There is “no sign” of the transition away from burning fossil fuels that was pledged by the world’s nations a year ago, with 2024 on track to set another new record for global carbon emissions.

The new data, released at the UN’s Cop29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, indicates that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature target and limiting “increasingly dramatic” climate impacts on people around the globe.

The world’s nations agreed at Cop28 in Dubai in 2023 to “transition away” from fossil fuels, a decision hailed as a landmark given that none of the previous 27 summits had called for restrictions on the primary cause of global heating. On Monday, the Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, told the summit in Baku: “History will judge us by our actions, not by our words.”

The rate of increase of carbon emissions has slowed over the last decade or so, as the rollout of renewable energy and electric vehicles has accelerated. But after a year when global heating has fuelled deadly heatwaves, floods and storms, the pressure is on the negotiators meeting in Baku to finally reach the peak of fossil fuel burning and start a rapid decline.

Cop29 will focus on mobilising the trillion dollars a year needed for developing nations to curb their emissions as they improve the lives of their citizens and to protect them against the now inevitable climate chaos to come. The summit also aims to increase the ambition of the next round of countries’ emission-cutting pledges, due in February.

The new data comes from the Global Carbon Budget project, a collaboration of more than 100 experts led by Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, at the University of Exeter, UK. “The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked. Time is running out and world leaders meeting at Cop29 must bring about rapid and deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions.”

Prof Corinne Le Quéré, at the University of East Anglia, UK, said: “The transition away from fossil fuels is clearly not happening yet at the global level, but our report does highlight that there are 22 countries that have decreased their emissions significantly [while their economies grew].” The 22 countries, representing a quarter of global emissions, include the UK, Germany and the US.

The calculation of 2024 emissions is based on the data available up to October and estimates for the final months of the year, which have been accurate in the past. More than 37bn tonnes will be emitted in 2024, about 4m tonnes a minute.

Gas emissions show the biggest annual increase, 2.4%, thanks to increased use in China and elsewhere. Oil burning increased by 0.9%, driven in particular by international flights, while coal emissions are expected to rise marginally by 0.2%.

The emissions of China, the world’s biggest polluter, are expected to rise slightly. “It has had another record year of growth in renewable power, but coal power also kept growing due to even faster growth in electricity demand from hi-tech industries and residential consumption,” said Jan Ivar Korsbakken, at Center for International Climate Research (Cicero) in Norway. Emissions from oil in China have probably peaked owing to the boom in electric vehicles.

Emissions from the second biggest polluter, the US, are expected to decline slightly, with coal continuing its decline to its lowest level in 120 years, but offset by an increase in gas burning. Coal emissions are falling even faster in the European Union, driving a 3.8% drop in emissions. However, coal burning is increasing in India as its economy grows strongly, leading to a 4.6% rise.

The Global Carbon Budget also calculates the emissions from the destruction of forests, some of which are compensated for by the regrowth of trees elsewhere. These emissions have declined by about 20% over the last decade. However, they rose in 2024 because of the drying effect of El Niño, which increased droughts and wildfires in key regions.

Most of the emissions from deforestation comes from Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Much of these emissions result from the export of goods to the global north, for example soya beans from South America going to China and to Europe,” said Prof Julia Pongratz, at the University of Munich, Germany.

Overall, the combined emissions from both fossil fuels and deforestation will reach another record high in 2024. “There is a feeling that a peak in global fossil CO₂ emissions is imminent, but it remains elusive,” said Dr Glen Peters, also at the Center for International Climate Research. “The world continually finds ways to burn ever more fossil fuels.”

Romain Ioualalen, at Oil Change International, said: “At Cop28, all countries pledged to transition away from fossil fuels but, on the ground, we have witnessed the opposite: new oil and gas projects are being approved around the world, in complete defiance of climate science.”

“At Cop29, we need to see countries come to the table with [commitments] that end fossil fuel expansion and accelerate renewable energy,” he said. The host of Cop29, Azerbaijan, is planning a major expansion in gas production in the next decade.

Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, Donald Trump said on Tuesday.

