Typically, economic shocks are, well shocking. They emerge as a surprise- a war, a natural disaster, a pandemic, a stock market crash. They are rarely predicted, predictable and self-imposed. Economic theory and reason would suggest that individuals and nations will utility-maximise, they will always try and make themselves richer in all circumstances. As ever, Donald Trump proves the exception to the rule. What the Trump administration has done overnight is to (in effect) impose economic sanctions on their own country.

There are few (if any precedents for the introduction of such significant trade barriers, imposed so quickly. To take a longer view, if Trump follows through and sustains the tariffs, then 2nd April (“our economic Independence Day”) will mark the end of an eight decade trend towards freer trade in the United States and to a greater or lesser extent, around the world. From the GATT agreement onwards, through the Bretton Woods era and beyond, it was the US that led the way in removing barrier barriers and towards trade simplification. It reaped the benefits, in that the US shaped the economic order in its own image, gained access to lucrative foreign markets and cemented the dollar as the world’s pre-eminent and reserve currency. Trump is sending a signal that that long march is over and on paper we’re about to return to tariffs which were in excess of those seen in the Great Depression. It is yet another re-ordering in which Trump seems to specialise.

That is not to say there weren’t costs to the US of the older order and Trump’s analysis is completely empty. The President is right that the US economy was sometimes more open to the world than the other way around, especially in emerging markets. In the heyday of globalisation, successive administrations put too much faith in the power of the free market and competitive pressures to replace jobs lost in traditional manufacturing sectors and industrial regions, with devastating consequences for many families. That insouciance has led us to the political moment where we are today. Trump is also right that some economic players, especially China, have rigged the game in their own favour and been far more strategic in the protection of their own key industries. But that is only a shade of the story, and Trump’s message of economic pillage and “rape” is simplistic in the extreme. America gained more than it lost through free trade. The absence of protectionism solidified America’s position as an economic superpower and drove down prices for US consumers. US companies became dominant across the globe. Competitive pressures spurred innovation. America became and remained an economic hegemon because of the old order, not in spite of it. Trump’s read ignores all of that. It is also curiously insensitive to the immediate pressures of his own politics. The President was elected largely on a mandate to lower prices. Instead he has just imposed what is a de facto sales tax across the US economy, for no short term gain. If nothing else, it is…courageous and (for Trump) unusually dogmatic and ideological. He seems to really believe in tariffs transformative power to both reorder the American economy and provide a permanent source of new revenues, which will allow him to lessen direct taxation. There is little evidence for either proposition.

There is read across through Trump’s approach to economics and geopolitics. Both rest on an assumption that the United States is so powerful and so dominant that it will be largely immune from the consequences of Trump’s own policy actions. On geopolitics, Trump believes that it is largely immaterial that he unpicks decades’ worth of alliances and alienates America’s friends, America is big enough to operate without the sentiment of its old friends. He believes that America’s base hard power has been under-utilised by successive US presidents. Likewise, Trump’s zero sum game analysis is that America has underused its raw economic strength and leverage, which he is now unlockinG. He believes the US can weather any economic shocks from tariffs and become more autarchical, produce what it needs itself. It’s a huge economic experiment and a gamble. As with political leadership, America’s erstwhile allies will start to unpick their relationship with the old superpower and try and forge new partnerships. In the long term, we might even see yesterday not so much as America’s Independence Day but as a day when its Western economic leadership came to an end.

But this is speculation- we can’t know for sure how this will play out for the US. It is true that its continental sized economy and reserve currency might insulate it from some of the worst effects. But what we can be sure of is that that is certainly not true of the relative economic minnow that is the UK. Not that you’d know it from the way these tariffs have been covered in a fair bit of the UK press. Downing Street was quick to spin that Trump’s application of a 10% tariff on the UK was a minor triumph for Britain and a vindication of Starmer’s softly softly strategy in dealing with Trump. The Telegraph and even Politco cited the relatively lower tariffs for the UK vs the EU as a Brexit benefit. Many broadcasters said the same.

This is pretty risible parochialism. Let’s look at the facts.

1. A 10% tariff is still very significant and will be damaging to a whole suite of UK industries. That’s what we've got for endless diplomatic effort and hugging Trump as closely as possible, irrespective of what he does or says.

2. Many of these same pundits and papers conveniently fail to mention that it’s not just the UK which has received the 10% rate. Other countries to do so include Brazil, Turkey, Argentina, El Salvador, Peru to name just a few. Viewed through that prism, it is hardly a vindication of the “special relationship”. That’s the despite the fact that the UK is one of the few countries with which the US enjoys a healthy balance of trade.

