A selection of new and archived journalism, commentary and interviews
The climate crisis is coming for all our ways of life, who knew?
‘Badenoch must reverse course on Net Zero before she destroys the Tories’, announced a pretty extraordinary headline in the Daily Telegraph earlier this summer. Extraordinary, because for decades the ‘house newspaper of the Conservative Party’ has been a constant platform for climate scepticism and, more recently, anti-Net Zero agitating. Even more startling was the unironic use by a Telegraph staffer of the phrase ‘runaway climate change’ in the stand-first.
What on earth was going on at the Telegraph? Was this, as some media commentators later speculated, a sign of a changing political direction for the newspaper under its new owner (the German media group Axel Springer)? Probably not, since it was business-as-usual the very next day when the Telegraph’s editor Allister Heath penned a column with the headline ‘Britain can’t stop climate change. Scrap Net Zero and embrace Mediterranean life’ (references to the ‘Mediterranean life’ were later removed, presumably when it was pointed out that large areas of southern Europe were ablaze amid the record-breaking heatwaves).
The most striking aspect of the first article, written by the Telegraph’s economics editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, was the specificity about what runaway climate change directly threatened: namely, “the Conservative way of life”. The gist of the piece was that opposing Net Zero policies risked economic ruin as climate-driven impacts like broken supply chains and uninsurable property destroyed the foundations of traditional Tory values (leading to the collapse of the Conservative Party).
In the weeks after publication, wildfires would destroy homes in Stourbridge, Worcester, Stoke-on-Trent and Birmingham and ravage 380 acres of the Dunwich Heath nature reserve. Back to back heatwaves would leave much of the country parched and brittle. Parish churches photographed from the air looked as if they had been stranded mid-Sahara. The “invincible green suburbs” famously evoked by John Major now appeared anything but invincible.
Climate scientists once expected that low-lying, farming-dependent nations in the global south would to bear the brunt of early climate crisis impacts. The really scary stuff (ecosystem collapse, global crop failures, mass population displacements and the rest) still looked comfortably over the horizon, unlikely to affect us in Britain before well into the second half of the century. But more recent data shows that Europe is now the fastest-warming continent, heating up at twice the global average rate. We all saw the consequences of this (wildfires, thousands of excess deaths, drastic crop yield reductions) this summer. As Professor Matthew Agarwala, chair of sustainable finance at the University of Sussex Bennett Institute, has noted “climate breakdown is coming faster and harder than even the most dire of earlier predictions”.
Faced with the increasingly unarguable reality of the climate crisis, opponents of climate action have changed tack, moving the political battleground from the existence of the problem to the costs and feasibility of the proposed solution (Net Zero), insisting that climate adaption and carbon capture technologies will obviate the need for major carbon emission reductions and lifestyle changes. But these arguments are fast running out of road too.
The limits of climate adaption are now predicted to be reached and passed much sooner than thought. Profound and lifestyle altering changes will be wrought on all of us by climate breakdown and the costs of tackling climate related ‘natural’ disasters could be economically crippling (one estimate from research cited by the Financial Times put this at $450 billion annually).
The polarising politics of climate change and doctrinal objection to behavioural change (nothing must interfere with our consumption driven lifestyles and economies) are paralysing global efforts to tackle the principal driver of global heating (dangerously high carbon emissions and consequent heat trapping) and speed up vital adaptions to protect health, livelihoods and homes. The framing of next zero by right-leaning critics as ‘eco-dogma’ or a leftist plot compounds the problem.
Now, add to this mix the fatalistic narrative propounded by Allister Heath that “the global fight on climate change has failed” and there is no point in taking action. The contorted bravado of “embracing Mediterranean life” (and invitations to “just enjoy the warm weather” from other Net Zero critics) plays into a wearisome characterisation of Net Zero supporters as wimps and snowflakes. The Telegraph even designates garden flowers as either “heatwave heroes or wimps” (hydrangeas and roses respectively just in case you’re wondering). But even when the newspaper is mourning the ‘slow death of the English garden’, it can’t quite bring itself to say that it is the climate crisis that is hastening its demise. Meanwhile, the famously hot summer of 1976 is routinely invoked as a example of the fortitude we used to show in the face of heatwaves, despite being an extreme anomaly in a much cooler world, and an argument that climate change is not real (a fixation that the sustainable energy specialist Sam Kimmins has suggested should be known as ‘1976 derangement syndrome’).
