There is no need to pick only a few of the many explanations of Donald Trump’s political comeback. Most of the endless reasons we have heard over the past five days ring true: inflation, incumbency, a flimsy Democratic campaign, white Americans’ seemingly eternal issues with race, and what one New York Times essayist recently called “a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright”. But there is another story that has so far been rather more overlooked, to do with how politics now works, and who voters think of when they enter the polling booth.

Its most vivid element is about the left, and one inescapable fact: that a lot of people simply do not like us. In the UK, that is part of the reason why Brexit happened, why Nigel Farage is back, and why our new Labour government feels so flimsy and fragile. In the US, it goes some way to explaining why more than 75 million voters just rejected the supposedly progressive option, and chose a convicted criminal and unabashed insurrectionist to oversee their lives.

The latter story goes beyond Kamala Harris and her failed pitch for power. When established parties on the progressive and conservative wings of politics go into an election, in the minds of many people, they represent a much larger set of forces, whether their candidates like it or not. After all, what people understand as the left and right operate far beyond the institutions of the state: political battles are fought in the media, on the street, in workplaces, campuses, and more. This has always been the case, but as social media turn the noise such activity makes into a deafening din, seeing most big parties and candidates as the tips of much larger icebergs becomes inevitable.

Trump leads the movement that was responsible for the January 6 insurrection, has made less-than-subtle noises about his affinity with the far right, and makes absolutely no bones about any of it. For the Democrats, the lines that connect a centrist figure such as Harris to the wider US left tend to look much fuzzier, but that does not make millions of people’s perceptions of them any less real. Around the world, in fact, the left looks to many voters like a coherent bloc that goes from people who lie in the road and shut down universities to would-be presidents and prime ministers – the only difference between them, as some see it, is that radical activists are honest about their ideas, whereas the people who stand for office try to cover them up.

What the US election result shows is that, when told to make a choice, millions of people will draw on those ideas, and ally themselves with the other political side. Many of them, of course, have arrived at that conclusion thanks to outright bigotry. But given the remarkable spread of votes for Trump – into Latino and black parts of the electorate, and states considered loyal Democratic heartlands, from California to New Jersey – that hardly explains the entirety of his win. What it highlights is something that many American, British and European people have known for the past 15 years, at least: that the left is now alienating huge chunks of its old base of support.

That story has deep roots, partly bound up with the decline of political loyalties based around class: compared with 2008, 2024’s Democratic coalition was skewed towards the higher end of the income range, whereas Trump’s tilted in the other direction. The same kind of fracturing now seems to be affecting many ethnically based political loyalties: as Trump well knows, there are now large numbers of voters from minorities – and immigrant backgrounds – who largely accept rightwing ideas about immigration. That is partly because modern economies create such a desperate competition for rewards.

But there seems to be more to it than that: polling shows the suggestion that “government should increase border security and enforcement” is supported by higher percentages of black and Hispanic voters than among white progressives – but the same applies to “most people can make it if they work hard” and “America is the greatest country in the world”. Growing chunks of the electorate, in other words, are not who the left think they are.

Meanwhile, the widening political gap based around people’s education levels – voters without college degrees supported Trump by a 14-point margin, while Harris had a 13-point advantage among college-educated people – creates yet more problems. Some of them are to do with “wokeness” and its drawbacks. Because the cutting edge of left politics is often associated with institutions of higher education, ideas that are meant to be about inclusivity can easily turn into the opposite. The result is an agenda often expressed with a judgmental arrogance, and based around behavioural codes – to do with microaggressions, or the correct use of pronouns – that are very hard for people outside highly educated circles to navigate.

At the same time, our online discourse hardens good intentions into an all-or-nothing style of activism that will not tolerate nuance or compromise. A message about the left then travels from one part of society to another: there is a transmission belt between clarion calls that do the rounds on college campuses, the Democratic mainstream, and unsettled voters in, say, suburban and rural Pennsylvania. And the right can therefore make hay, as evidenced by a Trump ad that was crass and cruel, but grimly effective: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

In its own ugly way, that line highlights what might have been Trump and his supporters’ strongest asset: the idea that, because they are so distant and privileged, modern progressives would rather ignore questions about everyday economics. Nearly 40% of all Americans say they have skipped meals in order to meet their housing payments, and more than 70% admit to living with economic anxiety. A second Trump term, of course, is hardly going to make that any better: the point is that he was able to successfully pretend that it would.

That then opened the way for something even more jaw-dropping: Trump’s sudden claim to be a great unifier, something implicitly contrasted with progressives’ habit of separating people into demographic islands. It takes an almost evil level of chutzpah to flip from his hate and nastiness to a new message of love for most Americans, but consider what he said about his coalition of voters: “They came from all quarters: union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American. We had everybody. And it was beautiful.” That is the increasingly familiar sound of populist tanks being parked on the left’s lawn.

