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Vladimir Markin, the head of Russia's main investigating agency the Investigative Committee, told Russian news agencies that the charges had been reclassified.

Last week, 11 Nobel prize-winners wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin, urging him to drop the charges of piracy.

Mr Putin said last month that the activists had violated international law but it was "absolutely evident that they are, of course, not pirates".

"The Arctic 30 are no more hooligans than they were pirates," he said in a statement.

All 30 people who were on board the ship are in pre-trial detention in the northern port city of Murmansk until late November. They have complained of being held in harsh conditions,

They were detained when Russian security sources stormed the ship five weeks ago following a protest against drilling for oil in the Arctic.

Greenpeace denies any wrongdoing and is calling for the release of the detainees, who come from 18 countries, and the Arctic Sunrise.

Some policy experts say it can and should survive, with or without the United States.

US officials "stand completely alone on being climate deniers," Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, told me. "If you look at the speeches from Paris, all the heads of state who came -- all -- and even fossil fuel providers, identified this as a real, science-based issue that they're working to solve together."

There's only so much carbon the world can pump into the atmosphere before we're assured of screwing up the targets set in the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

By some calculations, we're only five, 10 or perhaps 20-some years away from those red lines if the world keeps polluting at the same staggering rate.

Sterman calculated that the United States pulling out of the Paris Agreement, and canceling many Obama-era climate regulations, including the Clean Power Plan, would increase global temperatures on the order of a few tenths of a degree by 2100. That assumes, however, the rest of the world keeps making aggressive cuts. "Assuming that all nations, including the US, aggressively cut emissions, would yield 1.9 degrees Celsius [of warming] by 2100," he said. "But if the US does nothing, then expected warming rises to 2.2 degrees Celsius by 2100."

Current pledges made as part of the Paris Agreement, including US commitments, put the world at about 3.4 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, according to Sterman and Climate Interactive. If the entire agreement fell apart and global emissions continued at their current clip, the planet could expect 4.2 degrees of warming.

That could be truly catastrophic. At 6 degrees of warming, for instance, "most of the planetary surface would be functionally uninhabitable," according to Mark Lynas, author of "Six Degrees."

Nearly seven in 10 registered voters in the United States say the country "should participate in the international agreement to curb global warming," according to a November 2016 survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Some NGOs and developing country experts also view talk of postponement as counterproductive. Mohamed Adow, the director of Power Shift Africa and a close observer of the talks for many years, said: “We would rather not see it cancelled until we know more about the spread of the virus. Cancelling it immediately might mean action on climate change gets ignored this year and people on the frontlines in poorer countries can’t afford that.”

Lord Stern believes any move to postpone the talks would put paid to any hope of making real progress. “At the moment we must just get on with the preparation,” he said. “This is such an urgent challenge and there is so much to do, and so much valuable work that is being done, that we can’t afford to lose the momentum.”

One key issue is that the US presidential election is due to take place a week before Cop26 begins. Donald Trump is strongly opposed to the Paris agreement and his withdrawal from it will take effect the day after the election. A new president, if there is one, could be more amenable to climate action but would not take office until January, so a postponement could allow the US to participate.

Some pre-Cop meetings are already in doubt. The UNFCCC has cancelled all meetings for the next month but a decision will have to be taken soon on an intermediate meeting set for Bonn in June. Italy is due to co-host Cop26 with the UK but its plans have been thrown into disarray by the coronavirus pandemic.

The UNFCCC also said there was no immediate move to postpone the talks. Any decision would have to be taken by the Cop Bureau, made up of elected representatives from various countries, and would also involve the Chilean government, which technically will preside over the process until the UK officially takes on the presidency in November.

A slowdown in activity during the 2009 economic downturn reduced carbon emissions and air pollution, but emissions rose 6% the following year, data from the International Energy Agency showed, as governments unleashed stimulus programs to reinvigorate growth.

the rapid changes in regions around the world resulting from measures to stop the spread of the virus could yet bring about long-term behavioral changes such as walking to work and increased teleconferencing over travel.

