My speech at the “Trump Climate Disaster” Rally outside the US Embassy (11/1/25).

The new US Ambassador that Trump is installing in that Vice Regal fortress behind us – and, I’ve got to say that that’s a very wide moat they’d got there, which makes you wonder what they are anticipating – is a guy called Warren Stephens.

Stephens is an investment banker from Arkansas, whose company holds huge oil concessions in the Gulf of Mexico (which Trump wants to rename the Gulf of America). He is also a climate smartarse – someone who likes to use pseudo scientific one liners to deflect from the seriousness of climate change, which are only convincing for those determined to be convinced and unwilling to ask any questions to puncture their own delusions.

He will have two jobs above all.

One will be to push the UK government off its agenda for green transition.

Trump wants “no windmills” in the USA and “no windmills” in the North Sea.

If renewables are abandoned, the limited reserves in the North Sea means that, even if they were maxed out, they would be unable to fill the gap in energy needs; which would have to be made up by very expensive imports of US Liquifid Natural Gas, which we now know has a carbon footprint 33% worse than that of coal.

If the government succumbs to that pressure -which is being pushed “patriotically” by the Conservativbes and Reform now as Trump’s Fifth Column, with the media in a screaming descant in support – it would be a spectacular act of self harm that will impoverish people on a grand scale and make climate damage a lot worse.

His other main priority will be to push the US militarisation drive.

Trump wants NATO allies spending 5% of their GDP on their militaries. Thats more than double the current average.

Neil Kinnock seems to think that 4% is “reasonable”.

This is NOT because they are under any threat militarily. Direct US allies account for 2/3 to 3/4 of global military spending already (depending on what estimates you use).

This collosal concentration of coercive power polices the transfer of $10 Trillion from the Global South to the Global North every year.

This is why countries want to join NATO. It makes them part of the imperial core. As Anthony Blinken put it, “if you are not at the table with us, you’re on the menu”. The problem now though is that being at the table with the US is a bit like having dinner with “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”, as Trump might put it. You can never be sure when the host is going to trun round and take a bite out of you. But you can be sure that he will do so at some point.

Doubling that level of expenditure cannot be seen as a defensive measure. It only makes sense if they are planning wars of aggression.

That is explicitly proclaimed by the UK Defence Review, which talks of being in a “pre war situation”, and there is overt talk of the British Army having to be ready to fight a major land war in Europe within the next ten years. This is completely mad and suicidal.

The impulse for this is partly that the US is losing ground to China very fast economically, but also because, in the context of the climate crisis, US society as it currently stands – and the wealth of the feral billionaires who are running its government – can only be sustained if they can put the Global South in general, and China in particular, back in its box.

They are fully aware that the climate crisis is real. All the denialist stuff is just prolefeed. An example of this is the US Army Report from 2019 that argued that,

• left unchecked, the climate crisis would lead to a social collapse in the US itself at some point this century
• the US Army had to be ready to intervene to make sure that the new oil and gas reserves revealed by melting polar ice caps would be under the control of the US – annexation of Greenland anyone?.

This would be extreme cognitive dissonance if they did not have a perspective where they could maintain a per capita carbon footprint the size of a Diplodocus, so long as most of the world barely has one at all.

So, the United States can no longer pretend to be anyone’s elses future, not even its own.

The problem they will have with this is that the costs of carrying through this massive shift of resources into militarisation will lead to massive economic and political crises.

To be specific. For the UK to spend 5% of its GDP on its military would cost an additional £60 -70 billion a year. Mark Rutte of NATO has very kindly suggested that this could come from Health and Pensions. Nice. We can be absolutely clear that it would also have to come from green infrastructure investment.

Flood defences? Why would we need those when we can trust to luck?

Ditto investing in fire prevention, because there’s no problem with wild fires is there?

Insulating homes? That would have to go. People can stay patriotically cold.

Electrified railways and affordable public transport? Who needs that when there’s weapons to buy?

So, if the government capitulates to this pressure we will face

• extinction from climate breakdown in the long term, because they won’t have invetsed enough to stop it or limit the damage
• extinction from nuclear war in the medium term, because they are investing in preparing for that and seem oblivious to the risks
• misery and impoverishment in the immediate term to pay for it.

All to defend a “rules based international order” in which – as we’ve seen this week with the US sanctions on the International Criminal Court as punishment for the Gaza indictments – the US makes the rules, and the rest of us are expected to follow the orders. The US is not interested in global leadership, it is interested in global domination.

You can’t build a wall to keep this out.

Millions across the world will resist this – including in Europe and the US itself. Trump’s polices are likely to blow up in his face. His tariffs, if imposed, will be ruinous.

People do not want to be poor. They do not want to be killed in a war. They want more action to keep us safe from climate breakdown. Let’s mobilise that majority, with the trade union year of action from this September as a lever.

I’ll end with an advert. Just down the road from here, on Clapham Manor Street, is the only trade union owned pub in the World, called, perhaps inevitably, Bread and Roses. On 23 January at 7pm it is hosting a showing of the latest Reel News film about the inspirational GKN Firenze factory occupation, and another supporting Vauxhall workers resisting Stellantis closing their plant.

Everyone is welcome.