Relentless sun and ruthless populists: how the climate crisis will change the next 20 years

Interview Relentless sun and ruthless populists: how the climate crisis will change the next 20 years Gaby Hinsliff Former diplomat Arthur Snell says a heating planet is accelerating conflict and migration – and fostering a new age of empire. Democracies are dangerously unprepared, he warns After a diplomatic career spent in the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen, the last place Arthur Snell expected to cheat death was on holiday. But it was an uncomfortably close brush with a falling boulder while climbing in the Swiss Alps that helped to bring his personal and professional lives together. His beloved mountains were, he realised, becoming less stable thanks to a changing climate. And if physical geography drives the way states exercise their power, as classic geopolitical theory argues, then a heating planet must be dislodging more than rocks. “You see wars and you think they’re about types of Islam, or whether or not the US has access to oil. But underneath all of that there’s this longer running thing that is becoming more and more important,” says Snell, who left the UK Foreign Office in 2014 and now hosts the podcast Behind the Lines . That insight led ultimately to his new book, Elemental, which examines how a climate crisis that threatens the planet’s capacity to sustain life is helping to stoke conflicts from drought-stricken Africa to a defrosting Arctic, as well as the rise of far-right populism in Europe and the US. “It’s like rising damp in your house – you don’t know it’s there, but it’s changing everything.” It’s a tale of a world in flux, as superpowers are forced to confront new vulnerabilities and smaller countries find their natural resources – from habitable land to minerals critical for renewable energy technologies – unexpectedly in demand. (As Greenland has found, that can be a blessing and a curse.) What makes these power shifts unusually disruptive, says Snell, is the sheer pace of them. “Normally, we can say: ‘In so many million years,...