“Financial incentives from governments embedded in stimulus packages to move people toward using energy less and less mobility may be part of the results we are going to see after the shock is over,”

The government imposed lockdown measures in mid-March, and this week the measures were loosened to allow children under the age of 14 daily outings of up to an hour.

“The beach is a living ecosystem. And when you spray it down with bleach, you’re killing everything you come across.”

ith humans barred from the beach for the past six weeks, she had hoped the number of nests in the area would double this year. “Now I’m worried that the tractors crushed the eggs,” she said.

“Fumigating beaches with bleach in the middle of bird-breeding season or during the development of the invertebrate network that will support coastal fishing … is not one of [Donald] Trump’s ideas. It is happening in Zahara de los Atunes,” Greenpeace Spain wrote on Twitter, in reference to the US president’s recent musing on whether the injection of cleaning products could combat Covid-19.

ne municipal official, Agustín Conejo, said his actions had been motivated solely by a desire to protect children. “I recognise it was an error,” he told the broadcaster Canal Sur. “But it was done with the best of intentions.”

In another stark example of the dangers to marine life from human actions, one turtle followed was found dead on a beach in Suriname only 120km (74 miles) from the starting point, drowned after having become enmeshed in a discarded fishing net.

Estimates say more than half of all sea turtles have ingested plastic. The animals also face threats from overfishing, though they are mainly bycatch rather than targets.

“Sea turtles survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, but they might not survive us,” said Will McCallum, a campaigner at Greenpeace. “Human activity has put such severe pressure on sea turtle populations around the world that six out of the seven species are threatened with extinction. Without urgent action the situation will only get worse.”

The U.S. government is lending its support to SMR development. In September, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the first time issued a final safety evaluation report on a SMR—a critical step before a design can be approved—to NuScale

is developing its first commercial SMR for utilities in Utah and promising power by the end of the decade.

the Energy Department awarded $210 million to 10 projects to develop technologies for SMRs and beyond, as part of its Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. The agency had already awarded $400 million to various projects since 2014 “to accelerate the development and deployment of SMRs,

. Potential buyers range from U.S. utilities trying to phase out coal-fired generators to Eastern European countries seeking energy independence.

GE’s second offering, a system now in development with nuclear startup TerraPower LLC, replaces water with molten salt, similar to what’s used in some advanced solar-power arrays. Dubbed Natrium, the system runs hotter than water-cooled reactors but at lower pressure and with passive cooling, which eliminates piping and electrical systems while improving safety, according to TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque.

“When you have a really elegant design, you can get multiple benefits working together,” Mr. Levesque says. TerraPower, established by investors including Bill Gates, received $80 million of the Energy Department funding for Natrium in October.

Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other advocacy groups argue that nuclear power remains a dangerous technological dead-end that causes as many problems as it solves.

Traditional reactors grew over time to achieve greater efficiencies of scale and lower cost per kilowatt-hour because power output rose faster than construction and operating costs. “There’s no reason that’s changed,” he says, dismissing SMR makers’ promises of lower costs and increased safety

Many proposed SMR expense reductions, such as less shielding, could ultimately increase their danger, while the combined use of several modules could create new safety risks like radioactive contamination that negate gains in individual modules, he says.

Mr. Ramana also says that the technological advances like 3-D printing and digital manufacturing that make SMRs possible are doing even more to improve green renewables. “It’s a kind of treadmill race, where one treadmill is going much faster.”

although SMRs have lower upfront capital cost per unit, their economic competitiveness is still to be proven.”

the benefits are really vivid, they are really clear. Everybody agrees that the world will be better off the faster we move. And that really wasn’t the case five or 10 years ago. There was much more muddled analysis and messaging then. And I think we have to take advantage of the new unanimity and not let people fall back on the logic of status quo bias and incumbency and just think that change is expensive and difficult

david wallace-wellsMy basic feeling is that the changes that we need are all systemic. And so the things that individuals can do to make that change are primarily through the political realm, not through their individual behavior. If we want to really halt this problem and get a handle on it, it means large, large scale changes that are beyond the capacity of individuals to enact on their own.

jane coastonHow do we get our house in order? What do I as an individual or the people listening to this podcast, how do I make this happen on my level? Knowing all of that, what do I do? What do I personally need to do? Give me a thing to do, Genevieve!