Despite the name, the department will not be a government agency. Trump said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy will work from outside the government to offer the White House “advice and guidance” and will partner with the Office of Management and Budget to “drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.” He added that the move would shock government systems.

Trump said the duo “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.

It is not clear how the organization will operate. It could come under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which dictates how external groups that advise the government must operate and be accountable to the public.

Federal employees are generally required to disclose their assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest, and to divest significant holdings relating to their work. Because Musk and Ramaswamy would not be formal federal workers, they would not face those requirements or ethical limitations.

Musk had pushed for a government efficiency department and has since relentlessly promoted it, emphasizing the acronym for the agency: Doge, a reference to a meme of an expressive Shiba Inu and the name of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which Musk promotes. Trump said the agency will be conducting a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, and making recommendations for drastic reforms”.

Trump said their work would conclude by 4 July 2026, adding that a smaller and more efficient government would be a “gift” to the country on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, is a wealthy biotech entrepreneur whose first time running for office was for the Republican party nomination last year. After dropping out of the race, he threw his support behind Trump. He told ABC earlier this week that he was having “high-impact discussions” about possible roles in Trump’s cabinet.

He also has no government experience, but has pushed for cost-cutting in the corporate sector. After building a stake in the struggling online media firm Buzzfeed, he urged the company in May to cut staff and hire conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson.

Musk, speaking to reporters last month, stated a goal of reducing government spending by $2tn. Practically speaking, experts say those cost cuts could result in deregulation and policy changes that would directly impact Musk’s universe of companies, particularly Tesla, SpaceX, X and Neuralink.

Trump had made clear that Musk would likely not hold any kind of full-time position, given his other commitments.

“I don’t think I can get him full-time because he’s a little bit busy sending rockets up and all the things he does,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan in September. “He said the waste in this country is crazy. And we’re going to get Elon Musk to be our cost-cutter.”

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the only British writer shortlisted this year, has won the 2024 Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction.

Harvey’s tale of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station was “unanimously” chosen as the winner after a “proper day” considering the six-strong shortlist, according to judging chair, the artist and author Edmund de Waal. “Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share”.

“I was not expecting that,” said Harvey in her acceptance speech. “We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It was just one swear word 150 times.”

She went on to dedicate her win to those who “speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace”.

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a “finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration”, wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

At 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the prize in its history; it is four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979. Asked whether the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said “absolutely not”, adding that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”.

Harvey said that she nearly gave up on writing Orbital because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” She said that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel”, she said.

Orbital was bookmaker William Hill’s joint favourite to win, along with Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. James was the favourite at Ladbrokes, and critics agreed that Everett was most likely to take home the prize. With Everett being the only man on the shortlist, this year marked the first time that five women were shortlisted in the prize’s 55-year history. Taking home the £50,000 prize on Tuesday evening, Harvey has become the first woman to win the award in five years. Asked what she would spend the prize money on, Harvey said that she needs a new bike and would like to visit Japan.

Harvey was previously longlisted for the Booker prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. Orbital is her fifth, following All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind. She has also written a memoir on insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, which was published in 2020.

Shortlisted with Harvey and Everett were Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, Anne Michaels for Held, Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep and Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional.

Alongside De Waal on this year’s judging panel were novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician Nitin Sawhney. “As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share,” said De Waal. “We wanted everything.”

“Orbital is our book,” he added. “Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”

The winner was chosen from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. To be eligible, books had to have been written originally in English by an author of any nationality, and published in the UK or Ireland. Before 2014, only books by writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible.

One of last year’s judges, the comedian Robert Webb, called the task of reading every submitted book “impossible”, adding that “you finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.” However, De Waal said this year’s judges “read every single one fully”.

Last year, Irish writer Paul Lynch took home the award for his dystopian novel Prophet Song. Other recent winners include Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Douglas Stuart. The last time a woman was announced as winner was in 2019, when Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood were named joint winners.

This year has been “a masterclass in human destruction”, the UN secretary general has said as he reflected on extreme weather and record temperatures around the world fuelled by climate breakdown.

