David Attenborough has just turned one hundred. He was rightly celebrated across the world for his impact on nature and climate awareness. And yet on the same day, Britain woke to a sea of turquoise as millions had voted Reform in regional elections.

Each vote was a stab in the heart for one of the greatest climate communicators we have ever known.

I met David once, at Humphrey Head nature reserve in Cumbria, the home of the last English wolf. That meeting was about 30 years ago, David was already in advanced years and his mere presence filled everyone around him with hope for a more empathetic, nature-friendly future.

Attenborough has given hundreds of millions of people the capacity to feel something real about creatures they would never meet, in places they would never go, facing threats they could not see from where they were standing.

It has been one of the largest single acts of environmental communication in human history.

But in Attenborough’s UK, mirroring events around the world, the country went to the polls. And voted, in significant and growing numbers, for a party that would scrap net zero, halt the renewable transition, repeal the hunting ban, and dismantle, Trump-like, the science-led structure of key policies.

So Happy Birthday, Sir David, from the bottom of my heart. I am so sorry that your nation chose to dishonour you in this way.

An Emotional Connection

Let’s take a moment to give the great man the tribute he deserves. He did not just make popular television. He altered the emotional connections with nature of entire generations.

I am one of the millions who can name him as a key influence in my lifelong love of the natural world, and my career in journalism specialising in climate, nature and pollution education.

My children have a deep love of nature as a result. My 11-year-old son is currently, without any prompting, working his way through all the Attenborough TV epic documentary series.

Attenborough’s landmark series Blue Planet II did not just win awards. It shifted public attitudes toward single-use plastic in a way that years of campaigning had failed to do.

A Life on Our Planet - released in 2020, when he was 94 - was more a political statement than a nature documentary. A witness account of a man standing in the ruins of places he had filmed in their fullness, saying plainly: I watched this happen. We did it. Here is what we have to do now.

It was the most direct and urgent communication of his career, and it arrived because he had read the data and understood that beautiful filmmaking alone was no longer enough.

Even he knew. Even this great environmental communicator looked at the results of his life’s work and decided he needed to say it more plainly.

He wasn’t accused of being woke. He wasn’t met with laughing emojis. His country hangs on his every word.

That’s what makes the latest political results all the more devastating.

You cannot be both a Reform voter, and also a person who names David Attenborough as a British legend.

To be completely fair, the same goes for Conservative voters, with their own anti-climate and nature policies, and Labour’s growth agenda has also sent the message that our natural world comes second to the economy.

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So Who’s Fault Is This?

Should we just attack all the Reform voters for their actions? Of course not. There is another crisis at play. A crisis of communication.

If you showed most Reform voters footage of a dying coral reef, they would no doubt find it sad. A world away from what Jacques Cousteau and Finding Nemo showed us.

If you played them the sequence from Blue Planet II, where the albatross chick is fed plastic by its mother, a significant number of them would feel something real.

And yet those same people voted for a party that has pledged to undo all the policies that are designed to protect the things that Attenborough made them feel sad about.

This is the state of environmental politics in 2026. You can seemingly love nature as something beautiful, something worth grieving over, but without connecting this to politics.

You can weep at a dying whale on a Tuesday and vote for net zero abolition on a Thursday, and experience no internal contradiction whatsoever, because no one is explaining the connection well enough.

The Green Party has cleverly pivoted, and tripled its membership as a result, by speaking to the issues of inequality that Reform has built its foundations on - only the Greens target the billionaires, while Reform punch down and blame the immigrants.

But this also means the Greens have toned down their climate and nature stance considerably. It still exists, but they realised that talking about it was turning voters away.

So now no politician is talking about it.

The UK regional election results tell us that the environmental movement - for all the genuine progress it has made - has not solved the problem of reaching the people who are not already persuaded.

I used to think that didn’t matter. I took solace from surveys revealing that more than 80% of people did care about the climate and nature, and wanted their government to do more to protect it.

But giving power to Reform, and indeed the Conservatives, at local level, puts them in charge of planning decisions which will turn down solar and wind farms, and approve the destructive, nonsensical act of fracking - which in the United States has only led to more oil and gas extraction.

Reform Are Funded By Fossil Fuel Giants

Reform have been very open about the environmental destruction they would unleash on the country.

Leader Nigel Farage has repeatedly voiced his support for barbaric fox hunting and so-called country sports, and the party have aligned themselves closely with pro-hunting and shooting interests.

Reform actively ridicule net-zero policies, despite the fact that this simply addresses the need to reduce emissions, and protect all life on this planet.

But that’s hardly a surprise.

DeSmog, the home of specialist climate accountability journalism, revealed that since December 2019, Reform UK received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers - amounting to 92% of the party’s donations.

What Comes Next?

As David Attenborough is forced to reflect on his life (he famously doesn’t like the fuss), the man himself will no doubt be looking forwards instead.

The communication challenge of the next decade cannot be solved by a new Attenborough - though I hope he still has a few offerings in the tank yet!

The footage and the explanation has never been clearer. David Attenborough showed the world how to do this. But it is not moving the needle nearly enough.

This has driven me to launch Ethical Disruption, to enter the online territories where the Reform voters live. To make the issues personal. To use humour, irreverence, and the unexpected as vehicles for the most serious content.

To connect a vote on a ballot paper to serious changes in life which are just around the corner. That’s what I’ll be doing in the coming months and years.

David Attenborough spent his career proving that people are capable of responding to a crisis, when someone takes the trouble to show them. But he couldn’t do it all by himself.

That has to be Attenborough’s legacy, to fire up the passion in a new generation of effective climate communicators, to protect all life on this stunningly beautiful, dumb planet.

Your Support Is Crucial

Ethical Disruption exists to close the gap between the urgency of what is happening, and the inadequacy of how it is being communicated. It is one journalist, operating without a publisher, without advertisers, without a safety net.

If this kind of work matters to you, please support it at buymeacoffee.com/ethicaldisruption.

Whatever level makes sense for you, the work continues regardless - but it continues more effectively with your support. Thank you.

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Time for some real talk. Very soon, your weather will change dramatically. Every day. If you have a young child today, it will affect the majority of their life. If you’re in your 50s, this could kill you.

You may not have realised this was the news, because climate communication is notoriously poor. That’s one reason why Ethical Disruption was launched.

You might have caught The Guardian warning: Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought.

Or Carbon Brief asking: Is global warming tipping key Atlantic ocean currents towards ‘collapse’?

What’s actually happening is this: The weather in the UK and Europe is about to get MUCH colder in winter. And hotter in summer. Droughts and flooding will hit the rest of the world as a result.

There is no scientific agreement on a timescale, but the most alarming research (which we should ALWAYS work with, just in case) finds that the vast system of Atlantic Ocean currents - called the AMOC - is weakening faster than previously understood.

The tipping point at which shutdown becomes inevitable is now probably within the next 10 to 20 years, according to new research published in the journal Science Advances. A separate 25-model analysis places the collapse itself around 2055, under a scenario of continued high carbon emissions.

The collapse is being triggered by a rapidly warming world.

We have caused this.

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Ironically, in northern parts, global warming will bring much colder temperatures in winter. More people will die, crops won’t be able to grow - it’s that level of panic. Or should be.

The effect of collapse will be monumental worldwide - but only Iceland is taking it seriously. The country has declared it a current national security risk, enabling coordinated planning for worst‑case scenarios.

It’s time for everyone else to wake up.

This is not a story about the future.

Here’s something you need to get your head around: The gap between now and 2055, is the same as the gap between now and 1997.

The year that saw the deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, the handover of Hong Kong to China, the launch of Netflix and the release of Titanic and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

No. 2055 is not far away.

Case Study: United Kingdom, 2055

I’ll look at the global effects of AMOC collapse soon, but let’s focus, for an example, on the United Kingdom - all based on genuine models from the finest scientific research, and of course, actual measurements.

The UK should today be permanently frozen - it sits at the same latitude as Newfoundland, the northern tip of Labrador, and the coldest inhabited parts of Russia.

The only reason the country has a mild enough climate to grow food and live comfortably… is the AMOC.

It pumps warm tropical water north, releasing heat into the atmosphere above Western Europe, keeping UK winters at least five degrees warmer than they would otherwise be.

But the AMOC is collapsing. And if the 2055 prediction is correct, that’s just 29 years away.

If you have a child who is five years old today, they will be 34 in 2055. They may have children of their own. They will be living inside the collapse, which arrives very slowly, and then all at once.

The decade before 2055 will see a growing disruption to the jet stream, which the AMOC helps regulate. That will bring more extreme weather events - from heat domes to snow bombs.

Flood events on the east coast will intensify, also proving too much for the Thames Barrier in London.

By the time that child is in their mid-twenties, in the early 2040s, what we now call ‘extreme weather’ will be just ‘weather’ to them.

And then 2055 arrives.

European climate models, calibrated against the last AMOC collapse roughly 12,000 years ago, show that transition can be devastatingly fast.

Your child, now 34, is experiencing winters that regularly reach -15°C or lower in the north of England. One study predicts as low as -30°C in Edinburgh.

The British agricultural system simply cannot feed the country at those temperatures, with those frosts. In fact, it could begin to struggle as early as the 2030s. That’s just around the corner.

The UK produces about 60% of all food consumed, with imports accounting for only 40%.

The AMOC is primarily a winter phenomenon. Its warmth reaches Europe via ocean heat transfer that matters most when solar heating is absent. In summer, the sun does the job instead, and the AMOC’s collapse doesn’t override it.

This means the violent seasonality is the real story. Professor Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter described it as “coming out of the freezer into a frying pan of summer heatwaves.”

The climate in northwest Europe is potentially becoming more continental - colder winter extremes and hotter summer extremes.

Associated with this, the UK today is divided by arguments over immigration. By 2055, it will witness the largest enforced migration event in modern European history.

Tens of millions of people will have to move away from coastlines, from failed farmland, from cities with poor infrastructure.

They were just five years old when you were reading this. Did you do anything about it?

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Weather-Related Death Rates Will Soar

Let’s say you’re 52 now. You will be 81 in 2055, assuming average luck with your health. In the UK, average life expectancy at birth is now just past 81, so there’s a reasonable chance you will be alive when the system tips.

Sadly, the run-up to collapse will already claim more and more victims to the cold.

As we know, cold kills elderly people. The UK currently records between 25,000 and 50,000 excess deaths every winter, the majority of them in people over 75, most of them driven by cold and damp and inadequate housing.

As the AMOC weakens through the 2030s and into the 2040s, those numbers will rise, due to increasingly harder winters, longer cold snaps, and the energy system, NHS and social care system being put under increasing strain.

Then there’s the summer heat to contend with. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) projects that rising temperatures could see heat-related deaths in the UK TREBLE by 2050, with vulnerable people such as elderly adults most at risk.

Europe is also expecting a three-fold increase in the heat-related mortality rate by 2040-2050, compared to the 2015-2030 baseline.

More than 92.7% of heat-related deaths will be individuals aged 65 years or older, according to one heralded report.

This is not a simulation. It’s time to wake up.

Why Is The AMOC Collapsing and What Can We Do About It?

The AMOC is collapsing because of the increased freshwater pouring into the North Atlantic, the rainfall changes from a destabilised jet stream and the reduced salinity from a warming Arctic. So the density gradient that drives the ocean circulation can no longer maintain itself.

That freshwater is coming from vast areas of ice in Greenland, that is melting because the planet is warming.

The planet is warming because of carbon emissions.

Carbon emissions are still increasing because we are allowing this to happen.

How the AMOC Collapse Will Reshape the World

The AMOC is a global heat distribution system - a vast ocean conveyor moving warm water northward and cold water south, regulating rainfall, monsoons, sea levels, and temperatures across every inhabited continent.

When it collapses, the effects are not contained to the North Atlantic. Here is what the current body of research says will happen, and where…

Northwestern Europe and the British Isles

The most immediate and severe impact falls here. A 2025 study in Geophysical Research Letters found that cold extremes could approach -20°C in London and -48°C in Oslo.

Over the whole of Europe, dry season intensity would increase by 8% in a moderate-emissions scenario with the AMOC intact. With AMOC collapse, that intensity increases to 28%.

In Sweden, the dry season increases by 54% with AMOC weakening and 72% without it. Spain, already struggling with extreme drought, will see its dry season increase by 40% with AMOC weakening and 60% without it.

Agriculture will collapse in line with the temperature. Research carried out by the Campaign Against Climate Change found that an AMOC collapse would reduce the proportion of Britain’s land area suitable for arable farming from 32% to just 7%.

The US East Coast

An extreme weakening or collapse of the AMOC would produce additional sea-level rise, specifically along the northeastern coast of the United States. The AMOC currently pulls water away from the US Atlantic seaboard. Remove the pull, and that water stays.

Cities including New York, Boston, Miami, and Washington DC face compounded flooding risk, on top of the baseline sea-level rise already locked in from global warming.

A collapse would also produce cooling over parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including the US, disrupting agriculture and infrastructure across the eastern seaboard.

West Africa

The West African monsoon would likely face severe drying and a shorter wet season following an AMOC collapse, driven by a southward shift of the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone.

The tropical rain belt would shift southward, resulting in droughts over the African Sahel, driving human displacement on a scale that will dwarf anything in recent history.

South Asia and the Indian Monsoon

The Indian monsoon would also face severe drying and a shorter wet season. Crops, reservoirs, rivers, and 1.4 billion people depend on the seasonal rhythm for food production.