If you want to learn more about personal responsibility, I recommend Jason Marks’s article in the Sierra Club magazine, “Yes, actually, individual responsibility is essential to solving the climate crisis,” and the New York Times guest essay by Auden Schendler, “Worrying About Your Carbon Footprint is Exactly What Big Oil Wants You to Do.”

david wallace-wells

I don’t know that we have to all take on a feeling of guilt for the rise of G.D.P. under neoliberalism, because I don’t know that most of us have actually even seen that money.

ultimately, the things that we need to do to really get a hold of this are way bigger than cutting your food emissions by 10 percent or 50 percent or whatever. It’s like, the three of us in this room, we can’t build an electric grid, a solar farm. We can’t make sure that there are Tesla charging stations all across the country. We can’t re-imagine land use policy or agricultural policy. We can’t put an honest price on carbon so that when you’re buying gas, you’re actually paying for the environmental damage that’s being caused or when you’re buying an airplane ticket. Those are just things that are well outside of our capacity to control

jane coastonCould you explain what climate justice means to an audience that is me?genevieve guentherBasically, it means that the global north historically has been responsible for the vast majority of carbon pollution. And the global south has been responsible for almost none of it. Since 1990, for example, the top 10 percent of earners have been responsible for 52 percent of the growth of global emissions. And the poorest, 50 percent, who largely live in the global south, have been responsible for about 7 percent of global emissions. But that hasn’t grown at all. Historically, they have contributed nothing to the exponential growth of emissions and the increased and accelerating global heating that we’re already seeing. So the idea of climate justice is that global north nations have a moral responsibility to reduce their emissions first and faster so that there is some room left in whatever carbon budget we still have for the global south to pull themselves out of poverty.

jane coastonDavid, what do you make of what Genevieve said about the messaging about good and evil there?

david wallace-wellsI would say even more importantly, we can’t set our standard at extinction. It’s not like if we survive and avoid extinction, that that’s a success. There is huge suffering between here and there. And every degree of temperature rise is going to create more suffering. And every degree we avoid can help us avoid that.

The climate crisis has begun in the United States, too. But the real violence of it is in the global south. And I would argue that the global north doesn’t see it because the news media isn’t reporting on it and because the kind of white supremacy prevents people in this country from really recognizing that this is a violence that would feel unimaginable if it happened to their children.

genevieve guentherOK, so the first part is understanding why we have to do this. And I would argue that most Americans still don’t know enough about global heating and the climate crisis.

jane coastonYeah, but and a benefit when? Because I think a lot of this messaging relies on something that, in general, people do not like, which is, you may need to do a thing or change a thing about your life for a future that we have not yet defined. From a messaging perspective, how do we message the urgency

To think about the concrete impacts, 350,000 Americans, it’s estimated, die every single year from the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. That is a death toll literally equal to the 2020 death toll from COVID.

Or is it going to take so long that, in fact, things are going to spiral out of control?

within the space of a few years, by simply refusing to accept their own impotence, they have literally remade the entire landscape of global climate politics. Like in the U.S., when we have Joe Biden who Sunrise gave an F to in the primary, talking about this as an existential threat, that is because the protests worked. And they worked in an incredibly short amount of time

I personally think the high consumption, and particularly the flying of people who are in the public eye, trying to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis, is incredibly destructive to building a political movement. They’re actually doing something extremely counterproductive in my interpretation. They’re reinforcing everybody’s cognitive dissonance with their behavior, which is also a form of speech. They’re communicating that they’re not willing to make transformative changes and not willing to support transformative policies, and that, in fact, you need to use fossil fuels even to do climate work. And so, for me, I feel like the people who need to worry about their carbon footprints insofar as anybody does are the 1 percent and people in the climate movement.