António Guterres painted a stark portrait of the consequences of climate breakdown that had arisen in recent months. “Families running for their lives before the next hurricane strikes; workers and pilgrims collapsing in insufferable heat; floods tearing through communities and tearing down infrastructure; children going to bed hungry as droughts ravage crops,” he said. “All these disasters, and more, are being supercharged by human-made climate change.”

Guterres was addressing scores of world leaders and high-ranking government officials from nearly 200 countries gathered in Azerbaijan for the Cop29 UN climate summit. Over a fortnight of talks, nations will try to find ways to raise the vast sums of money needed to tackle the climate crisis.

Developing countries want guarantees of $1tn a year in funds by 2035 to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.

The talks have been overshadowed by the re-election of Donald Trump, an avowed climate denier, to the US presidency. Although leaders including the UK’s Keir Starmer, Barbados’s Mia Mottley and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed the summit, the heads of government of most of the world’s biggest economies stayed away.

Starmer confirmed stringent new plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as revealed by the Guardian, which were praised by campaigners and experts. The UK is one of the first leading economies to present such a plan, months ahead of a UN deadline of next February.

The cut, of 81% by 2035 compared with 1990 levels, will be partly met by decarbonising the electricity sector, but the government is also likely to have to add new policies to encourage public transport and walking, and a switch from gas heating to electric heat pumps.

Starmer told journalists at Cop29 that this need not involve drastic changes to people’s lifestyles, though the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, had previously recommended a 25% cut in meat and dairy consumption by 2030 and a 35% cut in meat consumption by 2050.

Rebecca Newsom, a senior policy adviser at Greenpeace International, said: “Starmer’s commitment to a relatively ambitious new target for cutting emissions will inject new momentum into the talks and he is right to highlight the huge opportunity offered by the green transition to cut bills, unlock investment and create jobs across the UK. But much clearer plans are still needed – particularly more investment for those working in offshore oil and gas to transition to renewable energy.”

Governments were told at Cop they must take concerted action on reducing greenhouse gases or face economic disaster that could threaten them electorally.

Simon Stiell, the UN’s top climate official, said politics, economics and the climate were now fatally entwined. Governments may be feeling the consequences of the worst inflation for decades but far more serious consequences were in store.

“Worsening climate impacts will put inflation on steroids,” Stiell said, tuning in to some of the economic fears that have helped deliver a series of electoral victories to rightwing parties around the world in the past year.

“The climate crisis is a cost-of-living crisis, because climate disasters are driving up costs for households and businesses. Climate finance is global inflation insurance.”

Rather than being an issue of protecting future generations, tackling greenhouse gas emissions was the only way to save the global economy in the short as well as the long term, Stiell said. “There has been a seismic shift in the global climate crisis. Because the climate crisis is fast becoming an economy killer – right now, today, in this political cycle,” he said.

Ilham Aliyev, the president of the Cop’s host nation, Azerbaijan, struck a different note. Azerbaijan has been a sizeable producer of oil and gas since the mid-19th century. Fossil fuels make up 90% of the country’s export income, and the infrastructure of oil and gas extraction is everywhere in evidence around the capital, Baku: a flaring refinery lights up the city’s night-time skyline, oil wells dot the suburbs, and tankers lumber across the Caspian Sea to its port. Even the country’s national symbol is a flame.

Aliyev, whose family is thought to have made billions from the country’s natural assets, called Azerbaijan’s oil and gas “a gift from God” and made clear the extraction would continue.

“As president of Cop29, of course we will be a strong advocate for green transition, and we are doing it,” he told the event. “But at the same time, we must be realistic.”

He attacked critics of the country – an autocratic state that has been found in NGO assessments to be one of the world’s most corrupt – and defended its use of its resources. “Countries should not be blamed [for having oil and gas deposits] and should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market, because the market needs them. The people need them,” he said.

His words contrasted with pleas from dozens of developing country leaders for urgent action to stem the rising tide of CO₂ emissions and rescue them from the consequences.

Hilda Heine, the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a tiny, low-lying atoll group in the Pacific that is threatened with inundation if temperatures rise much higher, criticised rich countries for telling the poor they must cut greenhouse gas emissions while failing to provide access to the finance that would enable that.