None of this is meant to imply that most progressive causes are mistaken, or to make any argument for leaning into Trumpism. What the state of politics across the west highlights is more about tone, strategy, empathy, and how to take people with you while trying to change society – as well as the platforms that poison democratic debate, and the harm they do to progressive politics. The next time you see someone on the left combusting with self-righteous fury on the hellscape now known as X, it’s worth remembering that its current owner is Elon Musk, who may be about to assist Trump in massively cutting US public spending, while cackling at the weakness of the president’s enemies, and their habit of walking into glaring traps.

Cop29 officially opens on Monday 11 November in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the conference is scheduled to end on 22 November, although it is likely to run later. World leaders – about 100 have said they will turn up – are expected in the first three days, and after that the crunch negotiations will be carried on by their representatives, mostly environment ministers or other high-ranking officials.

The crucial question for the summit is climate finance. Developing countries want assurances that trillions will flow to them in the next decade to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the rapidly receding hope of limiting global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, and to enable them to cope with the increasingly evident extreme weather that rising temperatures are driving.

Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijani president

The autocratic president of Azerbaijan since 2003, Ilham Aliyev has used Azerbaijan’s oil wealth to gain international influence for his small country, as well as to enrich his own family. Aliyev is the son of Heydar Aliyev, a national leader when the country was part of the Soviet bloc, who regained power in a 1993 after the country’s first free post-Soviet elections the year before.

Azerbaijan is rated as one of the world’s most corrupt regimes by Transparency International, with a poor record on human rights. Freedom of expression is limited, the media are shackled and campaigners have raised concerns over a number of prisoners held since the conflict with Armenia. Aliyev is likely to shrug off such criticism and focus instead on his plans to generate and export renewable energy and attempts to clean up the Caspian Sea.

Mukhtar Babayev, Cop29 president-designate

The president-designate of Cop29 is Azerbaijan’s minister for ecology and natural resources. Like his predecessor, Sultan Al Jaber, who presided over last year’s Cop28 in Dubai, Babayev has a background in the oil industry. He worked for Socar, the country’s national oil company, from 1994 to 2018, before his ministerial appointment.

Babayev, an affable and competent figure, is well regarded among developing and developed countries at the talks, though he was little known before Azerbaijan’s surprise decision to take on the hosting of Cop29. Choosing the host nation was a troubled process, only resolved at the last moment during last year’s Cop28.

This year is the turn of the post-Soviet bloc to host, and several eastern European EU members including Romania, Bulgaria and Poland had expressed an interest. All were vetoed by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, angered by the EU’s response to his invasion of Ukraine. Azerbaijan was regarded as an outside possibility because of the conflict with Armenia that has rumbled on through two decades, flaring into outright war last September before subsiding into an uneasy de facto truce.

But just as the organisers were preparing emergency plans to host the Cop at one of the UN’s campuses, Putin indicated he would allow the choice and Armenia supported the bid, leaving Azerbaijan’s president to make Babayev the obvious appointment.

He will be assisted by Yalchin Rafijev, the deputy foreign minister with a background in diplomacy, who is chief negotiator and the key point of contact for delegations.

Sultan Al Jaber, Cop 29 president

At last year’s Cop28 summit in Dubai, nations made a historic agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels. It was a weaker commitment than the full-blooded “phase-out” of fossil fuels that many countries and activists wanted, but – astonishingly – it represented the first time that these three decades of talks have produced a commitment to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis.

The promise was largely the work of the Cop29 president, the United Arab Emirates minister Sultan Al Jaber. A charismatic figure who is also chief of the UAE’s national oil company, Adnoc, Al Jaber dominated the Dubai conference and helped bring Saudi Arabia to the table.

That will not be the last of his influence. After Cop28, Al Jaber also masterminded continued influence over the process by helping to institute a new “troika” system for Cops, whereby the current Cop presidency is joined by the immediate past presidency and the designated next presidency to provide a degree of continuity that should safeguard progress made at previous Cops and strengthen future commitments.

Marina Silva, Brazil environment minister

There were high hopes that Cop29 would be galvanised by the presence of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose outspoken espousal of a billionaire tax has endeared him to activists and vulnerable countries. But he is unlikely to make it, so his place is most likely to be taken by environment and climate minister, Marina Silva.

Brazil occupies at key position at Cop29 as the prospective president of Cop30. Next year, at Belem in the Amazon, countries must arrive with fresh national plans – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – enforcing more stringent cuts to greenhouse gas emissions than they have yet promised. These must be in line with the globally accepted aim of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

Brazil, as the third member of the troika, will want to use Cop29 to chivvy laggard governments to present their NDCs as early as possible. Technically the deadline is February, but many countries are likely to see Cop30 itself as the de facto deadline.

António Guterres, UN secretary general

The UN secretary general is probably the most outspoken senior figure on the world stage on the climate crisis. He has talked of humanity committing “collective suicide” and has targeted fossil fuel companies who “have humanity by the throat”. Amid rapidly rising temperatures, he memorably warned that we are understating the seriousness of the crisis: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

Guterres will champion developing nations at Cop29, encouraging and berating rich countries into providing more climate finance. He is likely to be equally outspoken to leaders of countries with high emissions and inadequate reduction plans and, most of all, to the fossil fuel executives who are expected to turn up in large numbers as many multinational oil and gas companies, including BP and Shell, have strong interests in Azerbaijan.

Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Climate-related disaster struck close to home this year for the UN’s climate chief. Simon Stiell is executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – the treaty under which this “conference of the parties” (Cop) is held – and comes from the island of Carriacou, in Grenada. It was hit by Hurricane Beryl in July.

Stiell spoke movingly from the site of his grandmother’s house, utterly destroyed in the disaster. “What I’m seeing on my home island, Carriacou, must not become humanity’s new normal,” he said. “If governments everywhere don’t step up, 8 billion people will be facing this blunt force trauma head-on, on a continuous basis. We need climate action back at the top of political agendas.”

Stiell’s job at Cop29 will be to work closely with the Azerbaijani presidency, acting as an honest broker to all 198 parties, and guiding an agreement through the complexities of the UNFCCC process.

Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados

The prime minister of Barbados, under whom the country removed the British crown as head of state to become a fully fledged republic, has been an electrifying presence at recent Cops, and her mission to force the restructuring of international financial institutions has already borne fruit, with the new World Bank president, Ajay Banga, promising to take a more active role in climate finance.

Mottley wants to go much further and secure the flow of trillions of dollars of investment each year to the developing world, to transform the global economy and provide protection for those most at risk of climate disaster. She has forged close ties with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who held a climate finance summit last year, and with the Kenyan president, William Ruto.

With Cop29 focused on climate finance, she will be a linchpin for developing countries seeking climate justice in the face of inaction by the worst greenhouse gas emitters.

Ajay Banga, World Bank president

With climate finance top of the Cop29 agenda, the World Bank president Ajay Banga is in pole position to make a difference. But will he order the sweeping reforms to the bank’s practices that developing countries say are needed?

The World Bank held its annual autumn meetings last month, but there was little progress on climate finance. The group is awaiting a pledging conference next month, where developed countries must increase the amount of money they are prepared to put towards developing country finance. Focusing on that may mean that Banga has little to offer at Cop29, but that will not satisfy his critics.

The Americans

Joe Biden is not expected to attend Cop29, nor will his successor Donald Trump. During his last presidency, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris agreement, and he is likely to do so again. However, the delegation for the US at Cop29 will be from the Biden White House, as Trump will not take office until January. The “lame duck” delegation can still participate in the negotiations, and though they will not be able to bind the US government to clear future financial commitments, they are unlikely to stand in the way of agreement by other countries, meaning that the core decisions expected to made at Cop29 on finance can still go ahead.

Wopke Hoekstra, EU climate commissioner

The EU delegation to Cop29 will be rather a skeleton staff this year, as key figures – such as Teresa Ribera, the former Spanish environment minister who has played a galvanising role in recent Cops and is relishing the prospect of a new role as vice-president of the European Commission, and Dan Jorgensen, former Danish environment minister and another Cop veteran who will be the new EU energy and housing chief – are undergoing their confirmation processes, which will not be completed until a vote in the EU parliament on 1 December.

Hoekstra, who served as climate commissioner in the last iteration of the commission and keeps the job for this one, is a confirmed participant, leading the EU negotiations for the second week of the talks. He faces a big challenge – the EU is the biggest provider of climate finance around the world, but a rightward slant to the new parliament and among some member state governments may cut down on the bloc’s freedom to manoeuvre at the talks.

Liu Zhenmin, China’s climate spokesperson

Cop29 will be the first proper outing for the new Chinese climate envoy. His predecessor, Xie Zhenhua, was a key figure at Cops for two decades and enjoyed a cordial relationship with John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Both retired earlier this year.

Liu and his US counterpart, Kerry’s successor John Podesta, have enjoyed some warm meetings this year, including one at Podesta’s home. But even cosy dinners cannot disguise the real tensions between the two powers. China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by a long way, responsible for close to a third of global emissions, and is also the world’s second biggest economy, after the US. Yet China clings to its status as a developing country, under the 1992 UNFCCC treaty, and has refused to take on obligations to provide finance to the poor world, though it does provide such assistance on a voluntary level and under its own terms.

China will come under fierce pressure from the EU and the US to make commitments on climate finance and to demonstrate that its emissions will peak soon and fall sharply in the next iteration of its NDC. China and the US will also hold a methane summit during Cop29, at which activists will be hoping for concrete new measures to curb the powerful greenhouse gas, rather than the good intentions that have been the only outcomes of previous talks.

Ed Miliband, UK secretary of state for energy security and net zero

Cop29 will mark a resonant return to the world stage for Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, who played a significant role in salvaging a partial deal from the tumultuous Copenhagen Cop in 2009. In recent years, he has attended Cops as an opposition minister, well-respected and listened to, with a wide network of international contacts among delegations and Cop veterans.

In stark contrast to his Tory predecessors, who tended to send junior ministers – and not always for the key moments – Miliband will take charge of the negotiations himself throughout the conference, he will be assisted by Rachel Kyte, the newly appointed climate envoy, a post that had been scrapped by Rishi Sunak.

