19.02.2026

Burn, baby, burn

Yet another study shows the climate system rapidly approaching multiple tipping points, writes Eddie Ford. Meanwhile the US president is criminally chucking more fuel onto the fire

Yet more confirmation, unfortunately, that human civilisation is on the brink can be found in a new study published last week by the journal, One Earth, saying that the global climate is “now departing from the stable conditions” that once sustained us.¹

This assessment synthesised recent scientific findings on climate feedback loops and identified 16 tipping elements, including the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, mountain glaciers, polar sea ice, sub-Arctic forests and permafrost, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), or ‘North Sea drift’, which gives a country like the UK its famously moderate climate.

In fact, the world may be closer than previously thought to a “point of no return”, after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, say the scientists on the study team at the Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US.

Tipping may already be happening in Greenland and west Antarctica, with the Amazon rainforest appearing to be on the verge - especially as Amoc is already showing signs of weakening, which could increase the risk of Amazon dieback. In turn, carbon released by an Amazon dieback would further amplify global warming and interact with other feedback loops. In this way, continued global heating could lead to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, the study found, and runs the very real danger of locking the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3°C temperature rise the world is already on track to reach.²

This new climate would be very different to the generally benign conditions of the past 11,000 years. Indeed, it is likely that carbon dioxide levels will be the highest they have been in at least two million years, and global temperatures are very likely to be as warm, or warmer, than at any point in the last 125,000 years. As we have witnessed, at just 1.3°C of global heating, weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. But 3-4°C will bring a far more dangerous qualitative shift, according to the scientists, whereby “the economy and society will cease to function as we know it.”

Naturally, it is difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered - you could say it is radically indeterminate. But, once they are crossed, reversing course from a hothouse Earth is likely to be impossible, even if emissions were eventually slashed. Once the damage has been done, the metaphorical oil tanker cannot be turned around before it hits the rocks.

The group at Terrestrial Ecosystems said they were issuing this warning because climate change is “advancing faster” than many scientists predicted, requiring rapid and immediate cuts in the burning of fossil fuels. Politicians and the public are “largely unaware” of the risks posed by a point-of-no-return transition.

Dominoes

At the same time as the article in One Earth was published, Donald Trump ignored its warnings and moved “the single largest deregulatory action in American history” by revoking the bedrock scientific determination that gave the US government some ability to regulate climate-heating pollution.³

The ‘endangerment finding’, which states that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare, has since 2009 allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit heat-trapping pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources. Trump’s criminally reckless action has been widely described as a gift to “billionaire polluters” and the most “aggressive” act of dismantling public health protections in the agency’s 55-year history, bringing hothouse Earth one step closer.

Essentially, his action removes the government’s ability to impose requirements to track, report and limit climate-heating pollution from cars and trucks, even though transportation is the largest source of climate pollution in the US. So far, it does not apply to regulations on stationary sources of emissions, such as power plants and fossil-fuel infrastructure, which are regulated under a separate section of the Clean Air Act, but it will open the door to end those standards too - which is almost bound to follow. Indeed, the US president has already proposed that emissions from power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution” and therefore should not be regulated – so, along with the “drill, baby, drill” ethos, we can now add ‘burn, baby, burn’.

But Trump does not appear to have the complete backing of ‘Big Oil’. The American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil lobby group representing nearly 600 corporations, said last month that it backed a repeal of the endangerment finding for vehicles, but not for stationary sources of pollution like power plants - that is too mad even for them.

Joseph Goffman, who helped write and implement the Clean Air Act and worked directly on the endangerment finding, expects that it will be like “a row of dominoes falling”, when it comes to EPA climate regulations. The state of California, for one, will taking the EPA to court over the rollback, as it will inevitably lead to more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts, as the overwhelming scientific evidence about climate change is dismissed.

In a typical Trumpian press release, the EPA said that getting rid of the endangerment findings will save the US $1.3 trillion, while the US president himself declared it “will save American consumers trillions of dollars” - a complete inversion of reality, it goes without saying. At the same time, the EPA has removed crucial climate-focused science and data from its webpages; and, over the past year, its administrator, Lee Zeldin, has launched an all-out assault on climate, air, water and chemical protections. We are confronted by the new robber barons.

But one analysis from the Environmental Defence Fund, for example, found that the full repeal of the endangerment finding, combined with Trump’s proposal to roll back motor vehicle standards, would result in as much as 18 billion more tons of planet-warming pollution by 2055 and impose up to $4.7 trillion in additional expenses tied to harmful climate and air pollution by that time. The new rule will obviously have ruinous consequences for the working class - both in America and worldwide.