“It is in our blood to know when a tide is turning,” she said. “And on climate, the tide is turning today.”

On Monday the talks had got off to a slow start when officials tried to clear up some technical issues before the leaders arrived on Tuesday. A resolution on the trade of carbon offsets was passed, to the relief of the hosts, but this was criticised by some civil society groups who said it was flawed and had been rushed through.

The talks will continue on Wednesday when more world leaders including Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan will give addresses.

Late-night hosts talk Donald Trump’s re-election as president, Democratic infighting and a promotion mishap for the new Wicked movie.

The Daily Show

In his first monologue since Donald Trump won both the electoral college and the popular vote in the US presidential election, Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show shellshocked. “It turns out the election was stolen by more people voting for Donald Trump,” he joked. “It’s quite a caper.

“It’s a delight to hear about why it happened from so many people who were so wrong about what was going to happen,” he added, referring to the rampant blame game among Democrats, as evidenced by several clips of pundits blaming the “far left”.

“I only have one problem with the woke theory,” Stewart said. “I just didn’t recall seeing any Democrats running on woke shit.

“And don’t forget about Kamala Harris. It’s not like she was exactly waving around her NPR tote bag,” Stewart said ahead of a clip of the vice-president saying: “I have a Glock.”

“They acted like Republicans for the last four months,” Stewart bemoaned. “They wore camo hats and went to Cheney family reunions. Do you know how dangerous it is to wear a hunting hat around Cheney?!

“Democrats were mostly running against an identity that was defined for them based on a couple of months of post-George Floyd, defund-the-police Instagram posts from four years ago,” he continued. “What happened was the country felt like government wasn’t working for them, and that the Democrats in particular were taking their hard-earned money and giving it to people who didn’t deserve it as much as them. So the Democrats got shellacked.

“I’m sure any robust examination of better policies is very welcome. But I just want to please assure people: this isn’t forever,” he concluded. “This is not the end. We have to regroup, and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create a better society for our children, for this world, for this country, that we know is possible. It’s possible.”

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers looked into how “Democrats are doing what they do best: turning on each other”.

Many liberal politicians have expressed their opinion on what went wrong this election. Bernie Sanders, for one, said it was “no great surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them”.

“Bernie’s argument basically boils down to this: voters want someone who has the vibe of an outsider, who can direct the voters’ anger against powerful people like billionaires and political elites,” said Meyers. “Otherwise, a racist demagogue will come along and fill the void by scapegoating vulnerable groups like migrants, which is exactly what Trump did.”

Meyers noted that Harris “did campaign on many pro-worker policies like raising the minimum wage, making it easier to unionize or taking on corporate price gouging. But now some Democrats are saying those policies may have been overshadowed by the decision to elevate Republicans like Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney.”

And some Democrats, such as the New York congressman Tom Suozzi, claim that the party is too beholden to the “far left” and have begun supporting Republican transphobic talking points.

“To anyone suggesting Democrats could win elections by throwing trans people under the bus, let me just say: fuck off,” said Meyers. “If you’re choosing this moment to scapegoat and demonize vulnerable people rather than aim your criticism at the powerful elites and moneyed interests who paved the way for the return of Trump and stand to benefit from his second term, you’re way off.”

Stephen Colbert

On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert opened with a humorous story, as Wicked-themed dolls from Mattel are being pulled from stores after the company mistakenly listed a porn site on the packaging for the movie souvenir. Instead of printing the website for the movie, WickedMovie.com, the packages cited a different website with more than 6,000 scenes of “wicked” porn.

Anyone who clicked on the offending link was directed to a page requiring users to be 18 years or older; those that clicked enter landed on a promotion page for the porn movie titled Kenzie Loves Girls 2. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions, but I’ll just tell you right off: no, you do not have to have seen Kenzie Loves Girls 1 to understand the plot of Kenzie Loves Girls 2,” Colbert joked.

Mattel issued a press release apologizing for the “unfortunate error” and promised “immediate action to remedy this”.

“Adding ‘for a handy link to our full press release, please go to handyfullrelease.com. And we did it again, didn’t we?’” Colbert joked.

