If you care about the world we are handing on to future generations, the news on Thursday morning was dramatic. This January was the warmest on record; temperatures in 18 of the past 19 months have exceeded pre-industrial averages by 1.5C. There can be no comfort that the epoch-changing climate crisis is 20 or even 10 years away. It is already upon us.

Temperatures should have been moderated this winter by cooler air over the Pacific; it did not happen. Scientists are bewildered and scared. James Hansen, doyen of climate crisis research, believes that, unless this pace of deterioration is reversed, warm ocean waters flowing from the southern to the northern hemisphere will be trapped as vast sea currents cease. Sea levels will rise to impose a civilisational threat. It is a global imperative to dial down the rate of carbon emissions.

Yet this, according to President Trump, is just climate change fanaticism. Hence his withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement, the evisceration of the country’s environmental protection regulation to boost American fossil fuel production by at least another 3m barrels a day, and Friday’s suspension of Biden’s $5bn electric vehicle (EV) charging programme. The injunction is to drill, baby, drill. Burning fossil fuels is somehow manly and pro-economic growth; American banks and investment houses that just a few years ago were signing up for concerted climate action are now taking their cue from Trump and resigning their membership in droves.

There are echoes in Britain. Nigel Farage’s........

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