Amidst the various ongoing economic crises in the world, governments have started to abandon green policies and agendas as they ravenously hunt down policies that will incur growth (they are shouting the word "growth" as loudly as they can and hoping it might do something). This is absolutely farcical and isn't being talked about NEARLY enough, even on the left or by progressives more generally. I'm not talking about Trump here of course – that abandonment of anything pro-environment is no surprise.

Although there has been some great environmental progress made in recent years – which is often underreported – the general situation is still very bleak. So why on earth (no pun intended) are we suddenly just scrapping all of the hard (but not nearly hard enough) work that was going into environmental protection legislation?

Simply put, the world wants economic growth and is still too scared to consider trying something new to achieve that. Globally, we are lacking a somewhat powerful jurisdiction that is economically thoughtful. No one is willing to go a different way – again excluding the Trump administration's maniacal descent into fascism. Europe is dominated by pragmatism, which almost sounds rhetorical in itself – how can pragmatism be dominant? But it really is, and this is quickly leading to the rise of the far right across the continent. Orbán in Hungary, the rise of the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK. It feels as though the existing liberal establishment is not even hanging on to its claimed sanity of centrism anymore, it is instead sleepwalking into its far-right doom while a bunch of people who have never had to worry about money or how the economy might impact their livelihoods argue about how best to create economic growth. But the arguments either consist of "well we need competition" or "we need to cut back spending" or "AI will save us". I'd argue that 2/3 of these are completely stupid, and one is somewhat correct but it is mostly not being enacted properly.

(The good one is competition). While AI has great potential it is far too early to just rely on it. Especially considering the entities which currently own the largest means of AI production – there's no chance they'll let it eradicate poverty, if it even could do that.

But even for competition to be a strong driving force behind some economic growth right now, you need to take pretty big, arguably radical policy steps in order to massively limit the power and wealth of some of the biggest firms in the world such as Apple, Google, Amazon etc. While it does seem as though this is happening in some cases, (the EU's regulation, maybe even the US!) it is ultimately not enough. More radical change needs to happen. In Europe particularly, these big US tech firms need to be taxed like mad, using the revenue to boost the development of European-made tech competitors that are decentralised and ideally even semi-owned and ran by their users – a little bit like Farcaster, where users pay a small fee to join the platform and can in turn build their own mini apps on it, enabling a seamless interoperable online experience that also contributes brilliantly to discourse – so far without too much aimless, shouty and polarised dogma as far as I can see.

Anyway, back to the environment. It is Earth day after all! I saw an interesting comparison earlier this week that I wanted to share.

During the Cold War half-century, the US reportedly spent $13 trillion on defence (University of Warwick). Also – that estimate is at 1996 prices. By one inflation calculator that is now just under $23.5 trillion, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is much higher than that; that fee probably doesn't even take into account all the fun stuff the US were doing in other countries to meddle with leftist regimes. Regardless – this is an INSANE amount of money to be spent on one sector in that time period. Anyone suggesting that kind of concentration of spending on anything today would be ridiculed. "It will cause hyperinflation!", "Our debt/trade deficit won't allow it!". But at the time, those concerns were swept aside. Why? Because of the threat of nuclear war. Kind of fair, to be honest. But. Was the Russian invasion, whether nuclear or not, of the US/West inevitable? Was it 100% likely and guaranteed? Clearly not. Let's say, for the sake of the argument the chance was 50% (which is incredibly generous and a slap in the face to probability and years of Cold War studies – but hey don't forget the Cuban Missile Crisis and those Russian submarine commanders who almost sent a nuclear torpedo based on a misunderstanding!). If that was the case though, you'd say yeah, fair enough. Spend big, bigger than normal. Much bigger than normal. Much bigger than what we even have! So why are we not applying the same to climate change? Something that is almost 100% guaranteed. Something that we are already seeing the devastating impact of around the world. Make it make sense.

Covid was a global crisis, so public spending skyrocketed. The climate crisis is the single biggest threat to humanity ever. Yet it has become a figment of cultural politics that the centre and right have screamed away for years. Channeling the climate GOAT, Greta Thunberg here – how dare they!

To see even the existing lacklustre green policies be dropped for what I can almost guarantee will be ineffective economic policy is infuriating. Maybe the current people in charge have just decided you know what, we won't see the impact of this too badly in our lifetime, so fuck it. We need to fight back against this ridiculous abandonment of green policies.

How about this – green spending be changed and instead be classified as defence spending. This actually isn't a bad idea. It is defence. The defence of the human race. If you're willing to spend money on countless weapons and armies to supposedly defend your people, you should be willing to do the same for climate issues. Imagine a world in which defence spending was not focused on finding out how best to murder countless people with new technology as a means of defence AND was more effective at protecting your people than that. Just imagine.

In the spirit of an inspiration of mine, Paul Krugman, MUSICAL CODA: