The Visible Catastrophe

Something happened yesterday morning that deserves more attention than it will probably get. In the pre-market hours in New York, before any public announcement had been made, someone placed two enormous bets on the financial markets. One — worth $1.5 billion — wagered that stock prices would rise. The other — $192 million — wagered that oil prices would fall. Fifteen minutes later, President Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States had been holding "very good and productive conversations" with Iran, and that planned military strikes would be paused for five days.

The markets moved exactly as those bets had predicted. The oil position alone generated an estimated $100 million in profit within twenty minutes. The equity gains pushed the total considerably higher.

There was just one problem. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf flatly denied any negotiations had taken place, calling Trump's announcement "fake news used to manipulate the financial and oil markets."¹ Iran's Foreign Ministry confirmed there had been no direct or indirect contact with Washington at all.

Someone made $100 million in twenty minutes on a presidential announcement that the other country involved said never happened.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has not commented. The CFTC has not announced an investigation. The White House called the allegations baseless. And the news cycle has already moved on to the next crisis.

This is the moment to stop and ask ourselves a question: are we simply choosing not to see what is directly in front of us?

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There's a Pattern Going On Here

This was not an isolated event. Traders and hedge fund managers have noted multiple instances in recent months where very large, very precisely timed bets have preceded major US government announcements. Similar concerns have arisen around prediction markets, where suspiciously well-informed wagers have appeared ahead of US actions involving countries including Iran and Venezuela.²

There is also the matter of who is connected to those prediction market platforms. The New York Times has reported that leading prediction market firms share a notable commonality: Donald Trump Jr.^3,4

The pattern, taken whole, is not subtle. A president makes announcements — sometimes apparently false ones — that move markets in predictable directions. Immediately before those announcements, people with what appears to be advance knowledge place bets that profit from exactly those movements. The institutions responsible for investigating such behaviour are led by appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president himself.

What the evidence shows

Trump's Iran ceasefire announcement came two hours before US markets opened, and the five-day pause he announced ends precisely at the close of the energy trading week — a detail Iranian analysts were quick to highlight.

Iran's parliament speaker said: "Every week, when markets open, Trump makes these kinds of statements to drive down oil prices." Iran's Foreign Ministry confirmed there had been no negotiations, directly or indirectly.

The trades preceding the announcement were described by multiple hedge fund managers as "highly unusual." No regulatory investigation has been announced.

The most straightforward explanation — the one that fits all the known facts about this president's character, history, and the people around him — is that personal enrichment is at or near the centre of his decision-making, and that associates with advance knowledge of his announcements are profiting from them. Whether that is the actual explanation requires an independent investigation to determine.

There is no independent investigation.

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Why Is Nobody Stopping Him?

This is the question making us all crazy. And there are two levels of answer to it. The first level is about the current political situation.

He controls the enforcement mechanisms. The DOJ, the SEC, the FBI, the CFTC — all now answer, directly or indirectly, to the president. Investigating him would require institutions he controls to act against him. This is not accidental. It is the outcome of a sustained effort to place loyalists in every position of institutional authority.

The Republican Party has stopped functioning as a check. Individual Republicans who should know what Trump is have made a rational calculation: personal survival requires silence. The result is that one of the fundamental mechanisms of democratic governance — opposition within the system — has effectively ceased to operate.

The courts are slower than the damage. Legal challenges take years. By the time rulings arrive, the profits have been made, the norms have been broken, and the next outrage is already dominating the headlines.

The volume of wrongdoing is itself a weapon. When scandals arrive faster than public attention can process them, the effect is not outrage but exhaustion. There is substantial evidence that this effect, in authoritarian political movements, is not accidental. Overwhelmed people disengage. Disengaged people don't resist.

The greatest danger, alongside the physical reality, is the psychological retreat into helplessness that prevents even the damage-limitation that remains possible.

Historians who study democratic backsliding note one consistent feature: it almost always happens faster than people expect, and by the time the majority recognises it fully, the mechanisms for correction have already been significantly weakened. We are living through a case study in real time.

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This Didn't Come From Nowhere

The second level requires us to zoom out, but hold the Iran trades in your mind for a moment longer first, because they illuminate something beyond the ordinary question of possible self-serving. A man with the power to move global oil markets made an announcement that enriched people around him. That same man has used every lever of power to undermine climate action and information, both in the US and globally. The market manipulation and the climate obstruction are not two separate scandals. They are expressions of the same underlying logic: extract maximum value from carbon, for as long as possible, regardless of the cost to anyone else. And it's not a coincidence he is pursuing this agenda now.

