I roll over in bed in London. It’s 3.30am and still 25 degrees outside. The air in the room is a least a few degrees hotter – thick, heavy, claustrophobic.
Each movement drags my sticky sheets with me. I’m drowsing fitfully, unable to fully drift off, instead in a confused, fever-dream infused torpor, like someone half-drugged.
The UK isn’t supposed to be like this, I think to myself – that’s why my bedroom is carpeted and curtained, with no air con, shutters or a ceiling fan.
I’m sleeping in the eaves of a 1890s terraced house, but at this point it more accurately resembles a Finnish sauna. Cooking to above 40 degrees in the daytime, and never really cooling down at night. It’s not even July yet – June 26th to be precise – and we’re mid-way through the first of at least three European heat waves in this Super El Niño summer that is 2026.
I don’t know how to say this without sounding simultaneously trite and like I’m being over-dramatic – but I’m fucking terrified.
I’m lying there scared for the children I may one day bring into this world, for the abundant natural beauty we have so ungratefully inherited and are at risk of losing for generations at the least. I’m scared for the millions of people who may be displaced by heat, drought, fire or flood, and for the geopolitical implications of whole nations or regions forced to make tough decisions by previously unimaginable climactic changes.
I’m scared for my grandparents who can no longer regulate their temperature like they used to, for pregnant women the world over, for the millions of species of animals who play no part but still bear the burden.
Climate anxiety is a powerful fear because it feels so vast and omnipotent. It’s like a recurring dream I had in my twenties of a great tidal wave sweeping up a beach – I can see it coming, feel the tremors in the ground, yet I have no agency to change it or get out the way.
And alongside this I’m angry – simmering with frustration and rage. I’m angry at myself for flying +20 times a year. For eating meat, using oil-based products, driving a car, wearing rubber shoes. I’ve been aware of this coming change for at least a decade, but has my behaviour materially changed in this time? Arguably it’s got worse. So I point much of this fury inwards.
But I understand the data well enough to know I’m a rounding error of a rounding error in this fight. So really I’m angry at Big Oil, Big Construction, Big Fashion – anything starting with Big is likely culpable when 100 companies have been responsible for +71% of emissions since 1988.
I also rage against the deliberate denial of decades of scientific data. Against the lobbies for range anxiety and against heat pumps. Against the fact Europe hitting Net Zero is more or less irrelevant without China, America and the major developing economies. Christ, I’m even angry these developing economies have to suffer hits to their growth while we’re able to languish in our post-developed comfort without touching living standards.
The anger is also at politicians who swap short-term appeasement for political or personal gain, avoiding the hard questions because voters have got used to not having to answer things that make them uncomfortable. And ultimately the anger is at how little sense all this makes – that we’re building technologies to escape a planet we’re ruining because of the damage done by those technologies in the first place. How on literal Earth did we get here?
And I’m lying there thinking that this is the year we look back on, reflect on, tell stories about – the year it really changed.
2024 saw the Valencia floods and LA wildfires – arguably two of the first major (developed world) climate catastrophes that made the rest of us sit up and pay attention.
But they didn’t go far enough – the destruction wasn't sufficient to spur action. We saw them, we were scared, we mourned, we moved on. In a mood reminiscent of US mass shootings, hopes and prayers were sent and almost nothing changed.
The Ministry of the Future is a brilliant, prescient piece of writing, but the only bit I disagree with is that the major climate disaster will have to be closer to home and worse than we imagine before the major powers wake up to what needs to be done.
Could 2026 be that year? What will it genuinely take for collective action to move from a pipe-dream to a pandemic-style response?
It’s now late July as I reflect on this, as 300,000 French and Spaniards have just been evacuated from their homes. The Super El Niño is really starting to affect Europe now. Greece is burning at this very minute, as is Portugal and Southern Italy, on top of France and Spain and countless other European and North African nations. The French flames are just 15km from Bordeaux – could we see the second major urban western conurbation decimated in two years?
Hell, even the UK burned briefly, a country quite literally known for its grey and its wet. And we’re yet to see the worst for California and Canada – with that set to come as Europe ticks into the Autumn.
The planet is suddenly warming at unprecedented rates, the fastest in its history – due to feedback loops of permafrost thawing, reduced ice coverage, and the forest fires themselves both emitting huge heat + destroying cooling forests. It’s also, ironically, in part due to reduced aerosols in the atmosphere that served to bounce the sunlight back off us.
Even conversations amongst Brits now mention the heat – the weather always having been a favoured conversation starter. We flit between awkwardly accepting we wouldn’t mind summers like this every year, while acknowledging this is unnatural, an aberrance – just about letting the undercurrent of threat seep through into July positivity.
But the seasons have a wonderful way of helping us forget. What used to signal the changing of the agricultural calendar now signals the collective climate amnesia that hits us each year. The respite of Autumn always comes, and long, dark European winters bring with them a kind of nostalgia for the heat – was it ever really that bad? We ate out in the garden almost every night!
But maybe this year it’s bad enough? Perhaps the scale of damage and loss of human life we’re seeing breaks the curse of seasonal memory loss. Perhaps this is where the mass backlash begins – the populists no longer able to claim this is “natural” warming when the fires or floods reach their doorsteps.
Maybe this is the point governments commit to massive geo-engineering efforts, force through energy transitions, invest heavily in novel carbon capture and desalination technologies, commit to massive scale re-wilding, flood and fire defences, and band together around something bigger than themselves and their short term priorities?
Or maybe this is just the year we remember when it started getting really bad.
The one the story books tell before the dark period that followed. I sure as hell hope I’m wrong, but like frogs in slowly heating water, it’s almost impossible to tell from the inside.
My way of not going insane is to invest in incredible, paradigm shifting companies building solutions to these problems, through economically viable technologies, at Kindred and personally.
It’s why I/we backed Stardust, Rivan, a stealth fusion company, Secondlaw, Lithosquare, ScyAI, Atmospheric AI, Minimal, Cariqa, Aardaia, Recupere Metals, Sparkmate and more. If you’re building something genuinely transformational - that combines business models that can make real money (no subsidies or green premiums in sight - I didn’t make the rules) while solving real problems: hit me up. I’m honestly not sure what else I can do.
Speaks from my soul, too! 🫶🏽
Very insightful piece Max