Saginaw nestles along the banks of its namesake river in central Michigan, a small city that most people in the state pass without remark, or else remember only in passing. Once sustained by the long reach of the automotive industry, it has since settled into a quieter, diminished rhythm; its streets marked as much by what has left as by what remains. In the early years of this century, when gang affiliations held sway in certain neighbourhoods, Saginaw was a regular fixture on lists of America’s most dangerous cities. Though gang violence declined a little in the 2010s, Saginaw has remained above national crime standards and often achieved the unwanted accolade of having Michigan’s highest crime rate, above even Detroit. The city provides a familiar, quintessentially American story: bereaved parents pleading with local authorities to do something to combat gun violence. To this day, Saginaw is spoken of with caution, if it is spoken of at all.

Yet that version of the place – circulated outward, flattened into statistics and reputation – doesn’t tell the whole story. For those who grew up there, life during troubled times resolved itself into something more secure and navigable. For some of Saginaw’s children, like Tirrea Billings, the presence of a loving father provided a shield to protect against the city’s hazards.

In the early years of this century, Tirrea was among the children who played outside until dusk, moving through streets dotted with the faded grandeur of vernacular late nineteenth and early twentieth century wood-panelled houses. Those dwellings stand on largely unfenced plots, often interspersed with gaping spaces where the wretched legacy of mid-twentieth century redlining halted progress: like elsewhere, Saginaw’s black neighbourhoods were sectioned off on maps and labelled ‘hazardous’ for mortgage financing. What remains is an Upper Midwestern urban landscape that could be mistaken for anywhere in Illinois, Indiana or Ohio.

For Tirrea, living in the Buena Vista Township neighbourhood, Saginaw was defined less by danger than by familiarity: the stretch of a street, the edge of a yard, the slow drift of an autumnal Sunday afternoon following the service at Prince of Peace Baptist Church. In summertime her father would often barbecue, as she moved between yards with children who lived nearby, inventing elaborate worlds from ordinary things. Each household was equipped with its own swing set that, in the logic of childhood, became spaceships “swinging across the universe” to Tirrea as she played with her neighbours Ashley and MiKayla. Their neighbourhood sat close to the edge of farmland; beyond the residential streets stretched fields of corn, dry beans, soybeans and sugar beets.

On Saturday mornings, the hum of her father’s lawnmower moving steadily across the yard marked the beginning of the weekend. He cut the grass faithfully every week and took pride in the landscaping around the family home; though left the tending to the rose bushes to Tirrea’s mother. He would stow the lawnmower back in its place in the garage alongside the bikes, scooters, footballs and jump ropes belonging to Tirrea and her younger sister. All the while his radio would be set to Kiss 107.1, ensuring that old school R&B provided a soundtrack to family life.

When the confines of small city life narrowed or the weather turned to harsh winter, Tirrea found comfort in the calm, ordered rooms of Hoyt Library. This was a different kind of space altogether, where the limits of the city gave way, however briefly, not to farmland but to something larger and more expansive.

“My father fostered my love for reading and writing, for education. I get my drive and my ambition from him; he taught me self-confidence.”

It is tempting to treat places like Saginaw as explanatory in themselves; to see in their economic decline or reputation for violence the outlines of the lives lived within them. But for Tirrea, what endured was not the instability of the city but the steadiness of her father. He fostered in her a love of reading and writing, and with it a sense that education was essential; not an escape, exactly, but a way of understanding the world more clearly.

Tirrea credits her father for so much that defines the person she is today. From him came her drive, her ambition and, perhaps most importantly, her sense of self-confidence: qualities that do not emerge from place alone, and which would come to matter more as her life moved beyond Saginaw. He reinforced that confidence constantly, often through a phrase he had repeated to her since she was a baby, becoming an almost daily mantra: ain’t nobody better than you.

That confidence was nurtured deliberately from an early age. Tirrea grew up fascinated by nature, animals and the outdoors. Her father encouraged those interests by taking her to nature trails around the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge and Ojibway Island, where she searched for insects, watched wildlife and developed an early ambition to become an environmental scientist. He bought her microscopes and science kits, treating her curiosity as something worthy of investment.

The same encouragement carried into adolescence. By high school, Tirrea had immersed herself in volunteering, completing more than one hundred hours of community service each academic year through organisations such as the Mid-Michigan Children’s Museum, the Mid-Michigan Children’s Zoo, the Disability Network of Mid-Michigan and the McNally Hospitality House. She became president of multiple student organisations, including National Honor Society, Freshman Mentors and Future Farmers of America, whilst also playing football (“soccer”) and competitive cheerleading throughout her school years. The breadth of those commitments reflected not only ambition, but the confidence to believe she could inhabit positions of responsibility and leadership.

When Tirrea attended an interview for her first job, as an administrative assistant at the Saginaw Conservation District, her father drove her there and waited outside. She emerged having been offered the position on the spot and told him the news. He replied as he hugged her, “I knew you would get it because, like I’ve always said, ain’t nobody better than you.”

It is only later, and often indirectly, that the significance of that kind of fatherly presence becomes fully visible; most clearly in the effort required to maintain it. Tirrea would later come to be in a relationship with a man who, like her father, was deeply committed to his children. In one sense, he came to be defined – in her eyes – by how persistently he tried to inhabit the role of father. Yet like so many others, and as I touched on in my own story of father exclusion, he endured cruel efforts to prevent him from having a relationship with his young daughter and son, from his earlier marriage.

They lived in Manassas, Virginia and in the years they were together, Tirrea’s boyfriend faced a concerted effort from his ex-wife to limit his role in his children’s lives. The terms of his court-ordered access were formally set – weekends, in theory – but in practice those arrangements bent under the pressure of work and daily life. What remained was something narrower than parenthood as it is usually imagined: a schedule to be adhered to, a boundary to be enforced. Fatherhood became something continually negotiated within institutional constraints rather than simply lived.

His attempts to move beyond it, to see his children more often – often at their request – were met with inflexibility from the children’s mother. She was unwilling to allow anything outside of the short windows the court permitted. Time with his children became something that was meagrely rationed; his fatherhood itself rendered fragile and conditional.

The difficulty was not only the restriction of time, but the transformation of fatherhood into something provisional: dependent on permission, mediation, compliance.

Tirrea describes how unfair it felt seeing him trying to be there for his children, even when his work commitments meant he couldn’t always meet the exact terms of the court-ordered visitation agreement – which was for every weekend, but his work schedule only made it possible for him to have his children every other weekend. What struck her most was how any attempt for flexibility to make up the time with them was met with resistance. “He genuinely tried to be present for his children whenever he could, despite a work schedule that already limited his time with them. Yet any effort he made to see them outside of the agreed weekends was quickly shut down with reminders of ‘what the agreement says,’ which felt less about the children’s needs and more about enforcing boundaries at his expense.”

“The children’s inability to spend regular time with their father started affecting the closeness of their relationship. He often felt that their mother fed them false narratives about him, when in reality he simply wanted to be a present and involved father and do what was best for the children.”

With Tirrea’s support and understanding, he adapted to that constraint the only way he could. Weekends with the children, when they came, were crammed to excess: time stretched yet compressed at once, as though it might compensate for all that could not be shared during the week. “He would fill the weekend to the brim with activities, which was fun but equally exhausting. The limited time we had with the kids made him feel like he had to pack everything into a couple of days; to try to make up for time not spent with them.”

Though not married, Tirrea embraced a stepmotherly role. She enjoyed the visible lightness to her partner in those precious moments he was allowed to spend with his children; a version of himself that seemed briefly restored. But it did not last. When the children left, the absence reasserted itself just as quickly, settling into a quiet, persistent weight he carried. It shaped his moods, his habits and, in time, the space between him and Tirrea. “He was noticeably and visibly happier when he had his kids. The moment they left, he went back to a state of depression.”

There were mornings Tirrea woke with a cautious hope that nothing would arrive from his ex-wife – no message, comment, or small provocation of some kind – that might hijack the rest of the day. And yet often it did. What could not be dealt with within one relationship was frequently displaced into another.

“The situation really put a strain on his mental health. It also put a strain on our relationship; he was often absent and in a bad mood. I would wake up every day just hoping his ex-wife wouldn’t do or say anything to piss him off, because then he would take it out on me.”

Over time, the situation grew harder for all concerned. It became increasingly apparent that the children’s interests would be better served if they lived with their father full time. And yet, the barriers to that happening – legal, financial and interpersonal – were immense. Tirrea’s partner wanted to pursue full custody and believed he could make the case for it; that his attention to schooling and insistence on instilling good values in the children amounted to more than the occasional role of care the court straight-jacketed him in. But the court’s conditions for achieving custody, including the physical space of his home and his financial resources, remained just out of reach.

“From everything I witnessed, there was a strong argument for them being better off living with him. He was far more involved in their lives, supporting their schooling, spending quality time with them and providing enriching experiences. In contrast, his ex-wife came across as little more than a ‘glorified babysitter’, with the children often left to sit in their rooms when at home with her. Despite this, the court always sided with the mother, largely because she lived in a bigger home with her parents and could offer more space.” The court’s supposed logic didn’t quite add up for Tirrea: “What I found hardest to accept was that even when there were concerns about the children’s safety around her new husband, my ex still couldn’t secure full custody and was effectively required to obtain a larger living space before he would even be considered.”

For Tirrea, the contrast to her own childhood was difficult to ignore. She had known a version of fatherhood that was steady, formative and constantly close at hand; here she was witnessing one that was contingent, negotiated and repeatedly denied. What troubled her most was not simply the restriction itself, but how easily paternal absence could be interpreted as indifference rather than obstruction. It altered how she understood not only her boyfriend’s experience, but the broader narrative surrounding fathers in his position; and the ease with which absence is assumed to be chosen, rather than imposed.

He did not give up. He continued, despite the constraints, to insist on a firmer place in his children’s lives. He would, eventually, secure full custody of his children; but not before the struggle had taken its toll on his and Tirrea’s relationship. As I can personally attest to, an excluded father can fight an all-consuming battle for a relationship with his children, or he can try to live his life. He cannot do both.

Tirrea understands this, just as she understands the value of fatherhood itself – recognition of which in no way undermines motherhood: “Contrary to popular belief, fathers provide a different level of love and parenting that a mother can’t give alone. I know some mothers play both roles because they have to. But if they don’t have to and they’re choosing to anyway, needlessly shutting their children’s father out, then that’s an issue. We should not shy away from calling that out.”

To hear Tirrea reflect on her experience is to gain a clear insight into her as a person. These two close up versions of fatherhood, her own dad and her former partner, helped shape and then confirm a sense of social justice that burns to the core of who she is. It has driven her through a career in the nonprofit sector, highlighting its shortcomings in what she terms “the nonprofit industrial complex” and chronicles through her philanthropy unfiltered Substack platform. It has carried her to the University of Southern California, where later this year she will begin doctoral studies in Organizational Change and Leadership.

“My father has had an astronomical impact on my life, and I wouldn’t be where I am now without his love, guidance and support. I know what having a present father has meant for me. I couldn’t imagine what the cost would have been if that opportunity had been deliberately stolen from him, from us both.”

Sharing my own version of father exclusion with Tirrea, she instantly had a profound understanding of the ordeal I have faced. She never questioned my experience; she recognised it instantly. “The hoops and ladders my ex-boyfriend’s ex-wife would construct to make it difficult for him to be a present father were frustrating and absolutely heartbreaking to witness. The powerlessness that father exclusion brings is something I watched consume a good man who wanted nothing more than to show up for his kids.”

Tirrea’s empathy for my own struggle, grounded in what she lived through with her ex-partner, has been striking by its rareness. She explains, “I learned a lot from that relationship about how family courts are always partial to mothers, even if the kids would be better off living with their father.”

Speaking to Tirrea also brought back childhood memories of the weekends my sister and I spent with our father. Though that experience was an ocean and decades apart from hers, and from the perspective of the child, I instantly recognised the urge to pack every moment and try to make up for that which was lost during the weekdays. I remembered, too, something I had forgotten: my father wrestling with a sense of unfairness, masking his hurt from my sister and I, so as not to burden us or poison our time together. But it was unfair, it was all so utterly unfair.

From her own brush with father exclusion, Tirrea understands this. “It made me realise how often the narrative of the ‘absent father’ is manufactured and deeply unfair. From what I’ve witnessed, many fathers desperately want to be present, but are put in positions where mothers make it impossible for them to be involved and, over time, some simply give up. I’m glad my ex didn’t give up, he now has full custody of his children, and I’m so happy that he fought for them and their well-being. But I’m also aware that many fathers don’t get that outcome, or even the opportunity to try.”

The difficulty, Tirrea came to realise, is that fathers in these situations are often required not merely to remain present, but to continually prove the sincerity of their desire to do so.

What made witnessing that struggle so painful for Tirrea was not just sympathy for her ex-partner, but an acute awareness of what his children stood to lose. Fatherhood, to her, has never been an abstract ideal or political talking point; it is something she has experienced intimately and continuously in her own life. She has come to understand that fatherhood also depends partly upon recognition; on whether paternal care is acknowledged, trusted and simply allowed to be.

Perhaps this is why Tirrea recognised the injustice of father exclusion so immediately when I brought it up: she had spent her entire life living inside the opposite reality. She knew what it meant to grow up with a father who was consistently there; not only physically present, but emotionally attentive, invested in her interests and unwavering in his belief in her. Seeing another man struggle simply to maintain contact with his children sharpened her understanding of how profoundly formative that kind of presence can be, and how damaging its deliberate disruption may become. It forced her to confront the possibility of an entirely different childhood to the one she herself had known; one without the encouragement, steadiness and security of paternal love.

Looking back on her early years, what strikes Tirrea most is not just that her father was present during childhood, but that his support never receded as she grew older. The same man who once walked nature trails with her, bought her science kits and waited outside her first job interview remains equally invested in her writing, academic work and professional ambitions today. His encouragement did not belong to one stage of her life; it formed part of the foundation beneath all of it, encapsulated in five words: ain’t nobody better than you.

“I’m grateful that I grew up in a two-parent household. But if for some reason I wasn’t afforded that opportunity, I believe it would have been so important to my upbringing to be able to spend time with both parents equally, as much as possible.”

She pauses on this, before adding, “I couldn’t imagine not having my father in my life. He’s shaped so much of who I am.”

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I remember the moment of realisation that my life was plunging into darkness.

Choral voices began lifting one of my favourite pieces of music into Gothic ceiling arches. A subtle tension in the opening notes hung in the air, unresolved, as the harmonies rose and fell. Ambient sound swelled as it reverberated off ancient stone.

The intensity grew, sending harmonic wave vibrations pulsing through me. I started to tremble and realised I might not hold myself together. I closed my eyes, hoping it would somehow make me invisible to those seated around me in the nave. The sound pressed in: a sonic massage releasing overwhelming anguish.

It was my fortieth birthday; I was falling apart.

***

It’s an hour earlier and we are in the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral, on a particularly cold Tuesday evening in early December. My parents, myself and the other attendees are kept waiting in line for what feels like an age. The chill starts to bite so much that it penetrates my usually impregnable leather gloves.

The courtyard gardens are world-heritage pretty but not ostentatious. This is England, after all. People wait patiently, stoically. Warm breath from their chatter rises like shisha smoke, illuminated against dark sky by decorative lights. An austere Christmas tree and scant decoration create an underwhelming festive feel. The cold pierces through my jeans, stinging my thighs.

The last few months have not gone as planned. I’m not in the mood for any of this. It’s not how I imagined my fortieth birthday, nor my life, to turn out.

In front of us is a Japanese group: two couples around my age with their respective sets of children. They seem elegant, immaculately turned out. Their soft dulcet voices carry their language rhythmically, as though reciting poetry. I wonder whether their conversation is as graceful as I imagine.

I prefer to remain ignorant, rather than risk shattering my idealised notions of them. The line should at least be shuffling forward to give the impression of progress, but there is no movement.

My mother makes conversation with the middle-aged couple behind us. Wishing not to engage with them but without appearing rude, I attempt to give the impression that I am unavailable; that I am lost deep down some pensive well.

I have plenty on my mind. A few months prior I returned to the UK from Trinidad, leaving behind my pregnant wife and two stepchildren in order to get work, having failed to obtain a work permit on the island. Now I am out in the cold.

I focus again on the group in front, trying not to reveal my fascination; to not appear voyeuristic. They distract me a few moments more, yet all the while I’m waiting for the inevitable “this is my son” introduction, which duly comes. My mother cannot simply converse and let you be; she has an instinct to draw everyone in so no one feels excluded. Unfortunately, she cannot read the body language of my stepfather and me, which is screaming: please don’t make us talk to these people.

The conversation imposed upon us is not interesting. If I wanted to converse with strangers, I would rather talk to the poets in front. I try not to be irritable, but it’s difficult. The bitter cold doesn’t help.

A Chaucerian character with bald scalp and overly long white locks seems to be in charge of proceedings. He looks as medieval as the great stone structure of flying buttresses and everything arched up toward heaven that he keeps disappearing into and re-emerging from. He’s busily ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ to little effect. The queue is still not moving.

He is wearing a long dark cloth robe with a rope belt tied at the waist. He looks like a Franciscan monk. I ponder this briefly before concluding that there cannot possibly be Franciscan monks stationed at this bastion of Anglicanism. Perhaps he is clergy. Perhaps a curator. Perhaps simply there in costume for the tourists. Whatever, he looks as though he has stepped out of a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But it can’t be parody; I don’t think the Church of England does parody. Not deliberately, anyway.

My mind drifts back to cold reality. It has been two months since my wife shut me out without explanation, blocking me on WhatsApp and ignoring my emails. It makes no sense.

Eventually the aged Friar Tuck comes good: he gives the signal that guests can start to be admitted inside the cathedral. Finally!

Processing through the vestibule, the aroma of old church hits immediately; an uplift in temperature does not. We emerge into the nave, flanked by interior cloister-like side chambers, which must be the best part of a thousand years old and yet would have been, in its day, a state-of-the-art modern renovation in the ‘new’ Gothic style. Other parts of the cathedral are older still.

Rib-vaulted ceilings stretch high above us. The tone of the walls is magnificently understated, leaving stained glass to provide colour and narrative. It’s a triumph of limestone that probably hails, I imagine, from the same place as my ancient forebears on my mother’s side – Normandy, across the Channel. We slide into place on our pews. The Japanese group sit on the row immediately in front of us. If they are in awe of this place, they show no signs of it.

We are there for the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment – “The Tigers” – annual carol service. My brother, the music teacher at a nearby grammar school, received an invite for his choir to perform. They’ve spent the past couple of months working on a piece of music I suggested he try out. Despite everything else, I am looking forward to hearing it in person for the first time. Even in a bad mood, I can appreciate good architecture and good music.

First, it’s the turn of a primary school. We get through the obligatory carols: an annual reminder of the moving powers of Silent Night, which always transports me back to childhood. The choir changes and my brother takes up position to conduct, his pupils file into place. Proud parents – of pupils and conductor – sit quietly.

Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium starts to fill the pointed arches of the medieval masterpiece …

A haunting, subtle dissonance within the harmony of the opening phrase creates the suspense which constantly builds as choir voices weave in masterful homophony … then the pause, allowing the sound to dissipate, rising and falling away, before the tenors repeat the same melody as the altos.

I no longer feel cold but start to notice a trembling inside me; and realise that I will struggle to maintain myself. My eyelids burn as I close them, hoping to be anonymous for a second time that evening. The ambient sound engulfs us, releasing the most profound sadness I have felt since childhood. It pulses through me in waves, heightened by the acoustics. Resistance is futile.

My thoughts turn to my stepchildren. The children I have lost. What I wouldn’t give to scoop them up once more in my arms. Will I ever see them again?

My chest and throat tighten. The first crescendo arrives as the sopranos take it up to a high G, before it quickly falls away; not wanting to reach the climax of the piece too early.

I think of my child inside the womb, thousands of miles away, and wonder how the pregnancy is going ... Is our baby ok? She won’t tell me. She ignores my requests for information.

My brother’s choir is doing an incredible job. The high G heard previously is returned, bringing me back to the nave; back to the present moment. I feel warm, thin streams run down my cheeks, gathering at the corners of my mouth. Months of tension pour out. Am I actually going to be excluded from my child’s life, before he is even born?

Everything is amplified.

I find it hard to stay upright without swaying, exhausted by this overwhelming sense of failure and loss. It occurs to me that there is no comfort, no hiding place, sat on a church pew. It won’t cradle you, nor will it obscure you. I wonder whether my mother, to my right, has noticed my discomfort. I cannot bear to open my eyes for fear of catching hers. She will try to comfort me, but I want to be left alone in this grief.