The period between roughly 2025 and 2035 is considered by many climate scientists to be the last window in which aggressive action could still meaningfully limit the degree of environmental catastrophe — prevention is most likely no longer possible.

Yet combatting climate change represents the single greatest threat to the profits of the fossil fuel industry — the wealthiest and most politically connected industry in human history. As the science became undeniable and public pressure for action grew through the 2010s, the stakes for that industry became existential. When your entire business model is threatened, you don't quietly accept it. You fight back with every tool available.

The tools available to people with hundreds of billions of dollars are considerable. This is not conspiracy theory — it is documented history. ExxonMobil's own scientists understood climate change from the 1970s. Rather than act on it, the company funded decades of deliberate disinformation.⁵ The Koch brothers built an entire political infrastructure specifically to block climate legislation. Dark money networks poured billions into think tanks, political campaigns and media outlets designed to manufacture public doubt.

These same networks were instrumental in Trump's political rise.

And here is where the Iran oil trades connect back to all of this. Every false announcement that knocks dollars off a barrel of oil, every market-moving tweet, every crony appointment that further disables the institutions meant to investigate it — these are not just personal grifts. They are also, functionally, acts of climate obstruction. A president who has learned he can move energy markets with a social media post has every incentive to keep energy markets — and therefore global attention — focused on oil. Not on the transition away from it.

Meanwhile, Russia's entire economy runs on fossil fuel exports. A world that successfully transitions to clean energy is an existential threat to Vladimir Putin's power. He therefore has enormous motivation to fund and amplify the political forces in Western democracies that resist climate action — and there is substantial evidence he has done exactly that, through disinformation campaigns, funding of far-right parties, and election interference.

The alignment between Trump, the fossil fuel lobby, and Putin on climate is not coincidental. They all benefit from the same outcome: delay, denial, and the continued dominance of carbon-based energy. Trump isn't the cause of all this, he's just the perfect instrument to carry out this agenda — a man with no ideology beyond self-enrichment, and no inconvenient principles to navigate around. And he is doing this at precisely the moment it matters most — the period that climate scientists consider the last window for meaningful action.

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The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Which brings us to the hardest question of all. Given the seeming erasure of all climate action, science and information by one of the world's largest emitters, and given that the consequences are already unfolding — is it too late? Are we heading for civilizational collapse?

The honest answer, on climate at least, is: too late to prevent serious harm, yes. The 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement is effectively gone. We are on course for somewhere between 2.5°C and 3.5°C of warming under current policies, with the range of uncertainty extending higher. Several feedback loops — Arctic methane release, Amazon dieback, ice sheet destabilisation — are either already triggered or approaching their tipping points.

Civilisational collapse, in this context, doesn't necessarily mean human extinction. It means the end of the stable, predictable world that complex modern societies depend upon. Mass displacement. Food system failures. Water scarcity affecting billions. Political breakdown in vulnerable regions, leading to conflicts that make current wars look minor. The gradual erosion of the conditions that make interconnected civilisation possible.

Much of this is not a future scenario. It is already happening — to people in the Global South, in low-lying coastal regions, in areas of chronic drought. It is happening now. It is simply not yet happening to enough people in wealthy northern countries in ways they cannot ignore or insulate themselves from.

The darkest calculation

Some of the people funding and enabling Trump are not merely indifferent to climate change. They are old, extraordinarily wealthy, and appear to have concluded — perhaps consciously, perhaps not — that they will be dead before the worst consequences arrive, that their wealth will insulate them from much of what does arrive in their lifetimes, and that the profits available between now and catastrophe are worth extracting regardless of the cost to everyone else.

A rational, if monstrous, calculation.

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What Remains Worth Saying

Every fraction of a degree of warming still prevented matters enormously — the difference between 2.5°C and 3.5°C is the difference between very bad and potentially unsurvivable for large parts of humanity. The clean energy transition is happening rapidly in China, the EU, and elsewhere regardless of Washington. Massive efforts to restore nature's carbon sinks (forests, oceans, peat, meadows) are taking place. Local resilience matters even when global coordination fails.

And there is this: the resistance to action is not evidence that humanity as a whole has chosen this path. It is evidence that a relatively small number of extraordinarily powerful people have successfully manipulated democratic systems to protect their interests. That is a different problem — and in principle a more solvable one — than humanity being collectively suicidal.

But that solution requires people to see the situation clearly, name it accurately, and refuse the temptation of either false comfort or paralysing despair.

