not this time. But today each block gets its own outro. For Switzerland’s preëminent Gloucester Strain Geese Godmother, we present The National -

And for the author of Slick: Australia’s Toxic Relationship with Big Oil, we offer a this anthemic banger from our fave post-punk-to-pub-rock outfit, Midnight Oil:

Before we get to it there was an untimely media outlet death this week.

RIP Cipher

The Bill Gates/Breakthrough supported Cipher News sent out its last newsletter this week. A tough day for all the journalists working there, and special shoutout to friend-of-the-show Cat Clifford, who was kind enough to spend an hour with us not too long ago to talk about America’s AI-supercharged climate and energy’s Trumpocalypse.

Cat is a diamond and you should hire her immediately.

Why did Gates walk away from climate advocacy and not do more to try and stop Trump’s OBBBA murder/suicide climate crime spree? Meh.

Well in his parting gift of an exclusive interview for the media outlet he just killed, he ‘explained’ it this way:

In what are his first public comments on the matter, Gates said he is spending less money on clean energy policy for a few reasons, including his increased focus on global health and the fact that other leaders have stepped up recently to support climate action, though he said more are needed.

“I view global health as, in a certain sense, having a lot of urgency because of the dramatic reductions that have been made there,” said Gates.

He went on to point out that clean tech investments will suffer from the volatile political climate:

Bigger picture, though, policy uncertainty around tariffs and other parts of the economy is hitting TerraPower as much as many other companies.

“We live in a very uncertain environment,” Gates said, pointing out that TerraPower will have some components built in South Korea. “Is that 0% tariff or, I don’t know, a 40% tariff?”

When it became known just a few days after Trump’s second inauguration that Gates was cutting climate funding, Katie Brigham in Heatmap got the reaction of many:

But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.

“Their presence will be missed,” said the CEO of another climate nonprofit who was notified by Breakthrough that its funding would not be renewed. Breakthrough Energy “was one of the few funders supporting pragmatic research and advocacy work that pushed at neglected areas such as the need for zero-carbon firm power and accelerated energy innovation,” they added.

"Even if it’s a drop in the bucket, it still makes a difference,” another former grantee with a particularly large budget told me. This organization recently sent Breakthrough an inquiry about partnering up again and is waiting to hear back. “But for small organizations, it’s make it or break it.”

Speculation abounds as to the rationale behind Breakthrough’s funding cuts. “I have heard that one of the reasons that Bill decided to stop funding climate was that he concluded that there was so much money in climate that his money really wasn’t that important,” Nordhaus told me. But that is not true when it comes to agriculture, he said, which comprises about 12% of global emissions. ”There’s very little money for advocating for agriculture innovation to address the climate impacts of the ag sector,” Nordhaus told me.

Gates had been one of the world’s top grant funders of climate tech and advocacy. His role securing votes for the landmark US climate action plan in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) - as detailed by Climate Capitalism author and Bloomberg Green supremo Akshat Rathi and others - made the retreat more notable. And even when 21 Republican members of Congress signed a letter saying that the proposed gutting of IRA by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, Gates was silent - a stark contrast from his lobbying just three years earlier. Calls to those 21 members could have made the difference and changed history. As far as we know, climate’s former champion did…nothing.

As an enraged contributor to The Hill put it weeks earlier:

If his move is a simple reallocation of resources to other priorities like global health, that’s one thing. But if it reflects a deliberate abandonment of the federal playing field, that’s both irresponsible and politically naive.

Waiting for the perfect political moment to advance climate policy is not a compelling strategy. Since World War II, U.S. political parties have secured unified control of the White House and Congress an average of just once every 14 years.

In a world replete with a lot of shameful shit, it’s one thing to see evil lunatics do evil lunatic shit. It’s another thing entirely to see people who knew better just decide to keep quiet.

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On a happier note, let’s get on with the show:

Segment One: Jenny Chase on Pakistan’s Accidental Solar Revolution

If you missed the solar mystery unfolding in Pakistan, you’re not alone. Even their government didn’t see it coming. But thanks to a deep dive from BloombergNEF’s Jenny Chase, the picture has become clearer: Pakistan has quietly become one of the world’s biggest solar importers. As rooftop panels mushroom across cities and farms, grid demand is shrinking. Fossil fuel use is dropping. But the solar surge wasn’t planned—and now the grid, and those who still rely on it, are at risk of being left behind.

Jenny explains:

• Why Pakistan’s solar boom is driven more by price than blackouts

• The warning signs of a utility death spiral

• What it might mean for other countries (including your own)

• And why satellite imagery became her secret weapon in solving the mystery

Her TED talk earlier this year on this very subject:

And if you extrapolate what’s happening in Pakistan to its global potential, the implications are huge. For the grid - as a shared public resource that actually massively reduces inequality - as well as our ability to measure our economies using metrics that increasingly look shaky:

We get into it all.

