Energy, Agriculture & Global Warming

The story of how energy and food got captured by the same handful of interests, from Tesla's free electricity tower being shut down by JP Morgan, through the carving up of the Middle East for oil, to the slow-motion crisis of phosphorus running out while we flush our fertiliser into the sea. It's a big chapter and it deserves to be 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Energy, Agriculture and Global Warming. This chapter on its own could go on for a vast series of books. The amount of material, the number of cases, the scale of what's been done to this planet, and the people living on it in the name of profit is so overwhelming that trying to squeeze it into a single chapter feels almost disrespectful to the subject. But we have to start somewhere and we have to keep moving, so I'll do my best to cover the ground that matters most and trust that if any of it makes you angry enough, you'll go and look further into it yourself. Over the years I've tried to do my bit, I stopped eating beef for a while, tried full veganism, I reuse and recycle as much as I can, and I genuinely care about where this is all heading. But ultimately I want holidays, I enjoy a variety of food, I like the comfort of a warm house and a car that works. And at some point you begin to realise how little individual choices actually make when the institutions responsible for the vast majority of the damage carry on regardless. Unless the corporations change, unless the governments force them to change, unless the systems that prioritize profit over everything else are fundamentally restructured, individual action is just pissing into the wind. That's not a reason to stop trying, but it is a reason to start asking who's really responsible and why they've been allowed to get away with it for so long. Let's start with a story about electricity, because it sets the tone for everything that follows and it involves a recurring theme you'll recognise by now. One man wanted to give something to the world for free, another wanted to sell it. I bet you can already guess the outcome. In 1884, a young Serbian immigrant called Nikola Tesla arrived in the United States with almost nothing to his name. He went to work for Thomas Edison, the most famous inventor in America, but left after just six months. The two men had fundamentally different visions for how electricity should work. Edison had built his empire on direct current DC, which was inefficient and couldn't travel long distances without losing power. Tesla had developed alternating current AC, which could be transmitted over vast distances cheaply and efficiently. Edison knew that if AC won, his entire business model was finished, so he launched what became known as the War of Currents, a public campaign to discredit Tesla's system by electrocuting animals in public demonstrations to show how dangerous alternating current was. He even helped develop the electric chair specifically to associate AC with death. Tesla won the war. His AC system was adopted as the standard, and it remains the foundation of virtually every power grid in the world today. When you switch on a light, charge your phone, or turn on the heating, you're using Nikola Tesla's invention. But Tesla wasn't interested in just improving how electricity was delivered. He wanted to change the entire relationship between energy and humanity. In 1901, Tesla persuaded the financier JP Morgan, the same JP Morgan we met in the finance chapter, to invest$150,000 in a project called Warden Cliff Tower on Long Island, New York. Tesla pitched it as a wireless communication system that could send messages across the Atlantic. But his real ambition was far bigger than that. He wanted to transmit free electrical energy wirelessly to anywhere on the planet. No wires, no meters, no bills. A 187-foot tower with a huge copper dome on top and iron roots driven 120 feet into the Earth, designed to use the planet itself as a conductor and send energy through the ground and the atmosphere to receivers anywhere in the world. Free electricity for everyone. Morgan's money was supposed to fund a radio competitor to Marconi. When he realized Tesla's actual goal was to give energy away for free, he refused to put in another penny. And why would he? Morgan had major investments in General Electric and in the entire copper wire infrastructure that delivered electricity to homes and businesses across America. Every mile of copper wire, every meter, every bill, every power station, all of it depended on electricity being something you paid for. Free wireless energy would have destroyed the whole model overnight. When Tesla wrote to Morgan begging for more funds, asking him, Will you help me, or let my great work, almost complete, go to pots? Morgan's reply was blunt. I should not feel disposed at present to make any further advances. A few nights after that letter, the tower came alive one last time. Residents for a hundred miles around reported bright, crackling flashes of blue light shooting into the sky, visible as far away as Connecticut. No explanation was given. The tower never operated again. Tesla couldn't find another investor because he'd already burned his bridges with Morgan and John Jacob Astor, another wealthy backer he'd misled about his true intentions. The project was abandoned in 1906. The tower was demolished for scrap in 1917, and Tesla spent the rest of his life in increasing poverty, living in hotel rooms, feeding pigeons in the park, his mind still racing with ideas that nobody would fund. He died alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in January 1943 at the age of 86. Within two days, the FBI swooped in. Not two weeks, not two months, two days. The Office of Alien Property Custodians seized his papers, his notes, everything in the room, and called in Dr. John G. Trump, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, to examine them. John G. Trump was the uncle of Donald Trump. After a three-day examination, Trump declared the papers to be primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and promotional character, and of no significant value. The government recorded 80 trunks of Tesla's belongings. When they were finally shipped to his nephew in Belgrade, only 60 arrived. Nobody has ever explained what happened to the other 20. The FBI didn't fully declassify its Tesla files until 2016, and even then questions remain about what's missing. Donald Trump has referenced his uncle many times over the years, once saying, My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear. Edison died rich, celebrated, with streets and schools and companies named after him. Tesla died poor, forgotten, in a room he couldn't afford. His life's work seized by the government before his body was cold. The man who wanted to sell electricity to the world became a hero. The man who wanted to give it away became a footnote. And JP Morgan, the man who pulled the funding because free energy couldn't be monetized, went on to help create the financial system we're still living under today. Whether Tesla's wireless energy would have actually worked at global scale is genuinely debated by physicists, and I want to be honest about that. The science of transmitting meaningful amounts of power through the Earth and atmosphere over thousands of miles was unproven then and remains unproven now. But what isn't debated is the reason the project was killed. It wasn't killed because it couldn't work, it was killed because if it did work, the most powerful men in America wouldn't have been able to charge for it. And that tells you everything you need to know about how energy has been managed ever since. Now let's talk about oil, because the story of energy in the 20th century is really the story of who