We know what is happening. We know who is doing it, and why, and roughly who is paying for it. The question that remains — the only question that matters now — is whether enough people are willing to say so plainly, loudly, and without waiting for permission.

Come and see it for yourself — then let's talk

If this piece has left you wanting to do something rather than simply absorb more bad news, we'd love to see you at a local screening of a remarkable film.

Last November, 1,200 politicians and community leaders gathered in Westminster for the People's Emergency Briefing — nine leading experts speaking honestly about climate, nature, food security, health, energy, tipping points, weather extremes and national security. Opened by naturalist Chris Packham and chaired by writer Mike Berners-Lee, the event was organised by Simon and Nick Oldridge of the Climate Science Breakthrough project, with Ben Casey and Henrik Delehag of the Utopia Bureau. A feature-length film of the day has now been made.

Screenings are taking place in communities around the country — not just as film nights, but as facilitated spaces for people of all backgrounds and political views to engage seriously with the evidence, reflect on what it means for their lives and communities, and connect with others locally around the question of how society responds. The wider aim is to build the public and political momentum needed to bring this briefing to television.

We are hosting a screening on Sunday 5 July, 6.30–9.00pm, at Haslingfield Village Hall. Everyone is welcome — especially people who don't normally come to climate events. Head to our What's On pages for details and to book your place.

Notes & Sources

1. ↑ Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posting on X, March 23, 2026, as reported by Al Jazeera: Iran denies any talks with US after Trump claims 'productive' discussions. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei separately confirmed no direct or indirect dialogue had taken place. The IRGC described Trump's announcement as "psychological operations."
2. ↑ NPR, January 2026: How Kalshi and Polymarket prediction market traders make money. Polymarket faced intense criticism after users made substantial bets ahead of the US military action in Venezuela. The trader's identity has not been publicly confirmed.
3. ↑ Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi as a paid strategic adviser in January 2025, and later invested in rival Polymarket through his venture capital firm 1789 Capital, joining its advisory board. Both CNN and Reuters have reported on these arrangements. See: CNN, March 2026; Front Office Sports, August 2025.
4. ↑ The New York Times, January 15, 2026: reporting on Donald Trump Jr.'s connections to the leading prediction market platforms.
5. ↑ ExxonMobil's internal scientists accurately predicted the trajectory of climate change from the 1970s onward. Investigative reporting by InsideClimate News (2015) and the Los Angeles Times (2015) first documented this in detail, drawing on internal company documents. ExxonMobil subsequently funded external efforts to cast doubt on the science. Several US state attorneys general have pursued legal action on this basis.

Greater Cambridge Development Corporation Consultation Response

The government recently announced its proposal to set up a new body, the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation, stating that this is necessary to realise the potential for growth in this area. There is a consultation process, open until 1 April, so do have your say about this proposal which has huge implications for the future of our region.

According to the consultation document: “ Sustained economic growth is the only route to improving the prosperity of our country and the living standards of working people”. But what sort of growth, and will it be sustainable in the long term? I volunteered, within the Climate Leaders Group I belong to, to draft a response to the consultation. I did this by uploading a number of references which I thought were relevant to Claude.ai (a more ethical AI choice) and asking it to find more where I didn’t have evidence to support an argument. In the end we used 23 references, most of which are peer reviewed, and all of which are worth reading - if I couldn’t find evidence for a contention it is not included. I also gave the AI instructions about the main ideas I wanted to get across in my response: that growth must be within our planetary boundaries now and must contribute to more and better democratic engagement, not less. After 12 versions, in which I checked and edited every paragraph, I asked the AI to argue against my points, so that I would be more aware of what those with other points of view might think. This revealed where my arguments were weak or needed more support.

The final version, version 13, is linked below. This version has been shared widely, with the Climate Leaders and at the recent South Cambs Climate and Nature meeting with MP Pippa Heylings, where it was highlighted as one of the questions for her to address. She was complementary about the response, and addressed it thoughtfully, including revealing that her party, the LibDems, was involved in a process of re-evaluating how they wanted to define growth. It will be interesting to watch how that develops. A number of other community groups have also been in touch with me, wanting to build on or use the response as a reference. The version below is written as an email submission, but I have also created a version which is mapped to the consultation questions. I am happy to share either version - write to hnheco@gmail.com if you are interested.

Michelle Golder, co-chair

Greater Cambridge Development Corporation Consultation Response

Collapse, The Walking Dead and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill – Is there a way to not be scared?

There are 533 thousand members of the subreddit r/collapse, enough to make it the subject of a recent Guardian story. Moderated by a “mixture of neuroscientists, environmental scientists, chemical engineers, government auditors and history teachers,” most of the members are people like me – ordinary folks who, for whatever reason, follow the story of what people are now calling the “polycrisis” – the coming together over the past few decades of climate change, AI acceleration, pandemic risk, rising inequality, ecological breakdown, political incompetence and…need I go on?

It's scary and depressing stuff. Following the passage of Trump’s “Great Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashes clean-energy tax incentives and boosts fossil-fuel subsidies (while cutting Medicaid and food assistance programmes for millions of Americans), some scientists have begun to declare “game over.” Canadian scientist and broadcaster David Suzuki (Canada’s David Attenborough), for example, had this to say this week:

“I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and Johan Rockström, the Swedish scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. As long as humans, like any other animal, live within those nine constraints, we can do it forever, and that includes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle, etc. There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them — the ozone layer — and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone. Rockström says we have five years to get out of the danger zone.…And, if you look at those boundaries, like the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve had 28 COP meetings on climate change and we haven’t been able to cap emissions. We’re on our way to more than a three-degree temperature rise…”

iPolitics, 2 July 2025

Lately, I’ve been binging on the American zombie apocalypse TV show, The Walking Dead. Debuting in 2010, and lasting 11 seasons under its original title, the show, set primarily in rural Georgia (the US state), follows a group of survivors negotiating a world in which civilisation has completely broken down. No one is in charge, no supply lines exist, food and fuel must be scavenged from zombie infested houses and shops. The show, in its dramatic way, raises questions which prey on my mind a lot, both as they address the lived experience of people now and the experiences I fear for us all in the future: How – and why – do people find the strength to carry on in the face of loss, scarcity, sadness and uncertainty? Is it possible to still live with joy and love? What is the job of those who take on leadership roles? Reassurance… or Honesty? Innovation… or Sticking to the road?  Control… or Cooperation?

Unlike some other apocalyptic fictions, such as the harrowing book and film The Road, which focus on an individual’s journey through disaster, Walking Dead is very much about communities and the different ways people respond together - it’s this that keeps me gripped. The central “family” – led by British actor Andrew Lincoln, with a passable Southern accent – meets groups which have descended into cannibalism, groups led by sadistic psychopaths out for their own gain, groups living out bizarre fantasies of communion with the undead. But it also meets a resilient eco community, a feudalistic agricultural community on a historic plantation, and a group led by a benevolent “king” with his own tame tiger. Survival is the first priority of almost everyone they meet, but overarching that - for the central characters at any rate - is the quest to maintain their humanity. There has to be something to survive for, they say over and over again.

The Walking Dead is a traumatic and violent watch which I don’t recommend to everyone. It’s not scientific and it simplifies issues in a way that will turn some off. It says unpalatable things about human nature. Many times I’ve felt profoundly sad after watching it. But it’s a fiction, so I find it a less agonising watch then, say, the news from Gaza or Sudan, Antarctica or the Amazon. And in some ways, I find it uplifting. When the group, even briefly, finds what it is looking for – safety, food, time with loved ones, peace, the beauty of nature – it feels so good. It reminds me that those things are all I need for happiness.

The collapse today’s “doomers” envisage is unlikely to be as sudden as the catastrophe that afflicts The Walking Dead’s characters. Most people talk about an increasing “enshittification” of life, likely to proceed unevenly across nations, geographies, and socio-economic groups over decades. Some degree of it, I agree with Suzuki, is no longer preventable – in fact we are in it already. To prevent it becoming eventually apocalyptic – which 3 degrees of warming would be - we would have to stop emitting CO2 and stop destroying the natural carbon sinks (healthy soils, oceans and forests) which reabsorb carbon dioxide, and start radically repairing them, now, today, everywhere. There are many people trying to do this. Many more are needed. Whether we can succeed remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I find inspiration and energy in thinking about alternatives to enshittification. I remember the positivity at the Cambridge Carbon Footprint AGM last month - their Repair Cafés, Open Eco Homes and Imaginarium projects are blowing up around the region (they need more volunteers).  I remember the excitement of the young engineer explaining Grantchester’s proposed Heat Network project to me at their recent open day (it could supply every home in Grantchester with zero carbon, zero maintenance heat based on shared heat pump/solar and wind energy).  I walk around our village and our city and see the many spaces embracing a “Let it Grow” ethos – and the many more butterflies, beetles and bees thriving as a result. And I find hope in knowing that the future is still there to be written, by us, by what we choose to do. In the words of one of my favourite authors, Ursula K. LeGuin:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”

Acceptance speech for

The National Book Foundation Medal for

Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 2014

Wellhouse meadow bonfire area, June 2025

Time to Grab Our Opportunities

“You have the biggest opportunity, in all of human history, to live an incredibly meaningful life. And the actions that you take, because of the accident of the time of your birth, are of an order of magnitude in importance compared to most people who have lived before, because you are going to affect the future of life on earth in 50, 500 and 500,000 years by what you do in the next couple of decades. So, no one is asking for an easy life, really, deep down, we’re asking for a meaningful life, and living now is an incredible gift.”