East Asia

The East Asian monsoon would face the same issues as the West African and Indian monsoons.

The East Asian monsoon system covers China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, so AMOC collapse threatens global food security.

The Southern Hemisphere

An AMOC collapse would produce increased warming of the Southern Hemisphere, which would accelerate the melting of Antarctic ice sheets, which will feed back into global sea-level rise and potentially destabilises the Southern Ocean circulation.

So What Now?

The AMOC is collapsing because our political and economic systems have failed us.

Political parties that are building serious climate policy - and yes, there are some - deserve your vote, even when the media tells you they are unelectable.

Politicians calling for more oil and gas should be ridiculed, shamed, and held to account.

Demand that your local politician talks about the AMOC by name. Ask them what their party’s AMOC contingency plan is. Ask them when your country will follow Iceland and bring this before its own National Security Council.

Nothing will feel like enough, because it isn’t enough. The response requires the end of fossil fuel subsidies, and a managed transition to renewable energy.

It requires political courage, which only seems to appear when enough people demand it, loudly enough, and for long enough.

The tipping point is not only in the ocean - it’s with all of us, the voters.

We need to reach the point of enough people giving a damn, before the AMOC does exactly what you’re reading it will do.

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The Green Party is on the rise in the UK. In many constituencies it looks to be a straight fight between Green and Reform, as the traditional two-party system collapses.

Immigration is central to the argument. But immigration will not be the major issue come the next General Election, expected in 2029.

Neither will immigration be the big issue in the United States, when Trump is dethroned (if not earlier) in 2028.

Voter concerns were never truly about immigration, anyway. Aside from the core racist elements of society, we are actually living through what will be remembered as one of the most successful political misattributions in modern history.

Don’t Blame The Immigrants

The economic anxiety is real. People feel the pinch, their money isn’t going as far as it used to.

Wars and tariffs don’t help the situation, of course, but jobs are disappearing, too - and it’s not easy to walk into another one.

But politicians on the right have blamed these woes on immigration. And the message has stuck. This is yet another example of the left failing miserably to communicate the truth to the masses.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is offering employers cheaper, often more reliable solutions than employing humans. While wage stagnation continues for those in employment, as the cost of everything else continues to rise.

People feel like they are drowning. And they’re being told to blame immigrants, not the tech billionaires.

And many are.

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In the United States, the 2024 election was fought substantially on immigration. In the United Kingdom, the 2024 election was fought largely on immigration, too. The parties that spoke most loudly about borders, control, and anxiety performed strongly.

This is not because voters are stupid. It is because the story being offered was coherent, emotionally resonant, and targeted a real wound - even if the diagnosis was wrong.

The politicians most aggressively offering immigration as the explanation for economic anxiety are, in many cases, the same politicians most closely allied with the architects of the displacement.

Elon Musk - whose companies have automated more jobs, disrupted more industries, and concentrated more economic power in fewer hands than almost any individual in history - spent significant resources supporting political movements, whose core message was that immigrants were the threat to working people’s livelihoods.

The single biggest issue for political leaders to address at the next elections, will be unemployment.

The jobs disappearing now are not the jobs the previous generation of automation stories prepared us for. We were told to worry about factory workers and lorry drivers.

The current wave is taking junior lawyers, insurance processors, financial analysts, radiographers, copywriters, customer service teams, and mid-level administrators.

It is taking jobs that required degrees, training and knowledge. It is taking jobs that people were told were safe, because they required human judgment.

The scale is significant and accelerating. A 2024 report from Goldman Sachs estimated that AI could automate tasks currently performed in 300 million full-time jobs globally.

McKinsey’s modelling suggests that between 400 million and 800 million workers globally may need to transition to new occupations by 2030.

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Let’s look at the latest data around the world. The UK first - because it is possibly the most alarming.

Morgan Stanley research published in January 2026 found that UK companies reported net job losses of 8% over the past year due to AI — twice the global average and the highest rate among comparable economies.

A King’s College London study analysing millions of job postings and LinkedIn profiles from 2021 to 2025, found that firms whose workforces are highly exposed to AI reduced total employment by 4.5% on average, with junior positions falling by 5.8%.

Youth unemployment is particularly concerning. The most recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows the unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds at 15.8%, up from 14.6% the previous year, with 713,000 young people unemployed. That’s 70,000 more than the year before.

And we have barely started seeing the impact of AI on our lives.

Which makes predictions difficult. Nevertheless, the The Institute For Public Policy Research (IPPR) projects that up to 7.9 million jobs in the UK are at risk due to AI.

The National Foundation for Educational Research projects up to three million UK jobs could disappear by 2035 in declining occupations, including administrative, secretarial, customer service and machine operations.

Worryingly, 3.7 million UK workers already lack essential digital skills, says the Foundation, a figure projected to nearly double to seven million without serious intervention.

In the United States, in the first six months of 2025, 77,999 tech job losses were directly attributed to AI. Customer service employment declined by about 80,000 positions between 2022 and 2024.

Retail cashier roles face a 65% automation risk, with Walmart’s self-checkout expansion projected to replace up to 8,000 positions and Sam’s Club’s AI verification systems projected to eliminate 12,000 cashier roles.

You get the picture…

The US trucking industry is projected to lose 1.5 million professional driving jobs by 2030, with employment falling from 3.8 million in 2024 to approximately 2.3 million.

Manufacturing assembly line employment is projected to fall from 2.1 million in 2024 to one million by 2030.

AI guru, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has stated that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.

In Europe and Central Asia, 39% of sectors dominated by women are highly exposed to AI, compared to 26% for men.

In emerging markets including China, India, and Brazil, about 47% of jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation - lower than the 60% figure for advanced economies but substantially higher than the 26% figure for low-income countries.

As for the robots taking over… South Korea has the highest robot density of any economy on earth - 1,000 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers.

The Green March Must Now Tackle AI

For green politics, the trend cannot be ignored. In fact, it has to be tackled head-on immediately. Recent encouraging successes will fizzle out in terms of importance, unless Zack Polanski and other green leaders can suggest a fix.

AI unemployment is the political issue the Greens are missing - and it will fall hardest on the communities currently voting Reform.

What makes the current moment even more dangerous is the curve. Previous waves of technological unemployment were gradual enough for labour markets to adapt. New jobs emerged in the spaces created by the old ones disappearing.

The current wave is operating on a different timescale. People are falling into the gap suddenly, without warning, in the middle of mortgages and school fees and the ordinary financial commitments of a life built on the assumption of continued employment.

For the Greens, geography matters too.

AI displacement is concentrated more in cities and their commuter zones, while the green jobs being created are focused in coastal areas, former industrial regions, and rural landscapes suitable for wind and solar infrastructure.

The Green movement has a window. The anxiety currently being expressed as anti-immigration sentiment will soon become clearer, and targeted at Artificial Intelligence.

Politicians on the right have been closely aligning themselves to the leaders of AI, and they may seek to pull back from that position.

The wealth tax, central to Green policy, will help to fund the transition to wherever we are heading.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure required for a functioning net-zero economy, with renewable energy generation, grid modernisation, retrofitting, ecological restoration - plus a move to sustainable agriculture - will all require human skills that AI cannot easily substitute.

To maintain the momentum, the Green Party needs to inject this into political conversation now.

Green policies are supported on this channel because they seek to address the climate and biodiversity emergencies we face.

We cannot ignore, however, the fact that many Green supporters understandably are strongly opposed to the acceleration of AI, because of the environmental damage caused, in particular the demand on water systems.

Sadly, the horse has bolted. You can explore this more here:

Who Will Win The Next Elections?

By 2028 in the United States, the primary electoral anxiety will not be immigration. It will be unemployment driven by AI displacement, and the absence of any political programme operating at the speed and scale required to address it.

By 2029 in the United Kingdom, the same dynamic will be advanced enough to reshape the electoral map.

The Musk-aligned politicians will face accountability. The voters who trusted them will know, by then, what was automated and by whom - and who told them to look the other way.

All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so please, if you are able, follow the link below…

Support Ethical Disruption

Green businesses are not a niche. They are torchbearers. They lead the way in environmental and ethical practices. They are an example to us all.

Companies operating without greenwashing, without animal products, using renewable energy and alternatives to plastic wherever possible, are demonstrating something the entire economy needs to learn.

They chose the harder, more expensive, more ethical path. Their net impact on the natural world is overwhelmingly positive - and for this they deserve to be commercially successful.

As an environmental journalist, I cover the consequences of doing things the wrong way, the traditional way, the perhaps more profitable way. It leads to plastic pollution, ocean acidification, collapse of crucial pollinators, extreme weather… the list goes on.

But businesses leading the way on crucial solutions are often invisible to audiences. That’s something I’m trying to fix.

The Ways I Can Help

I’ve spent my career finding environmental, ethical stories that matter and working out how to make people stop and pay attention.

I now run Ethical Disruption - a media brand covering the climate, nature and pollution emergencies - and I am working to a mantra of ‘innovation in communication’.

The following is a list of different tactics, and not every one will fit every business. Scroll on by to the next one if you need to - there should be something here that catches your eye.

I have already partnered with respected eco brands like Fussy, Ocean Bottle and Homethings, and have built up social profiles for companies like smartgrid innovators SNRG.

I’m not trying to sell green businesses a package. I’m simply trying to make a difference, by working with people I have the utmost respect for…

LinkedIn / AI Search Support

I am determined to give eco businesses the same chance in the market as any other - but many simply don’t understand what’s changed.

More people every day are using AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude to search for information - the best solar / wind / vegan company etc.

Even those still using Google are given an AI answer through Gemini at the top of their search - and most people don’t scroll past that.

So how do businesses get mentioned in AI’s answers? That’s the power of LinkedIn in 2026 - and I’m very experienced at building up a business profile on the platform. I can help you, too.

LinkedIn is now the most cited domain across every major AI platform. The AI searches retrieve answers from sources they have weighted for authority. And LinkedIn content from real people, posting with genuine expertise, and consistency, is weighted heavily.

At the same time, LinkedIn’s own algorithm has shifted against company pages, which now receive just 5% of feed distribution, whereas personal profiles receive 65%.

So a green business leader posting as themselves, with genuine authority and genuine opinion, outperforms anything a company page can post, regardless of budget.

This is where I can assist, because I can write, or help to shape, interesting and relevant stories that build real authority with the people who matter, on the platform where buyers, investors and media are making decisions.

If this sounds relevant to where you are, let’s have a conversation. Email me: action@ethicaldisruption.earth

Founding Partnership

For a small number of businesses who want to be part of Ethical Disruption’s mission from the ground floor, I offer a founding partnership - a one-off lifetime investment of £500 that is truly unique.

It includes permanent recognition across all Ethical Disruption channels, a piece of genuine editorial journalism covering your business, and the opportunity to make money by launching a range of branded ethical merchandise, hosted on the Ethical Disruption store. You can read more about that in the next section.

This is not a sponsorship. It is not advertising. It is association with a growing, independent media brand, run by a person on the exact same page as yourself when it comes to making ethical decisions.

It’s a commitment from me, to help you and your business in any way I can, on your own future journey.

There are a maximum of 10 founding places.

Details can be found here.

Teemill Merchandise Store

You can make money from having your own ethical clothing and other merchandise range. You won’t have to devote any time to running this side of your business, and you’ll get a huge 75% of the profits.

Ethical Disruption runs a print-on-demand merchandise store at ethicaldisruption.store via Teemill - the most ethical, circular, plastic-free fashion operation around.

Other Teemill partners include Greenpeace, WWF, RSPB, Chris Packham, Friends of the Earth, Surfers Against Sewage and Music Declares Emergency - so you’ll be in great company, selling the exact same eco clothing and other products that they do - but with your own logo or design instead.

The Founding Partnership offers the chance to open another income stream this way - but there is another level of support that will give you the chance of launching a smaller range, still with the large profit margins.

And if you’re interested in having a whole store to yourself, instead of being hosted by Ethical Disruption, I’m happy to discuss how I can help with that, too.

More information can be found here

Editorial Coverage - Here And On Other Media

Ethical Disruption is an independent media brand, with the main website (this one) hosted on Substack. We’ve been listed already in the platform’s Top 20 rising publications across the world.

Substack has become the destination where the world's most trusted independent journalism now lives - a platform that has fundamentally shifted where serious audiences go when they stop trusting mainstream media.

When I cover a business, I do it as a journalist. It is editorial coverage, not advertorial, and that distinction makes it worth something.

‘Innovation in communication’ will also see inventive methods of putting the green message across on other platforms - and when environmental problems are raised, solutions are also revealed - many of which come from eco businesses.

I can also help you to be featured in national, regional and local media. Having been a journalist for many years, I know exactly what reporters want, and I have helped numerous companies receive valuable free media coverage. I can help yours, too.

Get in touch: action@ethicaldisruption.earth

Affiliate Partnership

I work with a number of carefully vetted affiliate partners - sustainable brands whose products I feature across Ethical Disruption content because I truly believe in them.

Every partner passes a vegan compliance check, a greenwashing audit, and a values alignment review before any commercial relationship begins.

If you make or sell something that genuinely belongs in this space, I would welcome a conversation about whether an affiliate relationship makes sense. The starting point is always the ethics, not the commission rate.

Note, too, that I will never recommend, feature, or partner with any brand that involves animal-derived products, animal exploitation, or practices that contradict the welfare of the animals we are asking our audience to care about.

If your business operates to these standards, you are the kind of business I exist to support.