controls it and what they're willing to do to keep that control. And to understand the oil crisis, you need to understand what came before it. Because there's a backstory that most people in Britain and America were never taught, and without it the rest of this chapter doesn't make sense. After the First World War, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them. Nobody asked the people living there. Britain took Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan. France took Syria and Lebanon. For the next 30 years, from 1918 to 1948, there were no major wars between the nations of the Middle East. The conflicts that did happen were almost entirely colonial, local populations resisting European powers who had drawn lines on a map and decided who owned what. The 1936 to 1939 Arab revolt in Palestine against British rule killed over 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews and 200 British, and the British crushed it so thoroughly that 10% of the adult Arab male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. That devastation of Palestinian society directly shaped what happened when the British finally left in 1948. But the point is this: for 30 years the region's violence was not nations attacking nations, it was empires controlling people, and people fighting back against empires. That's the pattern again. In 1948, Israel declared independence. Five Arab nations invaded Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Iran was not one of them. Iran had its own issues to deal with, Soviet pressure in the north, internal tensions between the Shah and Parliament, and a growing dispute with Britain over who owned Iran's oil. Iran had actually recognized Israel in 1950, becoming the second Muslim-majority country to do so after Turkey. It was not an enemy of Israel. It was barely involved in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict at all. In the early 1950s, Iran was one of the most progressive countries in the Middle East. It had a parliament, a free press, an educated middle class, women in universities, a functioning democracy. In April 1951, the Iranian parliament democratically elected a man called Mohammed Masadegh as Prime Minister. He was fiercely nationalist, hugely popular, Time magazine's man of the year, and he had one big idea that put him on a collision course with the most powerful countries on earth. He wanted to nationalise Iran's oil. At the time, Iran's oil was controlled by the Anglo-Iranian oil company, a British firm that would later become BP. The profits were flowing out of Iran and into British pockets, and Masadeg said enough. The Iranian parliament voted to take back control of their own natural resources. Britain was furious. Rather than negotiate, Britain set about destroying Iran's economy. The moment nationalization was passed, Britain imposed a worldwide boycott on Iranian oil, pressuring every major oil company and every buyer on the planet not to touch it. The Royal Navy sent warships to the Persian Gulf and threatened to board any tanker carrying Iranian crude. British technicians were pulled out of the Abadan refinery, the largest oil refinery in the world at the time, so that Iran couldn't run it properly. Britain froze Iranian assets held in British banks. They initially considered a full military invasion to seize Abadan by force, but were talked out of it. By September 1951, just months after nationalisation, Iran's oil exports had been reduced to zero. Not reduced, not slowed down, zero. The plan was simple, strangled the Iranian economy so completely that the people would turn on Mossad and he'd fall, without Britain having to lift a finger. But Mossadegh didn't fall. Britain took the case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and Mossad flew to New York personally to argue Iran's side. He was so persuasive that the court ruled it had no jurisdiction, handing Britain its first ever defeat at a UN Security Council resolution. He couldn't be beaten diplomatically, he couldn't be beaten legally, and even with his country's entire oil income reduced to nothing, he was still standing. So Britain decided to overthrow him instead. MI6 drew up a plan called Operation Boot, but Masado found out about it, closed the British embassy in October 1952, and expelled every British diplomat in the country, flushing out the spies along with them. With no agents left in Iran and no leverage left to pull, Britain went to the Americans. Declassified State Department documents released in 2017 confirmed that the British Foreign Office approached the Truman administration on more than one occasion in late 1952, beginning in October through a sustained campaign of communications and meetings trying to win approval for Massadig's overthrow. ME6 agents met their CIA counterparts separately in November 1952. Every time Truman said no, he believed the West's best hope was to work with Masadig, not against him. To the end of his presidency in January 1953, he refused to support a coup, but the British were so desperate they couldn't even wait for the next president to be inaugurated. Before Eisenhower had even taken office, they sent agents to approach him, going behind Truman's back, and crucially they changed the story. With Truman they'd pitched it as a dispute over oil. With Eisenhower they reframed it as a fight against communism, claiming Masada was opening the door to Soviet influence. It was nonsense. Masada had actually excluded communists from his government. And his own Secretary of State Dean Acheson later admitted the communist threat was a smokescreen. But in the paranoid atmosphere of the early Cold War, it was enough. Eisenhower authorized the coup in April 1953. The CIA launched Operation Ajax. They bribed journalists to print lies about Masadig. They paid politicians and mullers to denounce him. They hired mobs to create chaos in the streets of Tehran. CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, ran the operation on the ground with suitcases full of cash. The first attempt failed, and the Shah fled to Rome in panic, but Roosevelt regrouped, mobilized the military, and on the 19th of August 1953, Masadeg's government was overthrown. Around 300 people died in the fighting. Masadeg was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest until his death in 1967. The CIA didn't formally admit its role until 2013, 60 years later. When Eisenhower left office in January 1961, he gave a farewell address that has haunted American politics ever since. A four-star general who had commanded the Allied forces in the Second World War used his final speech to warn the American people about a force he believed was more dangerous than any foreign enemy, what he called the military-industrial complex, a permanent alliance between the military establishment and the arms industry that he said threatened democracy itself. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, he said. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. The irony is hard to miss. Under his own presidency, the CIA had run 170 covert operations, overthrown democratic governments in Iran and Guatemala, and the American nuclear stockpile had grown from roughly 1,000 warheads to over 24,000. He built the machine and then warned everyone about it on his way out the door. The Shah was reinstated as a Western-backed dictator. His secret police, Savak, trained by the CIA, became one of the most feared organizations in the Middle East. For 26 years, Iran was run as an authoritarian state friendly to Western oil interests. Then, in 1979, the Iranian people revolted, 9 million of them in the streets, and the Shah was overthrown. But what replaced him was not the democracy that Masadig had tried to build. It was the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini, a theocracy that has controlled Iran ever since. The country went from a progressive democracy to a Western-backed dictatorship to a religious autocracy in less than 30 years, and none of it had to happen. Now the conventional explanation for the coup is straightforward and it's largely true. Britain wanted to protect its oil profits, and the US was paranoid about Soviet expansion. Control of Middle Eastern oil was the strategic prize, and Mossadegh threatened it by insisting that Iran's resources should belong to Iran. After the coup, five American oil companies were given a share of Iranian oil that they'd never had before. So while Britain instigated the whole thing, it was America that ended up benefiting most. But there's another angle worth considering, and I want to be upfront that this is my own reading of the situation, not established fact, but it's the kind of question this book exists to ask. Israel was founded in 1948, five years before the coup. From the beginning, the United States positioned Israel as its key ally in the Middle East, and one of the central justifications for that relationship, repeated by every American president since, is that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Joe Biden once said, were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region. Israel has received over$300 billion in total USAI since its founding, more than any other country on earth, and the current agreement commits nearly$4 billion a year in military assistance alone. The phrase, the only democracy in the Middle East, isn't just a description, it's a strategic argument for why that money keeps flowing. Mossadegh's Iran was not at war with Israel. Iran didn't participate in the 1948 invasion and had recognized Israel's existence. Mossadegh viewed Israel as a form of Western colonialism and he cooled diplomatic relations, closing Iran's consulate in Jerusalem in 1951, but he never revoked Iran's recognition. Trade between the two countries continued, and he personally had good relations with Iran's Jewish community, even taking a Jewish journalist as an advisor on his trip to America. His issue with Israel was strategic. He needed Arab support against Britain over oil, and Israel was collateral damage in that fight rather than the target. He wasn't an enemy of Israel. He was a nationalist focused on Iranian sovereignty. So here's the question: what happens to the only democracy in the Middle East argument if Iran is also a democracy? A progressive, westernized, democratic Iran with its own parliament, its own free press, its own educated population making its own decisions about its own resources and one that isn't even hostile to Israel. If Mossadeg had been left alone to govern, if the country had continued on its democratic path, then the claim that Israel is the only democracy in the region doesn't hold up anymore. And if that claim doesn't hold up, the justification for sending hundreds of billions of dollars becomes a much harder argument to make. I'm not saying that's why the coup happened. The oil explanation is well documented and probably sufficient on its own, but I'm saying that the outcome was remarkably convenient for a particular set of interests, and in a book about questioning everything, it would be dishonest not to point that out. A democratic Iran was replaced with a dictator. That dictator was eventually replaced with a theocracy, and Israel remained, as intended, the only democracy in the region, with American money pouring in to keep it that way. After the coup, Iran-Israel relations improved dramatically. Under the Shah, Israel got a de facto embassy in Tehran. Iran became a major oil supplier to Israel. They even built a joint pipeline, and the two countries developed extensive secret military cooperation. Whether all of that was the plan or just a very fortunate coincidence is something I'll leave you to sit with. What isn't speculation is what happened next. The Shah's fall in 1979 triggered the second oil crisis. Iranian oil exports collapsed, and prices doubled to$39 a barrel. But that crisis had been building since 1973 when the real shock hit. On the 6th of October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The war lasted less than three weeks, but its consequences reshaped the global economy for a generation. On the 19th of October, President Nixon asked Congress for$2.2 billion in emergency military aid to Israel. The Arab oil-producing nations responded the next day. Libya imposed an immediate embargo on oil exports to the United States. Saudi Arabia and the other Arab members of OPEC followed within 24 hours. The weapon wasn't military, it was oil. And it worked. Within months, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled from around$3 to nearly$12. Petrol stations across the United States ran dry. Signs reading Sorry, no gas today became a common sight. Queues stretched for miles with drivers waiting hours just to fill up. And in some states, fuel was rationed by license plate number. Odd numbers could buy on odd days, even numbers on even days. People were fighting at the pumps. The world's most powerful country was brought to its knees not by an invading army but by a tap being turned off. In Britain, the effects were just as severe. GDP fell by 3.9%, and the recession lasted from 1973 to 1975. The government declared a state of emergency. A three-day working week was introduced to conserve electricity. Speed limits were reduced. Television stations were ordered to stop broadcasting at half past ten at night to save power. The country that had spent decades extracting oil from the Middle East and overthrowing governments to protect its access to it suddenly discovered what it felt like when someone else held the lever. The embargo was lifted in March 1974 after Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between the warring parties, but the price of oil stayed high. The world had changed. OPEC had demonstrated that oil could be used as a political weapon, and that the Industrialized nations were hopelessly dependent on a resource controlled by countries they had spent the previous century colonizing and exploiting. The sensible response would have been to invest massively in alternative energy sources and begin the long process of reducing that dependency. That is not what happened. Instead, the West went back to business as usual. America's love affair with big cars and cheap petrol resumed almost immediately. Britain discovered North Sea oil in the mid-1970s, and rather than using the revenue to build a sovereign wealth fund like Norway did with its own North Sea oil, Thatcher's government used the proceeds to fund tax cuts and offset the costs of deindustrialization. The money came and the money went, and when it was gone, there was nothing to show for it. Then in 1979 it happened again. The Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah, the very dictator the West had installed 26 years earlier to protect its oil interests, and Iranian oil exports collapsed. The price of crude more than doubled from$15 to$39 a barrel, its highest level in history at that point. A second wave of fuel shortages hit the United States. Long queues returned, panic buying returned. President Carter went on television and called the crisis the moral equivalent of war. He installed solar panels on the roof of the White House and urged Americans to reduce their energy consumption. Ronald Reagan, who replaced him, had the solar panels removed. That detail tells you everything. One president saw a warning and tried to change direction. The next one ripped the warning down and carried on as if nothing had happened. The oil industry, the car industry, the defense industry, all of them needed the world to keep burning fossil