The climate crisis
is it going to kill us?

The change in climate will impact you

It is easy to think this is other people’s weather. It is not. About 4 in 10 people live within 100 kilometres of a rising coast, and cities like Shanghai, Mumbai, London and New York are on the map.

You do not need to live by the sea for it to reach you. Failed harvests abroad push up the price of your food, rivers and wells run dry so water grows scarce, storms and heatwaves grow more violent, and people forced off their land migrate towards wherever there is work and safety.

The heat is the real killer

The fires make the news, but the heat behind them is what kills, and it does so out of sight. Heat rarely appears on a death certificate; it strains the heart, lungs and kidneys until they fail, so the real toll is only added up months later.

More than 25,000 people have died in Europe’s heat this summer, over 10,000 in a single week in late June. It is not only a rich-world problem: in India, a single day of extreme heat causes about 3,400 more deaths than normal. Heat is already a cause of death now, not just a future risk.

The four-year clock

We can still put about 170 billion more tonnes of carbon into the air and keep a 50/50 chance of staying under 1.5 degrees of warming. We add about 40 billion tonnes a year, so that budget runs out in roughly four years, and emissions are still rising.

Some parts of the climate work like a switch, not a dial. The frozen ground up north holds twice as much carbon as the whole atmosphere; as it thaws it leaks methane, which warms it further and thaws more. Once that starts it cannot be undone, so the next three to five years matter more than any that come after.

So who caused this?

It depends how you count. By emissions today China is top, at about 30%, then the US and India, but China has 1.4 billion people and makes much of what the rest of us buy. Per person the order reverses: one American emits about as much as two Chinese, or six Indians. And over all of history the US caused about 20% of the carbon ever released, with Europe and Britain close to another 20%.

All those numbers count emissions where goods are made, not where they are used. Britain has closed its factories and buys its steel, cement and gas from abroad, so that carbon lands on someone else’s books. Count what it actually consumes, and its real footprint is about 740 million tonnes, not the 405 it reports.

Who is hit hardest

The people who caused the least are hit first, and hardest: poorer countries, nearer the equator, with the least money to protect themselves. The rich nations promised to roughly double the funding to help them adapt, then fell short of it.

Low island nations put almost no carbon into the air, yet the rising sea takes their homes first. When Australia opened a climate visa, more than a third of Tuvalu applied within days. The Maldives is too big for any neighbour to take in, so it is spending fortunes raising its islands out of the water.

India and Bangladesh: the hardest test

More than 1.5 billion people live in India and Bangladesh, and several dangers land on them at once. The worst is a kind of heat you cannot sweat off: when heat and humidity climb together sweat cannot evaporate, so the body cannot cool, and a few hours outside can kill a healthy person. The monsoon is also turning erratic, and because India grows so much of the world’s wheat and rice, a bad heat year there raises food prices everywhere.

Bangladesh packs 175 million people onto a low delta squeezed between rising seas, cyclone storm surges and the floodwater of three great rivers, with salt creeping into the soil and almost nowhere to retreat. But it has already shown adaptation works, cutting cyclone deaths from hundreds of thousands to a small fraction through forecasts, shelters and drills.

Clean power just won on price

For a century, clean energy was the expensive way to make power, so the world burned coal and gas. Around 2023 that changed. Strip the subsidies away, and new solar and wind now come in cheaper than the cheapest new gas, while coal and nuclear cost two to four times more.

Solar got about 90% cheaper in fifteen years, and by 2024 some 91% of new renewable projects beat any fossil alternative on price. Once clean is also the cheapest, you no longer need to care about the planet to choose it. Last year, solar and wind together met almost all the growth in the world’s electricity demand.

Fossil fuels get the bigger subsidy

You will still hear that renewables only look cheap because of subsidies. But governments spend between 700 and 900 billion dollars a year holding down the price of petrol, gas and electricity, which is two to four times what clean energy receives. Strip the support from both sides, and in most places wind and solar still come out cheaper.

There is a bigger figure of about 7.4 trillion dollars a year, but that one adds in the costs fossil fuels never pay for, the illness from air pollution and the damage from the warming. That part is a bill society picks up later, not a cheque governments write.

Why your bill is still high

If clean power is so cheap, why has your bill not fallen? The price is set by the last, most expensive plant switched on to meet demand, usually gas, not by the average of all that cheap power. Britain’s problem is worse because it imports most of its gas and competes for it with the whole of Europe and Asia.

The way out is to build enough wind, solar, nuclear and storage that gas is pushed off the end of the queue for hours at a stretch. Britain’s own system operator thinks gas could be down to about 5% of generation by the end of the decade, and once you get there, bills follow the cheap power down.

Cheap power is only the first step

A solar farm is useless if the grid cannot carry its power to the cities, so the grid is now the real constraint. You also need storage, like batteries, for when the sun sets, and a steady backbone, usually nuclear, for the demand that never stops. India even switched on a breeder reactor in 2026 that can run on the thorium it has in huge amounts.

The biggest win is to run daily life on clean power. Swap petrol cars for electric ones, which waste far less energy as heat, and swap gas boilers for heat pumps, which burn nothing and turn one unit of electricity into three or four units of warmth.

Beyond electricity, and China’s bet

Some of the cheapest wins are not about power stations at all. Plugging methane leaks from oil and gas often makes money, protecting an existing forest beats promising to plant a new one, and about a third of all food is grown and then wasted, with its emissions spent for nothing.

On building all this, one country is on a different scale. China added around 540 gigawatts of new generation in a single year, against the EU’s 75 and Britain’s 4, treating cheap, abundant power as national strength. America has the best AI chips but is short of power to run them, while China has the power to run more of the older chips, so the AI race may be won on energy, not chips.

Getting ahead of the heat

Cutting emissions is a global job, because a tonne saved anywhere cools the whole planet. Adapting is a local job, because a sea wall or a cool roof only protects the place it is built. The world has to do both at once, and the cheapest defences have to be planned before the bad year, not during it.

The fixes are cheap and already working. In Ahmedabad, reflective white roofs save over 1,000 lives a year, new seeds ripen in 60 days before the drought, and just 24 hours of warning before a heatwave cuts deaths by about 30%. Clearing brush and cutting firebreaks before the season decides whether a fire summer is a scare or a disaster.

Two viewpoints, and the USA has moved

China, the EU and India are building the cheapest power in history as fast as they can, while the US is spending public money to prop up oil and gas and slow the alternatives down. The more of this the world builds, the cheaper it gets, and when a government fights the way costs are already moving, the costs usually win over ten years.

The real risks are China becoming so dominant that others are competed out, and those overloaded grids. But the direction is not in doubt any more, only the speed, and speed is exactly what the four-year clock is asking for.

What you can do about it

The fastest lever is on your plate. Farm animals warm the planet about as much as every car, ship and plane put together, mostly because cattle burp methane. You do not have to go vegan, but if people ate a little less meat, food emissions would fall by roughly half.

The other is where your money sits. Trillions will pour into clean energy this decade, and clean-energy companies are cheaply valued right now, partly because America has turned cold on the sector. That is a call for you to make, not advice. Record heat and record fires are here, and so is the cheapest power ever built. The next few years decide which one shapes our children’s lives, and ours.