Keir Starmer, prime minister of the UK

At last year’s Cop in Dubai, Starmer got his first taste of what leading on the world stage might be like, and it clearly had an impact. He used his first speech to his fellow world leaders, at the UN general assembly in September, to declare the climate crisis a key priority. “We are returning the UK to responsible global leadership,” he said. “Because it is right – yes, absolutely. But also because it is plainly in our self-interest … the threat of climate change is existential and it is happening in the here and now. So we have reset Britain’s approach.”

He will come to Cop29 armoured with action: he will unveil the UK’s NDC, expected to promise deep cuts in emissions, in an attempt to rally other nations to make similarly bold pledges. A key question he must also answer is how the UK intends to make good on the pledge made under Boris Johnson to spend £11.6bn on climate aid to developing countries by 2026. By the last days of Sunak’s government, only 45% of the total had been disbursed, leaving a heavier burden on Labour to make up the shortfall.

Strongmen surprises in store?

Vladimir Putin visited Azerbaijan in August for meetings with Aliyev, to underscore the resumption of a relationship that has been tested in the last three years, after the Cop host took over the supply of gas to the EU as the bloc tried to cut its dependence on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Azerbaijan also has its own links to Ukraine.

But Azerbaijan only managed to supply the EU so fruitfully by importing Russian gas for its own needs, demonstrating the relationship that still exists between the former Soviet pair.

Putin’s August visit was the first in six years. He is still unlikely to make an appearance at Cop29, but the Russian delegation is likely to have more behind-the-scenes involvement than it usually enjoys.

Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, received a warm personal invitation to the talks by Aliyev. Modi has skipped recent Cops and is viewed as unlikely to attend this one, but there is still an outside chance that Aliyev’s urging might tempt him. India has taken a trenchant line on climate finance, blasting developed countries for failing to do enough and demanding £1tn a year. The country also continues to depend heavily on coal, despite a burgeoning renewable energy sector.

Other strongmen of the world have also been mooted as potential visitors, but few are likely to be among the 100 world leaders coming. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was invited to Cop28 in Dubai, but did not attend. Nicolás Maduro, who fraudulently claimed re-election in Venezuela, may wish to try to legitimise his presidency by coming to enjoy the company of his fellow oil producers.

When a white whale, mysteriously kitted out with covert surveillance equipment, was first spotted in icy waters around Norway five years ago it seemed like an improbable chapter from a spy thriller. But working out the true identity and secret objectives of this beluga, nicknamed Hvaldimir by the Norwegians, quickly became a real-life puzzle that has continued to fascinate the public and trouble western intelligence analysts.

Now missing clues have surfaced that finally begin to make sense of the underwater enigma. The makers of a new BBC documentary, Secrets of the Spy Whale, believe they have traced the beluga’s probable path and identified its likely mission.

Hvaldimir, whose nickname is a combination of hval, Norwegian for whale, and the first name of Russian president Vladimir Putin, has regularly been described as a Russian “spy whale”. After all, the harness it wore bore the words “Equipment of St Petersburg” and seemed designed to carry a small camera. But the film uncovers new evidence that he might have been trained as a covert “guard whale”, rather than being sent out to sea to conduct maritime espionage.

“Our latest findings about the potential role that Hvaldimir had been trained to do bring us closer to solving the mystery,” said Jennifer Shaw, director of the film, which airs on BBC Two on Wednesday. “But they also prompt many further questions about what Russia might be seeking to guard in the Arctic, and why.”

After 10 months of research into the strange history of marine mammal training, the documentary team met one of the last remaining veterans of an early US Navy programme run from Point Mugu in California. Former dolphin trainer Blair Irvine, now in his 80s, explained how he had developed the programme. “Swimmers create bubbles, bubbles cause noise. The dolphin’s hearing is extremely sensitive and in this context it was unfailing,” he said.

Irvine and his team trained dolphins to swim like sentries, listening out for intruders. They would push a paddle with their rostrum, or snout, to sound an alarm if they detected noises. The Soviet Union soon launched its own programme using similar techniques. A phalanx of dolphins is thought to have guarded the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. Kept in floating cages, they were trained to warn of the approach of any underwater saboteurs.

The documentary includes evidence given by whale expert Dr Eve Jourdain, who details patterns of behaviour she had observed while watching Hvaldimir in Hammerfest harbour in 2019. She had seen the whale swim right up to touch the cameras being carried by anyone who tried to swim close by. “It was obvious that this particular whale had been conditioned to be putting his nose on anything that looked like a target,” Jourdain told the film-makers.

Shaw told the Observer that the whale found on the Norwegian coast had shown every sign of having been recruited as part of a security patrol. “As we sat interviewing Blair Irvine in America, thousands of miles away from Hammerfest, it dawned on me that I might be sitting opposite the man who had devised the exact training system Hvaldimir had been conditioned by, albeit 50 years later.”