The accented passing note creates a semitone clash, preparing the importance of the next chord … once more the sorrow of the falling melody landing on a dark F# minor chord resolving immediately to B minor … a shrill cry from the altos takes us closer to the first true resolution: “Alleluia!”

I tense every muscle I can muster to contain myself. Am I holding this together? The polyphony of the music matches the various competing thoughts flowing through my mind, just as the melody moves between voices.

This night will come to symbolise the beginning of everything that follows; the opening sequence of a journey that will change my life. Though in this moment I don’t yet fully realise the enormity of the struggle ahead. I just know everything I hold dearest is disappearing: my stepchildren, my unborn child, the family life I had always yearned for.

I weep inaudibly and long to return: if not to holding lost young angels, then to the courtyard. To the dark silence of the night.

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Your children are not your children

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you

– Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

My son and I are strangers. He turns seven soon and I’ve never celebrated his birthday with him. I have never read him a bedtime story. I don’t know if he is safe. I don’t even know if he is alive. I am a father needlessly separated from my child, and society makes me invisible. After years of holding my tongue and getting nowhere, I feel compelled to convey what it is like to be completely excluded from your child’s life in a culture that leaves virtually no space for fathers in my position.

We often hear about absent fathers, but rarely about those who are absent against their will: men erased from their children’s lives without justification. I call this “father exclusion”. It’s a term I have coined because I can’t find any official language or descriptor for fathers in my position. Despite impacting many families, it barely registers in our public discourse. No data seems to be collected on father exclusion. No politicians seem interested in addressing it. No one even names the problem.

Father exclusion is not a fringe issue. It is extremely harmful to families and society; a systemic failure so pervasive it becomes invisible. We talk a great deal about irresponsible fathers, but what about those of us fighting with everything we have to be in our children’s lives, only to be systematically shut out? This silence is institutional, cultural and statistical. It has consequences: for children, for fathers like me, for our understanding of parenthood itself.

One goal in sharing my story is to advance a rationale argument in favour of gender equality in parenting, guided by the humanist case for balanced parental rights.

Western culture’s current obsession with “toxic masculinity” prefers to cast men as villains, leaving no room to acknowledge that fathers can be victims of discrimination, or that many are unjustifiably pushed out of their children’s lives. Many people take offence at the suggestion that father absence is detrimental to our children, despite the evidence that it is. So, any attempt to raise fathers’ rights is met with discomfort, defensiveness or even aggression: if it is acknowledged at all. For the main part, it is met with silence.

I know this silence intimately. It helps prevent my son from knowing my love.

When he drew his first breath in Brooklyn seven years ago, I was thousands of miles away in the United Kingdom, unaware of his arrival because his mother had cut off contact with me. What began as a conventional path to fatherhood – ultrasounds, excited plans of being present at the birth – unravelled into a nightmare. Every attempt since then to be part of my son’s life has been blocked, defied or ignored by his mother, enabled by systems that treat paternal bonds as optional, granted or withheld at the mother’s discretion.

I later discovered that my estranged wife had given our son different names to those we’d agreed upon. She omitted my name from his birth certificate and provided a false address to give the impression that she lived in New York; presumably in order to align with her falsified Medicaid forms. In fact, she is a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago and lives there with her two older children, whose father she also denies access.

Or at least, they did live in Trinidad. Almost three years ago, my son was abducted by his mother. To evade the increasing scrutiny of Trinidad and Tobago’s Family Court and Children’s Authority, she disappeared with all three children and is hiding somewhere in America. I do not know if they are safe, in good health or whether they attend school.

When I met my ex, in our initial interactions, she told me her first husband had abused her and their children, claiming serious offences. I felt sympathy and wanted to help. She said she reported each incident to the police, to create a record. Though to what end, I couldn’t figure out: she never wanted to take legal action, only to have a record of complaints.

Her story became increasingly inconsistent and I started noticing contradictions that grew more absurd. When I questioned her, she sometimes responded by suggesting that I was paranoid, other times she insisted I was losing my memory. It was only later that I recognised this as gaslighting.

While married and briefly living in Trinidad, it began to feel that she had only wanted me there so that I could support her and the kids while she continued not to work at all. However, tightening immigration restrictions meant that I couldn’t get a work permit and the strain on our relationship grew. Pregnant with our son, she cut off communication when I returned to the UK to work.

Since then, I’ve been trapped in a nightmare. Parenthood has been an illusory half-reality: I am legally a father but have never been allowed to be one. Despite my indefatigable efforts, I have met my son just twice; his mother has blocked all other access in defiance of multiple court orders. I could detail here a long list of her heartbreaking breaches, but nobody would want to read it.

Life as an excluded father is utterly lonely. I feel cast adrift, like an inconvenience nobody cares about.

With court proceedings stalled by my ex’s disappearance, I have spent two years pursuing an application under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. I receive email updates mentioning INTERPOL and U.S. authorities’ efforts to locate my son. The situation is surreal. There are days when it feels less like my life and more like a documentary film that I never agreed to star in. I have needed to write about it to help me survive it, to produce a memoir I might someday share to help others enduring similar ordeals.

My story is highly personal; the international dimension somewhat unusual. However, my general experience is not unique. It reflects a deeper truth: we simply do not value fatherhood highly enough. We are far more comfortable accusing men of abandonment than confronting how and why institutions push them out.

It needn’t be this way. We can acknowledge this systemic exclusion while rejecting the false binary that caring about fathers must come at the expense of mothers. Justice does not require us to diminish one parent in order to elevate the other. Instead, recognising and supporting the vital roles of both mothers and fathers, on equal terms, is how we can best serve the interests of our children. Persistently favouring one parent over the other – as we currently do – undermines not only parental equality, but the well-being of children and the moral coherence of society.

My son was abducted and taken to the U.S. in breach of a court order prohibiting his removal from Trinidad and Tobago. Like the others, the order proved meaningless. Indeed, every directive issued by the court has been breached or ignored by my ex without consequence.

My ex is legally aided, so there is no financial deterrent to obstruction. Three different legal aid-appointed attorneys withdrew their representation of her after realising she was misleading the court. None of this resulted in sanctions; just stronger orders that my ex ignores. She has, effectively, been able to act with impunity.

She has also prevented my son’s siblings – my stepchildren – from seeing their own father since they were infants. Unwittingly, the children’s experience contributes to the often-racist stereotype of Caribbean father absenteeism. But their respective fathers are not absent: we are excluded.

Despite being represented by one of Trinidad and Tobago’s leading family lawyers (who sadly passed away suddenly last summer), I have felt utterly powerless. Court interventions have been too slow, enforcement mechanisms too weak or non-existent. In the initial years of my matter, the institutional indifference was astonishing. Even evidence of my ex preventing her older children from seeing their father – a relevant pattern of behaviour, one would think – could not be considered, due to family court evidentiary rules. Eventually the authorities did seem to realise what they were dealing with. But by then it was too late, my ex had disappeared with my son.

In fairness, the judge’s hands are tied by inadequate enforcement powers. The court knows that my son is being deliberately repelled from access to his father, without justification. It just isn’t able to actually do much about it. The system appears designed to make fathers give up.

With the disappearance, my attorney advised me to pursue the Hague Convention process. At first, it seemed promising: we received confirmation that my son had been taken to America. He was even, seemingly, located by U.S. authorities, only to vanish again. With the Hague application drawing blanks and family court proceedings stalled, I find myself back where I began. I am sharing my story in the hope that someone, somehow, might help locate my child.

The wider narrative of absentee fathers is well-known, but how accurate is it? In the United States, more than one in four children live without a father in the home. This is also the generally accepted proportion for the UK, though my own crude maths suggests that it could be higher, with nearly 40 percent of households with dependent children being single-parent families (3.2 million out of the 8.2 million total). Data from the Office for National Statistics show 85 percent of those are headed by mothers (child custody data reporting has it higher, at 89 percent). Statistics for Trinidad and Tobago are harder to obtain, but anyone will tell you the situation is likely similar to the U.S. and UK.

How many of these fathers are missing by choice versus how many, like me, are deliberately excluded? We don’t know the answer, because – and this is a point worth emphasising – nobody publishes that data. There is no government task force. No politicians introducing parental equality legislation. No newspaper headlines.

It’s easier to frame us as absent, easier to perpetuate the ‘irresponsible father’ trope than confront the reality of father exclusion. Doing so would entail acknowledging that men face systemic discrimination in family courts and are relegated to second-class parental status. It’s easier for society not to care.

For the sake of our children, we should care. Active father engagement results in improved child outcomes. In 2016 the UK Department for Work and Pensions hosted a Father Engagement Seminar, which concluded that children with highly involved fathers have greater self-esteem, perform better at school and have fewer behavioural problems.

Conversely, growing up fatherless is highly detrimental to children and society. Children from fatherless homes are exponentially more likely to run away, die from suicide, suffer with substance abuse, become teenage mothers, have behavioural disorders, be sent to prison ... the list goes on. The fact that we have to go back a decade to find such a level of attention (in the UK) to the issue tells its own story.

When I share this information, people often react defensively. One American acquaintance, raised by a single parent, accused me of “blaming single mothers” before I could explain that I, too, grew up in single-parent households (with both my mother and father at different points), and that I was not making a political argument. But I had offended his sensibilities; he wasn’t prepared to even momentarily consider an alternative perspective.

What puzzles me is why acknowledging evidence of poorer average outcomes for children in father-absent homes is so often treated as a moral judgment rather than an empirical observation. Recognising such patterns need not imply blame, nor does it diminish the efforts or sacrifices of single parents. If child welfare is a genuine priority, we should be able to discuss uncomfortable data openly and with nuance, even when it complicates prevailing narratives.

Being an excluded father feels like living in exile. Some people are sympathetic, but not overly concerned. There is no language for your grief, no place for your story. Father exclusion does not fit into any fashionable social movement. Indeed, it’s allowed to slip through the cracks because it contradicts prevailing assumptions about gender, victimhood and power. Refusal to acknowledge this issue reflects a cultural and legal bias that renders fathers morally disposable.

The “toxic masculinity” narrative compounds the problem. Last October, the UK government confirmed that it would repeal the legal presumption of parental involvement – a principle contained in the Children Act 1989 recognising that children thrive when both parents play a role in their lives.

The decision rests on a government-commissioned research report seemingly designed to reach a predetermined conclusion. Its methodology favoured selective evidence and, by the report’s own admission, engaged minimally with children. Instead, it relied on a very small adult sample, which limits the reliability of its findings. The report also acknowledged fundamental limitations: The Review encountered several challenges regarding availability, access and quality of data on the family justice system.

It is hard to see this as anything other than a stitch-up. No formal impact assessment addresses the harm the legislation may cause, presumably because its proponents are comfortable with father exclusion. Some legal experts warned the change was unnecessary, since courts already have powers to limit contact where risk exists. But they were ignored because politicians in the UK government, in hock to those pushing the moral panic on masculinity, saw no electoral cost in undermining men and making it easier to exclude fathers from their children’s lives.

And why would politicians see any downside to discriminating against fathers? There is no discernible political lobby promoting men’s rights that they need to worry about.

There is no accurate data, no political appetite and very little language for fathers being shut out against their will – and children growing up without them – despite the well-established harm of fatherlessness.

The UK government also ignored research published in 2023 that challenged assumptions underlying legislative responses to family-court abuse allegations, including legal instruments such as Kayden’s Law in the United States. This law gives heightened weight to abuse claims in custody decisions. The research study highlights that such laws rest on the belief that allegations made by so-called “protective mothers” are likely to be accurate – an assumption not supported by the available evidence. It also found that this presumption effectively shifts the burden of proof in custody proceedings, treating the accused parent – usually the father – as guilty unless he can prove otherwise.

The research concludes that policy in this area has been shaped by selective and weakly replicated research findings, while overlooking a broader body of scientific work that reaches very different conclusions. The link to the proposed UK policy change is clear. Framed as a child-protection measure, the reform follows the same logic: privileging accusation over proof, elevating advocacy-driven research over robust evidence. What both measures effectively achieve is to embed the assumption that father involvement is a risk to be managed rather than a good to be preserved.

None of this is to deny the seriousness of domestic abuse in instances when it does occur. But safeguarding children requires evidence-based standards that can distinguish genuine risk from untested allegation, especially when the consequence of error is the exclusion of a parent – almost always the father – from their child’s life. Policies that assume guilt by default may claim to protect children, yet in practice they risk doing the opposite, turning precaution into permanent separation that is harmful to them.

In her recent essay, Dispatches from the Long War on Fathers, Janice Fiamengo outlines how this move from the UK government is just the latest in a long quest by some actively trying to strip fathers of any rights at all. Indeed, she highlights how alarmingly close to that we already are.

The incoherence of the UK government’s position is extraordinary. Around the same time that it decided to remove the presumption of parental involvement and make it easier to exclude fathers, it also claimed that boys and young men are in crisis. Apparently, there is an epidemic of “misogyny” requiring special teaching of boys in schools across Britain.

This widely accepted narrative is promoted uncritically across mainstream media. I won’t try to critique it here, but Tom Golden’s recent piece, Manufacturing a Boy Crisis, is worth a read. It shows how cultural fears can easily be framed into public policy initiatives without reliable supporting evidence.

Even if we accept the UK government’s claims, there is a fundamental contradiction. We are told that one of the major drivers of this crisis of boys and young men is the lack of male role models in their lives. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said that boys and young men need “strong, positive male role models to look up to.”

I wonder: who do Phillipson and her ministerial colleagues think is the most important male role model any child, boy or girl, could have?

We all know the answer. So why is the UK government working against fathers who desperately want to love and guide their children, but are unjustifiably shut out in unfair family court proceedings? Has anyone really thought this through?

This matter warrants more scrutiny than it is likely to receive, and I often wonder how many silent battles like mine are being fought. Official statistics don’t capture how many fathers give up trying to see their kids, but many do.

Acknowledging the role that systemic bias against fathers plays in shaping these silent battles does not erase the existence of good single mothers. On the contrary, taking the issue seriously requires recognising the full range of parental behaviour and the ways institutions respond unevenly to it.

Let me be clear and fair: if we had accurate data, I would expect it to show a large number of single mothers doing all they reasonably can to co-parent and enable their ex-partner to remain involved in their children’s lives following separation. I know a number of wonderful mothers who bend over backwards to accommodate their ex and make access possible. I applaud these women.

However, there is a sizeable number who do not act in the child’s best interests and are subject to less scrutiny by default. Ask any experienced divorce lawyer about it and they will tell you of the mendacity employed by some mothers determined to block access to their children’s father.

As psychiatrist Hannah Spier argues in her essay on family-court psychology bias against men, this often does not require extraordinary cunning. When courts and professionals already default to trusting mothers and viewing fathers with suspicion, even modest misrepresentation or passive obstruction can be decisive; the system itself supplies the leverage.

Spier illustrates how the policy and legislative framing I mentioned above translates into courtroom practices where fathers face scepticism, whilst mothers’ claims are presumed credible. She asserts: “Men are routinely expected to prove benign intent before they are afforded credibility. Women, by contrast, are granted presumed innocence and interpreted through a care-first lens; their narratives are taken at face value unless disproven.”

She notes that this creates a system stacked against fathers from the outset: “the system has been trained to recognise distress in women and risk in men long before it is trained to recognise strategy, incentive, or gain. In that gap, certain behaviours flourish unchecked, precisely because they arrive wrapped in the language of care.”

Nobody is accusing all mothers in family courts of acting in bad faith. We just need to stop pretending that none do. What Spier highlights is a fundamental structural flaw at the heart of so many family court proceedings. It needn’t be this way. Acknowledging systemic bias against fathers does not deny the reality of instances of abuse, nor does it diminish the efforts of good single mothers. Both truths can, and must, coexist.

When a mother excludes a child’s father, as has happened in my own case, the instinctive response is to search for justification. The prevailing assumption is that there must be a good reason, because many people struggle to accept that a mother could act in ways that are contrary to her children’s interests.

This reflex functions as a kind of collective denial. Rather than confronting the possibility of strategic exclusion, we resolve the cognitive dissonance by presuming unseen paternal fault. I have encountered this presumption when I speak about my situation in daily life. The questions I am asked often carry a quiet suspicion that I must have done something to provoke such exclusion. I did not; nor did my ex’s previous husband, and yet the burden of disproving that suspicion falls on us nonetheless.

Social attitudes operate at one level; court proceedings at another. Systems built to protect children can develop blind spots, particularly when one parent’s claims are presumed credible and the other’s treated with suspicion by default. This requires a willingness to examine whether current systems reliably distinguish between genuine risk and strategic exclusion.

My experience reflects a wider silence. We speak of “absent fathers”, yet almost never of those absent against their will.

Even when a fair hearing is theoretically available, many excluded fathers cannot afford it. Prolonged legal representation is prohibitively expensive, compounding the institutional bias they already face. In many cases, when a father is granted access, the conditions are so restrictive that they seem designed to deter him from continuing with it. There is so much more I could write here. Suffice to say, these experiences are not hypothetical: they are all too common and ignored by society, despite the detriment to our children.

So, for a number of reasons, many fathers give up trying to remain present in their children’s life. This leads me back to my earlier point about absenteeism and negative tropes about fathers not meeting their responsibilities. Condemning these fathers, in many cases, amounts to adding insult to injury.

Sadly, insufficient attention has been paid to father disengagement following family court rulings. The dominant narrative perspective is that of the mother and a cursory search of the available academic and professional literature reveals work by authors who dismiss fathers’ testimonies.

Some of this work, while presented as scholarly, often seems to function more as advocacy briefing masquerading as academic research. Much of it feels hostile, designed to close down debate. It reflects a broader reluctance to scrutinise the issue, seemingly aimed at preventing the framing of it in any way other than solely from the mother’s perspective. This is divisive. It hinders the prospect of productive dialogue that might lead to the much-needed, meaningful, reform that could enable improved outcomes for children.

However, some research stands apart, untarnished by ideological bias or advocacy motivations. A prime example is the work of sociologist and social worker Edward Kruk, who has extensively published peer-reviewed research articles in scholarly journals on topics including parental alienation, shared parenting and family law reform. His paper, Psychological and Structural Factors Contributing to the Disengagement of Noncustodial Fathers After Divorce, stands out for centring the experiences of non-custodial fathers post-divorce.

Kruk’s findings reveal that many fathers experience the absence of their children and the constraints of a “visiting” relationship as a profound sense of grief, akin to bereavement. His research is also rare in its explicit recognition of a simple truth that is taboo to acknowledge: fathers are judicially and legislatively disadvantaged on the basis of gender.

As I briefly referenced above, many fathers are also disadvantaged on the basis of their race. In Fathering from the Margins, sociologist Aasha M. Abdill dispels the negative stereotypes of Black men as “deadbeat dads” that remain persistent in mainstream perception and discourse. She draws on four years of fieldwork in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant – coincidentally where I wrote about in this piece and just a stone’s throw away from where my son was born.

Abdill’s book confronts the destructive and, frankly, cruel assumptions and obstacles Black fathers face. This is something that has been on my mind as I’ve navigated Trinidad and Tobago’s family court and social services system, much of which derives from the English common law system it inherited when it threw off the shackles of British colonial rule. Whilst I’ve felt like I’m coming up against a brick wall, I’ve always been aware that others face additional hurdles.

I’m merely scratching the surface here. My point is to argue that more focus on father exclusion is required; and that much of what we think is father absenteeism through choice might actually be exclusion by the design of structural factors outside of the individual father’s control.

Writing as someone who will never stop trying to have a relationship with his child, I’ve reached a depressing conclusion: I can fully understand why others give up.

This thought always leads me to wishing that more excluded fathers would speak up about their experiences … but if they tried to, would they be heard? The evidence suggests not. The more I speak about my situation, the more I hear stories of children being unfairly prevented from seeing their fathers. Despite this, I have found no books and very little content that speak to our experience. Not from excluded fathers themselves.

All there seems to be is Alec Baldwin’s book on his custody battle with ex-wife Kim Basinger, plus a couple of self-published books on Amazon that could have benefited from careful editing. But the gatekeepers to our public discourse – literary agents, publishers, magazine editors – don’t want to touch the subject.