fuels. And any president who suggested otherwise was replaced with one who wouldn't. Carter lost his re-election bid, Reagan won in a landslide, the solar panels came off the roof, and four decades later we're having the same conversation about the same dependency on the same resource controlled by the same interests, only now the planet is on fire as well. Two oil crises in six years, two unmistakable warnings that the entire Western economic model was built on a resource that could be switched off at any moment by people who had every reason to resent how they'd been treated. And the response both times was to double down, protect the oil companies, protect the car manufacturers, protect the status quo, and hope it would all work out. It didn't work out, it was never going to work out. And the people who made those decisions knew that at the time they just didn't care because the profits were too good, and the alternatives would have meant changing a system that was making them very rich. Growing up in Wales, it wasn't unusual to know a farmer or two. They were always busy, always on the go. You would maybe think they maybe would be shielded from international affairs, but unfortunately not. So let's take a quick dive. In 1935, the United States had 6.8 million farms. Most of them were family operations, small to medium in size, diversified, rooted in their communities, and passed down through generations. The farmer owned the land, grew the food, sold it locally or to regional buyers, and kept enough of the proceeds to live a decent life. It wasn't glamorous, but it worked. And for the best part of two centuries, the family farm was the backbone of rural America. Then in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary, a man called Earl Butts, looked at that system and decided it wasn't efficient enough. His advice to American farmers became a slogan that shaped the next half century of food production. Get big or get out. The government rolled back the price floors that had guaranteed farmers a minimum return on their crops since the New Deal. From that point on, the global market determined what a farmer got paid, and if the price dropped below what it cost to produce, that was the farmer's problem. Big farms could survive low prices by scaling up. A few cents per gallon of milk adds up when you have thousands of cows. But small farms couldn't compete and they started going under by the tens of thousands. By 2024, the number of farms in the United States had fallen below 2 million for the first time in recorded history. Total farmland had dropped to 876 million acres, the lowest since 1850. Between 2017 and 2024 alone, 160,000 farms disappeared, and 153,000 of those were the smallest. In the same period, the number of large farms increased by 36%. Small farms accounted for nearly half of all US food production in 1991. By 2017, that had fallen to a quarter. In the dairy industry, small farms now produce just 10% of the country's milk. The direction is clear and it has been for decades. Fewer farms, bigger operations, more consolidation, less independence. In Britain, the picture is just as bleak. The number of English farms fell by nearly half between 2005 and 2013. There were over 125,000 farms with egg-laying hens in 1971. By 1999 there were 26,500. The number of UK dairy producers has fallen by 20% since 2019 alone to about 7,000. Britain now produces only around 60% of its own food and imports the rest, which means the country that once fed itself is now dependent on supply chains it doesn't control, priced by markets it can't influence, and vulnerable to exactly the kind of disruption that a pandemic or a war can cause overnight. And if you're wondering what killed the small farm, follow the money to the supermarket. In the UK, six supermarket chains control roughly 80% of the grocery market. That concentration of buying power gives them enormous leverage over the people who actually produce the food, and they use it ruthlessly. A dairy farmer in Britain is currently paid around 38 to 46 pence per litre of milk. It costs them between 40 and 50 pence per litre to produce it. In some cases, farmers are being paid as low as 30 pence, well below what it costs them to keep the lights on and the cows fed. That same litre of milk sells on the supermarket shelf for 107 pence. That's a 133% markup, while the person who produced it is making a loss. Some dairy farms in Britain are currently losing over a thousand pounds a day. It's not just milk. A kilogram of carrots earns the farmer 14 pence. The supermarket sells it for£65, a 364% markup. Beef goes from£4.80 a kilo at the farm gate to£10 on the shelf. Lamb from£4.13 to£12. The farmer does the work, takes the risk, pays the feed bills and the vet bills and the fuel bills, and the supermarket takes the margin. One dairy farmer put it about as clearly as anyone could when he said someone in the supply chain is filling their pockets and it's not the farmers and it's not the processors. The only people filling their pockets are the retailers. In 2015, supermarkets in Britain were selling milk cheaper than bottled water. Let that settle for a moment. A product that requires land, cattle, feed, labour, veterinary care, milking equipment, refrigeration, daily collection and transport was being sold for less than water in a plastic bottle, and while the small farmer is being squeezed out of existence, someone is buying up the land they leave behind. Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the United States, holding over 250,000 acres across 19 states, bought quietly through shell companies and an investment firm called Cascade. He's not the biggest landowner overall, that's Stan Cronke, the man who owns Arsenal Football Club among other things, and John Malone, who has 2.2 million acres, and Jeff Bezos with 420,000. But Gates is the biggest when it comes specifically to productive farmland. The land that grows the food and the secrecy around how he acquired it raised alarm bells across the agricultural world. The United States is losing 2,000 acres of farmland every single day. Half of all remaining farmland is expected to change ownership in the next 25 years as the current generation of farmers retires, and when they do, it won't be their children buying it because their children can't afford it. Land prices have been driven up by exactly the kind of institutional and billionaire investment that Gates represents, making it impossible for new or young farmers to get a foothold. The farm subsidies that were supposed to support the people working the land increasingly flow to the person who owns it, who might be a billionaire in Seattle or a pension fund in Canada or a church in Utah, while the actual farmer rents the ground they walk on and builds no equity of their own. Forty percent of all US farmland is now rented to tenant farmers. They work the land, take the risk, and at the end of it they own nothing. The landowner collects the rent, collects the subsidies, watches the land value rise, and never gets their boots dirty. It's feudalism with a spreadsheet. And the environmental cost of what we're producing on that land is staggering. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock production is responsible for 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the same as every car, lorry, ship, train, and aeroplane on the planet combined. Livestock uses 77% of all agricultural land on Earth but produces just 18% of the world's calories. 