Sanity

Nor will technologies like electric vehicles come to our rescue. In fact, they will actually do the opposite, logically only encouraging the burning of fossil fuels. Therefore, in a new study, published in the journal Environmental Research, researchers at Queen Mary University - not without controversy - say that the push towards EVs is fundamentally misguided as they are “delivering no proven carbon savings”. Hence the UK is “prioritising the wrong things”.⁴ Instead, they say, the urgent focus needs to be on grid capacity, renewables and carbon-capture.

While communists can disagree with this or that aspect of the research, we can fundamentally agree that EVs are a false messiah. Described as a ‘sanity check’, the scientists compared the UK’s 2030 net zero plan with “real-world data” from 2023. Since EVs increase demand for electricity during overcast or windless days, charging a new EV only results in more fossil fuels being burnt at power stations to provide the extra electricity.

In 2024, the government announced that it was bringing forward plans to decarbonise British electricity generation from 2035 to 2030, by encouraging the adoption of so-called ‘clean’ electrified technologies, and so on. But in the words of professor Alan Drew, co-author of the study, EVs and heat pumps “will be valuable later”, but for now “we must stop pretending they are reducing emissions when the data shows they aren’t”. Rather, the “real work right now is strengthening the grid, building renewables and addressing the enormous challenge storage for surplus electricity that renewables create.”

Now, most research into EV carbon savings calculates their energy consumption based on the total power mix in the UK grid, and in 2025 renewable energy made up 44% of the power supply on average. At the point of driving, recent research estimates that producing the energy to charge an EV creates 75% less CO₂ than the equivalent petrol or diesel fuel - so you might be tempted to think buying an EV would result in less fossil fuel being burned. But this is a false economy, so to speak. as buying a new EV simply adds one extra car’s worth of demand to the UK's energy grid.

If there was plenty of surplus renewable energy to meet that demand, then you would make some emission savings by going electric. But, of course, in the UK that extra demand on the grid is met in part by burning more fossil fuels and, the more EVs you have, the more fossil fuel is burnt. You are not making any progress - just the illusion brought by marketing. Then you have what goes into an EV - plastic, chips, glass, silicon, metal, etc, etc. How exactly are they made? By burning more fossil fuels at a power station …

Of course, the Daily Mail is trumpeting the Queen Mary research as part of its Trumpian anti-climate science agenda - net zero goes too far!⁵ But, of course, for communists it does not go far enough, as it assumes the existence of the ‘car economy’, and indeed an even bigger one, thanks to EVs. Then there is the ecologically damaging role played by the massive use of airplanes, international shipping, the dairy and beef industry, the US military, and so on. Rather, we need instead a totally different society with priorities based on human need, not production for the sake of production.

Rift

Jim Skea, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently said that efforts to decouple climate action from net zero targets were misguided, as the outcome was “not a political choice” - it is dictated by basic physics and chemistry rather than ideology.⁶ This, of course, is an incorrect formulation. Dealing with runaway climate change requires not physics, but system change, based on all the sciences, plus an understanding of the “metabolic rift”, located, not least, by Karl Marx - the disruption in the relationship between human society and nature caused by capitalism.⁷

Net zero, as popularly understood, would logically be achieved if the amount of greenhouse gas removed from the atmosphere equalled that emitted - but the past three years have been the hottest on record. The next round of IPCC reports is due to begin publication next spring, but no US scientists working for federal agencies such as Nasa will be taking part - more criminal negligence from Trump.

Governments have yet to agree publication dates for several key reports expected over the coming years, and Saudi Arabia and China are among the countries that have pushed for later release dates - which would mean the findings are not available in time for the UN’s second so-called “global stocktake” in 2028. Fiddling while Rome burns.

The object of the exercise, of course, is to assess how far the world remains from limiting the global average temperature rise to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and ideally to 1.5°C, as set out in the 2016 Paris Agreement.

But we all know the answer - the world is moving in the wrong direction fast. The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change is now advising officials to prepare for a world 2.8°-3.3°C hotter than preindustrial levels by 2100, and recommends ‘stress-testing’ for even hotter scenarios. Facing civilisational collapse, the working class as a matter of necessity must organise into mass communist parties and prepare for power internationally. Protest politics have already met their limits and all national roads are self-defeating. Climate is truly global, which should be stating the obvious, but some behave otherwise. We also have to recognise the truth that, even if we establish a World Union of Socialist States within a reasonably short time - which at the moment seems more than unlikely - the Earth we will inherit will be much impoverished and some socialist measures may prove impossible to implement, or at least subject to delay or major rethink.

Without doubt, it will take many generations to restore the natural conditions which we humans, being part of nature, depend upon for our very existence.