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Over 300,000 people have been displaced across France and Spain, the largest peacetime evacuations either country has ever had to carry out, due to the largest fires either country has seen in modern history. Villages decimated. Hundreds of thousands of acres scorched. Temperatures over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. And already, in June alone, at least 10,000 heat-related deaths across Europe, a number that will likely climb once the full data comes in.
James Matthewson, my Across the Pond co-host, isn’t in France or Spain, but he’s been grappling with fires nonetheless. Arthur’s Seat, the dormant volcano that overlooks Edinburgh, caught fire. He told me barbecue embers set off the blaze, and normally that would be a small local story. But this year the heather shrubs across the Scottish Highlands are so dried out from the heat wave that the same thing happened in the Cairngorms, at a scale big enough to be the largest wildfire in Scottish history.
That image ended up anchoring the whole conversation. We didn’t treat the fires as an isolated weather story. We connected them to the global climate crisis and the far-right authoritarians who seem hell-bent on worsening it. We talked about what the Trump administration and the global far right, including Reform UK, are actively doing to resist climate progress. We also dove into China’s dominance in renewables, the market forces already pointing toward a clean energy future, and the fight over where data centers get built and who gets a say.
We also got into a genuinely nuanced back-and-forth on AI, regulation, and where the ethical lines should sit, one that pulled in the Pope’s encyclical. We closed on Lindsey Graham’s funeral, which turned into an honest conversation about what it actually means to live a life worth remembering.
These are the kinds of big conversations I wish were centered more in our political discourse. How do we empower a renewable energy future to tackle climate change, and how should we navigate advances in AI ethically should be among the dominant debates in our politics. Instead, we’re absorbed by senseless wars and foolish debates litigating far-right delusions and the president’s corruption.
It’s frustrating living in this moment knowing what we could be. All these scientific and technological breakthroughs that could elevate humanity, and we’re busy murdering each other and debating nonsense. The world's progress is being held hostage by the giant, fragile egos of small, depraved men.
I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.
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The Climate Crisis & Wildfires Know No Borders
We started here because this issue is too important. James is living through a heat wave in Edinburgh with a fan running around the clock, and I opened with the numbers out of France and Spain: over 300,000 displaced, the largest fires in either country’s modern history, the largest peacetime evacuations either has seen. I mentioned that French President Macron called these fires France’s worst crisis since World War II.
Arthur’s Seat and the Cairngorms made it personal for James. He described watching a dormant volcano in the middle of his own city catch fire from barbecue embers, then described the far larger blaze in the Cairngorms that forced an entire evacuation to Aviemore.
I brought the Canada smoke into the conversation. Just a couple of weeks before we recorded, wildfire smoke from Canada made the air hazardous across much of the East Coast and Midwest, New York and New Jersey included. I said plainly that this isn’t normal.
James connected the fires to something bigger than any one country’s disaster. He talked about friends who can no longer travel to Italy or Greece in July and August because the heat has become genuinely dangerous, not just uncomfortable. Places that used to be lovely holiday destinations are becoming inaccessible for parts of the year, and he said that shift is happening within a single generation.
England’s drought turned into its own story mid-conversation. James read out breaking news that the Environment Agency had declared half of England in a state of drought, with hosepipe bans in effect because reservoirs haven’t been built in twenty or thirty years. He tied that directly to Thames Water, the privatized utility that’s billions of pounds in debt while still paying executives bonuses and dumping sewage into English rivers, and contrasted it with Scotland, where water stayed public, and Edinburgh is putting up free public water fountains ahead of the Fringe.
The Trump Admin Leads A Global Far Right Assault On Climate Change Progress
This is where the conversation moved from extreme weather to policy, and where I wanted to make the point that Trump isn’t operating alone. The same instinct to deny climate change and dismantle progress is showing up in the UK too.
I laid out what’s actually been rolled back in the US. The EPA revoked the “endangerment finding” that forms the legal basis for greenhouse gas regulation. DOGE ended a wildfire monitoring program before this season’s fires even started. And court documents show the administration canceled billions in clean energy funding, admitting outright that the decision was based solely on the political identity of the recipient states, all sixteen of which voted for Kamala Harris. The Trump administration is also actively spending billions of dollars to get companies to abandon wind farm projects.