3. The UK’s most valuable export to the US is cars. Those will still have a tariff of 25% imposed, which will be highly damaging to the UK auto sector. That’s in addition to more substantial tariffs which are already in place on UK steel and aluminium, two struggling industries.

4. There is also the clear danger of the dumping of goods which would have headed to the US flooding UK markets.

5. And crucially, even if a 10% is relatively positive, it ignores the far bigger problem. One way or another, if these tariffs sustain, they will create a major shock to the world economy. We can’t know for sure how severe it will be, just because tariffs were a major contributor to the depression of the 1930s, we can’t be certain they will have such a significant effect today. But there will clearly be economic dislocation and lost growth around the world. That will affect the UK even if we secure a trade deal with the US and the elimination of these tariffs altogether. The world is economically interdependent, whether Trump or we like it or not. In other words, if there is a slowdown in the EU and in the US that washes up on us, making a precarious economic and fiscal situation worse still.

Which brings us to the other delusion which abounds in much of the press and a fair section of the commentariat this morning- the self-congratulation that Britain is finally realising a substantial Brexit benefit in avoiding an extra 10% to which the EU is subjected.

I can understand this impulse to clutch at straws, but I am afraid it is largely just that. Let us consider the logic of that statement. It is posited that it is a vindication of Brexit that we have avoided an additional 10%. That is true, if we were still in the EU we’d be looking at 20% with no obvious means of securing a deal to ensure its reduction, which we now enjoy. But so what? For the reasons I’ve outlined above, 10% is bad enough. But looking at this moment as a Brexit benefit ignores the endless economic disbenefit that we’ve endured since 2016 and ignores the far bigger picture. Our currency remains devalued. UK goods exports to the EU have declined, with some studies showing a 27% drop in exports and a 32% drop in imports between 2021 and 2023 compared to a scenario without Brexit. Services have been less affected, showing more resilience to deal with the exigencies of the TCA but every study would suggest they are lower than they would have been without the years of uncertainty Brexit caused. Overall, the OBR has said that the UK economy will be 4% smaller than it would have been without Brexit, our trade intensity with the EU will be 15% down on where it would have been in the medium term and the overall economic damage will be comparable to the damage created by Covid. Compared to all of that, the 10% Trump tariff differential is a rounding error. It is like giving £100 to Peter, receiving £20 from Paul and congratulating oneself on a job well done.

And perhaps that wouldn’t have been so much of a problem if one of the central economic premises of Brexit- that we would secure new trade deals around the world- had been realised. But we haven’t signed many and most we have are rollovers with deals we had before. Certainly we’ve secured nothing which begins to replicate the economic relationship we had with the EU. Tariffs with the US are especially relevant here because we were also told repeatedly that a trade deal with the US would be one of the main prizes of an independent trade policy. Not only do we still not have that, nearly a decade on from 2016, but we actually facing additional tariffs from the US instead. Even if we do secure a trade deal in the coming weeks, it will be partial and weighted in the US' favour.

Brexiters told us that plucky Britain could lead the way in an era of free trade, instead we have headed into a world of protectionism where Britain’s modest economic weight counts for little. Many of the same people who slammed Obama for telling us we'd be "back of the queue" for a trade deal are many of the same people who are today telling us that it's a triumph for Britain that Trump has imposed only a 10% tariff rate on British goods. The truth is that the post-Brexit settlement has rarely seemed more exposed: we have neither the security nor the power of being in a large trade bloc, nor a truly special relationship with the world’s remaining economic superpower and insufficient economic power to matter much on our own. Far from a moment of triumph, today should be clarifying for our true status in this world new order, one which we have partly imposed on ourselves. But few in Britain will dare to say it aloud.

Donald Trump doesn't understand soft power. He doesn’t trust it, doesn’t believe in it, and certainly doesn't know how to wield it. To him, power only works when it bruises. If it doesn't punch, it doesn't count. As a man, as a leader, as a bully, he is too weak to see the power in speaking softly.

Which is why America under Trump has become smaller, meaner, and less effective than at any point in its global history since the Second World War.

Soft power isn't a vulnerability. It's persuasion without coercion. It makes the world lean toward you instead of away from you. It's why a student in Lagos studies English literature, why a democracy protester in Hong Kong quotes Ben Franklin and Obama, why countries used to line up to make trade with the United States, and why American ideals—flawed as they are in practice—are still magnetic.