here are huge, huge health consequences from this pollution. It may be the case that air pollution may even be a bigger crisis than climate change. That is how dramatic these impacts are. They happen to be caused largely by the same thing so we can solve them at the same time, but we’re talking about rising rates of respiratory disease and coronary disease and cancers of all kinds and Alzheimer’s and dementia and ADHD and criminality and premature birth and low birth weight. And just every aspect of human flourishing is damaged by the pollution that is produced by the burning of fossil fuels

david wallace-wellsIt’s really, really stark, as Genevieve lays out, that it is the wealthy countries of the world and the wealthy people of the world who have engineered this crisis. So whenever we hear about the problem of India, the problem of electrifying sub-Saharan Africa, these are problems. We need to figure them out and do them clean in a way that doesn’t imperil the future of the planet. But those are only problems that we have to deal with now because of the development patterns that countries like ours and across northern Europe went through over the last few decades and centuries.

Half of all emissions in the entire history of humanity have come in the last 30 years. Now since Al Gore published his first book on warming, you know I often joke it’s since the premiere of “Friends,” which means that, actually, the people who have done the lion’s share of the damage to the planet are alive today. And it is true, of course, that the people who have been running Shell and Chevron and ExxonMobil have much more responsibility than I do or Genevieve does or Jane does. But it is also the case that all of us have benefited in significant ways from economic activity that has been powered by fossil fuels and to which we could have raised louder objections earlier.

genevieve guentherI think it’s worthwhile to point out that the vast majority of Americans are literally going to be richer once we have decarbonized, because their electricity, their heating, their transportation, and their health care costs are going to go down significantl

genevieve guentherPick one. Do it once a week, and things will change. First thing is vote. You can’t do that once a week, but vote in every election. Vote

some of the actions that you’re talking about, the individual actions, I think can be useful in terms of generating small scale political energy that can eventually sort of trickle up into politics. Leaders see that we’re making changes. They see that we’re demanding changes. They may feel more comfortable making those changes themselves.

We as a culture need to normalize that it’s actually healthy not to be happy in the face of climate change and that it doesn’t mean we’re failed Americans. It means that we’re actually human beings who are having an appropriate and ethical moral response to the suffering that is coming in the pipe for everybody, also our own children

Or you can donate to groups that are working on electoral politics directly, like the Environmental Voter Project or Stacey Abrams’s Verified Action

david wallace-wellsHonestly, the person I was talking to was the United States. I mean, that is the perspective that we have as a country. And as guilty as I feel as responsible as I feel, as I’m sure, Genevieve, and to some extent, Jane, you feel, all of us are actually behaving in ways that are imposing that kind of suffering on people elsewhere in the world. It’s almost unavoidable, given the systems that we live in today. And that is really horrifying. But I think the more clearly that we can see that, the more likely we are to be demanding real change of our leaders and the systems in which we live

david wallace-wellsWell, some of them can matter in limiting your carbon footprint. So if you don’t eat beef, if you don’t take airplanes, if you drive an electric car, you’re probably pretty far along in reducing your own carbon footprint. And that is one measure of climate responsibility, carbon responsibility

The ability to put your preferred candidates in office is a huge part of the climate fight

david wallace-wellsI think that this story is one about our responsibility towards other humans, in which collectively, human behavior has imperiled the future of the planet. I think as a result, we have to talk about it in terms of good and evil, that there are very obvious sides.

And it is borne disproportionately by Black and Brown and poor people.

genevieve guentherI actually agree with David. This is a systemic problem that is only going to be solved by governments and large corporations leading the transformation of our economies to zero-emission economies. That said, rich people across the globe have a responsibility, a personal responsibility, to reduce their discretionary emissions, to reduce their consumption, both for climate justice reasons and also simply because we need them to do it if we’re going to meet our emissions targets and halt global heating.

what is hopeful about these net zero pledges, even as they are greenwashing, is the fact that these companies feel pressure to make them at all, right? This is a sea change in politics. If they can’t actually transform, they’re going to be pushed out, and new incumbents are going to come in. And the question is, can we do this fast enough to halt global warming in time to preserve much of the habitable world?

