The climate squeeze

Greening the economy has become a one-sided war, as governments and businesses squeeze the living standards of ordinary people. 

Existing policies won’t limit global heating to anything close to a safe level. Claims of sustainability disguise a zero-sum battle where the powerful profit and everyone else foots the bill. 

As the cost-of-living soars, jobs are lost and everyday life becomes constantly disrupted, our lives become meaner, smaller. Even our hopes and dreams shrink. This is the climate squeeze.

This is an excerpt from Nicholas Beuret’s forthcoming book, ‘Or Something Worse: Why we need to disrupt the climate transition’ (Verso Books, 23 Sept 2025).

Dystopian

The squeeze is not only a problem of prices and shortages. It is a question of deteriorating physical and mental health as social and health services are pushed to breaking point, amid constant disruptions.

If we count the climate costs to healthcare in monetary terms, the scale is huge – between US$2billion and $4bn per year by 2030. The societal costs of mental disorders provoked by climate change could reach US$47bn per year. 

But while projected figures like these can help us grasp the scale of the impacts, they miss crucial details of what it means to live them: to understand what such an experience does to us – to our ability to care for ourselves and others, and what it does to our politics and sense of hope.

In 2023, smoke from unprecedented Canadian wildfires covered an area from Minnesota to South Carolina, subjecting 55 million Americans to dangerous levels of air pollution, and briefly making New York one of the most polluted cities on Earth.

The fires, covering an area twice the size of Portugal, turned New York City’s sky a dystopian orange, as hospitalisations due to the pollution spiked. Fires in Indonesia led to similar scenes in Malaysia and Singapore, forcing schools to close.

Succumbed

While wildfires might grab headlines, climate change worsens air pollution in other ways. It encourages the formation of ground-level ozone, usually known as smog. Smog forms when pollutants interact chemically with sunlight, and higher temperatures speed up these reactions, producing higher levels of smog. 

Air pollution has a huge range of impacts on our health. It is responsible for seven million deaths globally each year. It is linked to respiratory and cardiovascular issues – from asthma and bronchitis to heart attacks and strokes. 

It can reduce lung function and lead to reproductive health issues. It increases the risk of cancer, kidney disease and diabetes, impairs cognitive function and neurological development, exacerbates allergies, skin conditions and epilepsy, and has been linked to various mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and cognitive decline.