Trump bulldozed that - all of it - in a matter of months because he sees diplomacy as betrayal and alliances as scams. He considers every relationship a zero-sum hustle where you own the other guy or get played. The idea that power could be shared or values could be exported without bombs and sanctions makes no sense to him. So instead, he slaps tariffs on allies, threatens airstrikes when diplomacy stalls, and calls the whole sorry state of affairs a show of strength.

He doesn't understand the long game because he's never played one. Every move is transactional, reactive, and performative. It's not about winning people over; it's about dominating the moment. And if you need proof, look no further than his latest "deal-making" playbook: threatening Iran with bombing unless they come to the table on his terms while simultaneously gutting the very diplomatic channels that once led to a multilateral nuclear deal that actually worked.

When Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018, he didn't offer a better strategy — he threw a tantrum. He replaced inspectors with threats, and now he floats the idea of flattening Iran if they don't fall in line. That's not negotiation. That's extortion dressed up as foreign policy. And it has left the U.S. isolated and the Middle East teetering.

He does the same thing with trade. While South Korea, China, and Japan work toward a regional agreement to stabilize markets, Trump barrels in with new tariffs and calls it "liberation." He can't see cooperation as anything but capitulation. He thinks a win means someone else lost and that anyone who doubts him is disloyal, even if they're an ally.

This is a man so addicted to blunt force that he doesn't realize the walls are closing in. America used to be the country that built coalitions, kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy. Trump has taken a sledgehammer to that legacy.

The world is adapting. Regional powers are forming their own pacts. Former allies are hedging their bets. Dictators are emboldened. The U.S. is still powerful but less trusted, less admired, and less listened to—not because its weapons have stopped working, but because its word has utterly failed.

Even within his own government, Trump prefers loyalist wreckers to competent experts. He fires generals who warn him, guts the intelligence community, and purges the diplomatic corps. He closes embassies and mocks development aid, failing to understand that helping build a school in another country can do more for American security than a dozen fighter jets.

He thinks symbolism is substance, that deleting a tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen is a realignment of priorities, that pulling embassy staff is an act of fiscal toughness instead of a retreat from relevance, and that culture wars at home are more important than stability abroad.

The result is a hollowed-out State Department, a demoralized military, and a foreign policy run on bluster. America under Trump isn't feared because of its strength. It's avoided because of its ignorance. It's the drunk, belligerent, and painfully racist uncle at the party that nobody wants to get stuck talking to. It is, in fact, the perfect representation of Trump's own voting base.

Meanwhile, adversaries study the chaos and capitalize on it. China expands its diplomatic footprint. Russia exploits America's diplomatic 4-year (at least) sick day. Even longtime partners find new footing away from Washington because they can't depend on a man who governs by vendetta and governs alone.

Soft power is credibility. It's showing up, staying engaged, and listening more than shouting. You cannot fake it with a flag pin or a fighter jet flyover. It’s earned. And under Trump, it's squandered.

You don't have to be a foreign policy expert to see the pattern. Trump doesn't read briefing books. He picks fights with allies. He leaks military plans on commercial chat apps. He governs by instinct, which might be less terrifying if his instincts weren't so shallow.

He doesn't comprehend soft power because it requires vision, patience, and an ounce of humility — qualities he neither possesses nor respects. And while he plays the strongman for crowds at home, the rest of the world sees what he really is: a man screaming at a mirror, mistaking volume for leadership.

America can be strong without being cruel. Powerful without being petty. Respected without being feared. But not under a man who only knows how to bludgeon.

Trump's America is loud, brittle, and alone. That isn't power. That’s abject failure.

This is how they kill free speech. It's not through Twitter suspensions or cancel culture. It's done the old fashioned way, just like they did it a century ago: With thugs in masks bundling someone into the back of a car.

Rumeysa Ozturk was walking down the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, when she was approached by a man in a hat and a hoodie. At first she tried to be polite. She had that unmistakable look of a woman hoping a threatening stranger was not going to attack her. Then he grabbed her arms. She cried out in fear. Another man appeared and wrenched her phone from her hand. Several other officers appeared wearing masks and sunglasses. They handcuffed her and put her in an unmarked vehicle.

At this point she effectively dropped into the administrative abyss. A district judge ordered law enforcement not to move her out of Massachusetts without two day's notice, but it made no difference. She was shipped to the other side of the country and held in a Louisiana detention facility.