Unavoidably, amid the highly factionalised Net Zero debate, the source and context of climate commentary becomes significant. It is because Evans-Pritchard’s warning about Kemi Badenoch’s anti-Net Zero stance appeared in the Daily Telegraph that it was so widely noticed – and thoroughly unpacked.
Another much bigger intervention in the climate debate might yet have the power to shift attitudes on the political right. It comes from a slightly different direction, in that its focus is biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. These phenomena and climate change are deeply connected in a destructive feedback loop where each crisis directly accelerates the other. Commissioned by the last Conservative government and produced by the cross-departmental Joint Intelligence Committee Global biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security was released as a 14-page shortened version after publication of the full-length report was halted by Downing Street officials over fears that it was “too negative”.
The report is extraordinarily blunt. Its authors, who grade national security outcomes with either high, medium or low confidence ratings conclude that “every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse – meaning irreversible loss of function beyond repair” (‘high confidence’). They state that “severe degradation or collapse of critical ecosystems would highly likely result in water insecurity, severely reduced crop yields, a global reduction in arable land (and) fisheries collapse … and increased risk of novel zoonotic diseases” (‘high confidence’). And they conclude that “cascading risks” of ecosystem degradation are “likely to include geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources” (moderate risk).
A report by Greenpeace or the IPPC on ecosystem collapse will be invisible to many people precisely because of its provenance. But a report compiled by a committee on which the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCQH sit will maybe land differently. The committee’s findings are slowly finding their way into the UK national media (even if the Telegraph has scrupulously avoided mentioning the report), and are now likely to reach an international audience after Andy Burnham shared them with the United Nations General Assembly in September). The UK’s security services are not the only agencies who are warning about the impacts of worsening climate and nature crises. Senior figures in US intelligence have long argued that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that directly jeopardises national security.
Various efforts have been made to reframe the climate debate and refresh the vocabulary used to define and describe the climate crisis. There is a view inside climate circles that the term Net Zero has now become so toxic that it should no longer be used. Even the titular UK Commons Select Committee on Energy Security and Net Zero has quietly dropped the ‘Net Zero’ part of its name. Urgency around climate action is now commonly invoked in ways that emphasise ‘resilience’, ‘energy security’, ‘energy independence’ and ‘household savings’.
Some researchers and political leaders have gone a further by making the case for climate action in the form of appeal to patriotic duty. Rather than allowing environmentalism always to be framed as a radical lifestyle sacrifice, this strategy presents climate action as a way to defend and preserve a country’s established “way of life” against an existential threat. A study led by Katherine Mason, a psychologist based at New York University, trialled communications techniques that flip conventional climate messaging so that, rather than asking people to make l sacrifices they are encouraged to do things to protect the ways of life they cherish that are directly threatened by runaway climate change.
Some climate organisations warn that talking about environmental issues in an overtly patriotic way – so-called ‘green nationalism’ framing – risks backfiring, and could potentially lead to further misunderstandings about the mechanics of climate change, and misplaced ideas about protective borders.
It is often been said, about climate change, that the laws of physics are indifferent to politics. In the same way, different types of political framing of the climate crisis will clearly not alter its material impacts. But finding effective ways to defuse the intense politicisation of the debate around climate change is vital. It is becoming ever clearer, even if belatedly to Daily Telegraph columnists, that the climate crisis is a grave and potentially existential threat to all our ways of life. Comprehensive decarbonisation of our economies and lifestyles remains our best chance of preserving a liveable planet and averting catastrophe. Maybe just don’t call it Net Zero.
October 2026. First published at Natural Newsdesk
