These are tumultuous times on planet earth. There’s turmoil everywhere you look. Trouble and strife. The earth’s crust moves, mountains crumble, plains flood, missiles devastate, cities burn, armies march.

Birds fall from the sky. Locusts swarm. Forests die.

It feels like an apocalypse. Perhaps it is. Nowhere is safe.

If we thought there might be peace beyond Covid, then Vladimir Putin put paid to that. His war of conquest is not a success. But it has reordered the world we knew.

It has shown just how effective a force can be when fighting for its own people against a badly trained and poorly motivated conscript army, using unwieldy and badly maintained weapons and strategies. Notions of war will be revised. Flexibility, cunning, intuition, technical inventiveness and tactical genius matter more than brute force and ignorance.

Alliances have shifted. Now we see the fossil fuel giants on one side and those who want to green the planet on the other.

China, Iran, Chechnya, Syria, North Korea and Belarus are all supporting Russia.

Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and petro-states like Kazakhstan are refusing to raise oil and gas production to help the western states’ embargo on Russian fuels.

This opens up an interesting possibility: that the rest, out of desperation and anger as much as conviction, will accelerate the green transition.

We all know what must be done. And it has to be concerted and determined. So bring it on.

Sign on Pitt Bros restaurant protestin against Putin invasion of Ukraine.

Right-Wing Coup

That’s not the only major realignment needed. Battle is also joined regarding values and philosophies in politics and economics. For almost fifty years global economic policymaking has been dominated by a neo-liberal consensus focusing on mobility of capital, low taxation, cheap services, light-touch regulation and so on.

Yes, prices and interest rates have been kept down. But the gap between haves and have-nots has grown exponentially; autocracies and oligarchies have flourished; the necessary services to maintain a general quality of life have been widely degraded; and the myriad workers who come to advanced economies to fulfil necessary work have been exploited.

Meanwhile, the very rich have got very much richer, driven by greed, insider-trading, kleptocracy, tax dodging, personal oligarchies, dark money – and oil sheiks buying all around them, including British town centres, football teams and the World Cup itself.

Neo-liberalism has corroded even the most basic services a society should be able to expect. Socialist and social democratic policies have been derided and dismissed. The British social services are a salutary example of how a good system goes bad.

Joe Biden, a man who would be seen as a Christian Democrat in Europe – firmly of the centre-right – is demonised in the US as a radical leftist. But – as we learned with the slow drip of evidence throughout 2022 – it was the uber right-wing followers of Donal Trump who armed themselves and stormed the capitol in Washington, with a coup in mind..

In European politics the hard right seems to be growing in France, Italy and Spain. A mad, right-wing coup has just been prevented in Germany. But this collection of proto-Nazis may yet form a very nasty coalition with Hungary and Poland.

Elsewhere, the far right has suffered some serious setbacks. Bolsonaro was defeated in Brazil; and the Republicans lost the race for the Senate in the US.
A jury in Manhattan found the Trump Organisation guilty of tax fraud. Another jury ruled that US right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay at least $965 million (€994 million) in damages to numerous families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, for falsely claiming they were actors who faked the tragedy.

But the threat to democracy in the US remains real. That’s how serious all of this is.

Foto: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil

Ash Dieback Disease

Still, the rest of the world is more worried about climate change than the war in Ukraine; or about China’s military ambitions in Asia than Russia’s in Europe.

It starts with the catastrophic impact Putin’s war has had on global food supplies. They want a peaceful world, more reliable crops, energy and broadband. They want non-exploitative relationships with former colonisers.

While these scary pre-occupations dominated, some good things happened in 2022.

Remarkable advances are now being made in medicine, including genomic treatments, new anti-virals and anti-cancer treatments; there is progress too in AI and robotics; in finding new crops and variants that withstand hotter climates; in batteries for electric vehicles; and in solar panels and wind generation.

Yet, those wild birds still fall from the sky. Ash trees succumb to Ash Dieback disease. Others wither in hellish heat. The winds and waters still rise. Rivers parch or flood. The bones of cattle whiten and desiccate on new deserts…

All the presumptions we had about stability and safety are history. Even as our medical treatments promise greater health and longevity, we’ve entered a new era of precariousness in employment, weather, economics, technology and relationships.

That’s the world we live in now: wide and earthly, apocalyptic and exhilarating, all at the same time. We have to make the best of it.

Read the full Hog in the new annual issue of Hot Press, out now.