This is frustrating. It shows how cultural conditions conspire against fathers like me. It adds another layer to the systemic injustice we face, through denying recognition of our experiences as morally salient. Indeed, we seem to be a thorn in the side of dominant cultural narratives: our struggles expose how certain lived experiences are overlooked, even when articulated through powerful first-hand testimony. Excluded fathers are rendered invisible, denied the chance to be narrative agents whose experiences could enrich our collective understanding of parenthood.

This pattern has been analysed by philosopher Miranda Fricker in her book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Fricker argues that people can be wronged specifically in their capacity as knowers. She distinguishes between testimonial injustice, where a speaker’s credibility is unfairly deflated because of identity-based prejudice, and hermeneutical injustice, where gaps in our shared interpretive frameworks prevent certain experiences from being properly understood at all.

Both forms are visible in father exclusion. When fathers describe procedural obstruction, evidentiary double standards, or the erosion of court-ordered contact, their testimony is often filtered through cultural assumptions that cast men as potential risks, unreliable narrators, or merely peripheral parents. Their credibility is subtly discounted before their evidence is even considered. At a deeper level, there is no widely accepted conceptual framework for naming systematic father exclusion; without shared language and reliable data on the scale of the issue, these experiences appear as isolated grievances rather than instances of patterned injustice.

The result is a double invisibility: excluded fathers struggle not only to be believed, but to be intelligible within dominant moral narratives. Our suffering fails to register as a social problem, even when articulated with clarity and firsthand evidence.

Nick Couldry, a specialist in media communications and social theory, in his book, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism, emphasises the importance of voice as a form of social recognition and legitimacy. Having a voice is not just a question of speaking, but of being heard and acknowledged in cultural, legal and political arenas. Couldry uses the example of how neoliberal systems often commodify culture and public discourse, amplifying some voices while silencing others. This produces structural inequities that prevent marginalised groups from gaining recognition, even when their experiences are valid.

Voice becomes essential for social agency; without it, people are rendered powerless. As such, recognition for father exclusion as an issue therefore requires cultural and institutional structures that grant legitimacy to our experience.

But we are not granted such legitimacy; and this is how excluded fathers remain invisible. Without adequate data or cultural recognition, our experiences go largely unacknowledged. The work of Nevada attorney Marilyn York stands out as an excellent lone voice, striving to bring these experiences into public view and challenge the institutional and cultural forces that allow paternal exclusion to persist unaddressed.

Despite York’s valuable contribution, we still need much more for father exclusion to register in the public consciousness. Coverage of it is rare, leaving the issue misunderstood and obscured both in terms of the scale and the harm of paternal exclusion.

As part of this struggle for credibility, as I mention above, excluded fathers also face a challenge of narrative form: the very stories we attempt to tell often fail to fit dominant cultural and institutional scripts. Without shared narrative conventions capable of structuring and interpreting these experiences, our accounts risk appearing unintelligible. Not because they lack validity, but because they lack narrative legibility.

This dimension has been explored by another philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, in his book Time and Narrative, Volume 1 and by historian and philosopher Hayden White in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Ricoeur argued that human beings make sense of experience through emplotment – the organisation of events into coherent narratives that render them temporally and morally intelligible, an idea White had earlier introduced to historical theory.

Excluded fathers frequently confront precisely this difficulty: our accounts of legal obstruction, parental alienation, or even (in my case) child abduction do not align with prevailing cultural scripts that cast men as absent, negligent, or secondary caregivers. As such, our experiences are rendered fragmented and insignificant. White argued that narrative form shapes recognition itself; the structures through which events are told determine whether they appear tragic, comic, marginal, or meaningful.

So, when lived realities fail to fit dominant narrative patterns, they are not simply not debated: they are sidelined or erased. Father exclusion, then, is not only a legal or social problem but a narrative one. Without culturally available plots through which to tell their stories, excluded fathers struggle to secure moral and public recognition.

These narrative constraints are visible in mainstream media coverage of father exclusion, insofar as it does cover the issue at all. Here in the UK, the focus tends to come in the form of occasional tabloid newspaper portrayals of campaign group Fathers4Justice. Mention fathers’ rights and many people picture men dressed in superhero costumes, scaling prominent public buildings. The spectacle is easily framed as eccentric or comic rather than as an expression of parental grief or systemic injustice.

In White’s terms, what should be understood as a tragic account of separation and loss is instead emplotted as farce or stunt. Coverage remains sparse and sensationalised, leaving the issue misunderstood and trivialised, obscuring both the scale and harm of father exclusion from the broader public. The social, emotional, and legal consequences of this systemic exclusion therefore go largely unrecognised, and the fathers and children affected remain virtually invisible.

Against this backdrop of trivialisation, I welcome the efforts of Fathers4Justice and lament the fact that such tactics were the only way to draw attention to the issue, to the extent that they did. The ridicule that those publicity stunts received was cruel and missed the point. That said, we need something different; something thoughtful, inclusive, and sensitive to children, fathers and mothers alike. Media spectacle may generate short-term attention, but without sustained recognition through engagement and institutional reform, news coverage alone fades without delivering meaningful change.

Denied contact, fatherhood becomes an abstraction. The anxiety is almost constant. I’m invisible to my son and I fear him growing up believing I rejected him. I fear him carrying scars that were never his to bear, succumbing to one of the negative repercussions of father absence I outline above.

I have largely stopped sharing these anxieties with friends and family. I learned early on that it is not uncommon for people to be dismissive without realising it. Some try to sound helpful, often saying the same thing: “Don’t give up. Children grow up, gain independence, and you can have a relationship with your son in the future, when he’s older.”

I try to explain how devastating it is to be entirely absent from my son’s life; to be missing his childhood altogether. I try to explain that by the time he is an adult, it may already be too late. He will almost certainly have been told his father was not interested in knowing him, and he may reject me before I ever have a chance to speak. I dread to think what his mother tells him, and his siblings, to justify her extraordinary behaviour. She always used to speak ill of her first husband within earshot of my stepchildren. His children.

I’m not sharing this to elicit sympathy or claim victimhood. I want people to recognise the empathy gap that allows fathers to be dismissed or disbelieved, and to understand how it contributes to prejudice and systemic bias.

When I speak about being alienated from my child’s life, people tend to say, with good intentions, that children “form their own views” as they grow up and “see the truth eventually.” Each time I hear this, my heart sinks. It is another reminder that they do not truly grasp what is being lost. I have stopped asking them to imagine how they would feel if they had a child in this world and did not know whether that child was safe – or even alive.

And yet, I do imagine. I imagine how those same people would respond if I were a mother rather than a father. If I were a woman who had a child somewhere in the world and did not know whether her child was safe or well, did not even know whether her child was alive, because she had been entirely denied access to him.

No one would tell her to wait until that child reached adulthood. No one would suggest that the loss of an entire childhood was something she should simply endure. They would recognise her anguish immediately. They would feel urgency. They would see the injustice and want something done. They would insist that a child should not be separated from his or her mother without the gravest justification.

This is the difference. This is how deeply parental inequality is ingrained in our attitudes. When a father is excluded, he is told to wait, to hope, to accept the permanent loss of time he can never recover. We would never expect a mother to do the same.

Again, I’m not asking for sympathy. Sympathy alone won’t help me: what I seek is change, so that others do not have to endure the same exclusion.

We are told to let go of grievance, so that it doesn’t consume us. But this isn’t an option when letting go means abandoning your child.

Each year on his birthday I kiss one of the few photographs I have of my son, entrenched on my phone screen, and sing “Happy Birthday” aloud to an empty room. I have never been allowed to do it in person. I have never been permitted to take him to school, kick a ball about in a park, or hold his hand through a doctor’s appointment. I’m yet to get through a rendition without tears streaming down my cheeks.

The no-shows to court-scheduled visits I flew across the Atlantic for still plague me. Now he has disappeared entirely. It is difficult to convey the anguish of having a child and not knowing whether he is safe. Sometimes it jolts me awake in the middle of the night, drenched in cold sweat.

I started this essay with the opening lines of Kahlil Gibran’s poetic essay On Children, from The Prophet. A few lines on from those I quoted above, he wrote:

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams

My father memorised those lines and used to quote them verbatim to my sister and me as children. He did so in the car, on the weekends when he came to collect us for the access my mother didn’t deny him. Back then, I didn’t appreciate Gibran’s words. The thought of my sweet father not being able to visit me in the house of tomorrow felt devastating. I already missed him desperately enough during the weekdays without him, I couldn’t contemplate a future without him.

Now, Gibran’s words haunt me a second time. I feel the urgency of needing to establish a bond with my child before he is lost to the house of tomorrow; and the fear of what impact his childhood will have in shaping that house for him.

I wish his mother would consider this too.

I document this experience because there is, frankly, nothing else I can do at this point. Writing about it has offered a measure of solace; a way to make sense of chaos, to stay patient, to endure helplessness and grow resilient. I write to gain a sense of purpose through pain; and make peace with that which I cannot control. I write because it feels less futile than singing to a child who cannot hear me.

By sharing my story, I am searching for any support that might help locate my child. I do not expect to change institutions, but hope to illuminate father exclusion: a problem that remains largely invisible.

This story is not just about me and my son, but all fathers fighting to remain present in their children’s lives against a system that ignores their pain and silences their voice: despite the harm it causes children and wider society. If we truly care about children’s well-being, we must start acknowledging father exclusion. Not just in family courts and through fairer legislation, but in the media and in our cultural understanding of parenthood.

My story is not merely a personal tragedy. It reveals a societal reality we collectively refuse to confront: father exclusion. Let that term take hold. It’s a phenomenon that is widespread, under-documented and culturally taboo to discuss.

One of my goals in sharing this story is to advance a rationale argument in favour of gender equality in parenting, guided by the humanist case for balanced parental rights. A more immediate goal is to get any help I can in finding my child.

I hope my son and stepchildren are safe and well. I cannot reclaim the early years that have been stolen from us. But I cling to an enduring hope: that my son will one day know how fiercely I fought for him; and how deeply I loved him across the void of silence. Though I have no rights concerning my stepchildren, I hope they too will know that I shall forever hold them both in my heart.

If excluded fathers and their children have been denied everything else, we should at least be able to offer them this: the possibility of hope; and the promise that their story will no longer be invisible.

Thank you for reading. If this essay speaks to something you’ve lived or witnessed, I’d be grateful for your help:

1. If you know anyone connected to fathers’ rights or child-abduction advocacy who might help me locate my son, please share this with them.

2. If you’re an excluded father yourself, I’d love to hear your story – perhaps I can help you tell it. Please feel free to contact me via my Substack account.

3. If you know someone affected by father exclusion, past or present, please share this essay with them. No one should face this alone.

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“Have you read any Victor Hugo?” he asked me, somewhere on the edge of St Peter Port, during one of our walks many years ago.

“No,” I admitted sheepishly, fearing I would go down in his estimation.

“He described the Channel Islands as ‘bits of France that fell into the sea and were picked up by England,’ if I remember it correctly,” he said with a smile. He knew he had it exactly right; modesty was second nature to him.

“It’s a good line,” he added, enjoying Hugo’s words as much as the chance to pass them on to his grandson.

He also knew that it was just a line, that Hugo was bending history more than a little, adding poetic license to the story of how the Channel Islands came to be British Crown Dependencies. Even so, I wondered how my ancestors at the time had felt about being picked up by England. They clung to their Patois dialect for more than seven hundred years afterwards.

To this day, Guernsey’s advocates, the equivalent of barristers and solicitors in England (lawyers and attorneys elsewhere), still go to Caen to spend three months studying French law and old Norman law, in French. You can already guess how I first came to know this.

Douglas Howard Child, my grandpa and great teller of stories, was born on 17th March 1920. He was my only English grandparent, yet he had the good grace to enter this world on St Patrick’s Day.

In 1935, fifteen-year-old Douglas was accepted as an aircraft apprentice at the No. 1 School of Technical Training at Halton, then the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) aircraft engineering academy. His decision was shaped less by ambition than by circumstance. He lived with his grandmother, and there was not enough money to keep him at school; he understood this and didn’t want to be a burden. Of his own accord, he applied to Halton.

He had once hoped to become a pilot, but colour blindness ruled that out, and so he turned to engineering instead. It was a practical choice, quietly made, that would set the course of his life.

He was deployed to Guernsey on 3rd September 1939, attached to No. 201 Squadron, as a nineteen-year-old RAF engineer. At the exact time he was airborne from England, that same air carried the voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, via radio transmission:

“I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared, at once, to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.”

Not long after his arrival on that little island off the coast of Normandy, he met a seventeen-year-old local girl called Doreen Bougourd during a trip to the pictures one evening. Luckily for Douglas, Doreen spoke English as a matter of choice – although as a child she had to mix this with Patois or ‘good’ French at home, to please a grandmother who refused to speak English.

Without the Second World War, I would not exist.

Within a year of Chamberlain’s declaration of war, Guernsey was “demilitarised” by the British, and Doreen, together with her sister Frances and their mother Elsie, had been evacuated to London ahead of the German occupation of the island.

Douglas moved between different locations, spending time on Merseyside where he witnessed the first German bombing raid on Liverpool’s docks, before being posted south to gain a front-row view of the Battle of Britain. For a large part of this period he was stationed at Thorney Island with RAF Coastal Command, a base that itself came under attack from the Luftwaffe.

It was around the time of that momentous summer and autumn of 1940 that, alongside maintaining aircraft engines, he was also training conscripts drawn from a wide range of social backgrounds, lumped together largely on the basis of their technical expertise.

This involved giving classroom instruction to new recruits, and he later liked to recount how he became adept at throwing a piece of chalk to wake a dozing ‘student’. On one occasion, while delivering a lecture based on a textbook on metal fatigue or a similar topic, he scored a direct hit. He told his target that if he paid attention, he might learn something. The reply came back: “I wrote the book,” and the pupil was promptly excused.

He once overheard a colleague chide a new conscript assigned to wash a car: “You’d work harder at it if it were your car.” The conscript didn’t miss a beat: “If it were mine, I’d have my chauffeur do it.”

In the Spring of 1941, my grandparents were married on the coast of Kent, to the sound of gunfire from across La Manche. Doreen knew her father would not have given his approval for her to marry so young. At the time, however, he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp at Laufen, Bavaria, for his participation in Guernsey’s resistance to Nazi occupation – a story for another time.

Wartime promotions came rapidly, and by 1943 Douglas was a Sergeant serving at a training base in Cumbria, where bits of aircraft would fall out of the sky on a regular basis. During this period, he studied his superiors closely, absorbing every detail as they worked at the operations desk. Each Sergeant had an operational blackboard listing aircraft and their maintenance status, updated continuously with information passed from their Flight Sergeant who sat at his desk, almost glued to the telephone.

Douglas later performed the more senior role himself as a Flight Sergeant during the 1948–49 Berlin Airlift. He worked twelve-hour shifts at the end of a telephone line, so absorbed that it often surprised him when his relief came on duty to take over. He said it was the best RAF operation he was ever involved with.

In June 1943, Doreen gave birth to the first of four children, a baby boy they named Michael. He was still an infant when Douglas was then deployed to Asia, not returning home until 1947. By the time he arrived back in Guernsey, he was a stranger to his four-year-old son. Young Michael knew only island voices and was shocked to hear Douglas speak – his daddy sounded like “a visitor.”

When Douglas was deployed East, he and his comrades had no idea where they were being sent. He remembered the voyage as a guessing game: sailing down past the Bay of Biscay, around the Iberian Peninsula, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and into the Indian Ocean. Still, no one knew their destination.

They pressed on south, imagining Antarctica might be the next landfall. Then one morning, on the empty horizon, the tops of coconut palms rose from the sea like a mirage. They had reached the Cocos Islands, the British military’s staging post between Ceylon and Australia. The first aircraft to arrive were Spitfires that Douglas helped to unpack in a hurry to ready them for air defence. He then focussed his time on the maintenance and refuelling of aircraft passing through … and honing his skills as a Bridge player.

Douglas would recount tales of how bomber pilots always meticulously checked their aircraft before taking off. Fighter pilots, by contrast, would simply jump into the cockpit like a racing car driver and expect everything to work. Bomber crews, he noted, were often men with engineering backgrounds, inclined to trust their own inspections, while fighter pilots, trained to scramble at a moment’s notice, had little choice but to rely on the ground crews who kept their machines ready.

Douglas served in the Pacific until the dropping of two atomic bombs ended the war, triggering a scramble to bring troops home. Regular servicemen like Douglas had to retrace their steps back westwards and relieve departing colleagues, effectively holding the reins of a crumbling British Empire.

From the Pacific he sailed west to Bombay, then onward inland to be stationed at the Deolali transit camp, of “doolally” fame – a place legendary for its boredom and chaos, where the army’s humour was as necessary as its discipline.

After Deolali, Douglas was posted to India’s north-west frontier where he remained during Partition, near Peshawar. There he trained pilots – men who would soon form the nucleus of Pakistan’s air force – in engineering. They were, he liked to say, “good pilots but bloomin’ awful engineers.”

He described the place as utterly remote – at or near the Khyber Pass, as I remember being told – and reachable by flying over a mountain ridge before cutting the plane’s engine and dropping steeply into the landing strip below. As the aircraft descended in silence, local tribesmen would often take rifle potshots at them from the surrounding hillsides.

Douglas eventually left India in 1947 to be reunited with Doreen after years apart. They had a second son, Geoffrey, the following year, then my mother, Susan, in 1949. After a decade in which they all moved with Douglas’s postings in Germany, Cornwall and Ireland, they eventually settled back in Guernsey, where a fourth child – my aunty ‘Jin-Jan’ – completed the family.

Decades later in France, where he and Doreen spent their retirement summers, Douglas admitted feeling guilty about his war experience: “I had an easy war. Civilians had it a lot worse.”

He explained that recently qualified, very young servicemen were usually the ones sent overseas. He himself initially avoided this because his skills as a trained aircraft engineer were needed to instruct the influx of new conscripts.

Many of those he knew who went abroad, he said, never returned; and one who did come back, returned so deeply traumatised that he soon ended his life by walking into the spinning propeller of the aircraft he was working on.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother carrying me down an outdoor staircase from a small aeroplane at Guernsey airport. She handed me to a man in white overalls standing on the runway waiting to greet us. Guernsey is a small and friendly island, but it turned out that handing a visiting toddler to an aircraft engineer on the runway was not the customary reception.

The man was my grandpa, his RAF service and globetrotting long since ended, seeing out his career in civil aviation at the same airport that had been his first war posting in 1939. He was about to swap aircraft engine maintenance for a retirement of Portuguese winters and Bretagne summers, with extended sojourns in Spain. He went on to achieve master status as a Bridge player and watch his offspring swell in number.

Douglas passed away in the summer of 2017, nine years after Doreen, having eventually returned once more to the little island that had “fallen off France and been picked up by England.” He was surrounded by his four children, had ten grandchildren and, at that time, nine great-grandchildren (now eleven, my son being the tenth). He was ninety-seven years old and, in our family, the last of his generation.

He set an example for us all to follow, in more ways than one, and I felt honoured to speak on behalf of the family at his funeral, held at Le Foulon Chapel in St Peter Port. I read the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote on “What is success?” and spoke of Grandpa’s love of Voltaire and poetry, reading Robert Burns’ Epitaph on my own Friend. I concluded my remarks by quoting Shakespeare, with Hamlet’s words to Horatio:

“He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”

As I reflected on his life while preparing for the funeral, I was struck by how Grandpa had been present at some of the 20th century’s major events. It was an observation he was too modest to make himself, despite all the captivating stories of his wartime experiences.

I wish I had sat down with him to flesh out his anecdotes; I wish I had turned my hand to writing seriously whilst he was still alive. Uncle Geoff and cousin Nathan made some wonderful audio recordings with him to capture his stories, but didn’t get everything.

In the years since, I’ve often returned to this train of thought, grappling with a deep sense of regret at not recording these stories sooner: before I started writing, before the details faded, before the storyteller himself was gone.

“Stuck in Marseille” - Douglas in his own words (pictured with joint ground & aircrew + Blenheim bomber)

One conclusion I’ve drawn is that those times of great challenge and existential threat in the last century required an incredible degree of solidarity and unity of purpose that is once again much needed, but seems to be lacking in our societies right now.

We talk about Douglas and Doreen’s generation being the greatest, and I certainly subscribe to that view. However, we tend to emphasise the extraordinary bravery and resilience shown by so many during that dark chapter of modern history. Whilst courage and fortitude were undoubtedly evident, they were made possible through the incredible sense of shared purpose during that time; and surely that is the crucial factor which sets the wartime generation apart from others. They understood that they needed to pull together.