The Department of Homeland security claims that Ozturk, a Turkish psychology student doing a PhD, had "engaged in activities in support of Hamas". Tellingly, secretary of state Marco Rubio did not bother to make that allegation when he responded to the incident yesterday. He suggested that she wanted to "participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalising universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus".

Rubio's suggestion is several steps down from the Department of Homeland claim of terrorism. It essentially amounts to disorderly protest. But there's no more evidence of Ozturk's disorderly protest than there is of her allegiance to Hamas. There's just a March 2024 comment piece in her university's newspaper in which she criticises Israeli foreign policy.

Rubio was clear that foreign students were no longer able to participate in protest movements. "If you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don't want it," he said. "We don't want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country." Authorities seem to have developed a set tactic when it comes to foreign students they consider ideologically unsound. First they revoke their visa, leaving them with no legal status. Then they effectively kidnap them and send them to a detention centre. Rubio suggested he had been involved in targeting 300 people in this way although who knows. These people lie as easily as they breath.

The Louisiana complex where Ozturk is being held is in a remote former town around 170 miles from New Orleans, making it hard for detainees to access legal advice or communication with family and supporters. It was a hub for immigrant detention during Trump's first term but is now fast developing a reputation for where the Trump administration detains political undesirables.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who'd been visible in Columbia campus protests last year, is being held there. When his wife showed documents proving he was a green card holder, agents said it had been revoked. Like Ozturk, he was also accused of "activities aligned to Hamas".

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While these individuals are detained, institutions are also silenced. Trump yesterday signed an executive order putting JD Vance in charge of overseeing efforts to "remove improper ideology" from the Smithsonian institute - including museums, research centres and the national zoo. He has also demanded that the women’s history museum does not "recognise men as women in any respect".

Similar actions are being taken against universities. The government pulled $400 million in research grants for Columbia university recently and demanded nine separate reforms, including the presence of security personnel to make arrests on campus and a ban on protests in academic buildings. It also secured academic control, with a demand that the school "ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced" and that the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department were put under "academic receivership". Shamefully, the college agreed to these demands.

Just a quick side note on that. These are the times in which we find out what people are made of. Many people, in the US and around the world, have covered themselves in shame for the manner in which they have preemptively buckled before authority. One day that will haunt them far more than their present acquiescence has convenienced them.

At first sight, this looks like basic fascism and it is. It's precisely what the Nazi's did when they came to power through their Gleichschaltung policy, which ensured all civic bodies were aligned with the Nazi worldview. It's what Viktor Orban has done in Hungary, bringing universities, NGOs and museums into ideological uniformity with the Fidesz movement. The only real difference is the speed of the American societal collapse.

It is also patently a free speech issue. The removal of "improper ideology" is an attempt to eradicate the free speech of institutions. Let's see what happens when they try to talk about the genocide of the native Americans or the treatment of slaves. The demand that a museum does not "recognise men as women" is obviously an attempt to deny the existence of trans people, but it is also the removal of an institution's right to recognise trans people in their displays or communication. The demand that "educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced" allows the government to wipe away inconvenient academic discourse and insert its preferred type in its place.

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Right wing authoritarians are doing what they always do. They’re attempting to destroy free speech. What not been clear, until this point, is whether there are enough progressives who are prepared to stop them.

Free speech started to go out of fashion in left-wing circles in the late noughties. You can see it pretty clear in the data. Recent More in Commons research, for instance, found progressive activists were more likely to prioritise protecting people from harmful speech over protecting free speech. A King's College study with Opsos Mori found 60% of those aged 55 and above disagreed with no-platforming while just 32% of 16-to-24-year-olds did. The figures are not earth shaking - the Generation Snowflake bollocks has always been overblown - but there was clear movement.

Online, it felt more frenzied than that, probably because the most vocal activist types were overrepresented and the algorithm encouraged their most extreme expression.

I was once in a video game called Watch Dogs Legion. I know that's an absurd sentence, but it happened. I was one of the voices you heard on the radio when you drove around in a car in a future fascist Britain. When the game came out, some online campaigners targeted another contributor because of her views on trans issues, which were critical but well within the realm of acceptable debate. The game developer removed her. I spoke out. I was then hammered for a week or so online. You'd experience it as this great and terrible wave. First Britain would tell you that you are a monster and a scumbag, then America would wake up and reiterate the argument. To defend someone’s free speech was not just wrong in itself. It was an insult to minority groups.