Tom Rivett-Carnac on answering the question: “Are we going to be okay?”

(Outrage and Optimism podcast, episode 211)

Sometimes someone says just the words you need to hear, and today, I needed the quote above. As I write, the Sustainable Travel Zone proposals for Cambridge, which I supported, are in grave peril. Despite substantial charging reductions in the latest version of the plan, a popular uprising challenged any level of congestion charge for the city, arguing that:

• it was an unfair tax on drivers that disadvantaged those on low incomes,

• it would cause economic and social hardship to families and carers,

• it would further challenge recruitment and retention at Addenbrookes,

• it could not possibly deliver on its promises for a better bus service,

• it was simply unnecessary. Congestion? What congestion?

Decent arguments can be and have been made both for and against all the points above. That’s fine, and I’m not going to rehash them here. And it’s fair and right that the Greater Cambridge Partnership (the GCP), which came up with the proposals, should be challenged (for one thing, why are the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority Business Board and both Universities partners, but not any citizens’, environmental, homeowners’, tenants’ or students’ groups?).  

But what really depressed me was this: Why didn’t the GCP, and the local authorities tasked with approving or denying the proposal, rise above the arguments to say, “We have to do this because … Climate Change”.  Instead, greenhouse gas emissions have been pretty much absent from the discussion. Just look at the language used– while the proposal was for a “sustainable” travel zone, the charge was a “congestion” charge, and included electric and low emissions vehicles. There were good reasons for this, but the messaging around it was stupefyingly unclear. It’s as if, having declared climate emergencies at the national and local level, our authorities have dusted off their hands and said, and now let’s never speak of it again.

I’m aware that there are many experts out there who advise the “don’t say climate” approach to those working on the transition. They say that using the word pollution is better, and focusing on the effects of pollution on health. Everyone can relate to these ideas, they say, unlike the more controversial and complicated ideas around climate change. Many, they argue, still see climate change as a problem of other people in other places, or of the distant future, or as a political football.[1]

I think the experts have a point, but I think it might be an outdated one. True, citing climate change as a reason for charges does give rise to the usual arguments, the ones our current government and much of the media are fond of making. Like the one that goes “The UK’s contribution to emissions is low compared to the US and China”.[2] Or “Even if everyone in Cambridge stopped driving, it wouldn’t stop climate change”. [3]

But what I think the pundits are missing is that public views have changed. The polls show over and over that most people ARE concerned about climate change and DO want fast action to avoid disaster. Add that to this year’s almost constant litany of natural disasters – the latest two, the floods in Libya and Hurricane Idalia, are estimated to have cost more than 2000 lives and between $12 billion and $20 billion in damage, respectively – and it is only the seriously misinformed or self-serving who are still in denial that the crisis is here, now, on us and we need to do something.

But most don’t know what to do. They make the arguments about the UK’s relatively low emissions because no one is telling them otherwise, or what their role might be in fighting climate change, or how the UK could be providing an example in the wider world.

So maybe it is time we talked about it.  In fact, maybe people are just waiting for their leaders to open the conversation.  What would it look like if it was our leaders – leaders at every level from schoolboards to charity boards, small businesses to corporations, local authorities to Westminster - who were saying, “We have the biggest opportunity in all of human history, and we have to make these decisions now to protect the future of life on earth?” What if we all started saying that? What if we said it when we made choices about what to buy, how to travel, what to eat, what to support and what to oppose…and who to vote for?

I’m hoping that, if the STZ proposals get thrown out, our leadership will rise to the opportunity. Not necessarily to push through a plan a majority doesn’t want. But to make the discussion about transport a discussion about the multiple crises hitting humanity and the planet, and about our responsibility – all of us – to rise to the challenge.

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[1] London Mayor Sadiq Khan has been following this playbook - defending his expansion of the London Ultra Low Emissions Zone by highlighting the thousands of people now breathing cleaner air because of it.

[2] True on the face of it, but ignores so many factors, like air travel, the fact that we have exported almost all manufacturing of the goods we use, mostly to China, and historical emissions.