In the 1980s, as the strategic importance of the Arctic grew during the Cold War, a new branch of the programme was launched in the northern Russian city of Murmansk. Here, Shaw suspects, these mammals were used to guard the ballistic missile submarines of the Northern Fleet. A former Soviet dolphin trainer and nuclear submarine commander Volodymyr Belousiuk, who was stationed in Murmansk at this time, reveals in the documentary that instructors turned their attention to whales because dolphins became ill in sub-zero temperatures.

“We knew we wanted to uncover more about the true identity of the whale,” said Shaw. “It’s a mystery that has captivated people around the world. But it also gave us an opportunity to explore the history of marine mammal training within the military – something that few people are aware of as it has been steeped in secrecy for decades and many of those who knew the truth are sadly no longer alive.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union saw funding for marine mammal programmes reduced, but the appearance of the “spy whale” was one of several signs of reinvestment. Imagery of a Russian Navy base at Olenya Guba revealed the presence of two large floating pens containing “white spots” thought to be belugas.

Hvaldimir was found dead earlier this year by two men fishing in Risavika Bay, southern Norway. Police opened an investigation after animal rights groups claimed he had been shot. However, an autopsy showed he had died after a stick became lodged in his mouth.

About 50,000 government officials, policymakers, investors and campaigners will gather in Azerbaijan this week in the hope of answering a trillion-dollar question: how much money should go each year to helping developing countries cope with climate-related costs?

The aim of the UN’s Cop29 climate talks in Baku, which is being called the “climate finance Cop”, is to establish a new annual climate financing target to replace the current $100bn pledge, set in 2009, which expires at the end of this year. There is one clear consensus already: the existing climate finance available to developing countries is nowhere near enough to withstand worsening climate impacts. The ambition is too low, and in 15 years the annual target has been met in full only once, in 2022.

Campaigners have called for the governments of wealthier countries to contribute to a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) on climate finance. Forecasts of how much this will be vary but are typically $500bn to $1tn a year, or less than 1% of global GDP. Some estimates are as high as $5tn.

“Setting a more ambitious goal will be essential to helping vulnerable countries adopt clean energy and other low-carbon solutions and build resilience to worsening climate impacts,” said the World Resources Institute.

But who should pay? To date, the financial contributions that enable developing countries to pursue low-carbon growth and greater climate resilience have come from countries defined by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as “high income”. The list includes the UK, US, Japan and Germany. But in the 30 years since it was created, countries including China, India and South Korea have dramatically increased their economic might – and their carbon emissions.

It is likely that the talks will include calls to expand the list of countries contributing to climate financing. But even then the sums involved are too large for government spending ­budgets alone, according to delegates from many wealthy nations.

Instead, the talks aim to reform global climate lending to encourage more private capital to play a part. In an open letter last month, Stephanie Pfeifer, the head of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, said many global investors were beginning to explore ways to unlock and mobilise capital.

“An ambitious finance goal that includes private capital can encourage greater ambition in developing countries’ targets [for helping to limit global warming] by building confidence in accessible funding for both mitigation and adaptation, with the latter being historically underfunded,” she said.

This approach is not without its critics. Climate and humanitarian NGOs have warned that loans, even on favourable term, place the financial burden of the climate crisis on already indebted developing nations, which bear the lowest responsibility for the climate crisis but face the greatest risks. These groups have called for polluting companies to pay their fair share.

“Climate finance is not about charity or generosity but responsibility and justice,” according to Debbie Hillier, a policy lead at the humanitarian NGO Mercy Corps. “It is based firmly on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities – those who contributed most to the climate crisis must bear the brunt of the solution.”

To this end, a new Climate Finance Action Fund (CFAF) will be under consideration. It aims to draw on voluntary contributions from fossil-fuel-producing countries and companies to support developing nations’ climate projects.

For polluters who would rather not pay, campaigners are calling for climate taxes. Billionaires and fossil fuel giants are in the crosshairs of environmental NGO 350.org, which plans to hold them accountable for their outsize impact on the planet in a new campaign. The group argues that funds generated through taxing the ultra-rich could be used both for domestic policies and programmes to lower carbon emissions, and for international climate finance to ensure “those most responsible for the climate crisis contribute to its solution”.

This approach is likely to prove popular with the public. Oxfam is scheduled to publish a report suggesting that the majority of the British public support higher taxes on private jets and superyachts to help tackle the climate crisis.

The survey, by YouGov, is also expected to show strong public support for increasing taxes on the wealthiest UK individuals to fund action, and hiking taxes on businesses in sectors that produce the most emissions.

The key to whatever form climate finance takes will be accountability – a meaningful climate finance target will mean nothing if the annual goal is never reached.

Prince William has said he wants the monarchy to evolve and for him to carry out his duties with a “smaller r in the royal”.

Speaking at end of a major visit to South Africa where he mixed the informal with traditional elements of the monarchy, the Prince of Wales said he was trying to do things differently.

While in Cape Town, Prince William had talks with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, but also took part in informal events and dressed casually.

Asked about whether he was trying to do royal engagements in a different way, he said: “I can only describe what I’m trying to do and that’s trying to do it differently and I’m trying to do it for my generation.