In political news, Trump announced his new chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who was also his 2024 campaign manager. “So she was the one who put Trump in a garbageman costume and had him dance to Ave Maria, and it worked, and I don’t know what anything means anymore,” said Colbert.

Wiles “may not be the worst choice for this job – and not just because the worst choice was elected president”, Colbert added, because during the campaign, Wiles reportedly worked to keep particularly divisive and fringe conservative figures out of Trump’s orbit. “For instance, she lured Rudy Giuliani away from Trump using a bottle of cabernet dressed up as a sexy lady,” he joked.

Jimmy Kimmel

And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel looked ahead to the transition of power. According to the Presidential Transition Enhancement Act, the incoming president has to sign a pledge saying he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while he’s in office. “Which is hilarious,” said Kimmel. “It’s like asking a bear to sign something promising to protect the salmon.”

Trump’s team has missed multiple deadlines to sign this, dating back to September. “Of course, he’s being difficult about signing an ethics pledge because he’s not going to behave ethically,” said Kimmel. “This is the White House version of Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The same thing happens over and over again.”

Trump actually signed the act into law, “so he’s breaking his own law, which is a bucket list item for sure”, said Kimmel.

Trump and his team still say they intend to sign the pledge, but Kimmel was skeptical. “Come on – we still haven’t seen his tax returns,” he said. “We’ve heard his penis described in excruciating detail, we still don’t know how many dependents he claims.”

The judge in Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal hush-money case has postponed deciding on whether to throw out the president-elect’s conviction on presidential immunity grounds.

Judge Juan Merchan told Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday that he’d delay the ruling until 19 November after defense and prosecutors submitted a joint letter asking for a postponement.

The postponement followed numerous successful attempts to delay Trump’s case. Earlier this year, he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a scheme to influence the 2016 election.

The verdict came on 31 May – following fewer than 12 hours of jury deliberations in the unprecedented first criminal trial of a US president, former or sitting. The outcome marked a potentially stunning blow to Trump, then the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

The campaign for Joe Biden, who ultimately withdrew his re-election bid, said “no one is above the law” in an email blast shortly after the verdict.

“In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law. Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” Michael Tyler, Biden’s communications director, said.

Trump’s criminal case portrayed a man who did not seem befitting of the presidency. Prosecutors said that Trump falsely recorded reimbursements he made to then lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payoff to adult film star Stormy Daniels, to silence her about an alleged affair with Trump, as “legal expenses”.

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said that these falsifications were made to hide Trump’s violation of New York state election law, which criminalizes promoting the election of any person to office through illegal means.

Prosecutors said those unlawful means were the $130,000 payout to Daniels. The payout was, in essence, an illicit campaign contribution, as it was carried out for the benefit of Trump’s 2016 bid – exceeding the $2,700 individual contribution cap.

But Trump, whose poll numbers remained steady throughout the trial, did not lose support. He ultimately became the Republican nominee and, on 5 November, bested Kamala Harris.

Trump was originally scheduled to be sentenced on 10 July. Then came the 1 July US supreme court ruling that granted sitting presidents broad immunity for official acts taken during their time in office.

Trump urged Merchan to delay his sentencing in light of this ruling. His legal team pushed to challenge Trump’s conviction, citing the supreme court decision.

Merchan agreed to mull over the legalities and pushed back the proceeding until 18 September “if such is still necessary” given the supreme court decision. Trump’s attorneys in August asked for still more time, saying that they would need it to possibly appeal Merchan’s decision.

Merchan on 6 September delayed Trump’s sentencing yet again until 26 November – after the election – saying the situation was “fraught with complexities”. He said this decision was meant “to avoid any appearance – however unwarranted – that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the defendant is a candidate”.

Trump’s lawyers argued over the weekend that there are “strong reasons for the requested stay, and eventually dismissal of the case in the interests of justice”, according to the aforementioned letter.

Trump’s election victory has derailed his other criminal cases. Special prosecutor Jack Smith is winding down the federal election interference and classified documents cases against Trump.