[3] Also true. But it would help slow it down a bit.

Michelle Golder

September 12th 2023

Anthony Browne’s Climate Change Optimism: Is it Justified? (May 2023)

My MP, Anthony Browne, recently posted a blog on Conservative Home with the title “Climate change. The more involved I have got, the more optimistic I have become...”

I’m very glad he decided to write directly about the crisis, and I agree with many of his points. For example, I agree that there are many reasons for optimism. Of course, how you feel about the climate and ecological crisis very much depends on the lens through which you are viewing it. If you are a mother in rural Somalia, where the worst drought in 40 years is leaving millions without food, you might well be feeling less than optimistic. Similarly, if you are a scientist studying the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is losing ice at a rate of 270 billion tons per year, or a native of Kiribati, a Pacific Island nation destined to be the first in the modern world to be swallowed by increasing storm surges, you could be excused for being a tiny bit un-cheery.

On the other hand, if you are an entrepreneur working on a transformative and potentially lucrative new technology, like the world’s most powerful wind turbine, which Mr Browne mentions in his post, you will be much more aware of the possibilities. As Mr Browne says, we do have the solutions to hand. Organisations like the Drawdown project have identified more than one hundred of the most effective strategies and technologies – including many which are nature based - which will, if implemented rapidly, lead to “Drawdown” of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere - and it is working globally to encourage their rollout. And though global emissions have continued to rise year on year despite the promises of the Paris Agreement, the progress made by large emitters like the UK and the EU is making a difference - there is reason to believe we are approaching the inflection point where emissions will begin to fall.

I also agree with Mr Browne that “pessimistic fatalism” and “counsel[s] of despair” are harmful to our children, and where they go mainstream they are terrorising many people into apathy. It’s also true that if you go on to any environmental forum online you will find those who prefer scaremongering to positive action and push conspiracies about how all the possible solutions will only be worse than the problem, because humans are basically sh**te.

However, I hope Mr Browne is also aware that once you get out of the toxic online environment, and engage with actual climate activists, you will find some of the most dynamic, solutions oriented, reasonable and well-informed people on the planet. The radicals, zealots and keyboard warriors do not, in my experience of ten years as an independent activist, represent the movement as a whole, which encompasses local eco groups, churches, professional societies and people from every age and social demographic. So it was very disappointing to read Mr Browne’s dismissal of Extinction Rebellion’s recent peaceful and joyful multi-organisation demonstration in London (see photos below) as the self-righteous posturing of a Doomsday cult. It is so misinformed that it leaves me unable to take Mr Browne’s views seriously. And that is a sad state of affairs.

So let’s put a few things into perspective.

Mr Browne’s cheery optimism comes despite the fact that he has consistently voted against new legislation aimed at tackling the UK’s emissions.

There’s evidence that taking steps to reduce emissions makes people happier, not more depressed. A low-carbon lifestyle, for example, is “more likely to involve routines—like balanced eating or hybrid working—that are known to maximize our individual happiness levels”. Research is also supporting the idea that “taking steps to protect the environment makes us feel good by fulfilling basic psychological needs, such as the sense that we are making a useful contribution to the world or acting on our own values and concerns.”

There’s a fine line between “pessimistic fatalism” and optimistic fatalism, which is a weakness Mr Browne may be prone to. In a letter to me about the EU Retained Laws Bill, Mr Browne made the odd assertion that leaving the EU would “enable us to legislate to discriminate in favour of bird and plant species that would otherwise be vulnerable to non-native species better suited to the changing climate.” In other words, our native birds are going to be out-competed by non-native species more suited to our altered climate, and his jolly solution is to legislate for…what exactly? Fighting natural adaptation to protect our native species? Instead of fighting climate change?

While there is every reason to be hopeful that we will eventually solve the problem of climate change, and do so while restoring our planet’s natural systems, we are a very long way from being out of the woods. In order to get out, we need everyone to play their part, and most importantly, we need the system change that will allow us to pivot from an extractive, linear (take stuff out of the ground, transport it across the globe, use it for a short time, dump it in landfill), inequitable (those who do the least actual work get the most benefit) and rapaciously destructive system, to a circular, restorative, distributive one. And this is not just an activist’s opinions. The Government commissioned Dasgupta Review on The Economics of Biodiversity and former Bank of England chief Mark Carney both came to similar conclusions last year, conclusions which were, sadly, pretty much ignored.