Please email me here: action@ethicaldisruption.earth

Where to Start

The right entry point depends on what you’re looking for.

If you want to discuss LinkedIn and social platform support: Email me directly at action@ethicaldisruption.earth

If you want a founding stake in something being built the right way: buymeacoffee.com/ethicaldisruption

If you want to explore editorial content or an affiliate relationship: Email me at action@ethicaldisruption.earth

If you just want to follow along and see what happens: Subscribe here, and share this with any green business founder you think should read it. That costs nothing and means more than you might think. Thank you.

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Or at least we can say: “I want no part in that.”

Ethical Disruption partners with a growing number of eco businesses, which have passed our own stringent ethical tests.

They are listed below in our Greener Than Green guide. Please support them to help them continue their vital work.

If you buy anything via links on this page, Ethical Disruption will receive a small commission from our partners - which of course helps this channel to continue its important work, too.

We will be updating this page regularly, as new genuinely green businesses come to light (or if some fall from grace). So please bookmark this page, and thank you for your support.

QUICK LINKS

Personal Care: Fussy, Make Waves, Truthbrush, TOTM

Natural Skincare & Beauty: Arella Beauty, Evolve Beauty

Sustainable Fashion: Ethical Disruption, Mashu

Vegan Supplements & Vitamins: DR.VEGAN, Vegums, Form Nutrition, Together Health, Pure Fungi, Nothing Fishy, Vegan Supplement Store, Spacegoods

Health and Wellness: One Living, BCalm

Sustainable Home: Homethings, Jungle Culture, Coco & Coir, Ocean Bottle

Green Digital Services: Eco Web Hosting

Circular Economy: Music Magpie

Eco Packaging: SR Mailing

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Greener Than Green Brands

Arella Beauty

An award-winning British vegan supplement brand (collagen, menopause support, skin gummies) with the Vegan Society trademark and multiple sustainability awards, including the Global Green Beauty Award.

Female-founded, and a member of Buy Women Built, the brand also boasts FSC-certified packaging and a tree-planting partnership.

Website

Atenai London

The award-winning wellness range spans bath, body, hair, fragrance, candles and diffusers, under three fragrance collections.

Everything is vegan, cruelty-free, paraben/ sulphate/ silicone /palm oil free, and uses Prevented Ocean Plastic in its bottles.

Website

B Calm

BCalm is a UK organic essential oils brand, run by a IFPA-registered clinical aromatherapist. All oils are explicitly vegan, 100% organic, and cruelty-free.

They support the CALM mental health charity, have won the Global Green Beauty Award 2025, and are a Buy Women Built brand. Eco-friendly packaging is used, too.

Website

Coco & Coir

Coco & Coir specialises in coconut coir products - primarily garden products like coir mats, hanging baskets, grow bags, and potting mix made from coconut husk fibre.

Coir is a byproduct of coconut processing, fully plant-based, and biodegradable. A genuine sustainability-focused business.

Website

Complete Unity Yoga

Complete Unity Yoga sells vegan-friendly and sustainable yoga mats, free from plastic, with FSC-certified plastic-free recyclable paper packaging.

Materials across the range of accessories, meditation equipment and clothing are natural rubber (sustainably harvested), jute, cork, and 100% cotton - no animal products visible anywhere. Eye pillows are filled with flaxseeds, linseeds and lavender.

Website

Dr Vegan

Dr Vegan is a UK supplements brand whose name declares its intent. They produce vitamins, minerals, and supplements formulated without animal products.

They only use plant-based and naturally sourced ingredients of exceptional quality, at optimal dosages, all of which are backed by science and research, provided in planet-friendly packaging.

Website

Doulton

Doulton is a UK heritage water filter company, one of the oldest filtration brands in the world. Their ceramic water filters are genuinely effective and reduce plastic bottle use significantly.

Made from natural materials, ceramic filters offer a more sustainable way to filter water at home versus plastic based filter systems. They are commonly used in gravity systems, under sink setups, and tap-mounted countertop filters.

Website

Eco Web Hosting

Eco Web Hosting is a UK green web hosting company that focuses on fast and eco-friendly web hosting, and offsets or matches energy usage with renewable energy.

Their entire proposition is sustainability-focused. and the company plants trees for every server and hosting package purchased, as well as offsetting the carbon emissions of its employees.

Website

Ethical Disruption

Our own store sells clothing produced through Teemill, the Isle of Wight-based circular fashion platform. Every garment is made from 100% GOTS-certified organic cotton, with a living wage paid across the supply chain.

The company is certified carbon neutral, uses renewable energy throughout production, and prints to order - eliminating warehouse overstock. Every product carries a QR code on its label allowing customers to return it when worn out, whereupon it is recycled through Teemill's fibre-to-fibre Remill process and remade into new products.

Low-impact non-toxic dyes are used throughout, and all products are vegan. There is no plastic packaging.

Website

Evolve Beauty

Evolve Beauty is an award-winning UK organic skincare brand. They are certified organic, cruelty-free (Leaping Bunny certified), and explicitly formulate without animal-derived ingredients across their core range.

Using pure botanicals and sustainable, eco-friendly packaging, the products are created in small batches to reduce waste and maximise freshness. Evolve also uses upcycled ingredients and prioritises circular packaging.

Website

Form Nutrition

A plant-based performance nutrition brand producing protein powders, supplements, and wellness products, formulated entirely from plants.

They are 100% vegan and have a strong following in the plant-based sports nutrition space. The UK’s first protein brand to achieve B Corporation certification.

Website

Frutteto Italia

A healthier jam, handmade in Italy from fruit only, with no refined sugar and no artificial sweetener. Organic, vegan and gluten-free.

Featured in The Guardian, Foodism, and Feast Magazine, and stocked by Planet Organic and Suma. Eight jam varieties include Apricot, Strawberry, Raspberry, Blueberry, SuperBerries, Sicilian Orange, Cherry, and Orange & Mango.

Website

Fussy Deodorant

Fussy is a refillable deodorant brand. The award-winning design features a durable outer case made with recycled plastic, and home-compostable refills made from waste sugarcane.

They are vegan and cruelty-free, B Corp certified and backed by science - Fussy’s formula contains an odour neutralising probiotic that literally eats sweat.

Website

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Homethings

Homethings is a UK eco cleaning brand known for its concentrated, refillable cleaning tablet system. Tablets dissolve in water to create cleaning products — significantly reducing plastic waste. They are also vegan and cruelty-free.

Homethings gives users affordable, eco cleaning and home care products, which save tonnes of plastic and CO2 compared to liquid based, big brand cleaners.

Website

Jungle Culture

Jungle Culture is a UK ethical brand selling bamboo and eco-friendly products, such as reusable straws, bamboo cutlery, coconut shell bowls and similar zero-waste kitchen and lifestyle products.

All products are plant-based and vegan, ethically sourced from cooperatives, with a B-certified supply chain, working closely with a network of small farms, crafts workshops and ethical factories in Vietnam to produce plastic-free products with a purpose.

Website

Make Waves

Make Waves is a refillable deodorant and antiperspirant brand. All products are vegan friendly and cruelty, alcohol, paraben and phthalate free. Their supply chain is entirely UK based - they manufacture everything locally, including the applicators, refills, deodorants, packaging and the inserts.

They are the UK’s first refillable deodorant brand that offers both natural deodorant and natural-based antiperspirant. Their dedication to creating sustainable, high-performing products has seen them become the highest-rated antiperspirant or deodorant on Trustpilot.

Website

Mashu

Mashu is a luxury vegan handbag brand - PETA-certified 100% vegan, using exclusively plant-based materials (apple leather/Uppeal, BioVeg corn-based leather, Yatay-R recycled materials, Lignify plant-based material, organic cotton).

Based in London, and designed by Greek-born Ioanna Topouzoglou, Mashu creates contemporary handbags using innovative fabrics and traditional craftsmanship. Mashu offers carbon-neutral shipping and free repairs for life.

Website

Music Magpie

Music Magpie is a UK secondhand tech and media marketplace. People sell old phones, laptops, CDs, DVDs and games - a pure circular economy model.

This reduces e-waste and extends product life. Used by millions every year, a sustainable and trusted way to buy, sell and rent, declutter and get cash for your unwanted stuff.

Website

Nothing Fishy

A supplements brand with sustainability at its core. All products are naturally sourced from plants, are vegan-friendly and sustainably packaged with compostable packaging, glass bottles and paper refill packs.

Nothing Fishy has more than 145,000 customers, with ethical accreditation from The Good Shopping Guide, and has a SeaTrees ocean restoration partnership, funding mangroves, kelp and seagrass with each purchase.

Website

Ocean Bottle

Ocean Bottle is a premium reusable water bottle brand that funds the collection of ocean-bound plastic. The company is B Corp certified and strongly mission-driven.

Ocean Bottle claim to have created the most sustainably-minded reusable bottle out there, with 1000 plastic bottles collected from our oceans for every bottle sold.

Website

One Living

This story started back in 2018, through founder and England rugby legend, Jonny Wilkinson, and his nutritionist wife, who discovered the role of bacteria in the gut and the idea of fermenting foods. One Living’s drinks are aimed at improving gut health, brain health, immunity, and energy, with added functional ingredients including mushroom extracts, vitamins, and botanical compounds.

The aluminium cans are recyclable, while a vegan commitment is evident in their use of algae-derived D3. Drinks are rich in live cultures and anti-oxidants, and are dairy-free.

Website

Pure Fungi

A UK mushroom supplement brand, specialising in 100% organic mushroom extracts crafted to support mental clarity, immunity, energy, and overall wellbeing.

The product range includes Lion’s Mane, Reishi, Chaga, Cordyceps, and Tremella, all available in both capsule and powder form. Each supplement is made exclusively from the fruiting body - free from fillers, grains, or synthetic additives - and is lab-tested, vegan, and HACCP-certified.

Website

Raw Beauty Lab

Vegan collagen - cruelty-free, UK-made, sustainably sourced, non-GMO, and featured in Forbes, Women's Health and The Independent.

The food-grown supplements support a range of health, beauty and fitness goals, as well as being clean, cruelty-free, and planet-friendly.

Website

Spacegoods

An adaptogenic mushroom and wellness blend brand. Explicitly plant-based and marketed to health-conscious consumers.

“Rainbow Dust” blends combining mushrooms, adaptogens, and plant-based ingredients.

Website

SR Mailing

SR Mailing is a sustainable, responsible and reputable packaging company based in Manchester, UK.

Its mission is to adapt a zero-waste concept and complete the lifecycle of products from raw materials, to sorting and to end consumer disposal. SR Mailing is innovating and developing products that are 100% recycled, recyclable, compostable, reusable and/or climate neutral.

Website

TOTM

TOTM (Time Of The Month) is an organic period care brand, offering organic cotton tampons, pads, and period pants. They are certified organic, vegan, and plastic-free across their product range.

Conventional period care products can contain up to 90% plastic and plastic tampon applicators can take up to 500 years to break down. TOTM is a certified B Corp.

Website

Together Health

A UK health supplement brand using whole-food ingredients in their capsules. They are certified vegan, use plant-based capsules (HPMC), and have strong ethical sourcing credentials.

Avoiding plastic in the pouches was non-negotiable for Together Health. The packaging is made from renewable sources, and they never use any plastic postage packaging or filling.

Website

Truthbrush

The Truthbrush is designed in Devon and is made from organic bamboo. The plant-based bristles are made from 100% castor bean oil, reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

They are vegan, plastic-free, and compostable, and each brush is hand-wrapped in fully recyclable packaging. Truthbrush is backed by the School for Social Entrepreneurs and is a member of 1% for the planet.

Website

Vegums

Vegums makes specifically vegan supplements in gummy form - designed for vegans who struggle to get certain nutrients (B12, iron, omega-3, vitamin D) from diet alone.

Every Vegums pouch is home-compostable and plastic-free. The company plants a tree for every review, and ships in recycled cardboard.

Website

Vegan Supplement Store

The Vegan Supplement Store is a UK online retailer specialising entirely in vegan supplements and health products. By definition, everything they stock must be vegan.

We can go further: they are cruelty-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, hormone-free, GMO-free, halal-compliant and kosher-compliant. No animal products ever. All own-brand products are registered with the Vegan Society.

Website

Have you ever stood in a store, or been shopping online, and wondered just how ethical or environmentally-friendly a product really was?

Should you buy it? Is it vegan? Are the claims on the packet or bottle just greenwashing?

Now you can bookmark this page and open up the FREE Ethical Disruption web-based app, to ask….

HOW GREEN IS IT?

About 60% of all clothing produced today is made from synthetic fibres - polyester, nylon, acrylic - which are, in practical terms, plastic.

They shed microplastic fibres into waterways with every wash. They do not biodegrade. They end up in landfill, in the ocean, and increasingly in human bodies.

Microplastics have been detected in human blood, lungs and breast milk

Fast fashion’s environmental toll is staggering, and most of it is invisible at the point of purchase. Choosing clothing made from organic, natural fibres and produced without hazardous chemicals means opting out of one of the most polluting supply chains on the planet.

The Ethical Disruption store is powered by Teemill, a circular economy clothing platform based on the Isle of Wight, that has spent a decade proving sustainable fashion does not require compromise.

Teemill’s products are GOTS-certified and OEKO-TEX certified, confirming that their printing inks and finished products are free from hazardous chemicals, to standards rigorous enough for baby clothing.

Every garment is made using renewable energy, from organic cotton, and designed to be returned and remade through their circular take-back programme.