The basic progressive attack was that free speech was just an excuse for hate speech, allowing dominant groups to make marginalised people feel afraid in public space. It derived from colonialist attitudes towards freedom. You can see the broad outlines of this latter aspect in a new book by Fara Dabhoiwala. John Stuart Mill developed the strongest modern argument for free speech. John Stuart Mill was an imperialist. Therefore, John Stuart Mill's "argument about freedom of expression was saturated with imperialist presumptions".

None of this is true. It is simply the assumption that what is bad about a person must necessarily negate what is good about them. More importantly, it fails to understand how crucial free speech is for weaker groups during political conflict. This was why the initial ideas around individual liberty were developed by the Levellers in the English civil war and radicals in the French revolution - because they knew it was their only chance against executive power. It's why they were adopted by campaigners for Indian independence and civil rights activists in the US. The powerful do not need free speech protections. They can do what they damn well like. It is the powerless who require them.

We know what happened next. The populist right embraced free speech as their own. Neuron-free grifters like Piers Morgan and Julie Birchill wrote books about Generation Snowflake. A circus of GB News types warbled on about how easily offended young people were nowadays. None of them had the slightest idea what they were on about.

It was all so tremendously boring. But it was also a disaster. First, it alienated young progressives from free speech values, because the only people they ever saw celebrating them were these absolute clowns. And second, it left one of the most complex and radical principles of political life in the hands of those with the fewest possible brain cells to understand them. Progressives had vacated the land of their birth.

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On the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo film podcast the other day, something interesting happened. A listener pulled up Kermode on one of his verbal habits. He'd always pronounced Timothée Chalamet's name in a mocking way. They made a short rational argument - why should someone be mocked for having a foreign name, especially given that he'd probably turned down the pressure to anglicise it? At the end of it, Kermode simply replied: ""OK, alright, I'll stop doing it." (You can hear the clip from 01:08:25 here)

I loved him for that. It communicated a central truth. Free speech is not only about aggression. It is also about modesty. It is about receptiveness. It is actually about vulnerability. The idea was not that we would simply scream at one other. It was that we would listen. That our ideas would be improved by being challenged. That the only way for that process to happen was to allow the maximum degree of freedom for communication.

It is an abstract idea, but it is also a practical one. A plan for reforming social security, for instance, will be flawed if we don’t test it against the way that people really live - how much they earn, what work they apply for, how the benefit system responds to a job offer. Our proposal for a transport network will collapse if we do not scrutinise it for traffic flow and human behaviour. It is only by exposing ourself to arguments and information that we develop viable policy.

How interested are the right-wing free speech warriors in hearing other people's ideas? Not at all. How likely are people like Morgan or Burchill to change their view? Not in the slightest.

Elon Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist. Obviously this is laughable politically - he rigged his site to promote people who agree with him and bury those who do not. But it is also extremely telling practically. The reason he is making such a godforsaken mess of things at his made-up efficiency initiative is precisely because he does not try to assess the information which contradicts his instincts.

They thought free speech was about machismo: thrusting, penetrating, dominating, talking over, shouting above. They did not understand that it is about taking in, about absorbing. And so now they fall about pathetically, without the values which would offer them guidance.

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In a speech in Arizona last week, the left wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: "I want to live in an America where you have free speech to express yourself and not be afraid of being put on a list or deported." The applause rang out around her. But it wasn't just that. Those words fit like a glove. They were the kinds of things which progressives used to say, the kind of territory they used to stake as their own. They were the kind of principles we once felt confident defending. And now, perhaps, will again.

A new generation of activists are learning one of the core liberal lessons: That liberty never belonged to the tyrants. It was always the weapon of the marginalised. If we’ve any luck, progressives will now rediscover these values, just in the nick of time.

Odds and sods

My i column this week was on the Spring Statement, obviously, and my increased sense of alarm that the chancellor has got herself stuck in a damaging economic and political position. Honestly, watching her fiddle around with the numbers, at a huge cost to those involved, so she could rebuild the same headroom she had last time with no effort to insulate herself against the same reevaluation next autumn was dispiriting in the extreme. It's suggestive of a government which simply doesn't have any idea of what to do except hope for the best. I also took part in the i verdict on cuts, which you can find here and I took part in this i documentary about Nigel Farage, in which I offered my usual sense of gushing praise. Or suggested he was a cunt. One of the two.

