It is now scientifically incontestable: we have two years—two—at current emission rates—before the planet overshoots its remaining carbon budget for a 66% chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C. That figure doesn’t come from a fringe report or activist blog. It’s the headline finding of a comprehensive assessment by sixty leading scientists, published in Earth System Science Data and reported by The Guardian this week. If emissions continue at 2024’s record-breaking levels, the 1.5C threshold will be breached, locking in catastrophic weather, mass migration, and suffering on an unimaginable scale.
And what is the response from the reactionary right? A sneer. A shrug. More oil. More gas. More culture war. Fewer wind turbines.
We are not dealing with ignorance. This is not about a lack of data. The figures are in: sea level rise has doubled in a decade; the oceans are hotter than ever; the Earth’s energy imbalance (how much heat the planet traps) is up 25% in just ten years. As The Guardian‘s environment editor Damian Carrington writes, even a 1.7C rise would still require a near-total global emissions drop within a decade. But emissions rose again in 2024. There is no sign—none—of the transition away from fossil fuels promised at COP28 in Dubai.
“The remaining carbon budgets are declining rapidly and the main reason is the world’s failure to curb global CO₂ emissions.”
– Prof Joeri Rogelj, quoted in The Guardian
The failure, though, is not shared equally. The ruling class of the carbon economy. The oil-funded politicians, the right-wing media barons, the fossil-fuel CEOs, have made a clear choice. They would rather see the world collapse than relinquish even a sliver of their power. To them, climate collapse is not a crisis—it is a management opportunity. A new justification for border walls, militarised policing, and corporate consolidation. A fortress world built on the ruins of the old. A world in which the dominant class will escape to their bunkers.
This is the true function of the far right’s climate denialism: not to argue in good faith, but to paralyse. They do not seek solutions. They seek stalemate, so that fossil capitalism can chug on until the last barrel. Meanwhile, they distract with nonsense about “green tyranny” and “woke windmills” while communities drown, burn, or flee.
“Things are not only moving in the wrong direction—we’re seeing acceleration.”
– Prof Piers Forster, quoted in The Guardian
The reactionary position is simple: growth without restraint, extraction without end, and suffering without consequence. So long as it’s happening to someone else. But climate collapse has no respect for nationalism or nostalgia. The floodwaters do not ask for your passport. The heatwaves do not care how you voted.
As The Guardian report makes plain, solar and wind energy are expanding, but energy demand is rising even faster. There is still time, just, to limit warming to 1.7C. But that requires a rupture, not a reform. It requires a political horizon that the far right cannot even see—because it lies beyond their death cult of infinite consumption.
They will not take us to safety. They cannot. Their politics depends on the very systems that are killing the planet. To confront the climate crisis means confronting them.
“Every fraction of warming we can avoid will result in less harm and suffering.”
– Prof Joeri Rogelj, quoted in The Guardian
The scientists, at least, still speak with clarity. The Guardian’s article is the latest in a long line of flashing red lights. The question now is not whether we’ve been warned. But whether we’re willing to fight those who’ve ignored every warning, every fire, every flood.