It is the example I draw inspiration from, coupled with a desire to go further, beyond shared purpose to true social cohesion. I write Gridlocked because I want to see a more equitable world; one that operates sustainably, so future generations can inherit viable societies on a liveable planet. That might sound idealistic. But in a time of accelerating climate breakdown, rising inequality and deep social division, it increasingly feels like a necessary ambition. That’s without even considering the current geopolitical outlook.

We have extraordinary knowledge, expertise and technology at our disposal.
So why do we seem unable to make the breakthroughs we need? Gridlocked is my ongoing attempt to explore that question, searching for ways through the deadlock that defines so much of contemporary life.

Overcoming the challenges of the last century – and those of the centuries before, even in pre-industrial times – often depended on the quiet ingenuity of engineers like my grandpa to break through societal impasses with innovative solutions. It is the systems and mechanisms designed and maintained by engineers that enable the realisation of big ideas.

Now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, as we face challenges as great as those encountered in my grandparents’ youth, perhaps it is once again to the engineers that we should look for solutions.

So, blessed are the engineers, for they will enable us to inherit the earth. And while we may not have recorded all of the stories of my family’s beloved engineer, they live on in the fragments we carry and share whenever we come together. They have taken on a ritualistic quality. We’ve all heard them before, yet delight in telling them over again – with added gusto when a younger member of the clan is present to hear it for the first time.

These exchanges act as a kind of informal verification, sometimes prompting long-forgotten anecdotes, which my uncle Geoff can usually be relied upon to retrieve. As he recalls, “I remember Dad saying how low he felt after Dunkirk, like so many others across the country. Then came Churchill’s speeches, which he said inspired him and made him believe we could win the war after all.”

Today, there is no Churchill. Our societies are too divided for inspiration to arrive – and be accepted – in the form of a single voice, broadcast to a populace holding its breath. Instead, we are left to seek it out for ourselves.

I have come to realise that I draw much of mine from my grandfather’s example. When I was young, I felt faintly embarrassed by my clunky name and avoided using it in full. I still don’t. But over time, embarrassment has given way to quiet pride: Nicholas Daniel Douglas O’Hara. Indeed, there is a story behind each name. So far, only Jasper, my cousin Carmen’s youngest son, and I carry Douglas’s name. My son was supposed to have it too; but that’s a story for another time.

As I think back on Grandpa’s life, I think of an intellect that was both grounded and theoretical. I think of his quiet competence, his patience, his belief that problems existed to be solved. It leads me to wonder whether what we miss most from his generation is neither bravery nor grand vision, but something simpler: common purpose and the humility to get on with the work. It was enough, for him, to keep the engines running.

I still look for him each time I disembark from an aeroplane.

- with thanks to my uncle, Geoffrey Child, for his review and input.

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“Hope is alive,” he declared to a couple of thousand people gathered last night at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre. He had just been confirmed as the mayor-elect of New York City. His words changed the tone of what otherwise might have been a conventional election night in America.

He spoke with clarity and conviction; delivering a powerful, unflinching victory speech. It contrasted sharply with the empty platitudes offered just moments earlier in two other victory speeches, delivered by two other Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey.

’s speech was different because he is different. His speech wasn’t a politician nodding to donors, but the leader of a movement finally taking a breath after a hard fought, historic campaign for change (as I previewed here five months ago).

He said that New Yorkers could finally exhale because they had chosen “hope over big money and small ideas.”

New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know.

We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale.

Thanks to all of those who sacrificed so much. We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn.

- Zohran Mamdani

He continued, “we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us: now it is something that we do.”

Perhaps the most powerful section of his speech – the final flourish of campaign poetry before the prose of governing – came when he spoke about political power being held in the hands of ordinary New Yorkers:

For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands.

Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.

Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.

- Zohran Mamdani

When Mamdani finished speaking, an immediate rebuke came from across the East River. It signalled a major part of the challenge that awaits him when he takes office in January. Because the biggest obstacle Mamdani faces isn’t conservative opponents, but those within his own party’s establishment who continue to refuse to support him.

Clutching their pearls over in CNN’s Manhattan studio, David Axelrod and Van Jones slammed the tone of Mamdani’s speech. They preferred the hollow clichés offered earlier in the evening by governors-elect Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in Virginia and New Jersey. The pundits preferred continuation of the status quo.

But the CNN reaction provided the surest sign that Mamdani had struck the right chord. Indeed, that he was pitch perfect.

The distance between that Brooklyn stage and that Manhattan studio desk says so much about how power – and imagination – is shifting in politics right now. Not just U.S. politics, but in post-industrialised societies across the world.

When CNN disapproves of your speech, you’re probably saying the right things. You’re probably speaking to the people who matter most. And they are calling for change. Long overdue change, as Mamdani noted last night: “Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come.”

Now the real battle begins …

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Imagine yourself stood outside, in a storm. Not a metaphorical one, but actual rain. Slick streets, car headlight beams piercing through slate sky, illuminating sparkling flecks of falling water. The kind of weather that leaves no room for interpretation. You’re either wet or you aren’t. And you are wet, because it is raining. You go inside, turn on the television and listen to a man in a suit tell you that some believe it is raining, while others have their doubts. No mention of the soaked camera lens. No acknowledgement of the umbrellas crowding the frame. Just the suggestion that truth is something that is up for grabs.

This is how we live now: in the space between what is happening and what we are told might be. Facts, when inconvenient, become opinions; reality becomes something to be argued. The storm, meanwhile, goes on.

It is inescapably evident that we are living in an era of populism. Ordinary citizens, in increasing numbers, are rejecting the establishment narratives pushed by political elites and parroted by mainstream ‘legacy’ media outlets; both of whom serve as compliant stenographers of talking points designed to promote the interests of wealthy individuals and large corporations, but framed as being in the common interest. Talking points which often attempt to make us question whether it has been raining, despite the fact of our being utterly drenched.

Against this backdrop, across western societies, trust in mainstream media has declined sharply and major outlets are losing the battle to be relevant in the 21^st century. Indeed, mainstream media is utterly failing right now to hold power accountable; the slack is being picked up by new media that is independent.

Established news platforms are experiencing ever-shrinking readership and viewing figures. To switch metaphors: they’re drowning in a new media sea in which independent sites and podcasters are riding the waves, propelled by impassioned audiences; largely comprised of adults under 30.

What we are increasingly witnessing is the breakdown of the propaganda model revealed to us almost 40 years ago by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The same filters and elite interests that have shaped our public discourse for so long are struggling to maintain control in the age of social media.

This unravelling of legacy media’s authority is not without precedent. Indeed, throughout history, the relationship between media and power has neither been static nor neutral. Newspapers have long been shaped by those who could afford both printing presses and political access.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, print media on both sides of the Atlantic was the domain of wealthy industrialists and aristocrats like William Randolph Hearst (New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner), Lord Northcliffe (The Times and Daily Mail), Lord Beaverbrook (Daily Express) and Lord Rothermere (Daily Mail). The most prominent contemporary equivalent has, for several decades now, been Rupert Murdoch (The Sun, The Times and Fox News).

Irrespective of the era, what these men have in common is that none of them were content on merely reporting what was happening in the world. They each needed to weaponise news coverage; to bend it to fit the contours of their own ambition, commercial interest and political outlook. The press, far from being the romanticised fourth estate in service of the people, has long served instead as a mouthpiece for the powerful.

Broadcast media has evolved differently, repackaged in smoother tones transmitted directly into our living rooms. With tight regulatory frameworks and high barriers to entry, control of broadcast media throughout the 20th century remained highly centralised and, certainly in its early decades, aligned with state and corporate interests. This started to change with deregulation from the 1980s onwards; western media has increasingly both reflected and promoted the spread of neoliberal ideology since.

In the 21st century, cracks formed in the glossy surface of traditional media have become ever more apparent to the public. Audiences, so often told not to trust their own soaked skin in the rain, began to look elsewhere. This loss of faith didn’t happen overnight but by stealth. Today, faced with a media landscape that no longer reflects them, growing numbers have turned toward something new: platforms that feel less curated and less condescending. Audiences have sought out something rawer and more direct to cut through the sanitised spin and consumerist drivel of mainstream media. New media, born of the internet and fuelled by digital technology, hasn’t just offered alternatives: it has offered a way out.

We define new media here as digital forms of communication that have emerged through the internet and related technologies, encompassing platforms such as social media, blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels and independent news websites. Unlike traditional or legacy media – newspapers, television and radio – new media is characterised by its interactivity, decentralisation and the ease with which almost anyone can publish content. These platforms have allowed a diverse range of voices to emerge, offering more personalised, on-demand and sometimes niche perspectives that appeal to audiences disillusioned with the perceived gatekeeping and editorial biases of mainstream outlets.

Audience figures have shifted significantly from traditional outlets to digital platforms, with many people now turning to social media, streaming services and independent content creators as their primary, or only, port of call for news and entertainment. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) have become key sources of information, especially among younger audiences. Podcasts and newsletters (often hosted on platforms like here on Substack or Patreon) are growing in popularity, offering more personalised and direct communication between creators and audiences. This shift reflects a demand for immediacy and a greater plurality of voices outside of mainstream narratives.

These new online platforms and outlets provide a direct channel to audiences from figures such as , Tucker Carlson, , Dave Smith, , Steve Bannon, – and, until recently, the late Charlie Kirk – to name but just a few of the eclectic mix of leading voices right now. Whether from the right or the left, these folks can be considered the ‘titans of new media’ and they are challenging the established narratives that legacy outlets – CNN, Fox News, BBC, The New York Times, you name it – promulgate.

Back in 1988, Herman and Chomsky warned us that the (mainstream) media serves elite interests. Today, independent media is rallying to resist that dynamic. But what’s driving audiences towards independent outlets? The short answer is that there is a myriad of reasons that we cannot do justice to in this piece. But we’ll try to present a flavour from across the board here.

In both the U.S. and the UK, many politically right-leaning audiences have increasingly turned to independent media platforms and podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, and The Ben Shapiro Show, as well as outlets like The Daily Wire, GB News and Rebel News. This shift has been driven by what many on the right perceive as biased and censorious liberal establishment propaganda.

A fundamental turning point in the U.S. was media reporting in the lead-up to the Iraq War, where major outlets uncritically amplified claims about weapons of mass destruction that were later shown to be lies, fuelling a broader backlash against U.S. foreign policy interventionism. This helped shape the rise of “America First” sentiment and growing hostility toward what many term “forever wars.”

More recently, perceived underreporting or biased coverage of issues such as immigration, COVID-19 policies (including vaccination and mask mandates) and what some term “gender ideology” have further reinforced the belief that mainstream outlets fail to offer balanced or honest reporting. For these audiences, as with their left-leaning counterparts who go to sources like Novara Media for their news, independent platforms are seen as more transparent and unfiltered. Across the political spectrum, there is huge audience appetite for seeing dominant narratives challenged.

In recent years, a series of high-profile controversies have deepened public scepticism toward legacy media, with critics from both right and left perspectives pointing to cases of incomplete, biased or contested reporting. One such example is the BBC’s coverage of the Brexit debate, which drew significant criticism. From a pro-Remain perspective, analysts and commentators argued that, in an effort to appear balanced, the BBC gave undue weight to Leave campaigners’ claims – many of which were misleading or false – without adequately challenging them. To give just one example: the bare-faced lie that Turkey was imminently about to be admitted into the European Union.

Critics, including former BBC journalists, accused the broadcaster of adopting a “false balance” approach that legitimised fringe views and failed to rigorously interrogate the economic and political risks of leaving the EU. A decade on, with those risks materialised in a weakened economy, the broadcaster is now complicit in stifling discussion of the subject.

In trying to understand the shift away from mainstream media there are several angles to look at, each worthy of its own essay. We don’t claim to offer a comprehensive analysis here. In the follow-up to this piece, we will touch on how audience disconnect is further compounded by how representative of society at large the gatekeepers to our public discourse are, from editors to literary agents and commissioning producers. In this piece we are focusing on the framing of news itself.

Perhaps nothing has eroded trust in western mainstream media more in recent times than its utter inability – or, frankly, unwillingness – to provide objective coverage of events in Gaza over the past two years. The tone was set from the outset with the false reporting of the events on 7^th October itself. What happened that day was horrific enough; mainstream media didn’t need to spread sensationalist disinformation about beheaded babies or babies in ovens. It set the tone of what was to follow.

We then had the bombing of Al‑Ahli Arab Hospital, when major outlets like BBC, Reuters, and The New York Times initially reported claims – based on statements from the Gaza Health Ministry – that an Israeli airstrike had caused the fatal explosion. Subsequent reporting, including Israeli military statements and U.S. intelligence assessments, contested this version and attributed the blast to a misfired rocket from within Gaza by Palestinian actors. Mainstream media decided to amplify these Israeli claims, which turned out to be false.

Thereafter those same outlets continued to downplay the evidence of human rights organisations and independent health workers documenting widespread and repeated Israeli strikes on hospitals and healthcare infrastructure throughout the conflict. The shifting narratives and early misreporting in this case set the tone. After a while, when it became clear that mainstream western media would do its bidding pretty much come what may, Israel simply stopped denying that it was, in fact, bombing Gaza’s hospitals.

Audiences tend to be fair-minded. Many of us are able to accept how high-pressure news cycles can lead to the rapid spread of unverified initial claims, especially in complex war zones. However, the way that most mainstream media outlets have ‘doubled-down’ on false claims or simply ignored the evidence refuting their earlier reporting has understandably infuriated so many of us.

These incidents have added to the perception that legacy media can not only be slow to correct errors, but is hesitant to challenge official narratives and, indeed, is overly influenced by political considerations. This in turn prompts many audience members to turn to alternative and independent media for what they see as more honest or representative coverage.

It’s worth dwelling on this point. Some investigative journalism has uncovered evidence that editorial decisions in major western outlets have been influenced by the Israeli government. For example, internal memos and testimonies revealed that CNN staff have been operating under strict guidelines influenced by Israeli government statements, requiring every story about the Gaza onslaught to be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau before publication. Staffers described directives from top management shaping the narrative and limiting content from Palestinian perspectives, in some cases suppressing or delaying reporting about Palestinian suffering compared to coverage of Israeli suffering.

BBC journalists similarly reported that senior newsroom figures downplayed Israeli atrocities or altered framing under pressure. These findings suggest that media bias is not only about omission or error, but may also involve systematic influence behind the scenes, reinforcing public distrust in mainstream news sources.

Time and again, mainstream media outlets have insisted on amplifying Israeli claims even after they have been shown to be not true – as though broadcasting one side’s lies somehow balances a story. But you cannot be neutral on facts.

Even now, despite everything that has been livestreamed to a global audience across multiple platforms, corroborated by independent human rights NGOs, academic experts and the key offices within the United Nations itself, The New York Times continues to operate editorial guidance that insists on caution in using terms like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” or even “occupied territory” – despite everything our lying eyes can see.

Just last week, as mainstream media reported news of the latest “ceasefire” deal as though the Middle East crisis has been resolved, the skewed framing persisted. A key feature of the deal involved the swap of people. But the language used by every mainstream outlet revealed widespread bias. The last living Israeli “hostages” were returned home, whereas as Palestinian “prisoners” were returned. There is, fundamentally, no difference between them. Both had been cruelly and unjustifiably held captive without due process; without having been convicted of committing any crime. But a “hostage” is an innocent victim, whereas a “prisoner” is a bad criminal.

Again, only last week a striking example of mainstream media bias emerged in relation to this wider story. First, we need to rewind to November 2004 and football-related violence in Amsterdam; when supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv – an Israeli club with a documented history of violent and racist fan behaviour – instigated serious disturbances in the city. Eyewitness accounts and independent footage showed Maccabi hooligans vandalising property, chanting hate slogans – such as “Let the IDF win, f**k the Arabs” and “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left” – and terrorising local residents.

Despite this, major outlets like Sky News reframed events (and their own initial reporting), portraying the perpetrators as victims of antisemitic abuse. Footage was edited or removed, and in one case, video of Maccabi fans chasing a local resident was falsely presented as the reverse. This selective framing – or media gaslighting – undermined trust by contradicting widely available evidence.

Other mainstream media skipped over the initial Maccabi violence altogether, starting their coverage with local resident responses to the provocation. As Rivka Brown highlighted in a Novara Media piece, this timeline manipulation reflects a familiar pattern: reshaping narratives to align with preferred political or ideological positions.

The issue resurfaced last week because West Midlands Police banned Maccabi supporters from attending an upcoming match in Birmingham against English club Aston Villa, citing safety concerns rooted in the Amsterdam disorder. Despite public support for the ban, senior political figures including Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned it, siding with a foreign group linked to violent extremism over police advice and local sentiment. This alignment continues to baffle many, intensifying accusations of institutional bias in both the media and political establishment.

And so, the growing gap between official narratives and ground-level realities contributes to public disillusionment. Many now feel that mainstream outlets prioritise political messaging over truth, driving audiences toward independent media in search of more honest reporting.

There is so much more we could write on this; we are barely scratching the surface. But here’s the thing: once you see news coverage designed to promote a particular agenda, you cannot unsee it. And then, will you continue tuning in to those news sources you know are deceiving you?

Step forward independent new media. Back in the summer, from both the right and the left, from Tucker Carlson through Dave Smith to Ana Kasparian, new media commentators with the biggest audiences were speaking out against war with Iran. And the numbers showed that – unlike their legacy media counterparts – they were in tune with ordinary U.S. citizens. In a June 13–16 Economist/YouGov poll, 60% of Americans said they opposed U.S. military involvement in a war with Iran, with only 16% in favour and 24% undecided. A Washington Post poll a couple of days later echoed that same cautionary stance.

But mainstream media coverage seemed blind to public sentiment. It seemed stuck in the same mindset that it had in the build up to the Iraq war a generation earlier. It got called out. If you missed Tucker Carlson’s interview with Senator Ted Cruz back in June, we strongly encourage you to have a watch. It provides the perfect example to illustrate this point.

For now, to return to the analogy, it’s been raining outside for a long time. Legacy media needs to start challenging those who keep insisting – lying through their teeth – that it ain’t raining. But rather than do this, it usually just parrots the lies. This only leads to more and more of us tuning out.

This decline of legacy media is no longer speculative: it is measurable, structural and increasingly irreversible. As outlined in a piece for DAME Magazine earlier this year, public trust in mainstream news outlets has fallen to historic lows; just 31% of Americans say they believe news organisations report “fully, accurately and fairly,” whilst 36% say they now have “no trust at all.” More striking still: for younger generations, national media is hardly more trusted than social platforms. Molloy notes that among under‑30s, there’s barely any difference in trust between what they get from the Washington Post and what they consume from scrolling on TikTok.

Behind these numbers lie deeper institutional problems. As Molloy argues, billionaire ownership has warped editorial priorities. When owners openly influence the ideological framing of opinion sections, or direct coverage in terms beneficial to them, credibility suffers … and audiences can sniff it out. The ‘balance’ once claimed by large outlets is now implicated – sometimes even enforced via AI‑tooling – in absurd outcomes that treats extremist, fringe or blatant self-interest viewpoints as legitimate counterpoints, rather than examining them critically.

What independent journalism offers that legacy media increasingly doesn’t is transparency about where it’s coming from.

– Parker Molloy

So, in the year 2025, audiences are rejecting stenography masquerading as journalism. Readers, listeners and viewers in this new media landscape demand factual reporting and authentic analysis, representing a spectrum of views free from corporate filters and government propaganda. Steve Bannon might be an architect of the MAGA movement, yet some of his audience is actually left-leaning folks simply seeking an authentic, in-depth discussion that hasn’t been sanitised through focus-grouped PR spin.

This year feels like it could be pivotal for independent journalism challenging established narratives and hitherto ‘perceived wisdom.’ We have witnessed independent outlets increasingly calling out what legacy institutions normalise: political hypocrisy, corporate influence and billionaire class self-interest. All the while, often doing so in a longer format in order to provide important context that the mainstream often omits in its condensed segments.

Last month, The Guardian ran an opinion piece entitled “Why have top Democratic leaders failed to endorse rising star Zohran Mamdani?” This subject has been covered ad nauseum by independent outlets like The Majority Report, Breaking Points and The Young Turks on YouTube ever since Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for NYC Mayor back in late June. Indeed, The Guardian has been playing catch-up on everything to do with Mamdani’s meteoric rise prior to and post his securing of the nomination. It is just the latest in a growing list of examples of mainstream media outlets being utterly behind the curve.