Nothing ends up in landfill. That is the commitment, and it is independently verified.

Teemill works with more than 10,000 brands globally, including Greenpeace, WWF, BBC Earth, and Lush. Wildlife broadcaster and activist Chris Packham chose Teemill for his sustainable clothing collections, including his REVOLTING range.

Whale and Dolphin Conservation, Birdlife International, and dozens of environmental organisations that scrutinise supply chains for a living have reached the same conclusion about where they want their merchandise made.

There is a particular power to a message worn on a body rather than published on a screen. It cannot be scrolled past. It travels to places editorial content never reaches. It starts conversations in the queue, on the bus, across the dinner table. It is ethically disruptive.

Every purchase at the Ethical Disruption store supports independent environmental journalism - and as we introduce green businesses and charities, you will be able to support them, as well.

Wearing your passion on your sleeve.

Shop at ethicaldisruption.store

You are now made of plastic. Right now, as you read this, plastic particles are circulating through your bloodstream, lodged in your organs, and accumulating in your brain.

Since 2020, there has not been a single part of the human body where scientists went looking for microplastics and failed to find them. Not one.

This is no longer a story about plastics in the ocean.

Microplastics are fragments of plastic smaller than five millimetres. Most of the particles found inside human bodies are far smaller than that - measured in micrometres or nanometres, invisible to the naked eye.

They enter your body in three ways:

• You breathe them in - they are in indoor and outdoor air everywhere on Earth.

• You eat them - they are in your food.

• You drink them - they are in tap water, and in particularly high concentrations, in bottled water.

That plastic is in virtually every water source on Earth is not in dispute.

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Once inside, some particles pass straight through. But many do not.

Some cross the walls of the gut into the bloodstream. And once in the blood, they go everywhere that blood goes - which is everywhere in your body.

In 2022, scientists in the Netherlands tested blood samples from healthy adult donors and found microplastic particles in 77% of them.

The most common type was PET - the plastic used to make drinks bottles and food packaging. The second most common was polystyrene, used in foam cups and takeaway containers.

Microplastics in Our Bodies: Organ by Organ

The Lungs

In 2022, UK researchers examined lung tissue samples from 11 living patients undergoing surgery. All 11 contained microplastics - including deep in the lower lobes, the furthest reaches of the respiratory system. The most common type found was polypropylene, used in packaging, ropes, and textiles.

The Heart

In 2023, researchers examining tissue from cardiac surgery patients found microplastics in the pericardium - the outer sac surrounding the heart - as well as in the heart muscle itself, the surrounding fat, and the left atrial appendage. In other words: every layer of the heart.

Perhaps most troubling, researchers found new plastic particles in some patients after surgery, that had not been present before - suggesting that hospital operating theatres themselves are a source of microplastic contamination.

The Arteries

In March 2024, one of the most consequential microplastics studies ever published appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Italian researchers examined plaque removed from the carotid arteries of 257 patients and found microplastics in 58% of the samples.

They then followed those patients for nearly three years. Patients with microplastics in their artery plaque were four and a half times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or death.

The researchers were careful to note that this does not prove the plastic caused these outcomes - it may be that inflammation draws particles to already-diseased arteries. But cardiologists are now actively debating whether microplastics should be considered a new cardiovascular risk factor, alongside smoking, blood pressure, and cholesterol.

The Liver, Kidneys, and Bone Marrow

These findings have been confirmed across multiple studies. The liver and kidneys, which filter the blood, accumulate plastic particles as a direct consequence of doing their job.

In 2024, microplastics were confirmed in bone marrow - buried inside the bones, where blood cells are produced. One researcher described it as evidence of “systemic penetration into core biological infrastructure.”

The Brain

This, and the examples following, should stop you in your tracks and leave you demanding that action be taken.

In February 2025, a study published in Nature Medicine compared brain tissue samples from people who died in 2016 with samples from those who died in 2024. Microplastics were found in all samples.

But that was not the most alarming part.

Microplastic concentration in human brain tissue had increased by approximately 50% in just eight years - rising to nearly 5,000 micrograms per gram of tissue.

The particles appeared as nanoscale, shard-like fragments: tiny, jagged pieces of plastic embedded in the frontal cortex.

The frontal cortex is the part of the brain most associated with what makes us distinctly human - decision-making, personality, impulse control, and the capacity to plan for the future.

The lead researcher, Matthew Campen at the University of New Mexico, put it plainly: ”This is an eyes-wide-open situation right now. We are just now realising how much plastic is in our bodies. We need a surge of research.”

The Reproductive System

In 2024, researchers at the University of New Mexico found microplastics in testicular tissue from every one of 23 human autopsy samples. Human testes contained nearly three times more plastic than those of dogs - despite dogs being far less discriminating about what they put in their mouths (Border Terrier father here, confirming that point).

Multiple studies have confirmed microplastics in human semen. Men with PET plastic in their semen showed significantly lower sperm normality in at least one study.

And in 2025, microplastics were confirmed in follicular fluid - the liquid surrounding eggs in women’s ovaries. The implications for fertility are not yet known.

Newborn Babies, The Placenta and Umbilical Cord

The placenta evolved to protect a developing foetus from harmful substances in the mother’s blood.

But microplastics are passing through it.

The first study to find this - the one that coined the term ‘plasticenta’ - was published in 2020. By 2024, microplastics had been confirmed in umbilical cord blood and in meconium - the first stool passed by a newborn baby in the hours after birth.

That really is frightening, and a huge WAKE UP alarm call: A baby’s gut contains plastic, even before they have drawn their first independent breath.

In 2022, microplastics were also found in breast milk from healthy women - being passed on during feeding.

Children’s Tonsils

In early 2025, a surgical team at Stanford was examining tonsils removed from children for routine conditions such as sleep apnoea. They began testing the tissue for microplastics.

They found them - not just on the surface, but embedded deep within the tissue. And in one child’s tonsils, they found something visible under a microscope: Teflon.

Yep, the non-stick coating used on cookware. It had shed as microscopic particles, been inhaled or ingested, and lodged inside a child’s lymphoid tissue.

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So What Do We Actually Know?

We do not yet fully understand the precise health consequences of all of this. The science is young and the regulatory response is slower still.

What we know for certain is that microplastics are in our bodies, in every organ studied, and in increasing concentrations.

There is no medical or regulatory body anywhere in the world that currently states microplastics in the human body are safe.

The position of the WHO, the FDA, and equivalent bodies is that more research is needed.

It is deeply unsettling.

How Did We Get Here?

The first microplastic was detected in ocean water in the early 1970s. The term itself was coined in a scientific paper in 2004. For roughly the following decade, public concern was focused almost entirely on the ocean - on marine animals, on images of seabirds and sea turtles. We responded, largely, with paper straws and a modest reduction in plastic bag use.

The first study finding microplastics in a human organ - the placenta - appeared in 2020. Blood: 2022. Lungs: 2022. Heart: 2023. Testicles: 2024. The brain in detail: 2025.

Science has only recently turned its full attention to something that has been accumulating inside us for decades.

Global plastic production was roughly two million tonnes in 1950. It is now more than 450 million tonnes a year.

Even if we were to stop producing all plastic tomorrow, what already exists in the environment would continue breaking down into smaller and smaller fragments for centuries.

There is currently no known way to remove microplastics from the human body. The only strategy available is to slow the intake - to reduce the use of plastics, wherever possible, now.

Plastic has always been found when researchers chose to look. In blood. In tonsils. In the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, 11 kilometres below the ocean surface. On the summit of Mount Everest. In Antarctic penguins.

There is nowhere left to look.

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Who Is Making This Worse — And Why

The health story above is disturbing enough on its own terms. But it exists within a larger story - one about power, profit, and a deliberate strategy to keep the plastic flowing.

Because while doctors are finding microplastics in children’s tonsils and brain tissue, the industry that makes plastic is planning to produce far more of it.

Plastic Is Oil’s Plan B

To understand why plastic production is accelerating rather than slowing, you need to understand one thing about the fossil fuel industry - it has seen the energy transition coming and is repositioning.

As demand for oil-based fuels faces long-term pressure from electric vehicles and renewable energy, major oil and gas companies have identified plastics as their growth engine for the coming decades.

Nearly 99% of plastics are made from fossil fuels. Producing more plastic means finding a new market for oil and gas, even as the world tries to burn less of it.

The scale of what is planned is staggering. Companies including ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are all in active expansion mode. Shell’s petrochemical complex in Pennsylvania became operational in November 2022, adding more than 1.6 million tonnes of polyethylene capacity per year - more than doubling the company’s global output.

Saudi Aramco has stated plans to channel roughly one-third of its oil production into plastics and petrochemicals by 2030. Petrochemicals already make up 82% of Saudi Arabia’s foreign exports critical to its government budget.

China is in a category of its own. The International Energy Agency describes its plastics expansion as dwarfing any historical precedent. In the five years between 2019 and 2024, China added as much plastic production capacity as Europe, Japan, and South Korea combined.

The global petrochemical industry, valued at $638 billion in 2023, is projected to reach $838 billion by 2030.

The Treaty That Failed

In March 2022, representatives from 175 nations gathered at the UN Environment Assembly and agreed to negotiate a legally-binding global plastics treaty - one that would address the full lifecycle of plastics, from extraction to disposal. The deadline for completing it was the end of 2024.

It failed.

Not because the science was absent. Not because most governments lacked the will. It failed because of what happened in the rooms where the negotiations took place.

At the fifth round of treaty negotiations in Busan, South Korea, in November 2024 - the session that was meant to be the final one - 220 fossil fuel and petrochemical industry lobbyists were registered to attend. That made them the single largest delegation at the talks.

They outnumbered the combined delegation of the European Union and all its member states. They outnumbered representatives from the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty by three to one. They outnumbered delegates from the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus by nearly nine to one.

The negotiations went on and no agreement was reached.

A follow-up session was held in Geneva in August 2025. At that meeting, the lobbyist count had risen to 234. The talks collapsed again.

The central fault line throughout both sets of negotiations was the same: the majority of countries wanted the treaty to address plastic production. The petrochemical bloc, led by oil-producing states including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iran, insisted the treaty should focus only on waste management and recycling.

The Recycling Myth

The industry’s preferred alternative to production limits is recycling. But global plastic recycling rates have remained below 10% for decades - despite billions of dollars spent on infrastructure and decades of public awareness campaigns asking people to sort their bins correctly.

The problem is primarily structural - most plastic is technically very difficult or economically impossible to recycle at scale. There are thousands of different plastic formulations, many of which cannot be processed together.

Contamination is a constant issue. And recycled plastic is often more expensive to produce than virgin plastic made from cheap fossil fuel feedstocks.

What Would Actually Help

The scientific consensus, as laid out in open letters from the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, is that recycling alone cannot solve this. The root cause is overproduction. Any meaningful solution has to address what is made, not only what is thrown away.

The mechanisms that would actually work include legally binding caps on plastic production - the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) - rules that make the companies who make plastic financially liable for its full lifecycle, including disposal.

The EU has made meaningful moves in this direction, including bans on specific single-use items and requirements that plastic bottles contain a minimum proportion of recycled content.

But the EU cannot solve this alone. Plastic production and pollution is global. The microplastics in your frontal cortex arrived from a global supply chain.

Meanwhile, youmay well remember February 2025, when President Trump posted “BACK TO PLASTIC” on social media, in reference to his intention to reverse a government plan to phase out plastic straws. That’s what we are up against.

All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so please, if you are able, have a look at the ways in which you can help out, by following the link below.

Please Buy Me An Ethical Coffee

References

Nature Medicine (February 2025)

New England Journal of Medicine (March 2024)

Greenpeace UK Plastics Treaty Report (2025)

InfluenceMap Corporate Advocacy Analysis (2025)

Center for International Environmental Law

OECD Global Plastics Outlook

Scientific American

Yale Environment 360

Health Policy Watch

Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty.

Organ-by-Organ:

Blood Leslie, H.A., van Velzen, M.J.M., Brandsma, S.H., Vethaak, A.D., Garcia-Vallejo, J.J. & Lamoree, M.H. (2022).

Lungs Jenner, L.C., Rotchell, J.M., Bennett, R.T., Cowen, M., Tentzeris, V. & Sadofsky, L.R. (2022).

Heart Huang, W., Yan, M., Wu, Q., Chen, P., Liu, C., Zhang, Q., Li, M., Wan, Z. & Wang, H. (2023).

Carotid artery plaque / cardiovascular outcomes Marfella, R., Prattichizzo, F., Sardu, C., et al. (2024).

Brain Nihart, A.J., Garcia, M.A., El Hayek, E., Liu, R., Olewine, M., Kingston, J.D., Castillo, E.F., et al. & Campen, M.J. (2025).

Bone marrow Guo, X., Wang, L., Wang, X., Li, D., Wang, H., Xu, H. & Zhang, S. (2024).

Testicles Hu, C.J., Garcia, M.A., Nihart, A., Liu, R., Yin, L., Adolphi, N., Gallego, D.F., Kang, H., Campen, M.J. & Yu, X. (2024).

Semen Zhou, Y., Wang, J., Shi, H., et al. (2023).

Follicular fluid Gómez-Sánchez, M.I., et al. (2025).

Placenta Ragusa, A., Svelato, A., Santacroce, C., et al. (2021).

Cord blood and meconium Zhu, M., Li, X., Lin, W., et al. (2024).

Breast milk Ragusa, A., et al. (2022).