Oh and for culture: Sorry, it's Adolescence. I know. An incredibly boring suggestion. I don't want to join the massed ranks of advocates either. But the thing is: it's very, very good.

See you next week, have a lovely weekend.

Think globally, act locally, they used to say. If it’s true, why does it matter that the US has — again — withdrawn support for international co-ordination on climate change? In the mid-20th century, the US emitted about as much carbon dioxide as every other country in the world combined. Now its share of global emissions is less than 15 per cent. It is a shame that the US administration can’t take climate change seriously, although a solid majority of Americans are concerned about the issue. But even without them, why can’t the rest of us just “act locally”?

That might seem a foolish question. The US stance undermines global agreement, and global agreement is important because climate change poses a collective action problem. Greenhouse gases emitted anywhere in the world, by anyone, mix in the atmosphere and contribute to the general problem of a warming world. It’s a little like splitting a restaurant bill between a large group. Order the Wagyu steak and vintage champagne, why not? Everyone else is sharing the cost. The trouble is that everyone else will do likewise and you’ll be paying for their extravagance, just as they pay for yours.

Finding a better way to split a restaurant bill is a topic so taxing that the writer Douglas Adams believed it needed its own academic discipline, Bistromathics. Finding a way to co-ordinate a response to climate change is even more of a challenge.

I was struck, then, by a new research paper with the intriguing title, “Does Unilateral Decarbonization Pay For Itself?” The paper, by the economists Adrien Bilal and Diego Känzig, argues that a US government entirely uninterested in global co-operation would still find it cost-effective to reduce America’s carbon emissions by more than 80 per cent. Much the same calculation applies to the EU.

If Bilal and Känzig are right, international agreements may be less important than they seem, because the major economies have selfish reasons to decarbonise. The logic behind this surprising conclusion is very simple: Bilal and Känzig estimate that the local damage from global warming is enormous. Acting alone, the US or the EU might only be able to make a modest contribution to reducing that damage. Yet they should still act, because a modest reduction of a catastrophic cost is something worth having.

The only problem with Bilal and Känzig’s argument is that it relies on their estimate of the costs of climate change. Those costs are uncertain, unknowable until it is too late, and endlessly contested. In the US, for example, the official benchmark for the social cost of carbon was $43 a ton under President Obama. The first Trump administration put it at between $3 and $5 a ton. Under the Biden administration, it was raised to $51 and then $190 a ton. Bilal and Känzig estimate it to be $1,367 a ton. Somebody who believes that the social cost of carbon is $3 a ton is not going to be much moved by the conclusions of economists who reckon it is 450 times higher.

There is, however, an alternative line of argument. Perhaps we should refrain from a diet of Wagyu beef and champagne, not because even our small share of the bill is too expensive, but because there are healthier and more interesting things to eat and drink. Or, in the case of climate change, perhaps we should decarbonise not just because it is perilous to trap more heat in the planet’s atmosphere, but because a low-carbon society offers many incidental benefits.

Some of these are obvious. Having more access to electricity from ever-cheaper wind and solar sources, coupled with energy storage, reduces our dependence on imported fossil fuels and our vulnerability to spikes in the price of those fuels — the kind seen after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Equally obvious, if people choose to walk or cycle instead of drive, they will reap the health benefits of their physical activity.

Other benefits are more surprising. Many of the richest and most productive places in the world are big cities, but these concrete jungles have much lower environmental footprints than sprawling exurbs. Urbanites live in more compact spaces that require less energy to heat and cool and they travel by mass transit, or that most efficient of mechanised people-movers, the counterweighted elevator. Far from perceiving all this as a deprivation, many people are willing to pay a premium to live in an eco-paradise such as Manhattan. (Let’s not even start on the topic of Venice, a city whose unparalleled charms depend not only on those beautiful canals, but also on the complete absence of cars.)

Chris Goodall’s recent book Possible gives further examples. Even though petrol and diesel vehicles are much cleaner than they once were, they still cause lung diseases and a significant number of premature deaths. Electric vehicles are quieter and emit no tailpipe air pollution. Gas hobs fill the home with harmful toxins. Induction hobs do not, and are a pleasure to use. There are plenty of technologies whose initial selling point — less carbon — is just one of a list of attractions.

The battle to slow climate change would be easier to fight with the US government on side, of course. But “act locally” is not just a hippie cliché. There is plenty we can do to decarbonise, and many of the benefits of doing so are closer to home than we might think.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 February 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

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