🌐 Follow Jenny:
🔗 solarchase.bsky.social
🔗 Jenny Chase on LinkedIn

Segment Two: Royce Kurmelovs on the Torres Strait Climate Ruling

Then we head to Australia, where a federal judge has done something remarkable—he agreed that climate change is an existential threat, agreed it’s already harming Indigenous communities in the Torres Strait... and then said the law can’t do anything about it.

It’s a decision that’s at once a defeat and a warning shot. Journalist and author Royce Kurmelovs, who’s been covering the case closely, joins me to explain:

• What actually happened in the Pabai Pabai decision

• Why winning on the facts and losing on the law might be more dangerous than outright denial

• And what’s next—for courts, for politics, and for Australia's role in a heating world

📰 Read Royce’s coverage of the case:
“Court agrees climate change is real, but throws out Torres Strait Islanders’ claim anyway” (RenewEconomy)
Also check out his book: Slick: Australia’s Toxic Relationship with Big Oil

🌐 Follow Royce:
🔗 roycerk2.bsky.social

🎧 Prefer us in your usual pod player? You can follow the show on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and pretty much everywhere you get good podcasts. But you’ll always get us here first and get that sweet, sweet bonus content.

📡 Follow me on BlueSky

All the Outros

We Start at the End

Today’s outro is brought to you by The Presidents of the United States of America. Not that one.

Thick ice caps topping some dormant volcanoes may be acting like a champagne cork. Research released earlier this month suggests that by speeding up the melt of those ice caps through human-caused climate change, we’re removing the foil and the little wire cage on some trapped liquid that will taste a bit more acidic than champagne when it gets out as the cork tries to free itself.

I don’t know about you, but I did not have “now we’re gonna cause volcanoes to erupt” on my bingo card. This decade does not disappoint in offering novel horrors to keep you up at night.

Bob Berwyn has reported for a decade for Inside Climate News - the OG climate outlet that in 2015 broke the story of the biggest corporate scandal in history: a nine-part investigative series demonstrating how much #ExxonKnew about the effects that burning oil and other fossil fuels would have on the future climate, and then doing everything in its power to prevent anyone from stopping it.

Bob’s piece on the volcano research stopped me in my tracks. As he said in this conversation:

“the most profound thing about a study like this volcano study … is how profoundly we're changing fundamental parts of the global Earth system. I mean, we're sitting here talking about things like, ‘wow, could our activities actually cause more volcanoes?’

I mean, just the fact that we're asking this question is, ‘wow, what have we done?’ You know?”

In our chat we also get into some of the other stories Bob is covering - from the increasingly deadly heatwaves in Europe to the despair in the UNFCCC talks in Bonn to the (omg wtf) need for scientists in America to read an Anti-Autocracy Handbook for their own safety to the expected Advisory Opinion due on 23rd July from the International Court of Justice on the obligations of states under international law to rein in climate pollution.

In This Conversation

01:33 Scientific Insights on Volcanic Activity

05:20 Challenges in Climate Research

12:09 Global Climate Negotiations

20:12 Heatwaves and Public Health

23:54 Legal and Ethical Responsibilities

24:36 The Reality of Heat Waves and Their Deadly Impact

26:13 The Political Project Against Climate Science

27:07 Social Science and Climate Action

28:58 The Anti-Autocracy Handbook for Scientists

31:02 Free Speech and Authoritarianism

34:25 The Role of Legal Obligations in Climate Justice

37:05 Public Perception and Managed Retreat

40:37 Final Thoughts and Upcoming Stories

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All the Outros

Just because the news is grim doesn’t mean our music choices need to be. So from our intro music from our good friends at Suncharmer to our cornucopia of outro tunes that - let’s face it - are normally pretty good but also suffer from Dad Joke Bias in their selection, we hope you’re enjoying that part of the ride as well.

Keep Up With Bob

Bob is an essential follow on BlueSky, and his journalism for Inside Climate News does not quit. Here are links to just some of the stories we touched on:

Melting Ice Caps Could Bring Dormant Volcanoes to Life

Human-Caused Global Warming Spiked the Death Toll of Europe’s Early Summer Heatwave

New Handbook Aims to Protect Scientists From Autocratic Threats

Bonn Climate Talks Rife With Roadblocks and Dead Ends

Coming Up

It’s been a weird couple of weeks - but we’ve been out harvesting great chats coming your way soon with fan fave Jenny Chase of BNEF on Pakistan’s solar revolution, Stonehaven’s Adam Bell on the verdict on Spain’s blackout, Royce Kermelovs on the Torres Strait case in Australia, and tons more.

If you think these conversations are worth listening to, share them with a friend or make an offering to the volcano gods to spare your town.

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