IF YOU could go back in time, would you kill Adolf Hitler?

It’s a staple question of counterfactuals and science fiction alike. It asks two main questions: does the end justify the means?

And how far are historical events caused by powerful individual actors?

The morality of climate change is complex. We all live lives of contradiction: daily pressure of eating, travelling to work and heating our homes precludes most us from living net-zero lives.

I carbon offset, but I know that’s not the same as reducing my emissions to zero. I’ve got solar panels, but my shower is heated by gas.

The reality of the unfolding climate catastrophe is not so doubtful. It will kill millions more than the Holocaust and World War II combined. Billions more.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 report leaves no doubt that we need to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Unfortunately, even that target is a pipe dream. An EU climate scientist explained to me that even if we hit all the targets from the Paris Agreement, we’ll experience a 3.5°C rise above pre-industrial temperatures.

Three-and-a-half degrees doesn’t sound much. Daily variation is greater than that. But it’s average global temperature we’re talking about.

In the last ice age, here, in Newcastle, the ice sheet was 300 metres thick. Global temperatures then were just 5°C cooler than the pre-industrial benchmark.

In his 2007 book, Six Degrees, Mark Lynas catalogues the peer-reviewed literature detailing the effects of each degree of warming.

We’re seeing the Arctic and Amazon on fire this year. At around 3°C, the ice caps are melting, sea levels rising, shifts in monsoons and El Nino global ocean currents change global rainfall patterns.

The Indian subcontinent will see a 70 per cent drop in wheat yield and a 30 per cent drop in rice yields. Bangladesh will oscillate between drought and flood, Pakistan will be scorched and dry.

Hundreds of millions of people will migrate, find no food when they arrive, and two nuclear armed states will struggle not to implode.

The Assad regime in Syria, despite its dictatorial nature, was regarded as a model of stability by Western analysts. Imagine that on a global scale.

Is wilful negligence towards to this cataclysm a crime against humanity? There’s a case to answer. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not proposing any kind of violence against the perpetrators.

When Vladimir Putin was destabilising Crimea and Ukraine in 2015, Barack Obama and the EU imposed travel bans and business restrictions on Putin and his nearest and dearest co-conspirators.

So let’s put travel bans and seize the assets of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and the CEOs of big oil.

Even the governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney warns of climate-induced financial collapse. Don’t say we can’t risk the consequences of losing free trade deals. When crisis hits there won’t be any trade.

Trump is an acknowledged climate change denier, has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, and is up to his elbows in big oil.

Bolsonaro is wilfully burning the Amazon. Big oil is still investing billions of dollars into spewing out billions of tons of greenhouse gases, despite the greenwash.

I’d say the end justifies those means. Ban Trump from coming to Europe, ban big oil executives from flying. And end the tax-free status of aviation fuel while we’re about it — it won’t hit jobs and fossil fuel dollars can flood into electric engine technology.

But should we make it personal? Are those actors the cause?

Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil. The curators of death, civil servants like Adolf Eichmann, arranged train timetables like cogs in a wheel. He and others justified their murderous acts as just following orders.

The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states that superior orders is no defence for crimes against humanity. Is allowing the planet to burn a crime against humanity?

Hitler’s malignant narcissism and personal evil is beyond question, I hope, for anyone reading this. But he didn’t pull the triggers — he acted through others.

Should we absolve Trump and Bolsonaro because we heat our homes and fly economy class?

The Nuremberg trials distinguished between those who were instigators and willing perpetrators, and those who were trapped in a system.

Ordinary German footsoldiers fighting at the front were never charged. I won’t ask any minimum wage bar staff to walk home instead of taking a cab; I’m not going to ask any pensioner to turn her gas fire off.

The answer has to lie in structural change — I don’t see how we can do it without replacing capitalism. Without massive investment in public transport, better housing, and shifts in ownership models, the quest for individual profit will trump sane planning. And we need to educate people on a factual basis.

The post-Versailles world was in chaos, other Western powers allowed Hitler’s rise as a bulwark against Soviet Russia.

If our time-travelling assassin had shot a 29-year-old Hitler in the closing years of the Great War, while he was in hospital recovering from a British chemical weapon attack, would Hermann Goering or Ernst Rohm have stepped up to fill the void?

Well here there is no absolution for the Trumps and Bolsanaros who destroy our world. This is not some butterfly-effect of possibilities. We know Trump and Bolsonaro and big oil are committing these crimes against the planet in real time.

And they are pulling the triggers, personally; the smoking refineries and smoking rainforests are in their hands.

They will lead our civilisation into a dystopian future of ruined buildings and armed gangs. Think not of Hunger Games or Mad Max fantasies, but the reality of Syria becoming the norm in western Europe and north America.

In the 1930s, contemporary commentators could see the slide to war, but could not think of a way to arrest it. They saw themselves as observers, not actors.

We can all see the planet burning. Be an actor. Join the climate activists. Don’t wait to vote out climate trashers. Take action.
Personally, I’d extend sanctions to all policy-makers who refuse to tell the truth about climate breakdown.

Jamie Driscoll is the North of Tyne Mayor.