The second piece is a kind of climate communication that shows people how this is going to affect them. Most people think of this as a crisis that’s for the global south or for the distant future or for our grandchildren’s grandchildren or whatever. And it’s up to every single communicator, as far as I’m concerned, to make it clear in really concrete embodied terms what this crisis is going to mean for the children who are alive today.

When I started writing about climate five years ago, I would not have thought that this kind of political change was at all possible. We are living through what is a genuinely unprecedented global climate awakening, which has totally changed the landscape of what is possible. And it really has made the world and the future look sunnier

famously last year, Drew Shindell, who’s an air pollution expert at Duke, testified before U.S. Congress saying that a green transition of the American energy system would entirely pay for itself through the public health benefits of cleaner air. You could put aside all of the climate impacts. You could put aside all the benefits of cheaper electricity. And just because we would be healthier as a result, even in the U.S. where air is already clean, the dollars and cents would add up and make that a very, very clear win for all of us

here’s another thing you can do. You can organize your workplace to ask your company to make greener business decisions or to lobby Congress for climate policies

once they’re in office, keep pressuring them. Call their D.C. offices. Call their local offices. Send them emails regularly

he dynamic is even more horrifying elsewhere in the world where other countries have much dirtier air than we do. Estimates are as high as 10 million people globally dying of air pollution every single year, 8.7 million of them from the burning of fossil fuels

then the third piece of that is really showing how making these changes that are required would be such a benefit to them.

that you have to live like a monk to make this work. That may have been, to some degree, true 25, 30 years ago when the alternative systems that we now see right around the corner were much farther away in the distance and much more expensive. But it just isn’t the case now that to green our economy will require an enormous burden

when we think of it simply in terms of, is the economy going to grow faster or is it going to go slower, I think we really, really miss the huge, huge public health consequences of continuing running the systems as we are running them today, and also the huge benefits we would get from getting off those systems

david wallace-wellsIn 2070, we’re in a net zero world. Nobody has a carbon footprint. So having more kids is not going to make one difference in either direction. And I think we’re still in a place where we can keep that goal in mind and fight to make that possible so that we don’t have to do things like reduce family size.

I had this interaction just before the pandemic at an event I did. I keep thinking about it. I think about it maybe every week, maybe every day, where I gave a talk about looking at how dire some of these situations could be. And afterwards, somebody came up to me who assured me that he was not a climate denier. And then he said, so really, how bad is it going to get? And I said, well, at two degrees, we’re talking about 150 million people dying of air pollution. And he said, but that’s out of 8 billion. And I said, well, yeah, I mean, I’m not talking about the total extinction of the human race here, but 150 million is 150 million. That’s 25 Holocausts. And he said, but out of 8 billion.

the true, are we going to make humans extinct, kind of futures that we were talking about as slim but real possibilities a few years ago, I think are much, much less likely today. And that is in large part the result of climate protests by people who started their activism within the last few years.

genevieve guentherAnd just say that the word “responsibility” has two different definitions, right? There’s the sense of responsibility as guilt. Who is responsible for this crime? Who has to pay the price? But then there’s responsibility as duty. Who’s going to take responsibility for cleaning up this mess?

There is a very small ask that can be made, which is just to support the people who support aggressive climate action. We’re talking about massive, immediate, or quasi immediate payback for all of the investments we’re making.