“I’m doing it with maybe a smaller r in the royal, if you like, that’s maybe a better way of saying it.”

Prince William said his approached focused on “impact philanthropy, collaboration, convening and helping people”.

“I’m also going to throw empathy in there as well, because I really care about what I do. It helps impact people’s lives … and I think we could do with some more empathetic leadership around the world.”

The Prince of Wales has long spoken about fighting homelessness, recently starring in a two-part ITV documentary devoted to the subject.

Earlier this week the prince opened up about what had “probably been the hardest year in my life”, having seen his wife and father, King Charles, being treated for cancer.

While in South Africa he sounded optimistic about possible joint overseas engagements with the Princess of Wales, who was declared cancer-free in September.

“I think hopefully Catherine will be doing a bit more next year, so we’ll have some more trips maybe lined up.”

Catherine attended a Remembrance Day event in London with William on Saturday, in her latest public engagement after going through cancer treatment.

Her last public appearance was in October when she met the bereaved families of three young girls who were murdered at a dance class in north-west England.

Republicans on Saturday appeared close to clinching control of the US House of Representatives, a critical element for Donald Trump to advance his agenda when the president-elect returns to the White House in January.

With votes still being counted from the 5 November general election, Republicans had won 212 seats in the 435-member House, according to Edison Research, which projected on Friday night that Republican Jeff Hurd had enough votes to keep Republican control of Colorado’s third congressional district.

Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won re-election to a US House seat representing Washington state on Saturday, the Associated Press reported, defeating Republican Joe Kent in a rematch of one of the closest races of 2022.

Gluesenkamp Perez won the seat by just more than 2,600 votes two years ago. Prior to her election, Gluesenkamp Perez ran an auto shop in a rural part of the district, which featured heavily in her campaign.

The Republican-leaning district, which Donald Trump carried in 2020, includes the south-western portion of the state and some Portland, Oregon, suburbs that spill into Washington state.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

Republicans need to win six more seats to keep control of the House and they already have enough victories to wrest control of the US Senate from Democrats, though Edison Research projected late on Friday that Democratic US Senator Jacky Rosen had won re-election in Nevada.

A first-term moderate in a presidential battleground state, Rosen was among the GOP’s top targets. She campaigned on lowering costs for the middle class, defending abortion rights and tackling the climate crisis. Over the summer, she introduced legislation that would allow extreme heat to qualify as a disaster under federal law, pointing to heatwaves that have devastated the west.

With Trump’s victory in the presidential election and Republican control of the Senate already decided, keeping hold of the House would give Republicans sweeping powers to potentially ram through a broad agenda of tax and spending cuts, energy deregulation and border security controls.

Results of 19 House races remain unclear, mostly in competitive districts in western states where the pace of vote counting is typically slower than in the rest of the country.

Ten of the seats are currently held by Republicans and nine by Democrats. Fourteen seats had widely been seen as competitive before the election.

Republican senators will decide next week who will serve as the party’s leader in the Senate in 2025, with John Thune, John Cornyn and Rick Scott vying for the job. On Saturday, Senators Bill Hagerty and Rand Paul endorsed Scott over the more senior Thune and Cornyn, who have been viewed as favorites.

Associated Press contributed to this report

Protests against Donald Trump erupted in the US on Saturday as people on both coasts took to the streets in frustration about his re-election.

Thousands of people in major cities including New York City and Seattle demonstrated against the former president and now president-elect amid his threats against reproductive rights and pledges to carry out mass deportations at the start of his upcoming presidency.

In New York City on Saturday, demonstrators from advocacy groups focused on workers’ rights and immigrant justice crowded outside Trump International Hotel and Tower on 5th Avenue holding signs that read: “We protect us” and “Mr President, how long must women wait for liberty?” Others held signs that read: “We won’t back down” while chanting: “Here we are and we’re not leaving!”

Similar protests took place in Washington DC, where Women’s March participants demonstrated outside the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing thinktank behind Project 2025. Pictures posted on social media on Saturday showed demonstrators holding signs that read: “Well-behaved women don’t make history” and “You are never alone”. Demonstrators also chanted: “We believe that we will win!” and held other signs that read: “Where’s my liberty when I have no choice?”

Crowds of demonstrators also gathered outside Seattle’s Space Needle on Saturday. “March and rally to protest Trump and the two-party war machine,” posters for the protests said, adding: “Build the people’s movement and fight war, repression and genocide!” Speaking to a crowd of demonstrators, some of whom dressed in raincoats while others wore keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, one demonstrator said: “Any president that has come to power has also let workers down.”

On Friday, protesters gathered outside city hall in Portland, Oregon, in a similar demonstration against Trump. Signs carried by demonstrators included messages that read: “Fight fascism” and “Turn fear into fight”.

“We’re here because we’ve been fighting for years for health, housing and education. And whether it was Trump, or [Joe] Biden before this, we have not been getting it and we are wanting to push to actually get that realized,” Cody Urban, a chair for US chapter of the International League of People’s Struggle, said, KGW reported.