The rise of new media influencers represents a break from the agenda-setting monopoly of legacy outlets. In Herman and Chomsky’s analysis, corporate and political elites dominate public discourse. New media breaks that gatekeeping structure and offers some prospect of resistance, through allowing counter‑voices to confront mainstream messaging before consent is fully manufactured.

The big question, to our minds, is not whether new independent media can change the political agenda in major western societies. It is, rather, to what extent.

There’s no doubt that we are in a new information age defined by a disrupted media landscape. The ability of everyone and his or her dog to get a microphone and start a podcast has brought diverse narratives to wider audiences. No longer is dissent restricted to op‑eds or niche blogs; it’s now front and centre with the ability to achieve direct and widespread reach.

As Carlson’s remarkable interview with Ted Cruz this summer demonstrated, millions will tune in to hear alternative voices that challenge the establishment narrative, including people across ideological spectrums. We are also witnessing real-time accountability. Independent outlets fact-check, challenge and mobilise public pressure rapidly, in ways that are far more agile than entrenched media hierarchies of old.

However, there are downsides. Whilst rousing core audiences and seeking a degree of ‘cross-pollination’ between different outlets, alternative media fragments discourse into ideological silos. Most channels face severe resource constraints, especially for new entrants. Whereas many legacy outlets benefit from deeper institutional support from powerful interests, independent creators rely on ads, donations, or platform algorithms that can be fickle – hence why we’re constantly being told to “please hit like and subscribe” when we tune in.

Tucker Carlson and others like him have come from mainstream media and ought to operate with a certain level of journalistic rigour. Others have gone straight into podcasting without any formal journalistic training. This presents a clear regulatory and information risk from a lack of robust professional conduct standards.

Additionally, new media is not immune to the same pressures and influence that their more established counterparts face, including when it comes to their supposed USP: authenticity and accuracy. Whilst many consumers are drawn to the unfiltered or independent nature of these voices, not all new media creators are as grassroots as they appear. Some platforms and personalities are covertly funded by wealthy individuals, corporations or political groups with specific agendas, calling into question the independence of their content.

Furthermore, the lack of rigorous editorial standards across much of new media increases the risk of misinformation, sensationalism and echo chambers, making it harder for audiences to distinguish fact from opinion or propaganda. So, as trust in legacy media continues to decline, it is crucial to approach new media critically, recognising both its potential and its pitfalls.

That said, at a time when plutocratic power needs to be challenged somehow, the benefits outweigh the downsides. We should be mindful of how rising threats of censorship, demonetisation or content moderation policies could silence or marginalise these new media voices. As we will come on to discuss, the establishment is already using the coercive power of the state to do just that.

But resisting isn’t the same as stopping. A sustained push from our new media titans will only matter if they maintain cross-partisan credibility; appealing not just to ideological bases, but to the wider public. They must also connect discourse to the levers of power, pressuring elected representatives and public officials to change course.

In their 2023 book, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life), George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison outline the ways in which neoliberalism has permeated modern life over the past 50 years. They touch on how the media has played a big part in advancing a pervasive ideology that preys on ever increasing aspects of our lives, as this extract from page 78 outlines:

To recap, neoliberalism’s network of influence operates as follows:

• Oligarchs and corporations often covertly (i.e. using ‘dark money’) fund think tanks and academic departments.

• These institutions, in turn, make the unreasonable demands of the oligarchs and corporations sound reasonable and normal.

• The press – also largely controlled by oligarchs – presents these policy proposals as critical and important insights by independent organisations, creating the impression that people in different places are spontaneously coming to the same conclusions on the basis of sound, disinterested research.

• Politicians who are paid by, or sympathetic to, the oligarchs and corporations cite the press coverage as evidence of public demand.

• The voice of the oligarchs is interpreted as the voice of the people.

– George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison

New, independent media has been threatening this model and the proprietors of legacy media outlets have wised up to it. Rather than continue trying to reverse audience shifts to new media, they are now acquiring as many of the new outlets as they can. Indeed, in an effort to assert the same control of our public discourse that they have long enjoyed via ownership of traditional print and broadcast outlets, they have been buying up control of entire social media platforms.

In fact, the entire media ecosystem is increasingly in the hands of oligarchs, from Google to the Washington Post and X, they control it all. Now TikTok is being added to the list and, just this month, major U.S. network CBS; which as part of the takeover process installed a controversial editor-in-chief with a track record of playing fast and loose with objective reporting of facts.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Oligarchs and large corporations will always try to find new ways to reassert control of our public discourse; to return to ‘business as usual’ – even if it means resorting to increasingly authoritarian methods to clampdown on dissenting voices. The efforts to thwart TikTok’s ability to reach audiences unfiltered has demonstrated this.

This feels like a perilous moment, one that demands clarity and open-eyed awareness of the power dynamics shaping our societies. If independent media continues to amplify informed dissent, mobilise audiences across ideological divides and hold the powerful to account, then perhaps there is still hope … perhaps there can be a break in the clouds.

But as ownership structures shift and money flows in, we must remain vigilant. Some of today’s new independent outlets may one day look us in the eye and insist the skies are clear, even as we feel the chill of rain-soaked clothes on our flesh. And if that day comes, if even today’s truth-tellers start trying to convince us not to believe our own senses, then where will we turn for objective reporting of news and current affairs?

Stay tuned for the follow-up to this essay, where we’ll explore new ways of bringing accurate news that truly speaks truth to power. In part two, we’ll focus on the role grassroots citizen journalism can play in driving people-powered change from the ground up. Because the storm is still raging. What we need now are not voices debating whether it’s raining, but ones willing to step outside and get wet on our behalf.

References:

1. Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books

2. Monbiot, George and Hutchison, Peter (2023). The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life). Penguin Random House

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Summer has arrived in New York City and the temperature is rising. Hot June political heat. Early voting for the Democratic mayoral primary is now underway and will continue through to Sunday, with the primary election day itself taking place next Tuesday. Though the final mayoral election is still months away (Tuesday 4^th November), the stakes in this primary could not be higher. With a tightening race and an increasingly energised base, one big question has emerged: is Zohran Mamdani – a 33-year-old New York State Assemblymember and democratic socialist – about to pull off a stunning upset and clinch the Democratic nomination for mayor?

The establishment may not be ready, but the surge of momentum around Mamdani is unmistakable. His campaign has grown from the outer edge of possibility to the centre of this race. His rallies are drawing bigger crowds. His platform is setting the tone for debate. And, critically, his poll numbers are rising. Just a couple of months ago, Politico was writing off his chances as a hopeful challenge. Now Politico reports the latest polling, showing Mamdani elevated to the top of the field and leading his main rival, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Hope is becoming expectation. Hope is contagious.

This contest has the potential to set the tone of politics across western democracies in the immediate future, especially in major metro urban centres. So, you don’t need to be a New Yorker to have a stake in this race.

That said, I have a somewhat unexpected connection to the city, rooted specifically in Brooklyn. My son was born at University Hospital at Downstate, not far from Prospect Park. My Puerto Rican uncle spent his formative years in Bedford-Stuyvesant during the 1950s and 1960s. A big part of my focus right now is on gentrification and urban displacement in Brooklyn.

Whenever I visit friends or colleagues in the city, I’m struck by what I learn of the cost-of-living pressures. Anecdotally, I seem to know more and more folks moving out to New Jersey or further beyond. The status quo is unsustainable; the time is surely ripe for an anti-establishment politician to take the reins and try to chart a different course.

From the New Yorkers I’m speaking to there's the customary energy but it seems mixed with a combination of anticipation, impatience and exasperation. In a city where every neighbourhood can feel like a world of its own, the race for mayor is more than just politics. It tends to also be about identity; a reflection of who people are and who they’re hoping to become … or no longer be.

“New Yorkers are hungry for a different kind of politics. We have seen the same politicians with the same ideas lead us to the same results for decades. This is in many ways a question of whether we want to go back to the past, or whether we want to go to the future.”

- Zohran Mamdani, speaking as a guest on The Breakfast Club

Zohran Mamdani is hoping to be the person New Yorkers can see themselves, and their futures, in. He has built his campaign around a bold, unapologetically progressive agenda (by U.S. standards). His vision is clear: transform New York City into a more just, affordable and inclusive place to live.

Among his signature proposals are a citywide fare-free and faster bus system, the construction of 200,000 new rent-stabilised housing units and the creation of a Department of Community Safety to rethink public safety. Mamdani is also offering a groundbreaking proposal to establish a network of publicly owned grocery stores to combat food insecurity and price gouging.

Add to that Mamdani’s call to freeze rent for all stabilised tenants, raise the minimum wage to $30 per hour by 2030 and provide universal free childcare for every child aged 6 weeks to 5 years, and it’s evident that Mamdani is not running a campaign of incremental tweaks; he’s going for systemic change. He plans to fund it through raising the corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s 11.5%, which is estimated to bring an additional $5 billion to the city’s budget. He says he will also tax the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers – those earning more than $1 million annually – a flat 2% tax.

It’s certainly got the New York Post rattled. If Mamdani wins the Democratic nomination then we can expect the most vicious smear campaign against him, possibly surpassing anything we’ve seen before in American political history. Think “swift boating” – on steroids. We’ve already had a taste of what’s to come, with Cuomo insisting on deliberately mispronouncing Mamdani’s name and a Cuomo-supporting political action committee (PAC) employing islamophobic dog whistle tactics.

Remarkably, after so many years as a prominent leader in New York politics, there’s no record of Cuomo visiting a mosque and he couldn’t recall ever having done so when asked about it in the last mayoral debate. This is astonishing given there are an estimated 1.5 million Muslims in New York, a state he used to lead.

Despite the dirty tricks being thrown his way, Mamdani shows no sign of being deterred. Just last week he dealt with the debate salvos fired at him from Andrew Cuomo and Whitney Tilson and, frankly, wiped the floor with them.

Importantly, he’s not just promising big ideas. Despite only being 33 years old, Mamdani has established a track record of turning principles into policy. He played a key role in securing over $100 million to increase subway service and helped pilot a fare-free bus programme across New York City. His ability to mobilise grassroots support, especially among younger voters and working-class communities, is proving crucial in an election where turnout could be everything. Incredibly, more than 26,000 people have signed up to volunteer for a campaign that says it is edging towards a million doors knocked on.

The dynamics of the race only add more intrigue. Mamdani faces not only the former Governor but incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, the latter now running as an independent (which Cuomo has also indicated he will do, irrespective of whether he wins the Democratic nomination or not). The fractured field, combined with the enthusiasm Mamdani is generating, could very well create the conditions for a breakthrough in November. He also has the backing of the Working Families Party and a growing number of labour and progressive organisations, giving him institutional support to match his street-level momentum.

Watching last week’s debate, I wondered whether Cuomo was starting to look drained and defeated. The contrast with fresh Mamdani couldn’t have been starker. Whilst it would be foolish to write Cuomo off, he seemed like a shadow of his former self: yesterday’s man, struggling to defend his record in office … and lashing out.

Born in Kampala to Indian-Ugandan parents, Mamdani moved to New York as a seven-year-old and became a U.S. citizen 20 years later, in 2018. He is a local politician with global appeal. His middle name is Kwame, after Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister following independence from Great Britain.

If Mamdani does win the primary, it would be historic and the implications could be profound: for New York, the national political landscape and beyond America’s shores. London should certainly be paying attention with 2028 in mind. A Mamdani victory would send a powerful signal that unapologetic democratic socialism is not only viable but resonant with voters in our major global cities.

It could also set up a fascinating dynamic with Donald Trump, whose record of inflammatory attacks on progressive politicians is well-documented. Given Trump’s past treatment of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, whom he once derided as a “stone cold loser” as part of a social media spat, it’s not hard to imagine an ongoing feud between the second Trump administration and Mayor Mamdani – who, like Khan, is a Muslim. It has the makings of a defining flashpoint in American political life in the years ahead.

So, are we on the verge of a Mamdani moment?

We’ll find out next week. But if the excitement on the ground is any indication, what was once a long shot might just become New York’s story of the summer. With just days to go, increasingly attention is turning to this nomination. Whether Mamdani wins or not, the momentum he has unleashed will be difficult for the Democratic Party establishment to contain.

So far, the wave of populism sweeping through the U.S. in the past decade or so has only favoured the right. Yes, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) have reinvigorated contemporary political discourse, but they haven’t captured high executive office. Victory for New York’s young democratic socialist next week could signal the pendulum beginning to turn towards leftist populism; not just in New York and not just in America.

The city that never sleeps could be about to deliver a rude awakening for the neoliberal establishment; a political earthquake with reverberations stretching far and wide. Because, as we all know: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

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The UK government’s 2025 Spending Review landed today with a bold promise: a £39 billion affordable homes programme, aiming to deliver 1.5 million homes by 2029. It’s being pitched as a double win: a solution to Britain’s housing crisis and a stimulus for economic growth. But for those of us who’ve watched successive governments promise, pivot, and ultimately fall short, this feels all too familiar. Same old same old.

Yes, if fully realised – and that’s a very big “if” – this would represent the most ambitious housing investment in decades. It comes on the back of reforms to long-term rent policy for social housing and legislative moves to increase protections for Britain’s 11 million private renters. On paper, that sounds like progress. But does this really signal a shift in the structural foundations of UK housing? Or are we watching another rerun of political theatre?

Because here's the uncomfortable truth: when was the last time a UK government, of any party, actually hit its housing targets? Furthermore, when did a flurry of housing new builds result in meaningfully lower prices?

The logic that underpins today’s announcement is the same one we’ve heard for decades: build more homes, increase supply and watch prices fall. It’s an appealingly simple narrative. The only problem is, it hasn’t proven true. And it likely never will, at least not under the current configuration of the UK housing market.

If the housing crisis were merely a question of insufficient new builds, we would expect to see some evidence that increasing supply dampens house prices. But over the past 40 years, as construction targets have come and gone, house prices have continued to soar. The UK’s independent fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), estimates that this latest plan – even if fully executed – would reduce house prices by just 0.8% by 2029. That’s barely £2,000 off the cost of the average home. Hardly transformative.

So, why won’t these headline-grabbing initiatives fix the problem? The answer is that the issue isn’t just supply. It’s demand. More specifically, how we have structured and incentivised demand.

Decades of permissive lending policies, the unchecked rise of buy-to-let landlords, the financialisation of housing and the free pass given to foreign capital investment (some of it questionably sourced) have turned homes into assets first, shelter second. Buy-to-let, in particular, has expanded since the early 2000s and rapidly so in just the past few years alone. But it has rarely been subjected to meaningful scrutiny.

Instead of addressing these issues, successive government policies have continued to feed demand. Think of the Help to Buy scheme, or those stamp duty holidays that always seem to get pulled out from the Chancellor of the day’s red box. Such measures don’t fix the problem, they just stimulate continued demand, which in turn creates upward price momentum.

Today’s announcement, whilst welcome in parts, fails to engage with these deeper currents. If today’s announced targets materialise into new social housing – homes that remain out of the private market and accessible to those most in need – then that would be something worth applauding. But unless we confront the systemic forces that inflate demand and distort housing as a commodity, any increase in supply risks simply being absorbed by a market that continues to privilege wealth accumulation over accessibility or affordability.

Put bluntly, if house prices continue to rise while wages stagnate, then "affordable housing" remains little more than an empty political slogan.

To fix this crisis, we need more than cranes in skylines. We need political courage. We need the courage to reform property taxation, to rethink buy-to-let incentives, to challenge the role of speculative capital. But we also need to do something truly transformative: treat housing as a public good and not a financial product.

So, has the UK government finally gripped the housing crisis, or is it still fighting the symptoms while leaving the root causes untouched?

Forgive the cynicism, but until we see evidence of deeper structural reform, today’s announcement feels less like a breakthrough and more like Groundhog Day. Yes, we need more homes. But even more urgently, we need a government brave enough to take on the system that made this crisis inevitable in the first place.

I’ve written elsewhere in Gridlocked pieces that neoliberalism isn’t working. There is no better proof point to my argument than the UK’s housing system. Free market dogma doesn’t work with housing. Let’s scrap it.

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“The film is about amplifying community voices in Brooklyn,” she says. The black frames of her glasses match her tied-back hair and fit her face perfectly. It’s a face of character and depth. As she speaks, she exudes a calm, steady confidence somehow enhanced by her New York accent. It makes everything she says instantly compelling. She’s effortlessly charismatic … and doesn’t seem to realise it. Everything about Alyssa J. Wilson draws you in.

Alyssa is Brooklyn born and bred; a native New Yorker without the ego but all the pride. She was born at the Methodist Hospital in Park Slope and raised in Prospect Heights, where brownstones and tree-lined streets greeted her at every turn. She grew up with her parents and five younger siblings, surrounded by a village of aunts, cousins and grandparents.

She wants to remain in that place she has always called home, but has seen too many people leave the area because they’ve been priced out. She fears that she will be next in joining that exodus. “If I want to buy a two- or three-bedroom condo in Prospect Heights, say 1,200 square feet, I would need to get a mortgage of two million dollars or more … it’s just not realistic.”

Alyssa is an independent filmmaker who is turning her attention to the story she has long known she needed to tell. She’s working on a documentary – provisionally entitled Seen – that shines a light on a growing sense of alienation among many of Brooklyn’s long-term residents. They see their neighbourhoods becoming increasingly transient and feel at best overlooked and disregarded, at worst like they are an inconvenience getting in the way of newcomers to the borough. They grapple with their feelings of resentment towards the new arrivals, who seem only to want to bend Brooklyn to their own tastes rather than blend in.

Alyssa speaks fondly about the influence Spike Lee’s Crooklyn had on her, having first watched it as a five-year-old. She tells me how Troy, the film’s young protagonist, felt like a reflection of herself. The film’s street scenes appeared as a mirror image of her own brownstone upbringing; its characters reminding her of people she knew intimately. “It’s like Spike Lee said: Brooklyn is not just a place, it’s a state of mind.”

The reality is that the Brooklyn Alyssa was born into has been steadily disappearing all her life. Mention Brooklyn today and most of us would probably picture a post-industrial landscape with any combination of hipster cafes, yoga studios and – of course – expensively restored brownstone townhouses; and all connected to demographic changes in the local population.

What I’m describing here is commonly understood as ‘gentrification’. I’m hesitant to use the term without an explainer because, like so many everyday concepts, the more you delve into it, the more you learn that its meaning has adapted over time. The word itself is derived from ‘gentry’, a term used historically in Britain to describe people of high social class just below the nobility. To ‘gentrify’ is to make something more refined or genteel; that is, suitable for the gentry.

The ‘gentrification’ term was first coined in 1964 by sociologist Ruth Glass, who founded the Centre for Urban Studies at University College London (UCL: a place where all the best people study!). She employed the concept of gentrification to describe social trends occurring in parts of London, where working-class neighbourhoods were being transformed by the influx of middle-class residents. Glass wrote:

One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes — upper and lower. Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.

- Ruth Glass, London: Aspects of Change, 1964: xviii–xix

Of course, the term ‘gentrification’ has since become widely used in everyday language. Most of us understand it with a negative connotation: it describes displacement, cultural erosion and inequality. This is how I’m using it here. For anyone interested in delving deeper, I found this paper useful.

Ask any New Yorker about Brooklyn gentrification and most would tell you that it all started in the 1990s, when Alyssa was born, before ramping up in the early years of this century. Well, the second part is certainly true. However, the trend was set a few decades earlier than many of us might realise.

In his book, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, historian Suleiman Osman illuminates how gentrification in Brooklyn neighbourhoods like Park Slope and Fort Greene actually has its origins in the 1960s and 1970s. And it wasn't just about rising rents or real estate markets; it was a cultural project, led by (largely white) middle-class professionals seeking 'authenticity' through community living and connection to a romanticised past.

Osman focuses on the post–World War II period up to the 1980s, prior to the full-blown gentrification waves of the 1990s and 2000s that has provided the backdrop to Alyssa’s life. His book lays the groundwork for understanding how cultural, political and social shifts in the mid-20th century invented a new vision of urban living that continues to influence Brooklyn life today.

Osman's work challenges us to rethink what drives neighbourhood change; and who gets to define what a neighbourhood is supposed to be.

As I touched on in a recent piece entitled The Right to Bed-Stuy, the reshaping of Brooklyn can be viewed through the lens of what philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre termed the production of space. Lefebvre argued that space is not neutral or passive, but actively produced by social, economic and political forces. In Lefebvre’s analysis, urban space becomes a commodity, consumed and controlled by those with capital, stripped from those whose lives once animated it.