Sperm count decline Levine, H., Jørgensen, N., Martino-Andrade, A., Mendiola, J., Weksler-Derri, D., Jolles, M., Pinotti, R. & Swan, S.H. (2022).

Tonsils in children Meister, K., et al. (2024–25).

The words we use to talk about the most important issue of our time, might be the very reason not enough people are listening.

Words matter. And even staples like climate, environment and sustainability are killing progress.

Please watch this video - I’d be grateful if you could also subscribe - and then we’ll look at the issues in more detail….

Change Your Language Of Doom

Communication of the perils facing planet Earth is still - STILL - not landing in sufficient numbers - and that puts the natural world, and all of us crisis-denying humans, at existential risk.

To communicate that better - it looks like we’re screwed unless we change our ways really, really quickly.

As a journalist myself, my job has been to communicate often complex information in a form that can be understood by an audience of all educational abilities and levels of knowledge.

In short, keep it simple. Then dive in deeper. That’s what this very article does.

In January 2025, I wrote an article here which garnered a lot of feedback, and it urged people to stop talking so much about climate change, when talking about climate change.

Now that Ethical Disruption is also a video channel, I’m returning to the subject with further thinking, updated reports and the YouTube explanation of the 25 words and phrases that really ought to be replaced, or at the very least explained better, to get more people onside with reality.

Why Don’t People Engage With Scientific Language?

Judging by recent surveys, most people seem to accept that climate change is real, and want action taken to tackle it. But huge proportions don’t feel any urgency about it.

That gap between belief and understanding - and between concern and action - is a failure of communication.

The 2024 Peoples’ Climate Vote, by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), was the world’s largest standalone survey on climate change, covering 77 countries representing 87% of the global population.

It found that 56% of people think about climate change daily or weekly, and 53% were more worried about it than a year earlier.

For the biggest, most worrying story in the world (yes, it will prove even more damaging than wars), these aren’t great figures.

Four out of five people globally do want their governments to take stronger climate action, more encouragingly, but it’s interesting the break that down into countries: 91% of Chinese respondents, 73% of Britons, 70% of Europeans and just 60% of Americans.

People listen to politicians over scientists when it comes to climate change. That depressing reality was confirmed in a study published in the journal BioScience in early 2026.

Researchers from Michigan State University and the University of Oregon took the world scientists’ 2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous Times on Planet Earth, one of the most urgent and compelling climate documents produced in recent years, and tested whether exposure to its language genuinely moved readers.

The short answer was: not really.

If the most authoritative voices in climate science are struggling to reach people through their words, what does that tell us about the words - and the whole approach to communication - that the environmental movement has been relying on?

Back in 2002, Republican strategist Frank Luntz advised President Bush to swap “global warming” for the “less frightening” and “less emotional” term “climate change” - a deliberate attempt to reduce public concern.

The green movement fought back by escalating the language. In 2019, The Guardian instructed its reporters to use “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” - a year after campaigning group Extinction Rebellion was formed, its name a direct pointer to what lay ahead.

But research suggests that neither the escalators or de-escalators really won.

We now have more scientific evidence, more data, more alarming reports than at any point in human history. We have documentaries, summits, school strikes, and even celebrities shouting from the rooftops.

But if we keep talking to people in a language they don’t speak, the message won’t land. And it isn’t landing.

So first, let’s go through those 25 very commonly-used words and phrases that I believe are getting in the way, and are failing to move people. And I want to suggest something better for each one.

Because the goal isn’t to be scientifically correct. The goal is to be understood. Only then will action and fury follow.

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1 Environment

Let’s start with perhaps the biggest offender of all.

It’s so broad it means everything and nothing at the same time.

“Protect the environment” - what does that actually conjure up? Some vague sense that you should probably recycle more? Maybe don’t leave the tap running?

Try instead: The natural world. Or maybe, our surroundings.

Make it about the river near where you grew up, the park your kids play in, and the coastline you drive to in summer.

2 Climate

Another biggie. And this word has had a rough ride.

Every time it snows heavily somewhere, you can set your watch by the social media response (certain politicians included): ”Hey, so much for global warming!”

Wow. I mean. it’s frustrating, but it also tells us something we need to hear - the word ‘climate’ is not connecting.

Part of the problem is that climate refers to patterns over decades. It’s not something you can feel on your skin or see out of your window.

But, the weather is. And that’s exactly what we should be talking about more. Extreme weather.

Enough of the climate projections for the year 2100. Instead focus on the wildfires tearing through places you’ve been on holiday - even your own locality.

Or the flooding that keeps returning to towns that never used to flood. The droughts, the heatwaves arriving earlier, and lasting longer.

Climate change, at its core, is an alarming increase in extreme weather. That’s the story, so we should always lead with that.

3 Global Warming

A lot of people think being warmer doesn’t sound so bad. Nicer summers, fewer grey days, maybe the British growing their own olives. Who’s going to march in the streets against that?

So take a moment to explain what warmer actually means.

A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour. More water vapour means heavier rainfall. That leads to flash flooding, bigger storms. more volatile, unpredictable, dangerous weather.

Warm might sound cosy, but the reality is chaos.

4 Biodiversity

This one sounds like it belongs in a school biology revision guide.

Say instead: All life on Earth. Or: The extraordinary variety of plants, animals and living things we share this planet with.

The biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis are deeply, dangerously intertwined. But it’s impossible to feel urgency about words you don’t fully understand.

5 Sustainability

One of the most overused words of the last decade. Ask 10 people what it means and you’ll probably get 10 different answers.

Say instead: Living in a way that protects our natural resources. Or: Living within our means, for the sake of the future.

6 Carbon Footprint

This one has become a political football, wrapped up in arguments about personal versus corporate responsibility.

It’s worth saying that the term was actually popularised by BP in a 2004 advertising campaign - we’ll look at that a bit later on. BP wanted to keep the focus on individuals, not corporations - but that doesn’t mean each and every one of us is excused.

Explain carbon footprint by saying: Our impact on the planet.

7 Greenhouse Gases

The greenhouse analogy actually works, because a greenhouse traps heat, which is exactly what these gases do.

But it’s better to explain that carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are heat-trapping gases.

The more we release, the more heat gets locked into the atmosphere.

8 Fossil Fuels

Not a terrible term, most people have a reasonable grasp of it.

But ‘coal, oil and gas’ is more specific, harder to dismiss, and harder to hide behind.

9 Renewable Energy

“Renewable” sounds appealing, but only if you already know what it means. Try: Endless energy sources.

Sun and wind don’t run out, and they also offer energy security - the strongest argument of all for many people, watching their bills rise on the back of the latest pointless war.

10 Net Zero

Politicians love this one, which means the public trusts it about as far as they can throw a solar panel.

What does it actually mean? It’s achieving a balance between the heat-trapping gases we release, and the amount we remove from the atmosphere.

It’s about achieving a balance, and saving lives while doing so - worth explaining…

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11 Deforestation

For such a devastating action, that’s emotionally vacant as a word.

Say instead: Cutting down forests, and explain that this is for animal farming, logging, and development.

And then describe what that means for wildlife, for the climate, and for the communities living alongside those forests.

12 Desertification

This sounds either like a dessert or a holiday destination. It’s neither.

It means land turning into desert because of human-caused climate change.

So explain that, because crops will fail, and communities will collapse.

13 Habitat Loss

The word “habitat” makes it feel like a David Attenborough documentary, rather than an emergency.

This is about animals losing their homes, species being wiped out, and the destruction of the natural world.

“Loss” doesn’t begin to cover that tragedy.

14 Coral Bleaching

Bleaching sounds like a spa treatment - this is coral reefs dying — mostly because the water around them is getting too warm.

15 Carbon Sequestration

Nobody needs to say this. ‘Carbon capture’ is fine, but ‘storing carbon underground’ is probably better.

And distinguish between the industrial process and the natural draw-down to trees, peat bogs, mangroves and other carbon-storing natural features.

16 Bioplastics

This word sounds nearly identical to regular plastics, but these are actually plastics made from plants, so talk up the difference.

17 Just Transition

This is a fair and important concept, but it has a deeply confusing name.

This is simply about a fair shift to green jobs - making sure workers and communities aren’t abandoned as we move away from fossil fuels.

It’s about people, over policy, so lead with the people.

18 Rewilding

Actually, one of the better terms, though the media loves to make it sound terrifying.

Wolves! In your garden! Eating your children!

In reality, it’s simply bringing back nature, and letting ecosystems recover.

19 Circular Economy

An economic model based on reusing and reducing waste. A worthy concept, but a terrible name.

Just say: The importance of recycling and reusing everything, so nothing ends up as waste.

20 Sustainable Fashion

“Sustainable” is already vague;, and “fashion” makes it sound like it only applies to people who attend Paris runway shows.

Be more specific, say “eco-friendly clothing,” and crucially determine whether the clothing is plastic-free.

A lot of so-called sustainable fashion contains plastics like recycled polyester or elastane, which shed microplastics when you wash them, which end up in our rivers and oceans.

If something is genuinely plastic-free, say so loudly. Or go to our plastic-free clothing store!

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21 Desalination

The process of removing salt from seawater to make it drinkable. It’s vitally important, but how many people know what the word means?

Don’t say ‘desalination’ without saying what it does: It makes seawater drinkable, and it could save lives in regions where clean water is running out.

22 Carbon Neutral

This means not adding more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, than you take away. Simple.

23 Tipping Points

When the damage reaches a level we can no longer stop, we hit the point of no return.

The melting of the Greenland ice sheet. permafrost thaw, dieback of the Amazon rainforest, are all on the precipice.

Once you cross these lines, the consequences unfold whether we act or not.

24 Nature-Based Solutions

This is using nature to fix problems, such as planting trees, restoring wetlands and protecting coastlines. Be specific.

25 Adaptation

Say: Adjusting to changes that are already happening, and preparing for those still to come.

This is one of the most important, and underdiscussed, parts of the whole conversation.

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Why Are These 25 Words and Phrases Important?

Whether you’re a teacher, a journalist, a scientist, an activist, or just someone who cares about the world you live in, the language you use is crucially important.

Using simpler words is not dumbing things down. It is the smartest thing you can do if you actually want change to happen.

Because the problem has never been a lack of evidence. It’s been a gap between the people who understand what’s happening and the people who need to.

Words can close that gap. Let’s start using better ones.

The Language of Crisis

When we talk about confusing environmental language, it’s tempting to put it down to the habits of academics.

But some of this language was designed to confuse.

Take “carbon footprint.” As previously mentioned, the term was popularised - indeed invented as a public relations exercise - by oil giant BP, as part of a major advertising campaign in the early 2000s.

The campaign included a “carbon footprint calculator” that allowed individuals to measure their personal impact on the planet.

This took a crisis that is fundamentally the product of industrial systems, corporate decisions, and governmental policy failures - and it relocated responsibility onto individuals.

It asked us to calculate our footprint. Not Exxon’s. Not the aviation industry’s. Ours.

But I’m not one of these people that leaps to the conclusion that BP’s PR campaign excuses individual behaviour. Personal choices are not meaningless.

We are the ones who choose to buy all these damaging products, and we can choose not to.

Developing a ‘green mindset’ translates to buying better and voting for politicians who give a damn.

Nevertheless, carbon footprint became embedded in our language, and the calculator was so complicated, mass movements of people were never going to be engaged.

“Sustainability,” meanwhile, became a corporate buzzword, with real enthusiasm. A company can claim to be “committed to sustainability” but ultimately unaccountable for the damage it is doing.

The word has been stretched so far it seems to cover everything - and therefore means nothing.

Why Does Abstract Language Fail?

There’s a substantial body of research on this.

Human beings are wired for immediate, personal threats that are visible and close.

The climate crisis presents almost the opposite. It is gradual (even though it is accelerating). It is wrapped in statistics, expressed in ranges and parts per million.

For much of the world’s population - particularly in the wealthy nations most responsible for historical emissions - its most devastating immediate effects are still largely happening to other people, in other places.

Which bothers me, and hopefully you - but not the majority of people.

This is sometimes called the “psychological distance” problem. When something feels distant in time, in geography, or in personal relevance, we mentally file it as a concern to be noted, and set aside.

Abstract vocabulary makes all of this worse. “Biodiversity loss” doesn’t activate the same neural alarm systems as “animals going extinct.” “Desertification” doesn’t hit the way “land turning to dust, crops failing, families leaving” does.

The more abstract the language, the greater the psychological distance - and the less likely anyone is to feel that urgent, personal pull towards taking action.

This is why it matters to be specific. The 25 examples given earlier may have seemed simplistic, or dumbed-down, but the alternatives given simply hit harder.

Making the issues more local and immediate translates to “the river in your town is flooding more often,” and “the insect populations that pollinate the crops in the fields near your city are collapsing.”

There’s also what psychologists call “solution aversion” - the tendency for people to resist acknowledging a problem when they perceive the solutions as threatening to their identity, lifestyle, or economic interests.

It probably won’t come as a surprise, but studies have found that conservatives are significantly more likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change when the solutions presented are market-based rather than regulatory — not because the science changes, but because the solutions feel less threatening.

This has implications for how we talk about the transition away from fossil fuels. “Just Transition” - one of the terrible 25 - is a term that will mean little to a coal worker. But ”making sure no community gets left behind when we change how we power our world” is a human promise, and might actually land.

The Media’s Role in Muddying the Water

As a journalist myself, one who has for YEARS attempted to communicate the urgency of the nature and climate crises, it pains me to bring this to attention.