If you don’t have the time to do that, donate money. Donate money to organizations that are putting their bodies on the line. Here are some of them— Sunrise, Fridays for Future

finally, one of the most impactful things that you can do is simply talk about climate change in your social networks, especially when it feels most socially awkward and embarrassing. Because unless we continue to break the kind of conspiracy of climate silence that allows people to look away, we’re not actually going to have the kind of pressure internally and psychologically in people that will help them join the climate movemen

genevieve guentherWell, let me contextualize this for a moment. The concept of the carbon footprint is actually a legitimate concept in sustainability research. It was developed by two researchers in the 1990s

What is the 1 percent? In the United States, I would define the 1% as people making $450,000 a year and above. So it’s hard to imagine how much consumption is normalized among these people. It is not at all considered wasteful to buy a new SUV every two or three years as new models come out. It is not all considered extravagant to fly up to 20 times a year. It is not at all horrific to buy an entirely new wardrobe two or three times a year and throw it all away. In fact, this is considered a signal that you are in the rich group and that you are living your best life.

it actually has to be done right now. We don’t get another shot at this.

Do my personal actions, be they avoiding plastic straws or composting or calculating my personal carbon footprint, as oil companies seem to really want me to do, or switching light bulbs or becoming a vegetarian, in the scheme of averting climate change or mitigating climate change, do those actions really matter?

I think that there are certain actors who have played hugely disproportionate, often toxic, roles in that story, namely the fossil fuel industry and their allies in political power, not just in the U.S. but all around the world.

that’s not to say that that person is as culpable as the CEOs of ExxonMobil. Obviously, there’s a huge spectrum of culpability, but I think that a huge majority of Americans are understandably viewed by people elsewhere in the world as contributing to the problem as opposed to contributing to the solution, and that we should not dismiss that judgment because we happen to think, well, I was just doing it for myself, or I was just acting in the system in which I live. We should take seriously that judgment and try to think about what we can do to sort of make it right, so to speak.

But BP extracted this concept from academia and created a multimillion dollar campaign, trying to change the discourse of the climate crisis and make, as you said, Jane, everybody feel responsible for causing the climate crisis, but also feeling responsible for solving it by doing things like no longer driving or no longer flying or no longer eating beef or turning off lights or using plastic straws. And as David said, this is impossible. Even if every single one of us brought our personal carbon emissions down to zero, we would not halt global heating.

number two, join a campaign or an activist group. There are local chapters of groups called the Sunrise Movement and 350.org in many communities. If you’re really hardcore, you can join Extinction Rebellion

It will require an investment, but that will sort of pay for itself in the relatively short term. And so we’re now in a situation where a lot of people often think that moving into a sustainable future is going to make their lives suck. And the truth is that just isn’t the case, but that is what the companies that are profiting from the status quo would like you to think because nobody wants their lives to suck.

I think we need to really tell the climate story as a story of good and evil because these people have known for decades what their products were going to do. And not only did they keep producing and selling fossil fuels, they lied about it. They lied about what they knew. And they tried to do everything they could to capture our political system just to sustain their own wealth and power. I think that’s pretty bad. It’s criminal. It’s absolutely criminal.

some of the changes that you’re talking about, people are compelled to do because they don’t want to feel a part of the ugliness of the destruction of the planet, more than because they’re making a rational calculation about how best to use their time and what they can do that has the highest impact

But the fossil fuel industry, as part of their disinformation campaign, wants to make everyone feel helpless, feel overwhelmed, and wants to shift our attention away from the political action that has a chance of resolving the climate crisis to what can’t possibly work, which is focusing on our carbon footprint.

I just don’t think that that’s the end all, be all of it, because I do think that many people, even today, think, OK, I want the future to be stable and green and prosperous. But I don’t want to pay $1 more at the pump for a gallon of gas and may actually vote in an election on that basis

That said, reducing the discretionary emissions of the top 1 percent is actually a piece of the decarbonization puzzle. So, if the top 10 percent reduced their carbon emissions do

n to the level of the average European, which is still quite significant — eight tons a year — we would be about one-third of the way to decarbonizing our systems. So we emit as a globe about 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year. And this reduction in luxury consumption would reduce emissions by about 10 gigatons a year. So that is just a staggering number.