From Dumbo to Bushwick, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Prospect Heights – you name it, we are witnessing this transformation: warehouses long ago reborn as luxury lofts, graffiti overwritten by branded street art advertising, public life privatised. What was once a patchwork of working-class enclaves has become the terrain of developers, tech workers and creative class migrants.

In Brooklyn, rezoning policies and speculative investment serve as mechanisms for what urban sociologist Neil Brenner calls urban restructuring, displacing vulnerable populations to accommodate capital flows. In this context, Brooklyn is not just a NYC borough, but also a battleground between competing spatial forces: everyday life pitted against profit.

Anyone with a few million dollars burning a hole in their pocket could try typing “Brooklyn Brownstone” into the Youtube search bar to discover one way of spending it. There they will encounter some glossy videos of realtors impersonating daytime television hosts, marketing the revitalised brownstones that once housed a very different experience of urban living. It has been fading from view for decades but hasn’t – yet – completely been erased. Beyond the ‘bougie’ dream pitched to us via Instagram photos and lifestyle magazines, there lies another Brooklyn; a place of people who are unseen.

We can acknowledge these people, if we care to. In her book, Invisible Child, journalist Andrea Elliott shines a light on the Brooklyn beyond the brochures. I read Invisible Child three years ago and haven’t read anything that impacted me so profoundly since. The book provides a portrait of structural, generational poverty in America in the most effective way possible: through the lived experience of real people.

Elliott uses the same narrative tools as a fiction writer to shine a light on a girl – Dasani Coates – and her family, trapped in NYC’s brutally demeaning homeless shelter and wider welfare system. Dasani spent much of her childhood at the Auburn Family Residence shelter in Fort Greene, about a mile from where Alyssa J. Wilson was raised. In the book, headline statistics together with an account of institutional failure are woven into a compelling human story.

It is striking how persistent inequality and institutional failure is so easily obscured by narratives of urban renewal and regeneration; how gentrification and systemic, generational poverty can coexist, literally side by side. Dasani’s childhood experience, like so many others in Brooklyn, exposes the myth that a ‘rising tide lifts all boats.’ Rather than focus on those floating high on YouTube, we should give more attention to the sunken lives of those drowning as wave after wave of gentrification laps over them.

Here once more we can turn to Henri Lefebvre for guidance. He introduced us to the concept of the right to the city, producing both a critique of modern urban life and a call to action. The right to the city is not merely a right to inhabit urban space; it is a right to participate in shaping it. Urban geographer David Harvey builds on Lefebvre:

The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts’ desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. How best then to exercise that right?

- David Harvey, Rebel Cities, 2012: 4

In Brooklyn, this right has been denied to many of its long-term residents, particularly Black and brown communities whose cultural legacies shaped the borough but now find themselves priced out, pushed out, almost forgotten.

These dynamics are not accidental. They are products of deliberate urban policy: rezoning (and “upzoning”), tax incentives, and infrastructural improvements geared not toward existing residents, but toward a new demographic that is wealthier, more transient and, yes, whiter.

The new build apartments that sprout up across the borough aren’t intended to be homes for working-class or even middle-class families. They’re designed and priced for professionals – the age profile of whom is rising – who don’t mind sharing space. This building policy exacerbates a predatory rental market, where landlords capitalise on people’s desperation just to remain living in Brooklyn.

And yet, Brooklyn resists. From Crown Heights to Flatbush, urban social movements rise up to contest this spatial assault. In tenant meetings held in community halls, in protest marches that reclaim streets and in murals that remember erased histories, communities assert their right to remain. Organisations like Equality for Flatbush and the Bushwick Housing Independence Project challenge evictions, document abuses and demand accountability from landlords and city officials alike.

These are not merely protests, but have the potential to be acts of urban creation; perhaps even a form of insurgent urbanism. Away from the spotlight of media presented to us to consume, there exists overlooked movements of people seeking to remake the city in more just and humane ways. In Brooklyn this insurgency is attempted, in part, through community land trusts, housing cooperatives and mutual aid networks designed to protect people, not profit.

Such resistance is central to the ongoing struggle over urban space. We need a new politics of urbanisation that places collective need over private gain. In Brooklyn, such a politics can be asserted through every food co-op, every housing court protest, and every block association meeting fighting to preserve rent-stabilised apartments.

Community-based urbanism in Brooklyn can reclaim space not just for housing, but for memory, dignity and culture. This can be spatial justice in action; an effort not only to survive in the city, but to redefine it.

I have an unlikely affinity with Brooklyn. My son was born at University Hospital at Downstate, near Prospect Park. My Puerto Rican uncle came of age in Bedford-Stuyvesant during the 1950s and 1960s. Some of my dearest friends settled in Dumbo two decades ago, transforming a former warehouse loft into a home where they raised their children and built a business. Just around the corner from their old redbrick building, crowds now gather daily for one of the world’s most ‘Instagrammable’ shots on Washington Street, with the Manhattan Bridge rising majestically in the background.

For me, a trip to Brooklyn feels almost like a pilgrimage. From across the Atlantic, I often find myself yearning to return to those brownstone avenues shaded by honey locust and Norway maple, where the air carries the breath of history. There, under a canopy forever autumnal in my mind, the past and present entwine like roots underground. Messy, tangled, inseparable. Each sidewalk hints at details for a story: the cracks in the pavement, the scent of rain on stone, the muffled bassline pulsing from a passing car. The air feels always thick with possibility, yet tinged with the melancholy of constant transformation. New businesses. New money. New people. And still, amid the churn, the spirit of those magical streets endures; a resilient heartbeat rooted in the brutal, complex history of the American story itself. Brooklyn is ever-changing, yet – at least for now – anchored in its identity.

For years now, a question has hung heavy in the air: can Brooklyn remain a home for the very people who gave it its soul? I believe the answer can only be yes if we commit, urgently and intentionally, to telling the stories that lie beyond the polished veneer of 21st-century Brooklyn; if we amplify the voices too often ignored and illuminate the lives that exist in the shadows of brownstones and new developments alike. This is the work Andrea Elliott did so powerfully in Invisible Child; bearing witness with compassion and precision. It’s the work that Alyssa J. Wilson and I myself are trying to continue; insisting that Brooklyn’s full story be told, not just the parts that fit neatly into real estate ads and curated social media feeds.

Policymakers and elected representatives respond to the above question with gestures that tinker around the edges of the challenges Brooklyn and other places like it face. We see tokenistic measures seemingly aimed toward equity: mandatory inclusionary zoning; extended rent regulation; and investments in public housing. But these measures always seem to fall short, either in scale or, frankly, sincerity. What is needed, as Lefebvre and Harvey have showed us, is not merely reform but a reimagining: a new urban contract rooted in justice, participation and solidarity.

This means listening to voices of Brooklyn’s unseen people. It means learning the lessons from real-life stories like that of Dasani Coates and her family. It also means treating space not as a commodity to be flipped and profited from, but as an essential public good we each have a legitimate claim to; a commons to be shared.

Brooklyn is so many things, including a metaphor for the tensions and contradictions of modern urban life. It is at once a borough reborn and bereft, revitalised yet ravaged. “It’s like a form of colonisation rebranded,” Alyssa tells me. “We are losing a lot of our cultural pillars, our black third spaces – so many I’ve lost count. Just recently, for example, we’ve lost Bed-Vyne and Lover’s Rock on Thompkins Avenue in Bed-stuy.”

In those glorious brownstone avenues, we see both the promise of urban paradise and the price of free-market fundamentalism packaged as progress. As we contemplate the continued waves of transformation across Brooklyn and beyond, the personal narratives we embrace matter just as much as public policy initiatives. The cultural considerations matter just as much as the economic. Let’s talk about who gets to shape the city … and who gets left out.

I’ve joined forces with Alyssa J. Wilson to do just this; to work on a documentary film that tells the story she and many others have been living throughout the 21^st century and before. The film poses a question: Brooklyn is the heartbeat of New York City, but what happens to its soul when the very people who gave it life are pushed aside?

Meeting Alyssa truly was, as the expression goes, a meeting of minds. We bonded over a shared belief in the power of human-centred storytelling; a shared conviction that stories change people, ideas alone don’t. Please stay tuned as we work together to deliver the Gridlocked mission: to see a more equitable world operating sustainably to ensure that future generations can inherit viable societies on a liveable planet.

Sometimes saving the world starts at home, right from our doorstep. For Alyssa J. Wilson that is, naturally, a brownstone stoop.

References:

1. Brenner, Neil. (2019). New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question. Oxford: Oxford University Press

2. Elliott, Andrea. (2021). Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City. New York: Random House

3. Glass, Ruth. “Introduction.” London: Aspects of Change, edited by Ruth Glass, Centre for Urban Studies, University College London, 1964, pp. xviii–xix.

4. Harvey, David. (2012). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso Books

5. Harvey, David. "The Right to the City". New Left Review, 2008. II (53): 23–40.

6. Lefebvre, Henri. (1991). The Production of Space (translated by D. Nicholson-Smith). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell

7. Lefebvre, Henri. (1968). Le Droit à la ville (2nd ed.). Paris, France: Anthropos

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… this essay continues from Part Two: “Nobody Understands Climate: Can We Trust the Science?

The sky is darkening over our political discourse on climate change. News bulletins inform us of somewhere being hit by a “once-in-a-century” storm, flood or wildfire with unsettling frequency. We hear and read about it and feel enormous sympathy for those impacted, yet it feels remote. We understand that there is a problem we need to tackle, yet it feels distant; and so we put it on the back burner. Our weather vane politicians react to focus group sentiment and electoral trends. They no longer seem capable of taking a lead. Their inertia feeds ours, and vice versa.

This is disconnected from what we are witnessing: a clear and concerning increase in extreme weather events, linked to human-caused climate change. Climate modelling – at least that which is shared widely for public consumption – isn’t necessarily accounting for what we are seeing play out. For example, the outlier events considered extreme scenarios at the turn of the century are now looking more likely than they were back then.

Irrespective of the modelling, scientists have clearly warned us about a future fraught with extremes. Reality is now catching up faster than expected. Earth’s climate is changing without waiting for us to get the memo.

The models back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the southeastern United States, did not suggest it was likely that the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold would be reached before 2030. Similarly, today’s modelling could prove to be underestimating the scale of the problem and the rate of temperature increase; which is not fixed.

Rather than constantly trailing in the wake of the data, we should inject some versatility into our strategies for tackling the issues linked to climate change. Because despite all of the talk, political declarations and commitments, we are not getting global temperature increases under control. All of the climate ‘consciousness’ of the (more than!) four decades of my lifetime isn’t making the required difference.

In this three-part essay I’ve attempted to briefly explore the growing gap between climate projections and lived experience, questioning whether our current understanding – and communication – of climate risk is sufficient for the moment we’re in. If what was once considered unlikely is now becoming commonplace, then our strategies, policies, and narratives must evolve with equal urgency.

We need a game-changer solution that works across political divides; for individuals and communities irrespective of whether or not we accept the premise that we are living through the Anthropocene Epoch. That means devising solutions that are better than the status quo of how we produce and consume energy, coupled with how we organise industrial activity and production.

Future Gridlocked content will explore this further, because we simply cannot continue doing things the way we have always done them. We are are already witnessing the devastating consequences of our inability to change. We know that worse is to come: we cannot say we weren’t warned.

I am, however, convinced that we can change. In fact, I know we can: because I myself have changed.

In my Nightswimming essay, I argued that it was naïve and unreasonable to think that the world can be free from materials that humans have been using. This was not always my view. Indeed, up until I met Jacopo Buongiorno in 2021, I unquestioningly considered any deviation from deriving energy from ‘natural’ sources such as wind and solar as being highly undesirable (there’s nothing natural about solar photovoltaic panels or glass/ carbon fibre wind turbine blades, of course).

Nuclear ‘waste’ – spent fuel – was entirely unacceptable to me, because I considered it to be incompatible with the natural order of life. It was a deviation too far from nature. I subscribed wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed by Gary Snyder in an essay he wrote for A Controversy of Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry back in 1965:

“As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.”

However, in coming to the view that nuclear is the only viable clean source that can underpin our energy systems moving forward, if we are serious about decarbonising, I had to confront my own hitherto ideology. I came to realise that I was holding humanity to an impossibly high standard and so decided to modify my opinion.

I still agree with Snyder, but I have no desire to hold up the conditions of Palaeolithic times as any kind of environmental benchmark (Snyder wasn’t suggesting this; he was arguing that his values are timeless and enduring). I now find that the words Snyder used in the line immediately following the above quote are the ones that really speak to me: “I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.” How relevant his words remain, sixty years on.

I’ll cover nuclear and other clean energy sources in future essays, building on this one plus my Salon pieces.

It is also worth focussing some more on the geography of human civilisation, namely our growing urban centres that are at the frontline of the fight to combat climate change. Most of our economic activity takes place in cities, consuming vast quantities of energy and resources and producing about 70 percent of global CO2 emissions. So, a razor-sharp focus on sustainable urban living will help produce a significant percentage of the decarbonisation progress we require, given the growing proportion of humanity that lives in cities.

And humanity is swelling in number – the latest projections by the United Nations indicate that the global population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and peak at around 10.3 billion in mid-2080s before declining a little by 2100. More than half of the increase in global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries, all in Africa and Asia.

Overall population growth is concentrated in developing countries that are already witnessing increasing demand for energy. This trend will only continue throughout this century. Therefore, any strategies for dealing with climate change must acknowledge the reality that energy demand will only go up, irrespective of any technological efficiency measures that are introduced to energy consumption.

Cities are also the urban laboratories where ideas are tested out, and where social and political change tends to be driven forward. This means considering cities in terms of the conflict of human versus nature, together with the back-and-forth between them; how each is both shaped by and shaping the other.

To understand how best to implement change in our cities and elsewhere, we need to appreciate the past and how it has led us to where we are now. Only then can we try to shape what may come. But we must be in no doubt about the seriousness and urgency of the situation we are currently in.

A climate event can dominate the news cycle for a couple of days. Then the media moves on to cover a military conflict, election campaign or celebrity court battle. Meanwhile, the threat of climate change does not move on; it stews and intensifies unseen before re-emerging somewhere to unleash more severe punishment.

I started Part One of this essay series with reference to Philip Gerard’s essay, What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes. By vividly conveying the emotional journey of enduring a hurricane’s onslaught on his home and community, Gerard transports an extreme weather event from the abstract realm of statistics, or the remoteness of a news bulletin, directly to life in the reader’s mind.

For many years I have recommended Gerard’s essay to anyone seeking out great creative nonfiction writing. Nowadays, sadly, I wonder whether I ought to do so more for its practical utility as a guide in how to prepare for when – not if – one encounters a major climatic incident.

Gerard concludes his piece with a flourish: “What they don’t tell you about hurricanes is how many ways they can break your heart.” Each year, more and more hearts are being broken in a myriad of ways. Many more will be broken still unless we get a grip of the climate crisis. Until we acknowledge that a sea of worst cases is already lapping at our doorstep, we risk drowning in our tears.

References:

1. Gerard, Philip. “What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes.” Creative Nonfiction, no. 11 (1998): 100–109.

2. Luqman, M., Rayner, P.J. & Gurney, K.R. On the impact of urbanisation on CO2 emissions. npj Urban Sustain 3, 6 (2023).

3. Snyder, Gary, in Paris Leary and Robert Kelly (eds), A Controversy of Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, New York: Doubleday, 1965: 551.

4. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2022), World Population Prospects 2022: Summary of Results. UN DESA/POP/2022/TR/NO. 3. New York: United Nations.

5. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024: Summary of Results. UN DESA/POP/2024/TR/NO. 9. New York: United Nations.

If you liked this essay, you might enjoy these related pieces:

… this essay continues from Part One: “Nobody Understands Climate: Kerry Emanuel and Hurricanes”

No matter how many graphs you draw up, as long as they are graphs about the future they don’t necessarily hold any more water than a leaky boot.

- Margaret Atwood

When people say they “trust the science,” what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks. Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it doesn’t know, willing to admit error.

- Bret Stephens

One of the key international policy responses to human-caused climate change came when 196 nations committed to limiting global temperature increases, when they gathered at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris in December 2015. The specific pledge was to restrict Earth’s temperature to “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” and aim to “limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold risks unleashing far more severe climatic events, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall. Since then, many governments have stressed the need to limit increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, and many have announced “net zero” policy targets for the middle of this century. As I will come on to discuss, this is all likely to be too little, too late.

Before getting into the level of progress being made to meet climate targets, it’s worth touching on how confident we can be in what the data is showing because some people still dispute it. Whilst the data is robust, dealing with the question of climate science denial is important – though I will only do so very briefly, because it doesn’t deserve too much oxygen.

Ignoring incontrovertible evidence is irrational. In the case of climate science denial, it tends to be driven from ideological dogma fuelled by disinformation, often to serve the special interests of the fossil fuel industry. The subject is well covered and refuted elsewhere and, as I say, I don’t wish to give it much energy (no pun intended).

Doubt, however, is different from denial. Doubt can be reasonable; scepticism is an intellectually healthy position to start from – that’s why I included Margaret Atwood’s advice above. Scepticism is where any scientist worth his or her salt starts from their research.

So, even though we can ‘trust’ climate science, let’s assume for a moment that we aren’t certain that it is accurate enough. If we have lingering doubt, then we need to think about risk and taking chances. Here I defer again to the wisdom of Kerry Emanual, MIT Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science, who discussed this point when interviewed for the Gridlocked podcast:

“We are taking a risk, the tail of which is an existential risk … Let’s say you had a seven-year-old daughter and she’s a bit late for catching the school bus. If she misses it, you’re going to have to drive her to school and you’ll be late for work. The school bus is across the street and she can make a run for it. The problem is, you calculate there’s a five percent chance she’ll be run over and killed. It’s a small chance, but you won’t do that because the consequences of losing her are way, way worse than the consequences of you getting into trouble for being late for work. So, it’s a no brainer, nobody in their right mind would let that child run. Well, the problem here is that there’s somewhat larger than a five percent existential risk to civilisation if we don’t do anything about climate change and lots of scenarios have been painted. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination: food and water shortages have historically led to armed conflict. That can happen again, but now it’s happening in a world armed with nuclear weapons.”

The challenge with climate change politics and policymaking isn’t a lack of evidence, inconclusive data, or scientific disagreement (which may exist on some points, but isn’t the major roadblock). The issue, to my mind, is an information/ public communication problem.

The challenge is how to talk about climate science and deal with the concept of “existential threat” in ways that resonate to the everyday lives of individual citizens, whilst at the same time mobilising governments, international organisations, corporations and wider civil society to act collectively to bring about change … with the (collectively expressed) consent of those individual citizens.

This requires trust. Scientists tend to be highly trusted, while politicians and energy companies are viewed with considerable scepticism. Important climate discourse has been made more challenging in this so-called “post-truth” era, in which some believe we can simply invent our own “alternative facts.”

The second quote I opened this essay with is from a New York Times opinion piece written by Bret Stephens, entitled, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” It elicited a strong response in the paper’s letters section the following day.

I don’t wish to discuss the specifics of mask mandates, or the merits of the writer’s criticism of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adherence to its masking guidance. I was, however, struck by a broader point Stephens made in his piece, when he wrote of the CDC: It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science – conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers – by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.

When we consider this, science communication – already imperative – takes on an additional significance. If the COVID pandemic taught us nothing else, it demonstrated that how we communicate important public health information, based on medical science, can profoundly impact so many aspects of our lives that we take for granted … whilst, of course, making the difference between life or death on a large scale.

At the same time, COVID showed us that science communication does not operate in a vacuum, but is just as exposed to political and social division and interference as other fields of our public discourse. Climate science is no exception.

The story of climate change is one of competing narratives, including narratives within narratives between those who agree on the central question of human activity being responsible for the significant increase of temperatures since 1950. We should focus on the observed reality: we are witnessing increases to the frequency, intensity and extent of extreme climate change events – from devastating floods, droughts and heatwaves, to hurricanes like the one Philip Gerard wrote about.