30% of the entire land surface of the planet is used for livestock, either for grazing or for growing the crops that feed them. In the Amazon, 70% of previously forested land is now cattle pasture, with another 10% cleared to grow their feed. The meat industry is the single greatest driver of deforestation on Earth. Producing one pound of beef requires roughly 1,800 gallons of water. Agriculture as a whole now uses 70% of all available fresh water, three times what it used 50 years ago. Livestock is responsible for 37% of all methane emissions and 65% of all nitrous oxide emissions, both of which trap heat in the atmosphere far more effectively than carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of CO2 and stays in the atmosphere for 150 years. And while all of this is happening, while the forests are being cleared and the water is being drained and the atmosphere is being loaded with methane and nitrous oxide, the global demand for meat is projected by the FAO to increase by 70% by 2050. Not decrease, increase. We already know what it's doing to the planet and the plan is to do more of it. 75% of all crop genetic diversity has been lost in the last century. That means the global food system is becoming less resilient at the exact moment it needs to be more resilient. Fewer varieties of crops, more dependence on a handful of strains, more vulnerability to disease, drought and climate disruption. The industrialization of farming hasn't just squeezed out the small farmer, it's narrowed the genetic base of the food supply itself. And when something goes wrong with a monoculture, it doesn't go a bit wrong. It goes catastrophically wrong. None of this is hidden. The data comes from the United Nations, from government agencies, from peer-reviewed research. It's not speculation, it's not theory, and yet the institutions responsible for it, the corporations that profit from it, the governments that subsidize it, carry on as though the numbers don't exist, because changing course would mean confronting the people who write the checks, and that is something no institution in this book has ever been willing to do voluntarily. We all love bees, don't we? Nobody enjoys getting stung, but unlike wasps who seem to exist purely to ruin a picnic and then sting you on the way out for good measure, bees are busy doing something genuinely essential. They're pollinating. Every time a bee lands on a flower and moves on to the next one, it's carrying pollen that allows that plant to reproduce. And when you start looking at the numbers behind that process, you realize very quickly that without bees, the entire food system falls apart. One in every three mouthfuls of food you eat exists because a bee pollinated it. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, coffee, the alfalfa that feeds dairy cows, all of it depends on pollinators, and bees are by far the most important of them. The global economic value of insect pollination is estimated at somewhere between$200 billion and$577 billion every year. These aren't nice to have creatures that add a bit of colour to a garden. They are a load-bearing wall in the structure of global food production, and that wall is cracking. In the United States, beekeepers lost an estimated 55.6% of their managed colonies between April 2024 and April 2025. That is the highest annual loss ever recorded. Not a bad year, the worst year since records began. Winter losses alone hit 40.2%, well above the average of the previous decade. Across North America, honeybee colonies have declined by a third since the 1940s. The American bumblebee, once found across the entire continent, has seen its population drop by nearly 90% in the last 20 years and has vanished completely from at least eight states. The rusty patched bumblebee has lost over 95% of its historic range and is now federally listed as endangered. The causes are well understood. Habitat loss, climate change, and parasites all play a role, but the single most discussed factor is a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, now the most widely used insecticides in the world. Unlike traditional pesticides that sit on the surface of a plant and wash off, neonicotinoids are systemic, meaning they are absorbed into every part of the plant, the roots, the stems, the leaves, the pollen, the nectar. A bee doesn't have to be sprayed directly, it just has to visit a treated flower and drink the nectar or collect the pollen and the chemical is inside it, attacking its nervous system, impairing its ability to navigate, to learn, to communicate, to find its way back to the hive. One single treated corn seed contains enough neonicotinoid to kill over 80,000 honeybees. The European Union banned the three most common neonicotinoids in 2018. After the European Food Safety Agency concluded they represented a high acute risk to honeybees and other pollinators. The United States has not followed suit. The chemical industry, led by the same lobbying structures we've seen in every other chapter of this book, has fought regulation at every turn, funding studies that muddy the waters and pressuring agencies to delay action. The pattern is identical to tobacco, to asbestos, to chromium 6 in the water, cast enough doubt to stall the response while the damage compounds year on year. The vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation said it plainly, current losses are not sustainable. The trend is down, as is the quality of bees. In the long run, if we don't find some answers, we could lose a lot of bees. Farmers in California's almond groves, the largest pollination event in the world, have already struggled to assemble enough healthy colonies to pollinate the crop. The cost of almond pollination alone has nearly tripled since colonies began collapsing in the mid-2000s. And it's not just the bees. Coral reefs support roughly 25% of all marine species, despite covering less than 1% of the ocean floor. They are the rainforests of the sea and they are dying. Over half the world's coral reefs have been lost since the 1950s. The Great Barrier Reef has experienced mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, and 2024, each one driven by warming ocean temperatures that force the coral to expel the algae it depends on for food, turning it white and leaving it to starve. If temperatures continue to rise at the current rate, scientists project that 90% of the world's coral reefs could be gone by 2050. Ocean acidification caused by the seas absorbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is dissolving the calcium carbonate that corals need to build their skeletons. The water is literally becoming too acidic for reefs to grow. And as the reefs die, so do the fish that depend on them, and the fishing communities that depend on those fish, and the coastal ecosystems that depend on all of it. It's a chain reaction, and every link is connected to the same root cause, an industrial system that treats the natural world as a resource to be extracted rather than a system to be maintained. Bees in the air, coral in the sea, both collapsing under the weight of an economy that cannot stop taking long enough to notice what it's destroying. The people who make the pesticides know what they do to bees. The companies that burn the fossil fuels know what the emissions do to the ocean. They know and they carry on because the quarterly earnings report matters more than whether your grandchildren will live in a world with pollinated crops and living reefs. Now I'm not here to convince you global warming is real or not. I'm simply going to present some facts that are measured, recorded, and publicly available, and then we're going to look at who benefits most from those facts being believed and who benefits most from them being dismissed. After that, you can make up your own mind. Global sea levels have risen by roughly eight to nine inches since 1880. That's measured by tide gauges that have been recorded daily for over a century and by satellite altimeters since the early 1990s. The rate of rise has accelerated. From 2006 to 2015, it was two