But for the same decades, the doctrine of “balance” in journalism has led to a distortion of the scientific consensus. Stories about climate science have been routinely “balanced” with the views of industry-funded sceptics, creating a false equivalence between the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists and a small, well-funded fringe.

And incredibly, this still happens, especially in the United States. “Now let’s bring in someone who says it’s all a woke hoax….”

Many people still believe the science is “disputed” when, on the fundamental questions, it emphatically is not.

The media has also struggled with the language problem. But journalists are regular people like the rest of us, you know - they’re not necessarily any more intelligent or informed in this area. Although I believe they should be, if they were doing their jobs properly.

Reporting the gloom and doom of the situation doesn’t tick all the boxes, however. Research from the field of environmental communication suggests that coverage dominated “everything is catastrophic and you are powerless” tends to produce disengagement and despair - not action. People just switch off when they feel overwhelmed and helpless.

The most effective communication combines honest urgency with realistic agency. This is a difficult balance to achieve, but using more understood language certainly helps.

What The 25 Words List Didn’t Say

It’s worth going into a little more detail about some of the 25. Tipping points deserves special attention because the concept is one of the most important and least understood aspects of the whole crisis.

The word “tipping” sounds gentle, like tipping a teapot to pour the tea. It certainly doesn’t convey the irreversible, cascading consequences, or the stakes involved.

For example, when the Greenland ice sheet crosses its tipping point, we’re not looking at a gradual, manageable rise in sea levels; we’re looking at metres of eventual rise.

Yes, it will take place over decades, over centuries - but it’s locked in from the moment the threshold is crossed. That will affect our children, our grandchildren, and generations to come.

When the Amazon crosses its tipping point - and current estimates suggest we may be disturbingly close - the consequences extend far beyond South America. The Amazon is a rain-generating system for a continent. Its dieback would affect rainfall patterns across the world.

A report by 160 scientists from 23 countries warned in 2025 that one tipping point had indeed already been reached - warm water coral reefs are now facing a long-term decline, also risking the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.

The language of “tipping points” doesn’t carry the urgency, nor the tragedy. The language of ”points of no return” certainly comes closer.

Adaptation is a term that will become increasingly central in communication from now on.

For most of the history of the climate movement, the focus has been on mitigation - reducing emissions to prevent the worst outcomes. Now we have failed so spectacularly with this, that we are focused on adaptation - adjusting to changes that are already happening and those now locked in.

It’s not conceding defeat, but it’s real life. A significant amount of warming is already baked in, as is sea level rise and increased frequency of extreme weather.

Communities, cities and nations need to start adapting NOW - and the reluctance to talk about adaptation has left many communities underprepared.

The Vital Importance of Communication

Communication is not a bit-part player on the periphery of the climate and nature crisis. It is central to it. It’s what drives me personally. I believe this job I do as a communicator is incredibly important.

The scientific work is outstanding, but what has consistently lagged behind - assisted by misinformation via politicians and sections of the media - is the public’s understanding, and the cultural shift that would allow progress to accelerate.

Language is a lever that can move things along. And language is entirely within our control.

We can change it today. Right now, in the next conversation. Please play your part.

If you found this useful, share it with someone who talks about this subject. The more of us who get this right, the better.

All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so please, if you are able, have a look at the ways in which you can help out, by following the link below.

By simply reading this article, you have already shown your interest and intention to play your part, so thank you.

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AI is killing the planet. And using it means you’re supporting billionaire tech bros who don’t care who or what gets harmed.

That’s the story being shared by environmental and ethical groups right now. And while there’s some truth in it, the call to boycott AI is not just unhelpful — it may be one of the most consequential mistakes that people with good values could make.

Because the world desperately needs earth-friendly, compassionate people to embrace AI, not boycott it.

You can only shape something from the inside. And right now, AI is already spiralling — fast.

Please watch the video (I’d be very grateful for a like and subscribe), then we’ll explore the subject in more detail…

This Is Already Happening, Whether You Participate or Not

Artificial Intelligence is transforming every aspect of human civilisation. Not might. Not could. Already is.

And the pace is accelerating in ways that most people haven’t fully absorbed. Within the next few years, AI will fundamentally reshape healthcare, education, agriculture, energy systems, transportation, politics and law - not to mention the impact it will have on people’s jobs and careers on a scale we haven’t seen since the Industrial Revolution.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform our world. That’s settled.

The question is: Whose values will it amplify?

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AI Is Being Weaponised

Right now, while thoughtful people debate the ethics of engaging with AI, politically-charged elites are spending hundreds of millions of dollars weaponising it.

They are using AI to generate thousands of pieces of targeted political content every single day. They’re creating deepfake videos and fabricated news articles that spread lies about everything from climate change and renewable energy, to immigration and human rights.

Around half a million deepfakes were shared on social media in 2023 - a figure that had grown to approximately 8 million by 2025, according to cybersecurity firm DeepStrike, representing annual growth of nearly 900%.

Research tracking a Russia-linked propaganda site found that when it adopted AI tools, it was able to generate significantly larger quantities of disinformation, with measurable shifts in both volume and breadth of content.

If current trends continue, the majority of political content online will soon be AI-generated. And right now, overwhelmingly, it’s being generated by people who do not share progressive values.

In the Wrong Hands, AI Becomes a Machine for Control

In the hands of authoritarians, AI becomes mass surveillance - systems that track and suppress dissent. Facial recognition that targets protesters and marginalised communities. Propaganda machines engineered to trigger fear and hatred.

This isn’t speculative. A recent report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that China is using AI to automate censorship, enhance surveillance, and pre-emptively suppress dissent - with the technology predicting public demonstrations before they happen and monitoring prisoners’ facial expressions for signs of anger.

Research from MIT found that in China, the government has increasingly deployed AI-driven facial recognition to suppress dissent, has been successful at limiting protest, and in doing so has spurred the development of still better AI-based tools - a feedback loop that MIT researchers have called an “AI-tocracy.”

And this technology is being exported. In Afghanistan, some 90,000 Chinese-manufactured cameras equipped with facial recognition have been installed in Kabul, helping the Taliban enforce gender apartheid policies and suppress any attempt at public protest.

Iran followed suit in 2022 during the women’s rights protests, announcing plans to deploy facial recognition linked to its extensive biometric database to police every aspect of women’s public behaviour.

Environmental harms get amplified too: more optimised illegal logging, more sophisticated wildlife trafficking, more efficient overfishing, more ruthless fossil fuel extraction.

AI doesn’t have values. It amplifies whatever values its users bring to it.

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In the Right Hands, It’s A Force For Good

AI has the potential to level the playing field in ways that have never before been possible. It can coordinate grassroots movements across thousands of communities simultaneously. It can translate campaign materials into dozens of languages instantly - making local movements truly global.

It can fact-check misinformation in real time. It can identify patterns of voter suppression and corruption that humans would simply miss in the noise.

Put AI in the hands of people who actually care about outcomes beyond profit, and you get smarter power grids that waste less energy and integrate more renewables.

Better forecasting for floods, wildfires, and heatwaves. Sharper deforestation monitoring and faster detection of illegal activity. Better climate modelling. Better battery research. Better ways to track pollution, optimise logistics, reduce waste, and protect habitats.

Research from the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics estimates that if AI is effectively applied in key areas, it could reduce global emissions by 3.2 to 5.4 billion tonnes of CO₂- equivalent per year by 2035 - outweighing the emissions from data centres by a significant margin.

The difference between these two futures comes down to this: who builds it, who controls it, and who uses it.

Let’s Address the Environmental Concern Head-On

Because it’s real, and it matters, and it deserves an honest answer.

Training large AI models does use serious energy. Data centres currently account for around 0.5% of global combustion emissions, though the IEA projects this could rise to 1–1.4% by 2030 - making it one of the few sectors where emissions are set to grow. That’s a legitimate concern, and anyone who dismisses it isn’t being straight with you.

But context matters enormously here.

Livestock production alone accounts for around 14.5% of global human-made emissions - comparable to all direct emissions from global transport, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The fashion industry causes around 10% of global carbon emissions, and is on track to grow its footprint by around 60% by 2030.

And bitcoin alone burns through more electricity each year than entire countries, like Norway and Argentina.

The Department of Defense in the US - to take one striking example - is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases among public institutions.

War creates horrendous emissions, among all other evils of conflict.

But nobody is boycotting their wardrobes or their banking apps on environmental grounds with the same intensity being directed at AI.

Critically, you can refuse to use AI on environmental grounds, but the result won’t be less AI usage. It will just mean that 100% of political AI is in the hands of people who don’t care about the environment.

Meanwhile, progressive pressure is pushing for change. Google has matched 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable energy every year since 2017, and Microsoft announced in early 2026 that it had matched 100% of its 2025 global electricity with renewables - with both companies targeting 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030.

Those milestones happened because environmentally conscious people engaged with the technology and demanded better practices. Boycotts don’t create that pressure. Engagement does.

The Clock Is Ticking

We are racing against time to influence the direction of artificial intelligence. And one side is already miles ahead.

While thoughtful people have been debating ethics, others have been building weapons. While some have been concerned about doing things the right way, others have been doing whatever it takes to win.

While some have been worried about compromising their values, others have been using AI to attack those very values at scale.

They’re not going to stop. They’re going to get faster, better, more sophisticated.

AI systems are enabling states and non-state actors to propagate disinformation and malicious narratives at a scale that was previously impossible. This is not a slow-moving threat. It is already reshaping political discourse in every country with a functioning internet.

If people who care about the planet, human rights and animal rights continue to sit this out, the future is already being decided. And it’s being decided without them.

This Is About Defending Your Values, Not Abandoning Them

The world needs more compassionate voices shaping AI. More voices that demand accountability. More voices that won’t accept the Silicon Valley doctrine of “move fast and break things” when the things being broken are vital ecosystems and people’s lives.

But you can’t shape it from outside. You can’t effectively influence what you don’t fully understand.

This isn’t about abandoning your values. It’s about defending them - in the arena where the fight is actually happening.

If you care about all forms of life on Earth, your voice is needed. Now. Your participation is needed.

Please, get more involved in the world of artificial intelligence. And help to make it a force for good.

The Truth About AI’s Environmental Impact

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centres currently account for about 0.5% of global combustion emissions. This is projected to rise to 1 to 1.4% by 2030.

That’s small in percentage terms, but it does represent one of the few sectors where emissions are set to increase, while most others decarbonise. Data centres are among the fastest-growing sources of emissions globally.

There are also water concerns that often go unreported. For every kilowatt hour of energy a data centre consumes, roughly two litres of water are needed for cooling, according to MIT research. As more data centres are built - particularly in water-stressed regions - this becomes a concerning ecological issue.

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions surged nearly 50% between 2019 and 2023, largely due to AI. Microsoft’s rose nearly 30% since 2020.

The same IEA that documents AI’s growing emissions footprint also concludes that widespread adoption of AI in key sectors could lead to emissions reductions of 1,400 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2035.

The Grantham Institute at LSE calculates potential reductions of 3.2 to 5.4 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent per year - several times larger than the footprint of data centres.

AI is already being applied to improve grid management for renewables integration, optimise energy use in buildings, reduce food waste, and model climate systems with unprecedented precision.

A Google AI project that helps airline pilots avoid contrail-generating flight paths could alone, if adopted industry-wide, offset more emissions than the entire AI sector currently produces.

AI’s environmental impact is real, growing, and inadequately regulated. The answer to that is better regulation, stronger corporate accountability, and more voices demanding clean energy commitments.

The IEA’s projection that AI’s benefits could dwarf its footprint is of course conditional. It depends on who controls how AI is deployed, and whether the people making those decisions have environmental values.

That’s why this article and video has been making the case to engage more, not less.

Why We Need The Input of Environmentalists

The large language models and generative AI systems that are reshaping public life were built by a small number of extraordinarily well-funded companies, whose founding cultures were shaped by the view that technology is neutral, disruption is a good thing, and that whoever ships fastest wins.

The consequence of this culture is that AI systems were built with almost no meaningful input from environmental scientists, human rights lawyers, indigenous communities, public health experts, animal welfare researchers, or the billions of people in the Global South who will be most affected by both climate change and AI’s economic disruptions.

This is not a problem that boycotts can fix. It is a problem that only sustained, informed, purposeful engagement can address.

What Weaponised AI Actually Looks Like

Researchers studying a Russia-linked propaganda outlet found that after it adopted generative AI tools, it could produce significantly larger quantities of disinformation. This peer-reviewed evidence is published in PNAS Nexus (2025).

Generative AI doesn’t just speed up the production of individual pieces of content. It enables the kind of coordinated, multi-platform, high-volume information flooding that makes it nearly impossible for fact-checking organisations to keep up.

By the time a deepfake has been debunked, it has already been seen by millions and shared by thousands.

The “Liar’s Dividend”

There’s a subtler, and in some ways more dangerous, consequence of AI-generated disinformation. Researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice describe what they call the “liar’s dividend”.

As deepfakes and manipulated content become more sophisticated, bad actors can exploit the confusion, not just by creating false content ,but by dismissing real evidence as fake.

So, for example, a politician caught on camera saying something damaging can now plausibly claim the video was AI-generated. A genuine document exposing corruption can be dismissed as a fabrication. Truth itself becomes contested.

That’s the world we now inhabit. It’s a new threat to democracy, and it accelerates as AI improves.

