Climate appeasers are leading us towards catastrophe

In 1940, George Orwell famously lambasted those who refused to prepare for WW2, writes Alan Rusbridger. Today we face a different war – on the climate crisis – and we are as much ‘in the soup’ now as we were then…

Numerous distinguished economists and scientists have over two decades or more spelled out the cost of inaction – in monetary and human terms (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

In October 1940, George Orwell sat down to write a furious call to arms. “The Lion and the Unicorn” opened with one of the most arresting sentences in the history of the English essay: “As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

I re-read the radical pamphlet on holiday last week and found it as angry and striking today as it was when Orwell’s molten words flowed more than 80 years ago. It’s not that he was necessarily right about the future in the way that his later novel 1984 can read like prophecy. But his skewering of that moment of history still has a raw, unflinching power.

“Anyone able to read a map knows that we are in deadly danger,” he wrote, barely six months after the humiliating retreat from Dunkirk.