Most of the people who are listening to this podcast and nobody in this room, for sure, is responsible for causing the climate crisis. But we’re all responsible for now solving it to the best way that we can.

Greenpeace. And here are some social justice organizations — UPROSE and WE ACT. There are also two new organizations who are writing climate policy in a new way and lobbying on the Hill to get them passed. They are Climate Power and Evergreen Action.

While there is a sort of transition bump and we should have public policy that addresses it, especially for communities who are already suffering, it’s also the case that the obvious economic logic is also the obvious environmental logic here. These are no longer in tension.

for me, that answer is really exclusively through a political engagement and political activism because we really need to shake the whole infrastructure of the world. And the only people who are capable of doing that are the people who are in corridors of power in politics and the corporate worl

For Berlin, loosening its energy dependence on Russia is not simply about hitting Moscow’s main revenue stream. It’s a threat to roll back “Ostpolitik,” a totemic post-World War II policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, and by extension later Russia, that involved economic and political engagement, notably through oil and gas links.

Yet as customers desert Russia, its partnership with the oil titans of the Middle East, with which it jointly leads the OPEC+ coalition, has so far stayed intact. Russia and Saudi Arabia are the world’s top oil exporters, accounting for 29% of the global total. 

“The U.S. can try to make Saudi Arabia increase production, but why would they accept a break in the alliance, which is key for them?”

Riyadh’s OPEC+ partnership with Moscow calmed years of distrust between the two oil rivals, and saved the kingdom from relying exclusively on Washington.

“Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to switch horses mid-race when they do not know if the other horse is actually going to show up,”

Gulf Arab nations accused the U.S. of a lack of support in the face of repeated attacks by Iranian-backed militia on Saudi oil facilities and Gulf tanker traffic, and on Abu Dhabi this year. In a measure of the discord, the United Arab Emirates abstained in a U.S.-led United Nations Security Council vote to condemn Russia’s invasion.

“Now that we are in a crisis moment, we’re reaping the effect of that lack of trust that’s been building over the years,” said Karen Young, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. 

Another source of friction lies in U.S. efforts to reinstate the nuclear agreement with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

Demonstrating just how exceptional the times are, a U.S. delegation traveled to Russian ally Venezuela last weekend in an overture to a country that holds the largest known crude reserves in the world.

Venezuela has been subject to international sanctions since the Trump era that have crippled its ability to sell oil. While there is not yet talk of allowing exports to resume, President Nicolas Maduro responded by offering to turn on the taps anyway, saying that state oil company PDVSA is prepared to raise output to as many three million barrels a day “for the world.”

the U.S. visit was “unexpected, surprising, a complete change in policy orientation,” with energy as the strategic catalyst.

“But I think there is a more important geopolitical move that is redefining the West,” he added. The U.S. is looking to confine the spheres of influence enjoyed by Russia and especially China, and for Venezuela that means a gradual process “to reincorporate with the West, through energy.” 

China will continue to carry on “normal trade cooperation” with Russia, including in oil and gas, said Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesperson. China is considering buying or increasing stakes in Russian companies such as Gazprom PJSC,

Even assuming a discount on the price per barrel, state-owned importers would weigh very carefully the impact on their global business of large purchases from a country that’s subject to so many sanctions, according to Qin Yan, an analyst with research house Refinitiv.

Neither would buying energy from Moscow be an easy solution, even if it meant less pollution, said Li Shuo, a climate analyst at Greenpeace East Asia. “To change China’s current energy structure, to replace a lot of coal it uses now with Russia’s oil and gas, would be a huge project for China, and it would take time,”

In Europe, the EU is refusing to budge on its climate commitments as it seeks to slash imports from its biggest supplier this year and replace flows from Russia completely by 2027. Those efforts were given a jolt by a suggestion that Moscow might shut off gas supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe.

“We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said as she unveiled the bloc’s plans this week. 

as Scholz told the Bundestag, Russia’s attack on Ukraine means “we are in a new era.” The world today “is no longer the same world that it was before.”

