It’s official: 2023 was the hottest year since records began and by some distance. The Earth is now 1.48C warmer than it was before the dawn of the industrial age and rapidly approaching the target limit of 1.5C set by the international community in Paris in 2015.

The movers and shakers who will pitch up in Davos to attend next week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) are worried – as well they might be. The WEF’s global risks survey is unequivocal: in a highly dangerous world, the threat posed by the climate emergency is the one that gives most cause for concern in the long term.

There is money to be made out of global heating and the battle for low-carbon market share has become part of the new cold war between Washington and Beijing. In the final three months of 2023, Tesla was toppled from its position as the world’s biggest carmaker by the Chinese company BYD. In future, countries that fail to manufacture their own green products will end up importing them.

In Britain, meanwhile, the economy has barely grown for the past two years. Living standards are barely higher than they were when the banks almost went bust in 2008. That was the moment the economy lost its mojo, never to regain it.

The economic weakness has been most marked in Britain’s old industrial towns, which, despite the hollowing-out of the past four decades, remain the heartlands of manufacturing. These towns........

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