The Surveillance Machine

China’s surveillance technology companies have sold facial recognition and mass surveillance infrastructure to dozens of countries. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has tracked AI surveillance technology deployment across at least 75 countries, with authoritarian governments disproportionately represented among the buyers - and Chinese companies, particularly Huawei, supplying the technology to at least 50 of them.

In Afghanistan, approximately 90,000 Chinese-manufactured cameras with facial recognition capability have been installed across Kabul, giving the Taliban a surveillance apparatus that would have been technically inconceivable a decade ago.

Iran deployed AI facial recognition specifically to identify women participating in the 2022 protests against the country’s gender apartheid policies.

The commercial AI ecosystem - driven by profit, not values - is actively enabling authoritarianism at scale, and nobody is going to stop that from outside the system.

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What Progressive AI Engagement Actually Looks Like

This is the part that’s most underdeveloped in public conversation - and this is the area we need to improve and accelerate. Here are some examples of how AI can amplify progressive values…

Disinformation Response

One of the most urgent applications is using AI to fight the AI-generated disinformation described above. Fact-checking organisations are already exploring AI tools that can identify deepfakes, flag suspicious content patterns, and trace the origins of viral fabrications.

The challenge is that well-resourced disinformation operations are currently outpacing underfunded fact-checkers. More progressive investment in this space - both financial and intellectual - is desperately needed.

Environmental Monitoring

AI is already being used for deforestation monitoring (Global Forest Watch uses machine learning to track tree cover loss in near real time), wildlife trafficking detection, illegal fishing identification through satellite data analysis, and tracking corporate emissions.

These tools already exist and they’re being used. But they could be scaled significantly with more engagement from the environmental community.

Grassroots Organising

AI translation tools are already transforming what’s possible for global grassroots movements. Campaign materials, legal documents, and educational content can now be translated into dozens of languages at very little cost - a development that dramatically lowers the barrier to truly international coordination.

The practical challenge is that many grassroots organisations lack the capacity or confidence to incorporate these tools. This is where AI-literate people within progressive movements can make an immediate difference.

Climate Modelling and Policy

Some of the most significant climate science of the next decade is expected to be shaped by AI - in the modelling of tipping points, the prediction of extreme weather events, the identification of optimal carbon capture sites, and the optimisation of renewable energy systems.

Uncomfortable Questions

We should be clear about the concerns of progressive engagement with AI companies. The history of corporate ethics engagement is mixed at best.

Environmental consultants have worked inside fossil fuel companies for decades without fundamentally changing those companies’ core behaviour.

Human rights advisors have consulted for social media platforms that continued to host hate speech and disinformation.

There’s a legitimate question about whether individual engagement with AI systems meaningfully influences how those systems are built and governed.

Individual usage probably has minimal influence. But organised, vocal, collective engagement has more.

The scale of potential job losses through the advancing intelligence and capabilities of AI is also alarming.

It’s a reminder that progressive AI engagement cannot only be about using the tools - it also has to include support for policies that protect workers, and distribute AI’s economic benefits more broadly.

The Time Is Now

The battle over AI’s values is not settled. The governance frameworks are still being written. The regulatory decisions are still being made. The public understanding of what these systems are and what they should be accountable for is still being formed.

The researchers, communicators and anyone who engages with these questions right now have an ability to influence the outcomes.

But this window will not stay open indefinitely. The time to shape AI is now.

Which means the cost of sitting it out, for people who care about what happens to this planet and all life on it, is potentially enormous.

All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so please, if you are able, have a look at the ways in which you can help out, by following the link below.

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Making clothes out of recycled plastic might have seemed a good idea as the fashion industry sought to become more sustainable. But it's harming the environment. It's harming animals. Humans, too.

This seriously undermines the 'vegan fashion' tag and brings into question accreditations like 'Peta-approved' and B Corp.

Why? Because at the heart of veganism is the prevention of any kind of suffering to animals. The Vegan Society defines veganism as "a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals."

So why might recycled plastic not be vegan? Used in a closed-loop recycling system, for long-lasting items like furniture, for example, recycling is a sensible way of responding to plastic pollution.

But clothing is a whole different thing. We wash clothing. And when we wash clothing containing oil-based materials like elastane, spandex, polyester, nylon - and recycled plastic - we release microfibres into the water system.

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Microfibres = Cruelty

Once in the water, microfibres are ingested by organisms and small creatures, which are then consumed by larger animals.

Microfibres can cause physical harm to wildlife by causing internal blockages and injuries to the digestive system.

Ingesting microfibres can lead to malnutrition and decreased energy levels, affecting growth and survival.

Toxins from the microfibres can leach into the tissues of animals, disrupting reproductive health and physiological functions.

Does this sound like cruelty to animals? Indirectly, of course, but surely it has to be?

So is recycled plastic in clothing actually vegan? We need to have a serious conversation about this.

Is It Really Possible To Be 100% Vegan in Fashion?

I appreciate the difficulty. Elastane, for example, adds elasticity to a product, particularly socks and waistbands, and such benefits can’t easily be replicated with organic, biodegradable fabrics.

Nevertheless, this and similar substances still pollute the environment when washed or discarded. It’s also possible to blend such things as natural rubber and organic cotton to produce stretchy material - and you'll see from the list below that there is a wealth of alternative materials now available.

In a Greenpeace report of 2023, Dr. Therese Karlsson, Science Advisor with the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), reminded us:

“Plastics are made with toxic chemicals, and these chemicals don’t simply go away when plastics are recycled.

"The science clearly shows that plastic recycling is a toxic endeavour with threats to our health and the environment all along the recycling stream.

"Simply put, plastic poisons the circular economy and our bodies, and pollutes air, water, and food. We should not recycle plastics that contain toxic chemicals.”

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To give some credit to the fashion industry, the realisation that using recycled plastic was a bad thing, is starting to dawn on people. See this article by The Sustainable Fashion Forum, for instance.

But countless 'Vegan Fashion' outlets are still singing their own ethical praises while selling items containing plastic - sometimes not even recycled.

The debate needs to be had, the question needs to be asked: Should plastic clothing products still be classed as vegan?

What Materials Are Vegan and Plastic-Free?

Look out for these textiles that are vegan, plastic-free, ethical and sustainable:

Organic Cotton: Grown without harmful chemicals, with minimal water use, and even improves the soil.

Recycled Cotton: Produced using post-industrial or post-consumer waste.

Linen: A durable material that becomes softer and stronger with each use.

Hemp: Grows without any use of pesticides or chemical fertilisers, and is completely biodegradable.

Bamboo: Look for organic sustainably sourced bamboo fabric, as bamboo rayon / viscose uses harmful chemicals.

Tencel: An elastane alternative, made from wood-pulp cellulose, this is one of the most sustainable fibres.

Lyocell: A soft fibre also made from wood pulp, usually of eucalyptus trees.

Modal: A variety of rayon, this is made from the renewable fibre of beech trees.

Seaweed: Dried seaweed is crushed into cellulose fibre to make a variety of textiles, known as SeaCell.

Cork: Sustainably harvested by shaving away bark from cork oak - which actually extends the tree's life.

Soybeans: Also known as vegetable cashmere, soy fabric is made from a byproduct of soybean processing.

Mirum: A plastic-free vegan leather made from plant oils and waxes.

Lunaform: A new fabric made from the nurturing of microorganisms in a nutrient-rich environment.

Ramie: A silk replacement made from a nettle plant.

You may also see reference to plant-based leathers, made from apples, pineapples, mushrooms, corn and more.

Most of these are not 100% plastic-free - but they're getting there.

Where Can You Buy Plastic-Free Clothing?

In seeking to provide people with guides to ethical, vegan, plastic-free fashion brands, I have faced a real battle, for the reasons already outlined.

I was so affected by this that I launched my own clothing range, teaming up with Teemill, an ethical print-on-demand company based on the Isle of Wight.

Using only 100% organic cotton, all their print-on-demand clothing is sustainable, ethical, plastic-free, vegan, cruelty-free and made with renewable energy.

It CAN be done. Others - especially so-called vegan fashion brands - should look and learn.

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All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so please, if you are able, have a look at the ways in which you can help out, by following the link below.

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There are more than 8 million species on Earth. We are just one of them. We can only understand the language of our own species, yet we consider ourselves superior.

Soon the animals could be telling us a few home truths.

The Earth Species Project (ESP) is an incredibly exciting mission to utilise the powers of a new ‘lifeform,’ which is rapidly becoming smarter than humans: Artificial Intelligence - AI.

ESP are building large AI models to decode animal communication - and early results suggest we can already ask meaningful questions of creatures, and get useful answers back.

Just imagine what we could learn from other species. What wondrous insights they could share, on such blurry phenomena like migration. What utterly sickening tales they could tell about the way they are treated by humans.

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How Can This Happen?

ESP has already discovered that AI can learn the structure and meaning embedded in non-human sound - calls, songs, clicks, choruses and the like. This is now helping scientists map those signals to learn behaviour and context.

ESP’s flagship model, NatureLM-audio, is the first large audio-language model tailored for animal sounds. ESP plans to release it this year as part of its open-science commitment.

Also used are AVES and BirdAVES - self-supervised encoders for animal vocalisations. ESP has also developed the first benchmarks for applying AI to animal communication research.

ESP ‘s models are being tested first with Killer Whales (Orcas), Zebra Finches, Hawaiian and Carrion Crows.

Learn more about the crows project in this interesting short video…

Beyond those species, ESP will work through datasets spanning birds, cetaceans, elephants, bats, amphibians, dogs and cats.

Many of us would like to hear from farm animals. This is more than a possibility, though expect a huge pushback if mind-blowing results have already been achieved with other species. The truth would be costly for many.

Fully decoding a non-human language will take time, but ESP believe they are far down the road to achieving this.

What ESP Says Animals Can “Tell” Us

As the AI models keep scaling, ESP believes the recordings can tell us:

• Who is here?

• How many are here?

• What life stage?

• What kind of call is it?

• What are they doing?

• Who’s interacting with whom?

• How are they feeling?

• What’s happening in their environment?

• How healthy is the ecosystem?

In time, they would hopefully be able to translate more specific messages, from animals, aimed at humans. Consider these, for example:

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Rethinking Our Relationship With Nature

The above images represent a bit of a reach at this moment in time, but it’s enough to give me hope that we will be able to communicate effectively with other species.

Christiana Figueres - ESP’s newest board member and former UN climate leader - shares her own vision for redefining humanity’s relationship with nature in this short interview:

Is It Ethical To Talk To Animals?

Listening to animals is surely ethical and often beneficial, for welfare and conservation. Talking back to the animals does cross into ethically fraught territory.

However, if the object of the exercise is to reduce harm, respect the decision-making of species, and avoid manipulation, then controversy narrows.

Benefits of communication for the species involved, include the fact that better interpretation of distress can lead to improved protections.

However, misinterpretation of messages could increase stress on animals, while AI-generated calls may intrude on mating, parenting or traditions.

Farm animals are a special case. Ethically, “talking” to these animals should not intensify production or mask poor conditions. We should use communication only to reduce fear and pain.

Project CETI, which is undergoing its own communication translation, with sperm whales, is currently drafting legal and ethical principles that start from the premise that non-humans are subjects, not tools.

ESP also publicly gives great emphasis to risk awareness and the need for high ethical standards in its own work.

From a personal point of view, this is one of the most exciting projects I have discovered in years. I realise I am an outlier when considering ‘life’ as ‘all life’ and not just seeing things from a human perspective.

As we are bombarded daily with human news, the idea of translating what other species are talking about is fascinating, and a breath of fresh air.

Read more: Visit the Earth Species Project website.

All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so please, if you are able, have a look at the ways in which you can help out, by following the link below.

Please Buy Me An Ethical Coffee

I feel compelled to write this, to help people understand. The type of people who call ethical vegans arrogant, or rude, or even extremists.

The kind of people who insist that we vegans want to shove our ideals down their throats, and ruin mealtimes for everyone else.

I’ve heard plenty of nonsense said and written about people like myself, who follow a vegan diet, and live a vegan lifestyle, for ethical reasons.

So if you’re one of those people, please learn from this. I’m not talking down to you, I’m not being rude, I’m genuinely writing this for the benefit of others - to help you understand where vegans are coming from.

I’m illustrating this article with screenshots from Bubble Space’s AI-powered music video, also shared by PETA, which powerfully reverses the roles of humans and animals.

That sets the tone for what I’m talking about.

By the way, I’m not going to share any gruesome facts in this article, if that was worrying you…

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Why Am I Vegan?

It’s simple. I don’t personally want to be the cause of anything to do with pain, torture or murder of any other sentient being.

So I won’t eat animals, I won’t wear animals, I won’t use any product that has involved the harming of animals.

I care about the climate crisis, and much of it is fuelled by animal agriculture. But that doesn’t actually influence my own veganism.

Speciesism is at the heart of it all, which is illustrated by the screengrabs.

A life is a life. Simple as that. Killing a cow is the same as killing a dog. Killing a chicken is the same as killing a cat. Killing a lamb is the same as killing a person.

Woah!! What was that last one?!

Maybe that’s where the ridiculous ‘extremist’ claim grows from, the fact that vegans value all lives as equal.

Of course, in reality, this is the opposite of extremism. We are 100% peace and love, no harm to anyone or anything.

Breeding animals for food, confining them in small spaces, making their poor, vastly shortened lives a torturous experience… now that’s extreme.

And we feel that pain. That’s why you may find us to be less than happy to enter a conversation about how juicy your meat was at mealtime.