and a half times faster than the average across most of the 20th century. NASA's Grace satellites, which measure shifts in the Earth's gravity caused by mass moving from land to ocean, show that between 2002 and 2025, Greenland lost an average of 264 billion tonnes of ice per year, and Antarctica lost an average of 135 billion tonnes per year. The rate of ice loss in Antarctica multiplied sixfold over the 30 years leading up to 2020. The Arctic has warmed at four times the global average. In March 2025, Arctic winter sea ice hit the lowest maximum extent in the entire 47-year satellite record, and the last 10 years are the ten warmest on record in the Arctic. Glaciers worldwide lost over 9,000 billion tonnes of ice between 1961 and 2016. These are not projections or predictions. They are measurements taken by satellites, buoys, and monitoring stations operated by NASA, NOAA, the European Space Agency, and dozens of national science agencies. CO2 levels in the atmosphere are currently over 420 parts per million, the highest they have been in at least 800,000 years based on ice core data. The correlation between CO2 concentration and global temperature is one of the most extensively studied relationships in all of science, documented in hundreds of thousands of data points extracted from ice cores drilled in Antarctica and Greenland. When CO2 goes up, temperature follows. When CO2 goes down, temperature follows. It has done this in a consistent pattern for as far back as the data reaches. 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history. And if you want to see what rising seas look like in practice, look at the people it's already happening to. Tuvalu is a nation of nine islands in the Pacific Ocean, with an average elevation of just two metres above sea level. Sea levels around Tuvalu have risen six inches in the last 30 years, one and a half times the global average. NASA projects that by 2050 daily tides will submerge half of its main atoll, where 60% of the population lives. In 2021, Tuvalu's foreign minister gave a speech to the United Nations Climate Conference standing knee deep in seawater to show the world what was happening to his country. Nearly half the population has since applied for a first of its kind climate visa to relocate to Australia, 280 people per year. An entire nation is preparing to leave its home. Kiribati, another Pacific Island nation, has already lost two islands, Abanuea and Tebuatarawa, which disappeared beneath the surface in 1999. The government bought 22 square kilometres of land in Fiji as an escape plan for its 116,000 citizens. The Marshall Islands, the Maldives, parts of the Solomon Islands, all of them face the same threat. These are countries that contribute virtually nothing to global emissions yet are the first to pay the price. I should note, because this book exists to be honest, that some studies have found coral atolls can grow through sand accretion and that certain island land areas have actually expanded in recent decades. The science on individual islands is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, but the broader trend in sea levels, in ice loss, in temperature, in CO2 concentration is not in serious scientific dispute. The measurements come from every major Space agency and climate institution on the planet, and they all point the same direction. So here's where it gets interesting. Rather than telling you what to believe, let's just look at who makes money from each side of this argument, and you can decide for yourself who has the bigger incentive to bend the truth. In 2023, the global oil and gas industry earned a total income of more than$2.7 trillion. The five biggest oil companies alone, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, Total Energies, and BP, made$102 billion in profit in 2024 and paid out$113.8 billion in dividends and share buybacks to their shareholders in 2023, the largest payout to shareholders in the history of the oil industry. And it happened during the hottest year ever recorded. Of all that money, just 4% of capital expenditure went toward clean energy. Oil companies collectively spend around 2.5% of their capital on green power. A 2025 study published in Nature found that across 250 of the largest oil and gas companies, renewable energy represents a tiny fraction of total energy production, and about half of their supposed contribution to renewables came from buying existing renewable companies rather than building anything new. Now look at the other side. The global renewable energy industry is growing, but it is still vastly smaller. In 2022, the total profits of every listed renewable energy company on Earth were less than 2% of the profits made by oil and gas. In the United States, the ratio was even starker. Renewable energy company profits were a quarter of 1% of oil and gas profits. The world currently invests about$1.7 trillion a year in clean energy compared to$1.1 trillion in fossil fuels. So the investment is shifting, but the profit margins in renewables are in the single digits compared to the extraordinary returns oil companies generate. So ask yourself this. On one side, you have an industry making$2.7 trillion a year that would lose almost everything if the world moved away from fossil fuels. On the other, you have an industry making a fraction of that which would gain from the transition. The oil industry has spent decades funding think tanks, lobbyists, and campaigns designed to cast doubt on climate science, and internal documents from companies like ExxonMobil have shown that their own scientists understood the link between fossil fuels and warming as far back as the 1970s and 1980s. They knew, and they funded doubt anyway, because the profits were too large to let a few degrees of warming get in the way. The renewable energy industry has its own interests, of course. They stand to gain enormously from a shift away from fossil fuels, and they lobby governments for subsidies and favorable policies just like any industry does. I'm not pretending they're saints. But when you line up the numbers and ask who has more to lose from the truth, the answer isn't close. One side is protecting a$2.7 trillion annual income. The other is trying to build something that isn't yet a tenth of that size. One side knew the science was real and buried it. The other side is asking you to look at the same science and act on it. I'll leave that with you. I've mentioned several times that I love a good documentary, and some of the most hard-hitting ones over the years have been about how far corporations are prepared to go in the name of profit. It's honestly enough to make you question how people can get to this point, how someone can sit in a boardroom and sign off on a decision that they know will poison other human beings and then go home and have their tea as though nothing happened. But they do, and they have. Let's look at some of the stories that stand out, and these are only a fraction of what's out there. In 1952, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, known as PGE, built a compressor station in a small town called Hinkley in the California desert. Between 1952 and 1966, they used a chemical called hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium 6, in their cooling tower system to prevent corrosion. When they were done with it, they dumped the wastewater into unlined ponds and let it seep into the ground. Chromium 6 is a known carcinogen, it causes cancer. PGE knew what it was, and they knew what it did, and they dumped it anyway because lining the ponds would have cost money. For decades, the people of Hinckley drank the water, bathed in the water, gave it to their children, and got sick. Cancers, miscarriages, organ failure, chronic illness across the entire community, and