Our current trajectory, if not deflected, is, sorry Mr Browne, genuinely disastrous. We are currently on track to reach in the neighbourhood of 2.7 degrees of global warming. We’re now at just under 1.5. Every tenth of a degree has an effect, so, if you can face it, let your imagination go to what an additional 1.2 degrees is going to mean for extreme weather events, crop failures, mass migration, killer heat waves and sea level rise. Not to mention our native birds, bees and trees.

So, yes, we absolutely can still change our trajectory with immediate, strong action. But if Mr Browne and his party colleagues continue to reject the need for system change, which has to come from the top, while ignoring or ridiculing those who care the most, no amount of techno-boosterism will get the job done. We will not solve the global environmental problem. And the children he is so worried about traumatizing will be truly stuffed.

The Big One - And We Were There ( April 2023)

Tens of thousands of people from all around the UK came together in London over four days from April 21st to take part in "The Big One" and make our voices heard about the future we want - and at least ten of our members were there! With marches, workshops, public assemblies, music and dance and activities for children, the vibe was friendly and positive - but also determined. The demands of the demonstration include ending the huge fossil fuel subsidies our taxes are still paying for - £20bn more than renewables received since 2015 - (see this article for information), and instituting citizens' assemblies whose decisions will be binding on the government to decide the way forward for the climate transition.

Initiated and hosted by Extinction Rebellion, which has embraced a new strategy of non-disruptive action, the event involved over 200 co-operating organisations, including trade unions, community groups, businesses, NGO's, conservation organisations and more (see the full list here: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-big-one/).

The event received overwhelmingly positive press, with the Metropolitan Police issuing the following statement in praise of Extinction Rebellion's foresight in helping the London Marathon avoid conflict.

Earlier in the year, our group had held a general meeting in which a member of Extinction Rebellion told us about the event and XR's new policy. As a result of this, at least ten of our members attended the event over the four days, with some members attending several days. Below is a short blog of her experiences there by Haslingfield resident Katharine Woodall, and some of the photos taken by our members.

"I attended on Friday, the first day of the 4 day XR protest. I didn’t know quite what to expect but began the day in a rainy Parliament Square listening to XR co-founder Clare Farrell talk about the need for citizens assemblies on climate.

Friday was a day of protest at government departments, so we joined members of the Cambridge XR group and some of our eco group outside the Home Office.

Everywhere we went in Westminster during the day there was a very positive energy and sense of community with people coming together from across the country. There were so many colourful flags and beautiful homemade banners.

The highlights for me were hearing Caroline Lucas talk about this government’s depressing lack of urgency and ambition on climate issues. She was followed by Mike Berners-Lee, author of There is no Planet B, talking about the newly established MP Watch, which monitors and supports MPs’ understanding of climate science.

We headed home with the sounds of the samba bands still ringing and the hope that some people in government were listening".

What is My Job? Facing the New UN Report (March 2023)

A group photo from the 2018 Cambridge Rise for Climate, which involved a number of local organisations coming together to demonstrate in the Market Square.

The UN has just released yet another report on where we are at in fighting climate change – and the news isn’t great. In 2015, in Paris, most of the countries of the world agreed to a target of a maximum of 1.5 degrees of global warming. This was based on years of research, and the pleas of a number of island and low-lying countries which argued that anything above 1.5 degrees would be a death sentence for them.

Eight years later, we are at about 1.1 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, and greenhouse gas emissions have gone up and up and up.

But hope is far from lost.

For one thing, progress is being made. New technologies, the number of people making an effort to modify their own emissions, and systemic thinking across every aspect of our civilization, from transport to farming, from buildings to the role nature plays in absorbing carbon, should eventually make a difference. With a massive effort, the UN argues, we could still stay below 1.5 degrees – if we stop pumping fossil fuels out of the ground and invest in carbon capture, anyway.

And if we don’t manage that target, well, every tenth of a degree of warming still matters. As Mark Lynas lays out in his book Six Degrees, every increment affects how much ice will melt, and thus how far sea levels will rise, and it also affects the total energy of the earth’s weather systems – more heat equals more energy, equals bigger storms, equals bigger and more frequent extreme events like heat waves and hurricanes.

So there would be an enormous difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees, for example. Just think about the impacts we’ve seen at just 1.1 degree of warming – record breaking fires, floods and drought across the entire world.

Even if we do blow past the 1.5-degree goal, then, we have to continue to hope and work toward not letting it go higher – and eventually even bringing it back down again. Though obviously that will probably be tragically too late for places like Kiribati, and likely for many of our current biospheres and the creatures which live there.