The state-level election case in Fulton county, Georgia, is on hold pending appeal, following revelations that district attorney Fani Willis had hired as a prosecutor a man with whom she had an affair. Even if the proceeding survived appeal, proceedings are all but guaranteed to languish until 2029.

More details soon …

A friend recently asked: “Do you think the United States will survive the anger of white men?” As blunt as the question is, the core element is not so far-fetched. In fact, the majority of white men (and women) who voted in the presidential election in 2024 have rallied around a man who has called for the “termination of the constitution”, vowed to be a “dictator”, and threatened to deploy the US military against Americans. They support a man who is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a proven liar, who has been fined nearly half a billion dollars for fraud, who incited an insurrection that injured 140 police officers, and who mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic causing hundreds of thousands to die needlessly.

The fact that Donald Trump’s candidacy was even viable, given that horrific track record, was because of the support of white men. White men, whose anger was on full display at Madison Square Garden as they spewed racist, misogynistic venom. White men who attacked poll workers and also voters of Kamala Harris. White men who chafed at the thought that their wives and girlfriends would not vote for the man who thought it was “a beautiful thing” that reproductive rights had been destroyed. And, as the New York Times reported, the downwardly mobile, frustrated “white men without a degree, [who] have been surpassed in income by college-educated women”.

And let’s be clear. Trump has laid out an agenda that will provide the “wages of whiteness” to his male supporters but very little else. The racist hate that undergirds Maga can only provide threadbare comfort. The planned enormous tariffs, the rollback on workplace, food and environmental safety regulations, the dismantling of labor protections, the planned deportation of tens of millions of undocumented people and naturalized citizens, the assault on reproductive rights and alignment with dictators – all of this will destroy the economy, explode the deficit and leave the United States severely isolated and weakened.

This is nothing new. White male anger, especially at the nation’s inclusion of African Americans, has repeatedly privileged white supremacy over the viability of the United States. During the war of independence, when the nation was fighting to become the United States, South Carolina’s government fumed at Congress’s request to arm the enslaved and give them their freedom in exchange for fending off a British force that was more than 10 times the size of what those in Charleston could muster. Government officials flat out refused and barked that they weren’t sure that the US “was a nation worth fighting for” and would rather take their chances with the king of England. In short, enslaving those of African descent was infinitely more important than the United States.

Later on, during the subsequent battles over drafting the constitution, far too many white slaveholding men were willing to hold the United States hostage unless they got their way. That meant reinforcing slavery and the power of slaveholders, despite the document’s language about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. They threatened. They raged. They schemed. And they succeeded.

The three-fifths clause, which partially counted each enslaved human being by that fraction, gave the slaveholding south disproportionate and unearned power in the US House of Representatives. The Fugitive Slave Clause allowed them to hunt down beyond their state borders those seeking that elusive freedom from bondage. The additional 20 years of the Atlantic Slave Trade meant they could secure more human cargo directly from Africa to engorge the coffers of those placing racialized slavery above democracy.

The disastrous contradictions embedded in the founding of the United States could not help but erupt into civil war. Once again, a group of white men were angry. Angry that the country had elected a man who did not want to see slavery spread beyond the South. Angry that Abraham Lincoln’s position meant a diminution of the south’s national political power. Angry that Lincoln was a Republican, a party founded on anti-slavery. So, in cold, calculated anger they attacked the United States of America. They set out to destroy it.

They did not succeed. But that war sowed the dragon’s teeth that undermined the promise of a true multi-racial democracy and led to the horrors of Jim Crow. When the need for correcting the US’s decidedly unequal democracy ran headlong into the threat of nuclear annihilation during the cold war, the choice should have been obvious. But, once again, white men’s anger put the United States in jeopardy.

In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, a satellite, which proved that the USSR unexpectedly had the capabilities to launch its nuclear arsenal across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The US was no longer safe. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by proposing the National Defense Education Act, which would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into universities so the US would have the “brainpower to fight the cold war”.

The bill was shepherded through Congress by two Alabama legislators, the representative Carl Elliott and the senator J Lister Hill. Both wanted the money but neither wanted what came with it. In other words, they wanted to continue to deny admission to African Americans to their racially exclusive universities, such as Ole Miss, LSU, the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama. If this was about educating those who could give the US an edge in the cold war, then limiting that access by race was folly.