I connected that to Project 2025, which mentions the EPA dozens of times and reads like an oil lobbyist’s wish list. My point was that none of this is incidental. It’s part of a coordinated plan.
Reform UK gave me the international part of the argument. Seven of the nine councils Reform now controls have scrapped their climate targets since taking office.
James offered a theory on why the far right benefits from fires even when they don’t talk about them. He said Farage’s messaging has stayed almost entirely on migration and cultural change rather than climate, but argued that a world visibly on fire still reinforces the far right’s larger narrative that everything is collapsing and drastic measures are needed. He connected this to a kind of political isolationism, the idea that a country can wall itself off and be safe from what’s coming, and raised the elephant in the room: mass displacement from the global south as sea levels rise, and where those people will actually be able to go.
I pushed the migration point further using the French and Spanish evacuees themselves. These are largely white Europeans displaced in their own countries, but I argued the far right will still find a way to spin scarcity and resource strain into their zero-sum framing regardless of who’s displaced.
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The Market Is Already Choosing Renewable Energy
I wanted to make the case that this isn’t even a fight between renewable energy and capitalism anymore. The practical choice and the renewable choice are the same choice, and only one side is pretending otherwise. The market is moving toward increasingly cheap, scalable, clean energy, and the far right is actively resisting it.
China’s dominance became my central example. China produces roughly 80 percent of the world’s solar panels, somewhere around 60 percent of its wind turbines, 75 percent of its lithium-ion batteries, and 70 percent of its electric vehicles. I said outright that if Trump were actually a smart, greedy operator, he’d be investing in this instead of fighting it, because China clearly understands where the future is headed.
James reframed the whole debate as ironically anti-capitalist. He walked through the free-market argument. Many companies are pivoting toward clean energy because that’s what markets do when the writing is on the wall. His point was that the administration’s posture is just plain obstruction of progress.
James also pushed back on a version of climate advocacy he sees as too rigid. Drawing on his own background in the northeast of England, he talked about the 1984 coal strikes and how Thatcher’s closures devastated working communities, not for environmental reasons but to break the unions. His argument was that any real transition, in places like Aberdeen’s oil industry or nuclear-dependent communities, has to bring those workers into good, union green jobs rather than discarding them, what he called a Green Industrial Revolution.
I raised the Strait of Hormuz as a concrete stake in this fight. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil moves through a single strait controlled by an authoritarian regime, and I argued that’s exactly the kind of vulnerability a serious renewable buildout would eliminate.
Our Nuanced Take On Data Centers
James opened this section responding to a question from Jools in the chat, and I liked that we started from the environmental cost rather than the tech hype, because that’s the actual entry point for how these fights are playing out on the ground in Scotland and in the US.
James described active court battles over data centers proposed for protected land. Companies are trying to build in some of the cleanest environments in Scotland. James said the local benefit is essentially nonexistent beyond a handful of temporary construction jobs, since the specialized maintenance jobs get imported.
He also flagged the speed problem, not just the location problem. James pointed out that real infrastructure, bridges and roads, takes years to get through UK planning, while private data center investment can buy land and bulldoze through approval almost immediately, often without meaningfully consulting the local community. He cited his own work with space tech companies as an example of how engagement should actually start, with the community first.
I connected this to the imbalance in US regulation. I said plainly that there’s more red tape on new housing in America than there is on data centers, which is backward given the scale of environmental impact, and argued these projects should require the kind of full public input that housing already does.
I laid out where I land rather than just criticizing the industry. A full ban isn’t realistic if AI infrastructure is going to keep growing, so I proposed the more useful fight is over whether these centers can be mandated to run on genuinely renewable power rather than the current practice of buying carbon offset credits elsewhere while still pulling from the grid. I also raised the idea of siting new centers on already barren or abandoned land instead of pristine areas as a middle path between a moratorium and unchecked buildout. At the very least, since a moratorium is likely not politically feasible, we need regulation to guarantee new AI data centers are both ethically powered and ethically located.