And before anyone fires into the comments with ‘but animals are killed when vegetables are grown in fields…. what about the bugs and mice?!’ They are not intentionally killed, not farmed. And the deaths are nowhere near on the scale of the 2.8 TRILLION animals killed on this planet for consumption each year.

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Justifying The Cruelty

If you eat animals, why do you do it? I think, because you always have - but after that it boils down to two broad categories.

Either you don’t know the facts, or you haven’t watched the horrendous videos that most vegans have, so you’re living in denial about how the chicken, prawns, lamb, pork or whatever dead animal you have in your refrigerator, got to be there.

Or you do know and you don’t care. I can’t get my head around that viewpoint, but there are clearly millions upon millions in the world who believe we can justifiably cause so much pain, presumably because we are a superior species, or because some imaginary god put them there for us to eat.

Please try to bear in mind how we feel. Vegans are not weak - neither physically nor mentally. We are incredibly strong to go against the norm and stand up for our fellow animals who can’t effectively vocalise their objections.

Saying that, we live in a world where where cries for help from large populations of humans are ignored. Can we really expect the world to have empathy for all other animals, when so many are happy to cause suffering and death to humans?

Please try to understand that when vegans see meat on the table, we see pain, torture and death.

When we pass lush green fields, with newborn lambs skipping around, we see holding pens for slaughter.

When we shop for our food in supermarkets, and have to look for the vegan ‘alternatives’ within shelves of carcasses, we hear the screams of those tortured animals.

That does not make us weak, rude, arrogant or extreme. It means we are loving, caring and empathetic. And empathy is a superpower.

Confronting The Truth

If you’re laughing while reading this, you’re probably the kind of person who will never understand. We vegans just have to accept that there are many people in the world with this attitude. It’s not easy to accept, but it’s human nature - I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the reality that animal abuse will never end.

Perhaps you’re curious about the facts but push them to the back of your mind, because - you know - you like the taste, and you can’t be bothered changing your diet. Too much effort.

I, too, was guilty of pushing facts away. I believed I was doing a good thing by being vegetarian for more than 30 years.

I am ashamed it took me that long to confront the horrors of the dairy and egg industries.

It’s Your Choice…

If you are not vegan, I will leave it up to you to decide if you want to learn the true facts - I have shared several informative links below.

I’m not forcing this on you, I merely ask that, before you next judge a vegan, at least try to understand why we are so angry with the world when it comes to the treatment of our fellow animals.

Thank you.

Dairy

https://www.animalaid.org.uk/whats-wrong-with-dairy/

https://animalequality.org/blog/dairy-industry-hurts-cows/

Eggs / Chickens

https://animalequality.org/issues/eggs/

https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-farming/chickens/egg-industry/

Prawns / Shrimps

https://animalsaustralia.org/our-work/farmed-animals/prawn-farming/

https://www.fastcompany.com/90833406/shrimp-farming-unethical-vegan-alternative

Fish

https://thehumaneleague.org/article/factory-fish-farming

https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-in-entertainment/cruel-sports/fishing/

Pigs

https://animalequality.org/blog/10-things-to-know-about-pig-farming/

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23817808/pig-farm-investigation-feedback-immunity-feces-intestines

Sheep

https://www.four-paws.org/campaigns-topics/topics/farm-animals/the-torment-of-sheep-in-the-wool-and-meat-industry

https://sentientmedia.org/sheep-farming/

All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so please, if you are able, have a look at the ways in which you can help out, by following the link below.

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Here’s the PETA video…

The growing backlash against ‘green’ policies is gathering momentum across the world. Anything designed to boost the health of humans and all living species is being weaponised as ‘woke’ or ‘unrealistic’ or ‘too expensive’.

Why? Because the fossil fuels lobby has tightened its claws around governments and opposition parties pretty much everywhere. They have unlimited resources, and money talks.

As the majority of people aren’t keen on facing up to the terrifying facts that simple measurements put before us (CO2 levels, temperature hikes, sea levels, ice melts, wildlife numbers etc, etc) it is easy for puppet politicians to come out with crazy buzzphrases that hit home.

So Trump can call the green movement “the biggest scam of all time” in the US, and Farage’s Reform UK party - currently miles ahead in the polls - can call it “Net Stupid Zero” and propose policies that will strip away environmental and health protections.

But these policies have deadly consequences. Whatever your political beliefs, whatever your views on issues such as immigration and patriotism, the devastating environmental impacts of right-wing populist programmes must be tackled head on - for all our sakes.

It’s a fact: Programmes that slow or reverse decarbonisation and clean-air rules translate into more premature deaths, more displacement, and accelerating ecological collapse.

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A Contract To Kill

Let’s look in more detail, starting in the UK, where the rise of Reform cannot be ignored. At the moment, Nigel Farage is heading for 10 Downing Street.

Reform UK’s “Contract” is uncompromising: “Scrap Net Zero,” ban ULEZ/Clean Air Zones, end “bans on petrol and diesel cars,” and fast-track new oil and gas, with fracking trials.

The document - a blueprint for a Reform UK government - also promises to scrap climate-related farming subsidies and opposes using productive land for rewilding or solar farms.

But what happens when you actually remove those protections?

Start with the air we all breathe. Long-term exposure to traffic pollution costs lives - that is the basis of the UK’s policy appraisal and the reason medical bodies support clean-air zones.

Undoing them doesn’t just inconvenience cyclists - another enemy of the right - it actually shortens lives, especially in the poorest neighbourhoods.

Then there’s extreme heat caused by man-made climate change - with fossil fuels being the driver. The World Health Organisation points to 489,000 heat deaths per year. A Nature Climate Change analysis attributes about 37% of heat deaths to human-caused warming - which is shaped by politicians, through energy, transport and land-use policies.

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Opposition to net zero and environmental protections has been rising among political parties - in power and opposition - in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Hungary, Argentina…. the list goes on.

It’s not just loss of life that sees the climate and nature crises already devastating populations. Displacement is a huge problem, with millions of people and wildlife on the move to escape the extremes we now have to consider ‘normal’.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre recorded 26.4 million disaster-related internal displacements worldwide in 2023, and 75.9 million people living in internal displacement at the year-end - figures increasingly driven by storms, floods and drought in a warmer climate.

Rich countries are also being hit, but they have better safety nets to hide the hardship.

In the US, NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster reports now list hundreds of deaths each year across heatwaves, floods, wildfires and storms.

In the UK, storm seasons that used to be “once in a generation” now move rapidly through the alphabet.

The Damage Is Done

Let’s not forget the devastating impacts on wildlife - and associated ills served on humans.

On October 13, 2025, The Guardian reported:

The earth has reached its first catastrophic tipping point linked to greenhouse gas emissions, with warm water coral reefs now facing a long-term decline and risking the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.

I set that out alone because it is probably more devastating than 99% of the headlines you will read in the media this year - yet it won’t cause the waves of panic and reflection that it should.

It came from The Global Tipping Points Report 2025, led by the University of Exeter and financed by the fund of the Amazon owner, Jeff Bezos - and includes contributions from 160 scientists from 87 institutions in 23 countries.

Reefs support a quarter of marine species at some life stage, and buffer coasts from storms. Their collapse isn’t just tragic for wildlife; it erodes food security and coastal protection for millions of people.

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Anti-climate programmes that delay the end of fossil fuels raise ocean heat, making bleaching events more frequent and severe. That link is undeniable.

More tipping points are close to the precipice. Scientists warn of elevated risks to the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, locking in centuries of sea-level rise.

There is a growing fear (and evidence) that disruption to the Atlantic overturning circulation (AMOC) will drastically change weather across Europe, while the Amazon will die back if warming and deforestation continue at current pace.

All these tipping points, and more, rewrite the rules for wildlife and people - submerging wetlands and mangroves, transforming fish and seabird ranges, and drying forests into flammable beacons of anti-climate agendas.

Forget Lower Bills, Expect Higher Death Rates

There’s a persistent myth that loosening climate policy lowers bills and protects the vulnerable. The evidence says the reverse.

If you keep today’s clean-air and decarbonisation policies, thousands of deaths per year in the 2030s will be avoided. Remove those policies, and you get the reverse - thousands of extra deaths per year. In every country.

So what can we do? Across the world, anti-climate manifestos share the same core moves: scrap net-zero targets, roll back air-quality and EV standards, license more fossil extraction, knock out nature-recovery budgets, and fight renewable build-out.

The near-term political promise is cheaper bills. That isn’t necessarily true, and in the mid-to-long-term, the effect will be higher mortality, bigger disaster losses, more displacement, and rising extinction risk.

But do enough people care? People falling for the rhetoric of Trump and Farage often talk about their value of “freedom”.

Well, how about the freedom not to breathe toxic chemicals on the school run; the freedom not to spend August indoors because the air is full of wildfire smoke; the freedom not to watch the sea take your marsh, your mangrove, your town.

You can deny the facts all you like. You can’t deny the body count.

Political analysis simply has to ‘drill baby drill’ down harder - into what these anti-climate policies would actually mean for us all.

All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so, if you are able, please see the link below for ways in which you can help out. Thank you.

Please Buy Me An Ethical Coffee

The term ‘net zero’ has been weaponised by the right in recent times as the latest thing to blame for everyone having no spare cash.

Yes, ‘net zero’ is the new ‘immigrants’ - just avert your eyes from the billionaires, warlords and psychopaths who are really making your life a misery.

Why is net zero the new culture wars victim? Quite simply, to achieve net zero, we have to stop using fossil fuels.

So political parties like the Republicans, in the US, and Reform, in the UK, who are heavily funded by fossil fuel interests, are going to tell you that net zero is ruining your life and costing you millions.

As a journalist, I’d hope that my profession would leap into action to expose the lies and hold these politicians to account. But of course, large sections of the media are not inhabited by real journalists any more.

So I’ll play my part to put you in the picture, and translate what the politicians are actually saying.

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Rewrite The Headlines

Let’s get one thing clear from the start - NET ZERO simply translates as SAVING LIVES.

Not in a literal sense, of course, but in reality.

So let me fix the messages from some of our fraudulent politicians:

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So What Is Net Zero and How Is It Saving Lives?

Net zero simply means balancing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere with the amount removed, thus aiming for a net total of zero emissions.

Why is that a good thing? Because it helps us to avoid further global warming, and lower the chances of continued catastrophic climate impacts.

So if net zero means zero emissions, how does that save lives?

For that, we have to look at the fatal damage already being caused by rising emissions:

Extreme Heat

Between 2000 and 2019 studies show that about 489,000 people died from heat-related illnesses - 45% of these in Asia and 36% in Europe. That’s tens of thousands of deaths through extreme heat, every year - so much for this being a future problem.

Extreme Weather

Pretty much the whole world has been suffering increased instances of deadly floods, droughts and wildfires; destroying homes, crops and water supplies, leading to malnutrition, disease and a raft of disaster-related illnesses that claim hundreds of thousands of lives.

Air Pollution from Fossil Fuels

The World Health Organisation estimates that 7 million premature deaths each year are linked to air pollution, with fossil fuels being a major contributor.

Burning coal, oil and gas produces toxins that cause heart attacks, strokes, respiratory diseases and lung cancer, among other killers.

Displacement and Conflict

This is where we return to immigrants… Climate-induced disasters create climate refugees. And there will be many more millions of them each year as time marches on. Time to stop demonising these unfortunate people and have a grown-up conversation about helping them.

They have to flee because of crippling rising temperatures, devastating floods and droughts. Rising sea levels are submerging low-lying countries, such as the Maldives and regions of Bangladesh, so there is an increasing scarcity of food and resources.

People being people, this in turn fuels violence, wars and unrest, meaning millions of people are displaced - The World Bank estimates that more than 216 million people could be displaced due to climate change by 2050.

Displacement brings disease, poverty, exhaustion, famine…. so many causes for so many deaths.

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Don’t Forget Wildlife Deaths

The WWF Living Planet Report revealed that global wildlife populations have declined by a devastating 69%, on average, since 1970, with climate change a growing reason for this.

Let’s not forget that we are existing in the age of the Sixth Mass Extinction - these stats are only going to get worse.

More than 16,000 species are currently on the ‘red list’ and directly threatened by climate change, due to habitat destruction, ocean warming, acidification and the collapse of food chains and migration routes.

The United Nations predicts that, without urgent, meaningful action - such as achieving net zero - a further one million species are at risk of extinction.

Bees, butterflies and other insects are also being annihilated by climate change and habitat loss - and these species are vital for our own survival, through their role in ecosystems, food production and biodiversity.

So Remind Me, Why Do We Need Net Zero?

Because it saves lives. Simple as that.

Achieving net zero would hopefully help to stabilise our climate. We can probably kiss goodbye to the rise of 1.5 degrees that countries committed themselves to - now a more realistic target might be 2 degrees, which would be devastating for many island communities in particular. Warming beyond that point is projected to triple the number of deaths each year from extreme heat alone.

A more stable climate would hopefully reduce the frequency of floods, droughts and wildfires, and food and water systems would be at less risk, reducing the likelihood of famines.

Transitioning to clean, renewable energy would also massively reduce air pollution.

Please Translate Net Zero

There is no bad thing that comes from achieving net zero. But everything will get far, far worse if we don’t achieve it.

So next time you hear anyone - particularly politicians - put the boot in on net zero, kindly educate them about what it really means.

All content on this website, which is hosted on the Substack platform, is free of charge to read, view and listen to.

But it does cost money to keep this vital mission going, so please, if you are able, have a look at the ways in which you can help out, by following the link below.

Please Buy Me An Ethical Coffee