Yet Elliott and Hill, both signatories to the virtually insurrectionist Southern Manifesto, which vowed to use every weapon at the congressional membership’s disposal to stop Brown v Board of Education from darkening their states’ doorsteps, refused to move the bill forward. They demanded, instead, that Eisenhower provide assurances that those hundreds of millions of dollars would be as whites-only as their universities. Faced with the dilemma of Jim Crow or possible nuclear annihilation, the angry white men chose to protect Jim Crow, not the United States.

Similarly, today, despite the warnings from generals who served with Trump, police officers who endured the attacks on January 6, and a God-fearing then vice-president Mike Pence who was targeted for a hanging with gallows constructed during the insurrection, the angry white men who propped up Trump’s return to the White House ignored everything they say they valued – the military, law enforcement and God – to give into the rage of white grievance, the “pastiche of sweaty anger” that the Trump-Vance campaign peddled, and to the fear and violence embedded in the “great replacement” theory.

Once again, unfortunately, the anger about a multi-racial democracy has put the viability of the United States in jeopardy.

Shell has won its appeal against a landmark climate judgment by a Dutch court, which in 2021 ordered the fossil fuel company to sharply reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

A court of appeal ruled on Tuesday that, while Shell does have a “special responsibility” to cut its emissions as a big oil company, this would not be achieved by imposing a specific legal goal.

Shell had appealed against a lower court ruling in 2021 that it must cut its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of 2030 compared with 2019 levels. It was the first such ruling against a company in the world.

Shell’s chief executive, Wael Sawan, welcomed the appeal decision, saying it was “the right one for the global energy transition, the Netherlands and our company”.

The case was brought by Milieudefensie, the Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth, and more than 17,000 co-plaintiffs.

“This hurts,” said the director of Milieudefensie, Donald Pols. “At the same time, we see that this case has ensured that major polluters are not immune and has further fuelled the debate about their responsibility in combating dangerous climate change. That is why we will continue to tackle major polluters, such as Shell.”

Shell was originally told it must slash emissions within its own operations, as well as those of its suppliers and buyers, in line with the Paris climate agreement.

During its appeal, Shell argued in court that corporate emissions were a matter for politicians, not the judiciary, and that any fossil fuels it chose not to extract would simply be exploited by another company.

The appeals court said Milieudefensie had the right to bring such a claim even though political choices must be made to combat dangerous climate change.

But it was not convinced that a reduction obligation imposed on a specific company would have the effect of limiting emissions from its customers, “especially if this reduction obligation can also be realised by selling less fossil fuels”.

Milieudefensie had accused Shell of failing to comply with the initial court ruling, which explicitly said the company should begin to act on the judgment immediately regardless of any appeal.

The NGO gave evidence to the court that, despite increasing its volume of renewables, Shell was also planning to develop hundreds of new oil and gas fields despite the International Energy Agency warning against investments in any new fossil fuel extraction.

The court said it was “reasonable to expect oil and gas companies to take into account the negative consequences of a further expansion of the supply of fossil fuels for the energy transition also when investing in the production of fossil fuels. Shell’s planned investments in new oil and gas fields may be at odds with this.”

However, it said this was not relevant to whether a specific reduction obligation should be imposed on the company.

Sawan said Shell still planned to halve emissions from its operations by 2030, adding: “We are making good progress in our strategy to deliver more value with less emissions.”

The court did uphold the statement that companies such as Shell had obligations to protect human rights.

The judgment can still be appealed against and taken to the supreme court. However, this would focus on interpretation of the law and not the key facts of the case.

Sjoukje van Oosterhout, head of research at Milieudefensie, said the NGO would read the full ruling carefully before deciding whether to appeal. But she said she believes there is still room for future legal action against corporations.

While this appeal was taking place, other domestic courts issued important rulings on assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel projects. In January 2024, Norway blocked the development of three North Sea oil and gas fields on the grounds that the state did not properly assess the impact of future use on climate breakdown. The UK supreme court issued a similar ruling several months later.