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AI’s Ethical Fork In The Road
This became the most philosophically interesting stretch of the episode, and I made a point of saying I don’t think AI is categorically good or bad, because I think that framing requires more nuance.
I argued against treating AI as an all-or-nothing issue. I brought up how much it’s already doing in genome sequencing and medicine as evidence that a blanket “AI is useless and dangerous” position doesn’t hold up, even as I agree the consumer-facing use cases are often wasteful and genuinely harmful.
James drew a sharp line between frivolous use and infrastructure use. He said he’d have far less of a problem with these data centers if the demand behind them were medical research rather than novelty images, and joked pointedly about a certain president generating AI content for hours at a stretch. His actual policy position was that the moratorium conversation should focus on pace and access rather than existence.
I pointed to the Pope’s encyclical as the most compelling ethical framework I’ve read on this. I described it as a genuinely pro-human document that calls for reining in AI companies without rejecting the technology outright, and said it’s helped shape how I think about where the guardrails should sit.
I raised concentration of power as the issue I care about most. I said AI cannot become a technology that only enriches a handful of people, name-checking Sam Altman and Musk specifically, and said Anthropic is about as ethical an operator as exists in the space even though it isn’t perfect. I flagged the circular financing between chip makers and AI companies, and the number of billion-dollar-valuation companies with no real revenue, as an AI bubble topic that probably needs its own episode.
James used the UK’s approach as the contrast. He described a £2 billion government fund distributed as open solicitations, essentially: any company, including a smaller outfit, can bid on a project like exploring how AI could improve healthcare, with grants running up to seven million pounds. I said directly that this is exactly the kind of centralized investment the US should be doing instead of leaving it entirely to private companies.
I closed this section with the bigger philosophical stakes. I talked about wanting AI in medicine and science to move us toward eliminating scarcity the way Star Trek imagined it, not through chatbots, but through the kind of foundational technology that could remove the need for people to fight over resources at all. I said that’s the real prize, even if it’s a long way off.
Reflecting On Lindsey Graham’s Life
We closed on Lindsey Graham’s funeral, and this section ended up being less about politics than about what Trump’s eulogy revealed by accident.
James described the eulogy as performative in a way that was hard to watch.
I zeroed in on the specific line that stuck with me. Trump told the crowd Graham “never saw a war he didn’t like,” which is a strange thing to celebrate at a funeral, and Hannity followed by noting that many people called Graham a warmonger.
I brought in reporting from my own past coverage of Graham. I referenced a New York Times interview I found years ago, not widely picked up elsewhere, where Graham said plainly that his entire political arc, from John McCain’s closest friend to Trump loyalist, was driven by a desire to stay relevant. I said that quote reframes his whole career as a study in political self-preservation and clout-chasing rather than conviction. This was actually the topic of one of my very first articles for The Independent in 2019, which started my 5-year columnist tenure there. I described Graham as the personification of the Republican Party’s descent into Trumpism. And I think that framing still holds up.
We both landed on the teleprompter moment as the most telling detail of the day. Trump was reading a line claiming virtually everyone liked Graham, caught himself, and ad-libbed live that Graham was actually “a tough cookie” who wasn’t universally loved, seemingly correcting the script in real time because even he didn’t believe it. James’s reaction was simply, “May that love never find me.”
James closed with the broader point that stuck with me most. He said the real tragedy wasn’t the funeral itself but what it revealed: a life spent chasing relevance ends with the person who eulogizes you mocking you, while the people who actually build lives full of love and friendship never end up in that position. I added that one of Graham’s final calls was reportedly with Trump, a man Graham once called a bigot who’d destroy the Republican Party, whom he then backed anyway.
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The Bottom Line
The climate crisis is here. The political response to that reality, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the same manufactured denial, whether it’s the gutting of the EPA or Reform UK councils quietly scrapping climate targets. But nothing in this episode suggested the fixes are actually complicated. The market has already picked renewables, and the resistance to it is both dangerous and nonsensical.
When it comes to AI, the path to an ethical approach to the technology is not rocket science. It will just take good faith debate and decent, smart people with the political will to get it done.
Let’s hope in this year’s elections and in 2028, we can elect leaders who are serious enough about protecting our futures that they take these issues head-on.
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