nobody told them what was in the water. Nobody tested it, nobody warned them. It wasn't until 1993 that a legal clerk called Erin Brockovich, working for a small law firm in Los Angeles, started looking into why so many people in one tiny desert town were so ill. She went door to door, she talked to the residents, she pulled the records and she found the connection. PG and E had poisoned the water, and the people of Hinkley had been drinking it for over 40 years. The case went to court and in 1996 PG and E settled for$333 million, at the time the largest settlement in a direct action lawsuit in US history. Julia Roberts won an Oscar playing Brokovich in the 2000 film. Most people know the story from the movie. What most people don't know is what happened after. Chromium 6 is still in the drinking water of over 200 million Americans across all 50 states. That's two-thirds of the population. California passed a law in 2001 requiring regulators to set a safe standard for chromium 6 in drinking water by 2004. It is now 2026 and the process is still not finished. The chemical industry, led by the American Chemistry Council, lobbied the EPA to delay its own review. An external review panel was brought in to assess the science, and it later emerged that three of the panel's members had consulted for PG and E during the Brockovich case. A key Chinese study that had originally found a strong link between chromium 6 and stomach cancer was mysteriously revised to reverse its findings, and when investigators tried to find out why, the scientist who revised it was dead. It turned out the revision had been written by a consulting firm working for PGE. There is still no federal regulation specifically limiting chromium 6 in drinking water. The limit that does exist, set in 1991, covers all forms of chromium and was based on skin reactions, not cancer. It hasn't been updated since. PGE knew about it, but they dumped it anyway. People got cancer, one law firm got a settlement. And 30 years later, 200 million people are still drinking the same chemical because the industry that profits from it has spent decades making sure nobody regulates it. Now let's look at DuPont. For decades, DuPont manufactured a chemical called PFOA per fluorooctinoic acid, one of the key ingredients in Teflon and hundreds of other everyday products. PFOA belongs to a class of chemicals known as PFAS, sometimes called forever chemicals, because they don't break down in the environment or in your body. They accumulate and they stay. At their plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, DuPont dumped PFOA into the local water supply for years. Internal documents later revealed that the company had known PFOA was hazardous for decades. They knew it was contaminating the water. They knew it was making people ill, but they said nothing. It took a local farmer called Earl Tennant, whose cattle were dying in ways nobody could explain, and an attorney called Rob Billot, who spent years piecing together what DuPont had done to force the truth into the open. That story became the film Dark Waters. One woman in the area won a$1.6 million settlement against DuPont for kidney cancer caused by PFOA exposure. She was one of tens of thousands of people whose water had been poisoned. Over 3,000 others are suing, but here's the kicker, they say it could take the best part of a century to try all the cases. A century, DuPont poisoned people's water, knew it was doing it, hid the evidence, and now the legal system will take a hundred years to work through the consequences. Meanwhile, PFAS chemicals are in the blood of almost every American alive. They can pass from mother to unborn child in the womb, and to this day, neither DuPont nor other manufacturers of PFOA have disclosed every location where the chemical was made, used, or dumped, then there's Flint, Michigan. In 2014, the city switched its water supply from Detroit's system to the Flint River to save money. The river water was 19 times more corrosive than the previous supply, and it ate through the city's old lead pipes, leaching lead directly into the drinking water. Lead is a neurotoxin, it damages children's brains. There is no safe level of lead exposure in children. None. Every health authority on earth agrees on that. Residents complained immediately. They could see with their own eyes the water was brown and it smelled bad. They had to watch as their children were getting rashes. Nevertheless, officials told them it was fine. For over a year, the city and state denied there was a problem while the people of Flint, a majority black city with a poverty rate above 40%, drank water laced with lead. It wasn't until independent researchers from Virginia Tech and a local pediatrician called Dr. Mona Hannah Atisha tested the children's blood and found elevated lead levels that the cover-up was finally exposed. By then the damage was done, thousands of children had been poisoned. A settlement of$626 million was eventually reached. Some officials faced criminal charges, most of which were dropped or resulted in minor consequences. Nobody went to prison for poisoning a city's children, nobody ever does, and that's the point. The company dumps, the people get sick, the company denies, the people sue, the company delays as long as humanly possible. A settlement arrives years or decades later, and nobody responsible ever sees the inside of a cell. It happens in Hinckley, it happens in Parkersburg, it happens in Flint, it happens everywhere because the system that's supposed to prevent it is funded by the people doing it, and the penalties, when they come at all, are treated as a cost of doing business rather than a consequence of a crime. These are three stories. There are hundreds more. Camp Lejeune, Love Canal, the Tennessee Coal Ash Spill, the list goes on and on, and every one of them follows the same arc. A corporation makes a decision that prioritizes profit over human life. The damage accumulates in silence, ordinary people pay with their health, and the institution responsible either delays accountability until the victims are dead or settles for an amount that barely dents its quarterly earnings, and then it happens again somewhere else because nothing structurally changed, nobody structurally made it change, and the incentives that caused it in the first place are still exactly where they were. So let's end this chapter with the food we eat. Carnivore, pescatarian, vegetarian or vegan. Nobody really escapes what's about to follow. But if you're a carnivore, you might be shocked about what you're about to read, or you could be at the point where you know exactly what's coming and you've been waiting for someone to say it out loud. The World Health Organization operates an agency called the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the IARC, whose job is to evaluate substances and determine how likely they are to cause cancer in humans. They classify everything into groups based on the strength of the evidence. Group 1 is the top category. It means there is sufficient evidence from studies on humans that the substance causes cancer. Group 1 includes tobacco smoking. It includes asbestos. It includes plutonium and mustard gas and formaldehyde. It also includes processed meat. In 2015, the IARC reviewed over 800 studies from around the world and concluded that processed meat, meaning anything that has been salted, cured, smoked, fermented, or chemically preserved, causes colorectal cancer in humans, bacon, sausages, ham, hot dogs, salami, corned beef, beef jerky, all of it, group one, the same classification as cigarettes. They found that every 50 grams of processed meat consumed daily, that's roughly two slices of bacon or one hot dog, increases the risk of colorectal cancer by approximately 