Gerard’s personal essay provides human context to scientific evidence, such as the research led by Kerry Emanuel:

My colleagues and I have shown that hurricanes should become more intense and produce much more rain as the planet warms, and observations are beginning to show such trends. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active in the 150 years on record, corresponding to record warmth of the tropical Atlantic. Katrina, which caused the largest storm surge in US history, cost more than $200 billion, and it claimed at least 1,200 lives. The 2017 Atlantic season was among the most destructive on record, causing well more than $300 billion in damages. The all-time record wind speed in a tropical cyclone was set by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, only to be broken by Hurricane Patricia in 2015. Hurricane Sandy of 2012 had the largest diameter of any Atlantic storm on record, and 2017 Hurricane Irma set the world record for sustained Category 5 intensity, while Hurricane Harvey – in the same month – produced more rain than any hurricane in US history. Globally, tropical cyclones cause staggering misery and loss of life. Hurricane Mitch killed more than 10,000 people in Central America in 1998, and in 1970 a single storm took the lives of some 300,000 in Bangladesh. Substantial changes in hurricane activity cannot be written off as mere climate perturbations to which we will easily adjust.

- Kerry Emanuel, What We Know About Climate Change, 2018: 39-40.

Some climate scientists are making bolder assertions than others. On 24^th June 1988, the top story on the front page of the New York Times late edition was entitled, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” The article by Philip Shabecoff reported: Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the “greenhouse effect.” But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.

Almost 40 years on, James Hansen’s testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is viewed as a turning point in history. Nowadays, as Director of the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program at Columbia University, Hansen is still making headlines – by making assertions that many of his scientific peers are reluctant to endorse.

Hansen’s broader argument that global warming is happening much faster than our aggregated climate models predict is not formally accepted. In 2023 he was part of a group of researchers who produced a study showing that the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature increase on preindustrial levels threshold could be exceeded this decade. Additionally, they concluded that a 2 degrees Celsius increase will be seen before 2050 (unless rapid decarbonisation beyond current plans is enacted).

Hansen is also breaking from many of his climate science peers by arguing that the rate of global warming is accelerating. This point, together with some of the headline results of the study – namely on the 2 degrees increase and the extent of further increases, together with the extent to which climate change is explained by greenhouse gases – is disputed by other scientists. However, most agree that the 1.5 degrees Celsius target is effectively certain to be missed.

The fact that Hansen has been proved right in the past doesn’t, of course, mean he must automatically be believed now. A consensus of experts is usually more reliable than any one expert alone, though Hansen’s track record suggests that it might be foolish to dismiss him.

Besides, I’m deliberately not going to be drawn too much here on the specifics of disagreements between climate scientists because I am neither suitably qualified, nor do I actually think it substantively matters, in a sense. We are already observing devastating climate change impacts, faster than previously predicted, that require us to act now.

Some scientists are suggesting that it could take the best part of a decade to resolve their disagreements on the rate of climate change acceleration. However, in making climate policy interventions we don’t have the luxury of spending the next few years eagerly awaiting the outcomes of these scientific debates, the conclusion of which would likely come too late to act upon. The danger is that those with competing data sets will continue to bicker, whilst the proverbial Rome burns.

We need to put in place robust plans that are sufficiently flexible so as to be adapted in tune with the changing scientific picture. Even leaving the climate data aside for a moment, we could consider taking a “no-regrets” approach to climate change. Estimates vary at somewhere between 5 to 9 million people – the World Health Organisation puts it at 6.7 million – dying prematurely each year, around the globe, from inhalation of particulates from fossil fuel combustion. The value of those lives alone might justify a switch to carbon-free energy if it is sufficiently cheap.

There is also the problem that current gas and oil reserves are expected to be depleted before the end of this century, assuming current rates of consumption (when in fact consumption is rising and shows no sign of abating). In practical terms, we will likely be forced to get off oil and gas anyway. So, better to pursue a sensible risk-based approach which takes into account the scientific modelling (and different scenarios) and adds in the observable reality of increased severe weather events and the rising price tag associated with them; the costs already being paid.

The purpose of using means in climate data is to establish trends. The global data can aggregate means and/ or mean methodologies, to try to establish a common framework. This is, crudely speaking, what the IPCC does when it produces its summary reports on climate science every few years; the most recent being its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) published in 2021, with the final synthesis in March 2023 (IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report is currently in its assessment cycle).

However, using means to predict systemic behaviours can be problematic since the items of particular interest are the outliers and upper boundaries, rather than the means. These are the extreme weather events that cause such devastation.

So, I suggest there is a different perspective we can take, in addition to the good work from the IPCC. We could focus more on the merit of specific, destructive impacts. Temperatures have been increasing, and the increase rate likely accelerating. Extreme weather is getting worse. Increasing weather severity combined with demographic shifts show that the event cost is rising exponentially regardless of whether radiative forcing is accelerating; in other words, regardless of the above-mentioned scientific debates.

The last two years, 2023 and then 2024, were each the warmest on record. The annual average global temperature approached 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which is the target limit established through the Paris Agreement.

Whilst scientists are more concerned with averaged multi-year data rather than one year alone, as mentioned above, the growing consensus is that the averaged data clearly points to us being off-track in limiting global warming. One consequence – among many – of rising temperatures is glacier and ice sheet melting, which is raising sea levels. Another is increased weather volatility, including more severe hurricane activity.

Major population centres and infrastructure assets tend to be clustered in coastal locations (there are large upward trends in both). Increasing coastal population and infrastructure along with rising sea level and increased storm intensity are leading to large increases in damage.

In the United States alone, 2023 witnessed 28 separate catastrophic weather events, each costing more than $1 billion, surpassing the previous record – 22 in 2020 – for the highest number of billion-dollar disasters in one calendar year (using data adjusted for consumer price index inflation). The price tag for 2023 was at least $92.9 billion … just for the United States alone.

The following year, 2024, saw one fewer catastrophic $1 billion event but still surpassed all records prior to 2023. However, 2024 included Hurricanes Helene and Milton and saw the cost of the damage at approximately $182.7 billion (again, just for the U.S.). This places 2024 as the fourth-costliest on record, trailing 2017 ($395.9 billion), 2005 – the year of Hurricane Katrina – ($268.5 billion) and 2022 ($183.6 billion).

Research highlighted by the World Economic Forum estimates that climate change could be costing the world $16 million per hour and that the global cost of climate change damage will be between $1.7 trillion and $3.1 trillion per year by 2050. This might be a conservative estimate: my colleague Rob Freda, a hydropower entrepreneur and MIT Research Affiliate, calculates that we will reach the upper end of that scale by the end of this decade.

So, we can disagree on politics and we can dispute the interpretation of data. However, when extreme weather is already destroying communities, causing fatalities and displacing people, and running up an ever-increasing bill, the debates can seem detached from reality.

We can think of climate change another way, as Kerry Emanuel put it to me:

“We are incurring costs from increased damages owing to sea level rise, increased level of storm activity, heat stress and so forth. The thing that we really need to focus on are what I call the tail risks, and we should be prepared to spend, if we have to, a lot to avoid them. That’s what we would do if it were a short-term risk that’s immediately apparent, like the kid running for the school bus. The psychological problem is that the risks are evolving more slowly in time so we tend to say ‘oh let’s put it off’ … but you can’t do that forever.”

References:

1. Atwood, Margaret, “Blind Faith and Free Trade”, The Case Against Free Trade, 1993: 92.

2. Ejaz et al, “How We Follow Climate Change: Climate News Use and Attitudes in Eight Countries,” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, December 2022.

3. Emanuel, Kerry, What We Know About Climate Change, MIT Press, 2018.

4. Hansen et al, “Global warming in the pipeline,” Oxford Open Climate Change, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2023.

5. Stephens, Bret, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” New York Times, 21^st February 2023.

If you liked this essay, you might enjoy these related pieces:

In his essay, What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes, the late Philip Gerard provides a step-by-step emotional account of the far-reaching implications of experiencing an extreme weather event. He writes about the nervous anticipation triggered when the weather warnings are issued for his Cape Fear community; the uncertainty as to whether and how to take mitigating measures to protect life and property; the dread that the full force of the hurricane will hit North Carolina’s shores at high tide; the constant, anxious, checking for updates as the clock counts down to impact – needing to know, “When, How Hard, How Long: the trigonometry of catastrophe.”

Through describing the indiscriminate, unfair and gruesome destruction of a hurricane, Gerard highlights the precariousness of human existence. He shows us that behind the data and statistics of climate change, beyond the aspirational political declarations and policy prescriptions, there lies a very human reality: a devastating personal toll, that continues to be felt long after an extreme climatic event hits. It is not an incident, but a protracted event with a domino effect of longer-term repercussions.

Gerard was writing about Hurricane Fran, which tore through nine eastern US states in September 1996. North Carolina bore the brunt of it, with 14 people killed and more than $2 billion in damage caused. When Gerard wrote the essay in the late 1990s, climate models predicted today’s increasingly common extreme weather events as having outlier probability. In other words, the potential ferocity of what we are witnessing today was foreseen, but the increased frequency of occurrence was considered far less likely to materialise back then. As I will come on to discuss, we are yet to adequately combine the modelling with policy responses to the new realities.

Gerard didn’t live to witness North Carolina’s latest encounter with a devastating hurricane, which came in the form of Hurricane Helene last September. Helene was quickly followed by Milton, adding two more to the list of major hurricanes of the 21^st century which have been, to date, smashing all kinds of records for different measures. They are just the latest in a growing list of adverse weather events linked to climatic change.

As I will touch on further down, hurricanes become more severe as temperature warms … and 2024 was the hottest recorded year in history, breaking the record set the previous year. Hurricanes bring greater rainfall and add to a wider picture of water volatility, effecting different places in different ways – floods and droughts are both increasing to devastating effect. The risk of food shortages and price rises increase as extreme weather linked to climate change creates lower agricultural yields. Climate change may not (yet) have directly triggered a war, but it is certainly triggering the conditions which could lead to armed conflict.

“I’m more comfortable with nuclear and advanced production,” I tell him.

“I’ve been working on that with Jacopo for the past couple of years,” I add. He doesn’t volunteer a response.

“So, I can make that argument, but I need more help on the first part,” I continue, hoping to elicit a reply. Still no solution is offered.

“I don’t understand climate,” I finally confess.

“Nobody understands climate,” he says – at which he, Jacopo and I all smile. He suggests some background reading for me to do. He knows I’ve glanced over his climate primer paper, because I’ve questioned him on it before for a podcast panel discussion that I hosted with him and Jacopo. But he isn’t going to let me off the hook of doing my homework properly.

After many decades as professor of atmospheric science at UCLA and MIT, Kerry Emanuel has now retired from teaching to focus on research and ‘doing’ more science. His previous work has already transformed our understanding of climate change and its costs, from hypothetical cause and effect to grounded reality, not least through providing evidence that oceanic storms have become more powerful as a result of higher water temperatures, caused by increased atmospheric greenhouse gases. He flew in from Japan yesterday and has another book manuscript he’s working on, on top of a host of other commitments. Such is the life of an MIT Professor Emeritus, who just happens to be a world authority on meteorology and climate science.

He shows a degree of patience with my relative ignorance, but then he’s accustomed to it. Virtually nobody can discuss these issues with him, on his level. He humours me on some of my basic misunderstandings. I ask him about the reported levelling-off of greenhouse gas emissions and why, despite this, the observable reality shows that global temperature increases and the frequency of extreme weather events are accelerating. What’s going on?

“If emissions were merely levelling off, there would still be rapid growth in greenhouse gas concentrations,” he explains. “If they were to stop altogether, greenhouse gas concentrations would not rise further, but would take hundreds of years for concentrations to fall appreciably.”

I ask about some drafting I’ve put together on exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature increase limit and whether so-called climate tipping points can be expected much sooner than expected. Again, he enlightens me. “This is problematic. First, there is no particular threshold beyond which tipping points can be expected, and secondly, tipping points are conjecture, so that we cannot predict them at all. A phrase like ‘increasing the risk of tipping points’ might be justified.”

Undeterred, I go away and read further articles and reports, discovering that I know more about the subject than I’d given myself credit for. The challenge is less one of comprehension, but more of distilling the complex information into a digestible format. Eventually, I decide to give myself a break and not even attempt to provide a sophisticated explanation of climate science. I’ll leave that to those who are qualified to do so. On that note, I highly recommend reading Kerry’s short book, What We Know About Climate Change. It’s the best outline of the issue I’ve read, and it takes only a few hours to digest.

Instead, here I’ll briefly share my understanding of what the issue is, in a nutshell. As I say, I’m not completely ignorant on the topic of climate change. However, like many of us, I do find that it’s easy to feel confused, overwhelmed and even detached from the story of climate change. The science explaining it can seem impenetrable, the back and forth between different scientists and activists on points of technical detail can feel abstract and removed from the reality of our daily lives – and sometimes even from the reality of dramatic climate events we increasingly see and hear about in our news media. The politics of climate change is beyond frustrating, showcasing so much of what is wrong with contemporary societal discourse.

Opinion polling shows that, irrespective of our political outlook, geographic location or identity, most of us care very deeply about the environment and are concerned about climate change. We want our governments, public institutions and private corporations to take the necessary action to mitigate and combat the worse effects of climate change. We want to play our part … we just don’t know exactly what that is. We want solutions to be found, but we hear conflicting information about what they are. World leaders don’t seem to be able to make progress. How many of us really care what comes out of United Nations COP summits anymore? The acronym itself is problematic. It stands for “Conference of the Parties” – hardly translatable to the common vernacular most of us connect with. They could just call it “junket” and be done with it.

So, what is the nutshell I’ve promised? Well, first the distinction should be drawn between post-industrial revolution climate change and the long-term fluctuations in weather patterns that would be expected irrespective of any human activity. Earth is 4.5 billion years old and throughout its existence, its climate has not been stable but rather has changed in a number of different ways.

One (but not the only) example of climate change is witnessed through the different glacial cycles which have played out in segments of around one-hundred thousand years. To look at Planet Earth from space would, at various times, show changes from a completely white ball when Earth’s surface was entirely covered with ice, to a blue and green mix when there was no ice, not even on the poles – and everything in between. Sea levels have risen and fallen dramatically throughout the ages, as have global average temperatures. Such variation has happened for different reasons and on different timescales. Kerry explains to me: “The gradual decline of global temperature over the past 100 million years or so is a much greater change, but over a much longer period.”

We know this in large part thanks to the study of climate records by scientists in the field of Paleoclimatology. Natural ‘proxy’ records of weather patterns, covering millions of years, are kept in such things as tree rings, fossils, layers of ice, coral or the patterns of layers of sediment in rocks formed by glaciers. Even the location of such rocks serves as evidence of past glacial periods in a particular location.

Here I could regurgitate information, on which I am no expert, to try to explain why all of this happens the way it does. I could try to explain how the changing tilt of our planet, or variations in Earth’s orbiting of the Sun, have been among the many different drivers for our planet’s historical climatic variations and instability. For ease, it is better to direct anyone seeking more detailed explanation to go and read Kerry’s aforementioned book. There are also a number of useful resources available on the internet, including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website. I also recommend the fine work of the good folks at MIT, who turned Kerry’s climate primer paper into a Webby Award-winning website.

The key area to focus on is the more recent acceleration in global mean temperatures caused by human activity. For decades now we have been witnessing, in the data, the rise in greenhouse gasses that trap heat, leading to warmer temperatures recorded on the surface of the Earth. The leading greenhouse gasses are: carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, nitrous oxide and ozone. Carbon dioxide (CO2) content started to rise in the late 19th century. This can be inferred from bubbles of atmosphere trapped in ice and detected in ice cores.

In 1958 we started directly measuring CO2 from the observatory on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Since then, we have witnessed the increase of CO2 in our atmosphere at an ever-accelerating rate – a sharp uptick that is higher than the amount that can be captured by Earth’s natural carbon cycle. This has largely (around 70 – 80 percent today) come from burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal, to power our lives: our homes, industries and transport systems. Agriculture, manufacture of concrete and changing land-use patterns (including deforestation) have also made significant contributions.

The pivotal change started more than 200 years ago with the industrial revolution, as evidenced by the sharp increase in greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols. However, the impact can be witnessed dramatically in the data from the middle of the last century.

Hence the subheading of this essay; some are dubbing this post-1950 period “The Anthropocene” – namely the era of human activity having a significant impact on Earth’s climate, weather, geology, landscape and ecosystems. The result is what we commonly term climate change, and refers to the increase in global average temperature (global warming) and the resulting effects this has on Earth’s climate system, including the increase in weather volatility and extreme meteorological events.

Across the world for more than a century, in weather stations on land and at sea, daily high and low temperature recordings have shown that Earth’s average surface temperature has increased by about 1 degree Celsius since 1880. This temperature increase directly correlates with increased levels of CO2 recorded in Earth’s atmosphere over the same period.

Unless it is offset in equal measure by something that has a cooling effect, increasing CO2 will lead to warmer surface temperatures. Since 1800, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from about 280 parts per million (ppm) to more than 410 ppm today.

Earth’s surface temperature increase is leading to a reduction in inland and sea ice, most notably the reduction in ice mass in the Antarctic and Greenland. Given that oceans absorb most of the excess heat from the air, they are further exacerbating the ice decline through rising water temperatures towards the surface. The warmer water is permeating deeper and harmfully affecting marine ecosystems. There is more to the physics of ice, but the substantive point is that big glacier and ice sheet melting is raising sea levels, at an increasing rate.

Our large cities and major population centres tend to be on coastal and estuary locations. Hundreds of millions of people, from downtown Manhattan to Osaka are at risk of seeing their homes submerged from flooding, or hit by the increased storm activity that results from higher sea levels. Mountain ranges including the Himalayas, Andes and Alps are witnessing the decline of glaciers, which further adds to the overall problem.

References:

1. Emanuel, Kerry. (2018). What We Know About Climate Change, MIT Press

2. Gerard, Philip. “What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes.” Creative Nonfiction, no. 11 (1998): 100–109

Some dialogue above taken from a conversation I had with Kerry Emanuel and Jacopo Buongiorno to discuss a draft book manuscript: “Gridlocked: why the 21^st century is broken and how to fix it.”

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Yesterday, the U.S. Government made an announcement that you probably didn’t see. It contained Trumpian language about ensuring “U.S. energy dominance” and grim military messaging on projecting power and being “focused on lethality.” This was all to inform us that eight companies have been selected as eligible to receive awards to provide commercially available dual use microreactor technology at various U.S. Department of Defense installations. Despite the off-putting tone of the release, the news itself should be welcomed. Yes, seriously. Hear me out.

The Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program is a collaboration between the Defense Innovation Unit, Department of the Army, and Department of the Air Force working to design, licence, build, and operate microreactor nuclear power plants on American military installations. This will help pave the way for widespread application of the technology in civilian settings. Yesterday’s announcement follows recent news that prototype nuclear batteries have been developed in both Japan and South Korea. Taken together, these developments could be the shard of light we need in otherwise dark times. Because innovations in advanced nuclear technology could be critical to unlocking the path to decarbonising our societies and combatting climate change.

First, let me back up …

Two years ago, from the Barcelona apartment I was calling home for the summer, I read a New York Times piece that caught my attention. My head was fixated on all things clean energy because I was in the midst of producing the first season of the Gridlocked podcast. The article was written by economist Paul Krugman. In it, he identified climate science denial and its weaponisation in culture war politics as a major obstacle we face in combating climate change. In the U.S., perhaps he is right to some degree. But this understates the problem. Especially when viewed from across the Atlantic, where questioning climate science is largely a non-issue (not entirely though).

The fundamental roadblock in more climate-conscious European societies is not so much climate science denial, but false environmental policy prescriptions such as the misguided concept of ‘demand reduction’ – the notion that we can energy-conserve our way out of climate change. This tired thinking is older than I am, and has never worked. Besides, even if some northern European countries did significantly reduce energy demand, so what? Global demand for energy is going up and up. Orders for new air-conditioning units are headed in only one direction, and the U.S. is not about to ditch the car as its main mode of transportation. So-called solutions such as switching off the lights when you leave a room, reducing travel or doing less of the things we love doing just won’t scratch the surface of dealing with global CO2 emissions. Small acts won’t add up to making a big difference; we need to drop the delusion that they will. Instead, we require policy solutions that politicians can sell to their electorates.

This means stopping our ignorance about what different energy technologies can actually deliver; stopping our slavish preference for deploying some energy technologies over others. As I argued in a Salon essay I wrote back in that same Catalan summer, too many of us are fixated on intermittent and unreliable wind and solar energy, which just tends to result in a continued reliance on gas and coal.

Instead, we should be focusing on maximising clean, low-carbon energy supply and consumption across our economies, including transport and manufacturing. Renewables have their place, but only get us so far. Today, more than 80 percent of global energy is still derived from CO2-emitting fossil fuels, causing emissions to continue to rise. Despite 25 years of green initiatives and promoting renewables, a quarter of the way into the 21st century we are cramming yet more carbon into Earth's atmosphere. Global average temperatures are rising: 2023 was the hottest year on record, until 2024 beat it. People need those AC units. Whether or not we’ve breached the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature to a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase on pre-industrial levels is a technical debate. Net zero isn’t working.