Also on Friday, dozens of demonstrators in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gathered in Point Start park to protest Trump’s election victory. People carried signs reading: “We are not going back” and “My body, my choice”.

“We are afraid of what’s coming, but we are not going to back down,” Steve Capri, an organizer with Socialist Alternative, told WPXI TV. “Trump is an attack on all of us so we need to unite, we need to get organized, join movements, study and learn together.”

Half a century ago, Richard Gun stood on the floor of parliament and became the first known Australian political figure to warn about the “sinister” threat posed by climate breakdown. Todayhis maiden speech is a distant memory.

“I never thought of myself as the first politician to issue a warning about climate change,” he says. “At the time it seemed to me an existential threat to our civilisation and it seemed like a sufficiently important issue to mention.

“Looking back, I’m a bit surprised other people didn’t take it as seriously.”

As Australia prepares to participate in Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Gun’s largely forgotten warning provides a poignant milestone to help measure the country’s action on the climate emergency.

With greenhouse gas emissions rising, fossil fuel production expanding, and devastating fire and floods becoming more frequent, the scale of these threats underscores the warnings given by political and scientific leaders all those years ago – and the amount of wasted time.

Gun is a retired doctor who remains involved with the University of Adelaide and is still active on the issue of climate breakdown. When he first entered parliament in 1969 as the newly elected Labor member for Kingston in Adelaide’s southern suburbs, he was 33 years old.

He began his March 1970 speech by addressing what he called “the problem of cities” and highlighting “an alarming tendency to put cars first and people last”. Halfway through, he pivoted to another issue he was deeply concerned about – growing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“But, whatever these ingenious proposals can do in reducing smog, they still cannot prevent consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide,” he said. “It is the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide which may be the most sinister of all effects.

“The only way that this can be controlled is by reducing the amount of combustion taking place.”

The statements were found by Dr Marc Hudson, a climate and energy transitions academic who says that until Gun there was “no good evidence that Australians were paying close attention” to growing concerns about the greenhouse effect like people were in the US.

“After Gun we start to find other people in federal parliament raising alarm early in the early 1970s,” Hudson says. “This matters because it should make us cautious about the idea that what is lacking is information. It forces us think about [how] this is also about resistance to change – psychologically, economically and financially.”

Senate committee’s air pollution warning

Gun partly attributes his awareness about climate breakdown to the joint Senate select committee on air pollution, which published the results of its investigation in 1969.

Though its focus was air pollution more broadly, the Senate committee directly addressed the risk posed by the climate crisis: “Man has been using the atmosphere as a huge rubbish dump into which is being poured millions of tons of waste products each year,” it said.

The report did not return to the issue again but its warning marks the first known time an arm of the Australian government recognised the impending threat – an insight that appears to originate with remarkable evidence given by the Tasmanian scientist Prof Harry Bloom.

Bloom was the chair of chemistry at the University of Tasmania. His initial scientific work concerned molten salts and he briefly had a stint with the storied Truesdail Laboratories in the US.

At a hearing in Hobart on 6 February 1969, Bloom delivered an impassioned speech – described by one senator present as an “address” – which outlined his frustration that no one was talking about the threat posed by growing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

“If carbon dioxide built up to such an extent in the Earth’s atmosphere as to trap radiation from the sun and cause climatic conditions to change all over the world, perhaps heating the whole world and melting the ice caps, nothing could be done about it at that stage,” Bloom said. “At this stage, when we recognise the problem exists we ought to do something about it before it becomes too late.”

When challenged by a senator who suggested he was overreacting, Bloom insisted he had “seen some very highly scientific studies of this matter” but did not name which, even as he insisted there was “no doubt” he was correct.

Bloom was ahead of the curve but his early warning has received little recognition. Graeme Pearman, the renowned Australian scientist who first began investigating the science of climate change at the CSIRO, met Bloom later in his career but said he “had no inkling” the chemist had an interest in the issue.

Bloom passed away suddenly, aged 70, in 1992. His son, Walter, who maintains a collection of his father’s papers, says he was surprised to learn about his father’s early concern over climate breakdown. He also does not know where his father first encountered the issue.

Walter does, however, remember the fierce backlash that followed his father’s fight on environmental issues, an experience that foreshadowed the campaign against climate science.

Bloom later advocated for phasing out leaded petrol but is best known for raising alarm about heavy metal pollution in the Derwent River from heavy industry.

In response, a local paper ran a front-page story labelling him “The Prophet of Doom” and Walter recalls how the wives of fishers organised an “oyster-bake” where they spent a day eating river shellfish to prove there was no issue. At one point, Walter recalls someone scrawled a swastika on the front fence of the family home.

“I remember the police and the efforts to clean this thing off,” Walter says. “You have to realise that we had no Jewish upbringing whatsoever … I think of a line that is often falsely attributed to Albert Einstein that says: ‘Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.’

“People get emotional about these things. They think that their livelihood is in trouble, or their friend’s livelihood is in trouble, or they won’t be able to eat oysters again, so they react.”

Today the University of Tasmania awards a prize in Bloom’s name for the best honours thesis in chemistry. Prof Anthony Koutoulis, the university’s deputy vice-chancellor of research, says Bloom should be lauded.