18%. Associations with stomach cancer were also observed. Red meat, meaning beef, pork, lamb, and mutton, was classified as group 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans, based on limited evidence linking it to colorectal, pancreatic, and prostate cancer. Now, before anyone panics, the IARC was careful to point out that Group 1 describes the strength of the evidence, not the level of risk. Tobacco is far more dangerous than bacon in terms of how many people it kills. Smoking causes roughly one million cancer deaths a year. Processed meat is linked to approximately 34,000 cancer deaths a year worldwide, according to the Global Burden of Disease project. But the point isn't that a bacon sandwich is as dangerous as a packet of cigarettes. The point is that the evidence it causes cancer is just as strong, and yet one of them has health warnings on every packet, is banned from advertising on television, can't be sold to children, is taxed at eye watering rates, and is socially stigmatized to the point where you have to stand outside in the rain to consume it, while the other is in every school canteen, every hospital cafeteria, every fast food restaurant, every petrol station, and every supermarket meal deal in the country with no warning label in sight. And it doesn't stop at processed meat, ultra-processed foods, the stuff that fills the middle aisles of every supermarket, the ready meals, the crisps, the sweetened cereals, the fizzy drinks, the frozen pizzas, the biscuits, and the snack bars now make up over 50% of the average daily calorie intake in both the UK and the United States. More than half of everything people in these two countries eat has been industrially manufactured with added emulsifiers, sweeteners, colourings, preservatives and flavor enhancers. A 2023 IARC study involving 266,666 people across seven European countries found that higher consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with an increased risk of developing cancer and cardiometabolic diseases. A UK Biobank study of nearly 200,000 British adults found consistent links between ultra-processed food consumption and colorectal, breast, and pancreatic cancer. The mechanisms go beyond the nutritional content of the food itself. The industrial processing creates compounds that may be carcinogenic, the additives may be carcinogenic, and even the packaging can leach chemicals with endocrine disrupting properties into the food before you've opened it. In 2023, the IARC also classified aspartame, the artificial sweetener found in thousands of products from diet drinks to chewing gum as group 2B, possibly carcinogenic to humans. Not the same strength of evidence as processed meat, but enough to raise a flag. And this is a substance that has been marketed as the healthy alternative to sugar for decades. The WHO announced in November 2025 that it is developing the first ever global recommendations on ultra-processed food consumption. The fact that it has taken until 2025 to even begin that process tells you everything about how slowly institutions move, when the industry being regulated has the resources to slow them down. And the resources are considerable. The global food industry is enormous, and the companies that dominate ultra-processed food production, the Nestle's, the Unilevers, the Kraft Heinz, the PepsiCos, have the same lobbying infrastructure, the same revolving door with regulators, and the same playbook of funding, favorable research and casting doubt on unfavorable research that we've seen in tobacco, in oil, in chemicals, in every chapter of this book. We started this chapter with a man who wanted to give the world free energy and was left to die in a hotel room while the man who wanted to sell it became a hero. We've travelled through oil, through farmland, through bees and coral and melting ice and poisoned water and the food on your plate. And in every case the story is the same. Someone knew, someone profited, someone else paid the price. And the institutions that were supposed to protect us were either too slow, too compromised, or too well funded by the people doing the damage to do anything about it until long after the harm was done. I'm going to end this chapter with this. Every human being on Earth produces roughly 50 kilograms of waste per year. Not rubbish, the other kind. And that waste is packed with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which happen to be the three nutrients that plants need most to grow. It is, in the most literal sense, free fertilizer. Urine alone contains about four kilograms of nitrogen per person per year, and studies have shown it performs comparably to the commercial fertilizers that farmers spend thousands of pounds on every season. So what do we do with it? We flush it into drinking quality water, mix it with industrial chemicals, pump it through miles of underground pipes to treatment plants, spend enormous amounts of energy cleaning the water, and then discharge what's left into rivers and the sea. But even the cleaned water still contains the nitrogen and phosphorus we just spent all that effort trying to remove, and when it reaches the waterways, it over-fertilizes them, triggering algae blooms that suffocate marine life. Meanwhile, back on the farm, the farmer buys synthetic fertilizer manufactured using fossil fuels to replace the exact same nutrients we just flushed away. We take free fertilizer, contaminate it, spend a fortune cleaning it, dump it where it causes damage, and then pay again to manufacture a replacement. That is the system we built. That is what passes for modern civilization. This isn't a new idea. In 18th century Japan, villagers went to court over who had the rights to collect human waste. It was so valuable that the excrement of wealthy families sold for higher prices because their diet was richer in nutrients. China, Korea, and Japan all used it extensively in rice farming for centuries. The Aztecs built their chinampas, floating garden islands constructed from mud, vegetation and human waste, and harvested crops from them up to seven times a year. Ancient Athens had a sewage system that channeled the city's waste directly to the farmland in the Cephisus River Valley. In medieval Britain, spreading human waste on fields was common practice. For most of human history, the cycle was simple. You eat food, the food becomes waste. The waste feeds the soil, the soil grows food, a circle. What we have now is a straight line and it's heading for a wall. Phosphorus, one of those three essential nutrients, is mined from phosphate rock. It's non-renewable. Peak phosphorus is predicted to hit around 2033. After that, supply declines, prices rise dramatically, and food production costs go through the roof. Without mined phosphate, conventional farming yields could be cut in half. And here's the thing that should make you want to scream. Studies suggest that if we properly recovered the phosphorus from human waste globally, it could meet 22% of total demand. Britain already recycles 77% of its sewage back onto agricultural land as treated biosolids, about 1 million tonnes of dry solids per year. It's regulated, it's treated, it works. We just don't like admitting it. We are flushing a non-renewable resource down the toilet, spending billions to clean the mess it makes, buying a synthetic replacement manufactured with fossil fuels, and watching the clock tick down to the moment when the raw material runs out. And all of this because at some point somebody decided that the natural cycle that sustained agriculture for thousands of years was beneath us, that we were too civilized for it, that progress meant replacing something that worked perfectly with something expensive, wasteful, polluting, and finite, and calling it an improvement.