THE next five years are almost certain to be the hottest period recorded. 

The World Meteorological Organisation reported last week that its modelling, taking account of the shift from the El Nina to El Nino warming cycle in the Pacific, is of a 66 per cent chance of global temperatures rising to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels at some point by 2027. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean that that threshold, which was set at the Paris climate conference in 2015, will be permanently breached. But it becomes more likely every month. 

The predictions for when it will happen are becoming shorter. The chaotic effects are already here. Extreme weather events. Sudden crop failures. Economic dislocation. All felt by working people in the form of floods, fires, forced migration and in wild surges in food prices.

But the alarming latest climate news had next to no impact on national politics or governments in the rich capitalist states. 

It was scarcely a footnote at the G7 summit in Japan, which was dominated by accelerating hostility to China and maintaining the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. The Japanese government is increasing its arms spending by 26 per cent this year. 

It has announced a 60 per cent increase over the next five years. That would give it the third largest defence budget in the world. 

According to Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “We’ll continue to see these dynamics spiral in east Asia, where we have no measures of restraint, we have no arms control.” Not just there. Germany is doubling its arms spending. The drive is upwards across Nato. 

Record increases in the Pentagon’s budget mean a handout of $452 billion to the arms industry, in part to generate domestic US growth as Ronald Reagan did four decades ago. Australia is to acquire nuclear submarines. 

So we see a vast extension of planning when it comes to the military and arms development. Britain’s governing consensus on more militarism is typical. 

Meanwhile, further evidence of the climate emergency brought forth no dramatic intervention from the British government or the Labour opposition — unlike when it comes to global power politics and the war in Europe. 

It proved irrelevant also to the narrative of the big parties in last Sunday’s general election in Greece, a country where extreme weather events and wildfires have produced political crises for successive governments. 

The sense of muddling through in full knowledge of rising disaster is not confined to Greece and countries derided as lacking forward thinking.

For there was nothing last week either from the German government, which includes the Greens. 

Of course, all the parties and governments have their policies with “green” in the title and their plans for reducing carbon emissions in the long term. 

But the “long term” as measured by the carousel of international conferences is at odds with the immediacy of the crises already upon us and the responses to them. 

Thus Germany ramps up arms spending and reopens coalmines in its reaction to, and participation in, the Ukraine war. 
 
There is a reason for all this. While there is rhetorical acknowledgement that multiple crises are forcing shifts in how the global system operates, there is a shared determination among governments to change things as little as possible. And even then, only where each hopes for selfish advancement. 

Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s pronouncement in the US this week that her deep thinking amounted to “securonomics” was no novelty. 

Joe Biden has been credited with adopting a more interventionist role for the US state: from subsidies and tariff policy to aiming to reshore US supply chains — all in the name of “security.” For any US president that means economic and political power globally. 

But the invocation of security interests in reconfiguring capitalist policy by states or blocs of states predates Biden. Liberal opinion was appalled at Donald Trump’s brash “America First” drive. 

In key respects, crucially trying to lock China out of Big Tech developments and exchanges, and to force EU arms spending up and exports to the US down, Biden’s administration is marked by continuity rather than break. 

Emmanuel Macron in France was open about his programme of restoring distinctly French political and economic clout six years ago. “France First.” The European Union has always operated as a cartel of nations in global competition with others. It is responding to Biden’s boost to US industries with its own protectionist measures. 

It already does that in projecting its interests into the north of the African continent and other neighbouring regions of strategic importance. 

The policy differences between, say, Labour and Tory in Britain or their counterparts in Germany amount to very little when considered from two standpoints. First, the multiple crises wracking the world. 

Second, the limited shift that is under way to an economically more active state but in the context of sharpening military and economic competition that is imposing a new consensus on governments almost irrespective of their political stripe. 

In addition, there is in the transatlantic capitalist states a pressure to restore politics to a pre-2011 template, but in updated form. That was of left and right faces of essentially the same narrow consensus. 

The great fear engendered by the “populist wave” in the middle of last decade has not abated in ruling class circles. Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party in Greece discovered this last week. His efforts to show that the party was now thoroughly domesticated were rebuffed by a united Establishment and renewed pole of the capitalist right who fought a moderate centre-left party as if they were fighting communism. 

There is an effort to restore the centre, but on lines that are even more militaristic and engaged in deepening geopolitical competition over trade, technology, economic policy overdetermined by “security” considerations and a global politics of explicit conflict.  

Hence one of the most alarming contradictions of our world and civilisation.

The environmental crises are imposing an ever-shorter horizon on the urgent necessity of radical social and economic transformation. 

For the radical left, that must mean a political horizon. We cannot talk of the immanence of runaway climate change one minute, and the next parse barely different proposals for one or other form of national-capitalist industrial policy that all leave the polluters and profiteers in charge. 

That truth is underlined by the open consideration in ruling-class circles of direct war between nuclear-armed states, more regional wars and the uprooting of huge numbers of people through climate chaos, conflict and economic collapse. 

The world and Britain feel very different from 25 years ago when globalisation was peaking and there was a confident, then new, centre of Thatcher-Blairism. The reason things feel different today is because they are. 

At the same time there is not a single party of government in the Western world that is prepared to apply the horizon imposed by existential crisis to politics or even to policy. 

It is a bit like reading good histories or contemporary literature of the epoch running up to the first world war. 

The sense of a looming danger, yet the frustration of any attempt to do what was necessary to avoid it. So international treaties and gatherings agreed to handle an arms race by… permitting an arms race on all sides. 

Dealing with the threat of war between the Great Powers by… promoting all sorts of proxy wars and intrigues in the colonised world in the hope that they could be a controlled alternative to world war. 

Technological advances brought the same wonder and bewilderment as does news about artificial intelligence, gene editing and robotics today. 

But then and now potential gains for humanity are linked to militarism and bringing productive resources under the direction of states vying for a greater share of global power and the fruits of exploitation. 

It is so important for the left to retain a radical and anti-systemic approach across the piece in these circumstances. Not to fall back into the official confines of the possible and a politics that is designed to exclude the grand questions of our age.

Funnily enough, that does not mean cutting ourselves off from the mass of people with ultra-revolutionist or catastrophist rhetoric. 

For the reality is that increasing numbers of workers and of the mass of people as a whole feel their own shortening of horizons and sense of desperate immediacy. 

People cannot afford enough food. Life is getting worse. In some countries — Britain is one — life is getting shorter for many people. 

If civilisational crises are one horizon ignored by the political centre, another is the one working-class people face: a bad bout of illness for one of the household breadwinners, a cold snap that requires putting the heating on, an eviction or losing your job. 

Tens of millions in even the rich countries face a serial existential horizon of a month or three. 

The left ought to be in the business of meshing with this popular sense of urgency — both in building direct social struggles and in drawing those together into a politics of the emergency.