This battalion of free-market thinkers has now been welcomed into 10 Downing Street. Five of the new prime minister’s closest advisers are Tufton Street alumni, including Ms. Truss’s chief economic adviser and her political secretary, and at least nine Tufton Street alumni are scattered across other major government departments. Tellingly, Mr. Littlewood says that Ms. Truss has spoken at his think tank’s events more than “any other politician over the past 12 years.”

Notoriously opaque about their sources of funding, something they defend as a right to privacy for donors, they have been found by investigative reporters to have financial links to the oil giants BP and Exxon Mobil, big tobacco companies and American libertarian groups. But the picture depicted is only partial. We simply do not know who is bankrolling the groups now at the heart of the British government.

First and foremost, they are significant operatives in Conservative circles: The Center for Policy Studies, for example, claims that it was “responsible for developing the bulk of the policy agenda that became known as Thatcherism.” Given that Margaret Thatcher herself co-founded the think tank, it’s not an idle boast. In the decades since, groups like it have multiplied as the Tufton Street network evolved from a pseudo-academic forum to an orchestrated lobbying outfit whose influence stretches well beyond the Conservative Party.

It’s common for a representative from these groups to appear on flagship current affairs programs, blandly presented as an impartial expert. There are striking parallels with America, where — as described by Jane Mayer in “Dark Money” — libertarian billionaires fund an assembly line of anti-tax, anti-regulation politics, gamely diffused through the media. In setting the terms of political debate, skewing perceptions of the state and the economy to the right, it has been a remarkably successful strategy.

Under Ms. Truss, once nicknamed the “human hand grenade” for her ideological obduracy, the libertarian right has detonated the British economy. The cost, for all but the richest, could be incalculable.

it has already racked up millions of views online and been translated into ten languages. I watched it on YouTube on Monday and can confirm it’s a dazzlingly entertaining film that distils the case against climate alarmism into a succinct 80 minutes.

‘There’s this mischievous idea that’s promoted that scientific truth is determined by consensus,’ he tells Durkin. ‘In real science, there are always arguments, no science is ever settled. It is absurd when people say the science of climate is settled. There’s no such thing as settled science, especially when it comes to climate.’

Not so, says Steve Koonin, a former scientific adviser to President Obama and now a professor at NYU. The geological record shows that for the past 500 million years the Earth was considerably warmer than it is now. In fact, we’re still in the late Cenozoic ice age, according to Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace. (Yes, he’s now in the sceptic camp.) ‘We’re at the tail end of a 50 million-year cooling period and they’re saying it’s too hot?’ he asks.

Are you under the impression the Earth has never been hotter

the film features a cast of distinguished scientists, including the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics, who gleefully take on all the sacred cows of the environmental lobby

But surely there’s no disputing that CO2, a greenhouse gas, is responsible for the 1 degree uptick in average global temperatures since the beginning of the industrial revolution

Oh yes there is, says the Nobel Laureate John Clauser, who points out that if rising CO2 levels were the cause of the temperature increase, you’d expect the former to occur before the latter. But evidence from drilling into ancient ice cores reveals CO2 only increases after the temperature starts to rise, usually following a lag of 100 year

Levels of this trace gas are far lower today (about 423 parts per million) than they were 500 million years ago (7,000 parts per million), and if CO2 is causing global warming, then why has the temperature barely risen since we started pumping out CO2 on an industrial scale in the 1940s? ‘I assert that there is no connection whatsoever between CO2 and climate change,’ says Clauser

What about the increasing frequency of extreme weather events? Bunkum, says Koonin. There were more heatwaves in the US in the 1930s than there are today; the number of forest fires is going down; there’s been no increase in the frequency of hurricanes over the past 120 years – ‘Even the IPCC admits that,’ chuckles Happer – and no observable increase in drought

For good measure, the film points out that polar bear numbers are growing and the Great Barrier Reef is thriving.