A Storm of Emotions

When people first start paying attention to what’s going on they often feel enormous anger that the world didn’t act fifty years ago, when scientists began sounding the warnings about carbon dioxide and its effects on global temperature. If we’d started acting then, we’d be laughing, and many lives would have been saved. But we didn’t.

Just as often, people feel terrible grief, over the natural world so under siege, and the innocent people suffering.

I’ve certainly felt, and still feel, both of those emotions, sometimes almost unbearably.

I’m not sure, though, that either emotion is worth indulging. Anger at people of the past, who had less reason to trust the science of the time than we do, seems pointless. Like many of us, they believed and hoped that solutions would be found which wouldn’t inconvenience them. Democratic leaders had other concerns that people cared about more – like education, poverty, and conflict.

And grief…well, that’s tougher for me. But one thing that helps me is to try to grasp Earth’s long history of life. I recently found out that an ancestor of dragonflies was around a million years before the dinosaurs. Five mass global extinctions later, there are still dragonflies enchanting the summer. The few tens of thousands of years in which Earth has hosted human beings almost seem insignificant against the vast span of millennia in which plants, fish, insects and reptiles have dominated. Over and over again, life has found a way. Not the life we are used to. Not the creatures we love now. But life.

A Transition Generation

So those thoughts keep me sane, but given I have them, why do I work so hard on my local eco group? I’m only a little, ordinary person and I don’t see myself as a world changer or eco-warrior. But I do believe that everyone alive now is part of a crucial and important transition generation. We will all see huge and rapid changes in the way we live – some caused by climate change, some caused by the attempts to prevent it. Some of us will choose to embrace it – to be part of the solution in any ways we can. Others are more resistant to change – but change will come for them as well, one way or another.

In the shorter term, i.e. the next few decades, it seems very likely that many of the changes we will see will be painful. We may lose much more of our native wildlife. Our choice of diet may become limited: plants like coffee and chocolate are at high risk from climate change, and there may be crop failures of staple foods like wheat and rice. And some of what we see as our freedoms and privileges may be curtailed.

For many, that seems like the hardest loss to take. Or maybe it’s just the most immediate one?

Here in Cambridge, and across the UK, for example, there has been outrage over proposed congestion charges, or sustainable travel zones, which some have mixed up with the idea of 15-minute towns to claim that “they” want to force everyone to stay in their own neighbourhoods. And in fact schemes in cities like Canterbury are proposing to charge car drivers every time they cross a sector boundary, that is, move from one neighbourhood to another. The idea is to make car driving so expensive that people are forced to use public (or active) transport, rather like France’s recent 3 year ban on short haul flights.

People don’t like being forced, and we can argue the merits of such a scheme. But let’s at least keep our facts straight - the idea of 15-minute towns is not always or even commonly connected to the idea of charging zones. The 15-minute towns idea involves planning communities to make it easy for people find everything they need within 15 minutes of their home. They can walk, or cycle, or take a bus, and it will be quick and easy to visit the doctor, pharmacy, school, or shops.

People who have experienced this kind of modern planning approach have found it improves their lives enormously. And of course, in cases where this is combined with road charging, they can still leave their neighbourhoods and go farther in a car…it just isn’t free anymore. Just as fossil fuel companies have not had to pay for the damage their product has caused, just as all forms of production have viewed the services which nature provides (water, air, plants, minerals, pollinators) as external to their business, and therefore outside of any need for consideration, we as individuals have taken our behaviour for granted. We pay (through our taxes) for our solid waste to be disposed of, but we have felt we have the right to emit greenhouse gases for free.

So What’s My Job? Or Yours?

Here’s what I see my job, as an ordinary citizen, to be. I need to keep informed of the changes going on around me. I need to think hard about what kind of future I’d like to see for the generations to come and for the natural world. I do need to question and be involved in the changes brought by society in its attempts to fix things (or otherwise!), but always in the context of that desired future – which for me is one in which we do keep warming to 1.5 degrees or less and we foster and protect nature. I need to do as much as I can to reduce emissions and consumption I have control or influence over. And I need to prepare for the environmental changes that are now inevitable, and protect the natural world where I can.

It's quite a list. And there’s one final thought. I can’t do any of this alone. I rely on smarter people to carry out research and provide the information I need. I rely on local authorities and organisations to also keep informed, answer my questions, and use their powers to support a positive transition. I rely on my community to do all the things communities do that will get us through this – from sharing goods, services and skills; to volunteering at sports clubs and school fetes and food banks and litter picks; to supporting each other when times get tough.

It's my job to be part of that. Just like air isn’t actually free, neither is community. In creating the future, we all have a part to play.