We need government-led green new deals that will convert the world to renewable energy, create enormous numbers of good public sector jobs and halt climate change.

These explanations still fit the present moment. But much in the politics has changed the four years since I published my book Fight The Fire: Green New Deals and Global Climate Jobs with The Ecologist online. The translation of this book into Greek has prompted me to review what has happened in those years.

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For one thing, everyone in the world now knows that climate change is real, man-made, serious and dangerous. Most of the people who deny that reality in public know in their hearts that it is true.

Drought

We all now know that the mainstream view, the scientific view, the normal and majority view, is that it is real, and that something must be done.

The whole world knows the problem because of all those years of campaigning by the scientists, the environmentalists and the global climate movement – the demonstrations, the direct action, the school strikes, the conferences and meetings, the papers and panel discussions and social media and TV programs, and everything else.

The other reason people know about climate change is that the physical climate has changed. The rise in temperature is faster than scientists expected. The impact of that rise is far greater than scientists expected. And extreme climate events are popping up all over the place.

Some of these are limited in their effects, but are immensely impressive, like the wildfires in Greece and so much of the rest of the world. Some are terrifying, like the hurricanes and the heatwaves. But it is the changes in rainfall that are making the largest difference.

In 2024 I talked with people in Afghanistan about climate change, just towards the end of a three-year drought. For three years in a row the World Food Program had fed 21 million Afghans each winter, just over half the population of the country. There will be more long droughts in the future, and they will be worse.

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