“Harry Bloom’s foresight was extraordinary – he anticipated the environmental crises we now grapple with daily,” Koutloulis says.

“His work highlighted the vital role of science as both an early warning system and a call to action. At a time when few were listening, Bloom was sounding the alarm about the planetary costs of inaction.”

When it comes to the “calamitous failure of the political consensus to follow scientific consensus” in Australia, Gun says that he did not anticipate the level of pushback from industry or the level of climate denial that he later witnessed.

“It still astonishes me. To deny the greenhouse effect is to deny the laws of physics. Why otherwise clever people would take such a position is a mystery,” he says.

Though he says Australia is getting “back on track” after the Abbott years, as a much older man, Gun now has a “much more desperate” warning as he watches the country continue to open new coalmines and expand gas production.

“I am not yet convinced the opportunity for change has been totally lost, but overall I’m not optimistic,” he says.

“I’ve only got one great-grandchild, but I don’t want any more because I’m fearful they are going to inherit a planet that will be barely livable.”

The UK must ramp up its efforts on renewable energy to foster national security in an increasingly uncertain world, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has warned, on the eve of a fraught global summit on the climate crisis.

He pledged that the UK would lead efforts at Cop29 to secure the global agreement needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate breakdown, in talks that have been thrown into turmoil by the re-election of Donald Trump as US president.

“The only way to keep the British people secure today is by making Britain a clean-energy superpower, and the only way we protect future generations is by working with other countries to deliver climate action,” Miliband told the Observer. “This government is committed to accelerating climate action precisely because it is by doing this that we protect our country, with energy security, lower bills, and good jobs.”

Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed climate science as a “hoax”, has vowed to withdraw the US again from the Paris climate agreement, as he did late in his last presidency. Scientists have warned that his policies would put paid to hopes of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, regarded as the threshold of safety.

Governments are now scrambling to save vital alliances that were led by the outgoing US president, Joe Biden, who made the climate a top priority of his term. At Cop29, governments are supposed to agree ways to bring global financial muscle to bear on the climate crisis. Though a team from the Biden White House will still attend, the inevitability that Trump will withdraw US support means other countries have to redraw their expectations, given the prospective absence of – and perhaps future hostility from – the world’s biggest economy.

The summit, taking place in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, over the next fortnight, has been hit by a flurry of late cancellations. The president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will not attend, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will stay in Berlin following the break-up of his governing coalition. Emmanuel Macron, president of France, is also occupied by a domestic political crisis.

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, will be at the talks, with the leaders of about 100 countries, mostly from the developing world, which is struggling with the increasing economic impacts of climate-driven disaster.

Keir Starmer, who will spend nearly two days at the talks, is one of the few remaining leaders of the world’s biggest industrialised economies who will attend. He is expected to announce tough new targets for the UK to cut greenhouse gases, and a commitment to fulfil a pledge of £11.6bn in climate finance to poor countries, made under the Conservatives but left hanging in the balance by Rishi Sunak.

Miliband, who will take personal charge rather than leaving the negotiating to junior ministers and civil servants as the previous government did, made clear that Britain would step into the leadership vacuum. “We will be going to Cop with the power of our example to call for others to do their fair share because climate breakdown knows no borders. The UK will step up and lead – to protect our people, and play our part in securing a future for our planet,” he said.

Adair Turner, former chair of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, now chair of the Energy Transitions Commission thinktank, warned that despite “happy talk” from some governments and civil society groups seeking to minimise the impact, the shadow of Trump would weigh heavily. “There is a tendency by some people to try to keep their spirits up by whistling in the dark. But this [Trump’s election] is bad, let’s be clear. We will not get further US action beyond the Inflation Reduction Act [under which hundreds of billions of dollars were supposed to be spent on clean energy] and we needed that.”

Poor countries are hoping for a settlement in Baku that will deliver at least $1tn a year by 2035 for them to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with increasingly extreme weather. Developed-country governments are only likely to agree that a much smaller sum, which could be significantly less than $400m in the absence of the US, should come from public sources, such as overseas aid budgets, the World Bank and other publicly owned finance institutions.

They also want large emerging economies, such as China, and petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to contribute to the funds.

Several studies have shown that taxing fossil fuels could provide all of the finance needed, but moves to do so would face fierce objections from petrostates. Some countries are also arguing strongly for a small tax on billionaires, who have seen their wealth boosted to record levels since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Levies on high-carbon activities such as flying and shipping are also possible means of raising cash. There are likely to be disagreements over how much of the $1tn demanded should come from the private sector, and what safeguards can be put in place to ensure that poor countries get access to the money they need without being pushed further into debt.

David Hillman, director of the group Stamp Out Poverty, part of the Make Polluters Pay coalition, said: “The UK government must not use Trump’s election as a justification not to step up at Cop with the scale of ambition on finance required to meet the size of the challenge that confronts us, similarly to how uncertainty around Brexit was once engineered by some countries to halt important progress on taxing the banks.”