Unfortunately, Krugman himself falls into the renewable fallacy trap in his article: a classic case of an economist (whom I respect, I might add) not taking the time to get a sufficient understanding of the technology. Thankfully some of us – myself and Krugman included – are not required to be technical experts. We can leave that to the engineers. But we really ought to furnish ourselves with a thorough enough understanding of the extent to which these technologies can actually meet our clean energy needs, and deliver on the policy arguments we make.

A mix of demand reduction and the mass proliferation of renewable energy will not solve climate change. In the middle of the 2020s, the rational environmentalists among us have come to realise that the only way we combat climate change is through nuclear as the linchpin of our low carbon energy mix. Nuclear is the safest, most reliable, concentrated, efficient and carbon-free energy source available to us. But its benefits go beyond merely generating clean power. By deploying nuclear energy as a central part of a strategy to unlock the potential for a new and resilient energy-industrial model, the global economy can transition out of its current fossil fuel dependency and create prosperity in any location.

A clean energy revolution is required and this means getting real about how we deliver the sustainable energy systems that will help us decarbonise our economies and create viable societies for the future. This is our calling: to ensure that our children and grandchildren can inherit a liveable planet.

In order to decarbonise a society, we need to look at major sources of CO2 emissions, by sector, across the entire economy. In most economies, electricity power generation rarely goes above accounting for a quarter of emissions – and can be lower still, even in industrialised countries. We need an energy technology that can enable us to reduce emissions from our transportation, buildings, industry and agricultural production. Large nuclear reactors, typically with an output of around 1,000 MW, are great for providing reliable and clean electricity for the grid and can help us clean up the above sectors insofar as they use grid-generated electricity – for example, by powering our homes, offices or electric vehicles by nuclear-produced electricity. But there are limits to the reach and application of grid-supplied electricity.

As this paper highlights, the expansion of the electricity grid has overlapped with increasing urbanisation. This has produced a highly interconnected yet creaking system which requires tight controls over electricity generating fuels – including natural gas, coal, oil, uranium – and their transport by pipeline, truck, or rail to large centralised power plants. This has required lengthy power lines for distribution, and supply and voltage synchronisation to deliver energy to end users. At every step, inefficiencies are introduced, whilst harmful carbon emissions are added to the atmosphere one way or another. The recent addition of variable renewables has simply added further complications. Renewables can play a role in decarbonising the grid if combined with clean nuclear, but they contribute to vulnerabilities in systems that are already fragile and susceptible to external pressures. Wind farms and solar arrays are proving especially vulnerable to extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes.

By contrast, advanced nuclear technologies – from small modular reactors (SMRs) to microreactors – offer solutions to so many of the challenges we face without these drawbacks. Microreactors enable us to move away from a centralised electrical grid model and provide incredible possibilities not simply to decarbonise, but to change the shape of industrial production and totally transform currently left behind communities and regions. Indeed, a new breed of microreactor called nuclear batteries (NBs) could just be the best thing since sliced bread, as the expression goes. They are probably also the best thing you’ve never heard of.

Nuclear batteries use standardised simple designs with few moving parts, combining a small nuclear reactor and a turbine to supply significant amounts of heat and power (on the order of 15–30 MWt or 5–10 Mwe) from a very small footprint. This is an energy output equivalent to that of a huge solar field or wind farm, but requiring only a fraction of the land use.

Nuclear batteries are unobtrusive and can be built into the landscape or even hidden within buildings and structures. Embedded intelligence and advanced (remote) monitoring systems enable semi-autonomous, digitally secure operation. However, the wonder of NBs is not so much in the technology itself – ingenious though it is – but in how they can be deployed. They could more efficiently and reliably heat and power a Midtown Manhattan block, development of 7,000–8,000 homes, airport campus, shopping mall or mid-size data centre.

The NB is a small but powerful stand-alone energy platform that can be directly integrated into manufacturing functions or industrial plants. It’s a solution bypassing the need for massive, low-use centralised infrastructure such as the national grid, energy storage, and fuel distribution networks. NBs can be factory-fuelled to operate for 5-10 years, powering virtually anything with no need for continuous fuel supply. After this, they are ‘recharged’ with low-enriched uranium fuel. They can be safely shipped back to a centralised facility for this refuelling and refurbishment at the end of the operational period, without the need for the user to handle the refuelling.

Unlike the better-known SMR, NBs are transportable ‘plug-and-play’ microreactors that can be shipped to even the most remote off-grid locations. They are fully contained, independent and – unlike traditional nuclear reactors – do not require water for cooling.

Whilst innovative, this concept is not actually new. As far back as the early 1950s, arguably the first small, self-contained, portable nuclear reactor came into being as U.S. Navy nuclear powered submarines. In the early 1960s, the U.S. Army designed, built and tested ML-1, a 500-kW gas-cooled microreactor that could be hauled around by truck and provide power in the field for over one year without refuelling. Of course, today’s NBs being developed by U.S. companies Westinghouse, X-energy, BWXT and others are a world away from that technology. Regulatory approval for models being developed would unleash to market a revolutionary innovation that can provide on demand, clean, economic, resilient and safe energy in any location. They offer a new type of distributed energy source that is low-carbon, compact, stable, flexible and geographically unconstrained.

Certain industrial processes, for example those concerning chemicals, food and other manufacturing activity, require heat in addition to electricity. Unlike electricity, heat cannot be transmitted over long distances and needs to be generated relatively close to where it is consumed. This is where NBs really come into their own. By being co-located with the heat user, microreactors can totally transform the geography of industrial structures and elevate manufacturing to an advance level of production. Large energy plants will likely continue to form the backbone of our energy infrastructure, of course. But unlike large reactors, large wind or solar farms, NBs can provide any desired amount of electricity and heat on site, eliminating the need for long-distance transmission and large centralised infrastructure.

NBs avoid many of the drawbacks associated with the costly and protracted construction of larger power plants. Indeed, large labour-intensive construction sites can be avoided altogether via prefabrication of NBs in a central manufacturing facility before delivering them in one piece directly to the end user location, where they can be plugged in and made operational within a matter of weeks. This reduces cost that would only fall further, dramatically in fact, through economies of scale as orders for NBs increase.

NB technology is at advanced development stage and can be ready for market by 2027-2028, according to industry estimates. I’m informed by those developing NBs that, within the first few years of mass production, the cost of each battery would come down to between US $50–$80million, excluding the fuel costs. This would circumvent the need for decades-long, multibillion-dollar construction projects and ought to be an attractive proposition for investors who can see their financial risk significantly reduced.

While the cost of each microreactor is low in absolute terms, it is likely the unit cost of energy generated by the NBs will be higher than SMRs and large reactors. However, NBs will be competitive because they will be used in markets where the competition is either diesel generators or non-existent.

This video of the Westinghouse eVinci™ shows how nuclear batteries could be deployed

We are at a point in history requiring us to avert climate breakdown whilst breaking through stalled ideas and socio-political divisions. One way we can do this is through setting our ambitions higher, by looking to completely change the way our economies are structured. And this is where the real beauty of NBs is seen: in their transformative potential to propel us into a new industrial revolution. By coupling them with advanced production procedures requiring consistent localised energy – from containerised modern farming facilities to advanced chemicals – how and where we manufacture the products of the future can be totally revolutionised. Remote rural economies, commodity dependent regions, developing and smaller nations could all have their economic destinies handed to them like never before.

It gets better still. In addition to helping us mitigate climate change (i.e. cutting emissions and slowing the pace of global warming), microreactors could just be the sharpest item in our climate adaptation toolkit. If the recent wildfires and hurricanes have taught us nothing else, it is that we need to better protect ourselves from climate consequences already on our doorstep.

Take the problem of melting ice caps and rising sea levels as an example. Across the globe, coastal communities are having to construct significantly upgraded sea defences. Increasingly these communities – especially islands – will require dykes and barriers to shield them from the higher sea levels. The controlled inner waterways and lagoons being created will require water to be pumped, in places almost continuously, in order to prevent devastating flooding. This will require a large amount of steadfastly reliable energy. Off-grid microreactors are the perfect solution.

As scarcity of fresh drinking water becomes an increasing threat to parts of the world, a single NB could provide enough desalinated fresh water for over 150,000 people. Indeed, with severe weather events and the impacts of climate change leading to the displacement of increasing numbers of people, NBs could be quickly deployed to provide energy in disaster relief zones.

All of the above is possible from a battery system small enough to fit within standard shipping containers (as the video above shows). A 2021 research paper led by MIT’s Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy systems highlights how much material could be saved by using NBs instead of other, less reliable, clean energy alternatives:

To build a windfarm of 100 MW requires about 20,000 tonnes of steel, 50,000 tonnes of concrete as well as 900 tonnes of plastics used in the blades. Solar photovoltaic farms producing similar outputs require 50% more materials, though less steel than wind. In contrast, NBs generating 100 MW would require around 20 tonnes of low-enriched uranium, 1,600 tonnes of steel and 4,600 tonnes of concrete.

Microreactors and NBs offer a society greater control of its economic destiny, building a more sustainable and prosperous future through technological solutions that can provide on demand, clean and reliable energy in any location. NBs really could be the most exciting innovation in decades … Yet virtually nobody outside the nuclear energy community is talking about them.

So, we need to change the conversation and, as we look ahead to a clean energy future, try to imagine a world without polluting power stations burning fossil fuels. A future landscape without pylons and grids. A world where acres of countryside and essential farmland are not surrendered to metallic rows of solar panels, containing toxic waste that will go into the ground somehow.

Imagine a future in which our planet’s precious ecosystems are protected, where the variety of natural life on Earth – our rich biodiversity – is preserved and secured. Imagine a future of resilience to floods, droughts and extreme weather, where talk of net zero targets is a thing of the past. Imagine a future world where we can ‘plug and play’ clean energy anywhere, whatever the business.

Imagine a world where economic prosperity is no longer the preserve of those living in large urban centres in already industrialised regions. Imagine a new globally shared equity that ends previous commodity dependency and lifts our left behind communities and regions out of poverty.

Well, imagine no more, because we don’t have time to waste. We must step forward into the future, starting today. To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, one small nuclear battery can create one giant leap for mankind; enabling us to build a world for our children and grandchildren that is worth inheriting. If we usher in the nuclear renaissance, with advanced microreactor technology at its core, we can create tomorrow’s world, today. So, what are we waiting for?

Further Reading (referenced above):

1. Buongiorno et al, “A Strategy to Unlock the Potential of Nuclear Energy for a New and Resilient Global Energy-Industrial Paradigm,” The Bridge, (National Academy of Engineering), June 15, 2021. Volume 51 Issue 2: https://www.nae.edu/255810/A-Strategy-to-Unlock-the-Potential-of-Nuclear-Energy-for-a-New-and-Resilient-Global-EnergyIndustrial-Paradigm

2. Buongiorno et al, “Can Nuclear Batteries Be Economically Competitive in Large Markets?”, Energies 2021, 14(14), 4385; https://doi.org/10.3390/en14144385

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It’s an unseasonably hot autumn day, about 25 degrees Celsius. I turn from Franklin Avenue onto Hancock Street, hugged tight by imposing four-storey Italianate brownstone terraces that frame each side of the road. Stoops worn smooth by decades of hard footsteps on soft sandstone seem to whisper secrets from a storied past, as they rise above ornate cast-iron black railings that line the weathered grey sidewalk. It’s almost Halloween and many of the frontages, set back from the street, are dressed in suitably spooky paraphernalia. Brownstones seem made for this holiday, as though their architects anticipated the dressing of orange pumpkins and faux spider cobweb decoration when designing those mud-coloured facades.

Honey locust trees have shed their wares: small yellow leaves and dark brown pod husks lay strewn across the old concrete slabs in front of me, softly crunching underfoot. Perhaps this explains the unfamiliar fragrance gently caressing my foreign nostrils. It’s Tuesday 29^th October 2024, exactly one week before election day. At each intersection, as I head east along Hancock, I hear the distant thud of bass-heavy music and the occasional car horn beep, blending with the muffled sighs of buses that pull over to pick up passengers on Fulton Street; where a teenage Christopher Wallace used to sell crack before he made it big – Biggie Smalls big. By contrast, here on Hancock I’m virtually alone and the street is still. Just me and the ghosts. But this Indian summer air feels thick with quiet tension. Beneath stone-carved ornamental lintels, some windows have dark blue posters displaying the name HARRIS, with WALZ in slightly smaller font underneath. Below that an instruction: “Text JOIN to 30330” … join what exactly, I wonder. My thoughts turn to next week’s vote. Could something eerie be stirring?

Brownstone architecture has become integral to how we both perceive and conceive of this captivating slice of Brooklyn, whose street names honour legendary black leaders like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, alongside old Dutchmen and Robert Fulton, the celebrated engineer and inventor. The brownstones themselves resonate, serving as a ‘hook’ to hang community activism around and as a key feature of how Bed-Stuy is represented in popular culture. This is particularly evident in films like Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing, much of the memorialisation of 1980s and 1990s hip hop music, or even more explicitly through initiatives like Brownstone Jazz.

I turn left at Tompkins Avenue, which is not just a street but an experience pulsing through the heart of Bed-Stuy. In summer weekends Tompkins is barricaded-off as an ‘open-street’ where drum bands march, jerk chicken sizzles on BBQs, and those that know the steps join impromptu line-dances that break out to Beyoncé’s cover of Before I Let Go. Even on a quieter autumn afternoon, Tompkins Avenue is brimming with an eclectic mix of old Caribbean influences, regulation NYC corner delis, new ‘bougie’ life. The tantalising aroma of artisan coffee percolates from a narrow café staffed by hipsters; boutiques sell non-high street garments. It’s a living, breathing testament to the resilience and soul of Bed-Stuy coexisting with the new reality. And, at each cross section, yet more avenues of seemingly endless brownstone rows.

Today those almost fairytale chocolate facades betray a very real story of what we call 21^st century gentrification; of ‘real estate’ now beyond the reach of ordinary folk. This is in stark contrast to the recent past, when Bed-Stuy’s brownstones came to symbolise New York City’s emerging black middle class. Today, the brownstones still stand proud, but they’ve become a symbol of a contested space; of economic displacement. It is here, in this shifting urban landscape, this enclave of the most archetypal of the world’s neoliberal cities, that Henri Lefebvre’s theorising on space and power finds clear expression.

In his 1974 book, The Production of Space, Lefebvre argued that urban environments are not merely physical landscapes but social products shaped by power structures. According to Lefebvre, space is not neutral; it is created, controlled, and contested by those who wield economic and political influence. Lefebvre identified three dimensions for considering space: spatial practices (our use of space in daily life); representations of space (maps and policies like zoning laws, shaping the urban environment); and representational spaces (our lived experience and the cultural significance we attach to place). Bedford-Stuyvesant provides as clear a case study as any for applying Lefebvre’s analysis to post-industrial western society.

“I own this brownstone”

By the early mid-20^th century Bed-Stuy had become a predominantly African American community, following the Great Migration from the Jim Crow segregated southern states. During the 1930s, Lefebvre’s second dimension for considering space – representations of space – came into play through the redlining maps drawn by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (ironically created as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal). These maps designated Black neighbourhoods as “high-risk” areas, ensuring that banks would deny mortgages to residents within the boundaries. This resulted in capital flowing elsewhere, deepening cycles of disinvestment. It served to perpetuate historic, structural inequality; effectively racializing poverty. Despite this, African American residents cultivated their own representational space through vibrant cultural and political institutions – from the jazz clubs that hosted Max Roach and Miles Davis, to the formation of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. However, the structural barriers imposed by redlining ensured that Bed-Stuy remained economically left behind relative to other parts of New York City.

Through Lefebvre’s framework, redlining can be viewed not merely as an act of financial exclusion but a deliberate production of space designed to concentrate poverty and limit social mobility for a particular demographic of society. The brownstones that now sell for millions of dollars were once long neglected by landlords who knew their tenants had few alternatives. Many brownstones fell into disrepair as housing conditions for Bed-Stuy’s residents worsened, against a wider backdrop of social decay. This was not an unfortunate accident, but the direct consequence of space being produced to serve the interests of one group over another.

Further up Tompkins Avenue I reach Herbert Von King Park. Near the amphitheatre in the centre of the park, a DJ with a mobile sound system spins old soulful house. The music seems to be trying to cling to the area’s identity at each beat. On a less profound level, it makes me smile at the memory of my younger self dancing to those tunes in London nightclubs. Those days are gone though.

The ghosts of the past linger in the musical notes, the chipped sandstone cornices of nearby brownstones and faded murals … but so does the future emerge – in the laughter of children in the play park, the teenagers playing basketball, the woman in a headwrap swaying her young baby to the music. Our eyes meet; we both smile and produce the nod exchanged between two strangers who recognise each other not by name, but by presence and experience. Here in this park, beneath the rustling trees and the gentle hum of city beyond, Bed-Stuy endures. Here Bed-Stuy feels like it still belongs to us – we the people, us – as though by inalienable right.

The reality, however, is that no such right to this place currently exists. Lefebvre was an extraordinarily prolific writer. One of his earlier works, The Right to the City, is another essential guide to understanding contemporary urbanism. Here Lefebvre argued that we should not merely live in cities but actively participate in shaping them. He critiqued the tendency to create cities as spaces of consumption rather than lived community experiences. The notion of a right to the city is not merely a question of physical access to spaces, but of who has power and control. It addresses who has a say in how a city develops: what a neighbourhood looks like, who it serves, and who benefits from regeneration and development.

Today, like so many other urban communities, Bedford-Stuyvesant is being reshaped. But for whom? The brownstones are prime real estate and the neighbourhood’s cultural vibrancy, once overlooked, is now commodified as part of any realtor’s sales pitch (I once made the mistake of typing “Brooklyn brownstones” into a YouTube search, hoping to uncover some architectural history documentaries). According to Zillow data, since the turn of this century, the median home price in Bedford-Stuyvesant has surged from just over $200,000 to well over $1million ($1.21million in 2023). That’s a more than 400% increase in two decades. A full 5-bedroom plus townhouse will easily cost three or four times this median price.

Renters have also been squeezed. According to NYU Furman Center, median gross rent in Bedford Stuyvesant increased from $1,050 in 2006 to $1,950 in 2022. It has jumped further since, pricing out long-time residents. Zumper has the current median rental price at $3,075 per month – and closer to $4,000 for a 2-bed apartment. With median household income in Bed-Stuy at $77,146, a large number of people will be spending half of their income or more just on rent alone.

And so, the cruel irony is that the ending of redlining ultimately didn’t liberate Bed-Stuy’s residents. Instead, from 1975’s near bankruptcy of New York City onwards, they got the neoliberal economic model – free markets, privatisation, deregulation and shrinking of the state. This led to the dominance of an ideology that doesn’t acknowledge itself as an ideology, instead acting invisibly as though it were some law of nature controlling increasingly more aspects of our lives. As Gordon Gekko taught us in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, greed became good and the selfish pursuit of wealth accumulation would somehow, magically, make the world a better place. This encouraged housing market bubbles built on cheap debt and predatory speculation. Such marketisation has not only broken the housing system – a public good – but should been seen as a clear symbol of a wider political/ economic philosophy that is a dud. It never worked at all.

We need a new way of organising our economies; to create viable societies in which equitable prosperity can be sustained in every community across New York City and beyond. But what form should that model take; and why is there no serious discussion of this amongst leading politicians or in our mainstream media? I doubt that texting JOIN to 30330 would have provided any answers.

Historically, Bed-Stuy’s residents asserted their right to the city through activism, from the 1960s civil rights movement to community-driven housing. Yet, as property values skyrocket, their claim to Bed-Stuy is systematically eroded. Rent hikes, predatory buyouts, and rezoning laws favouring developers create a new representation of space, in which the urban landscape is reimagined for wealthier newcomers. A decade before my Bed-Stuy sojourn, across the East River in Manhattan, Zadie Smith wrote:

There’s a reason so many writers once lived here, beyond the convenient laundromats and the take-out food, the libraries and cafés. We have always worked off the energy generated by this town, the money-making and tower-building as much as the street art and underground cultures. Now the energy is different: the underground has almost entirely disappeared. (You hope there are still young artists in Washington Heights, in the Barrio, or Stuyvesant Town, but how much longer can they hang on?) A twisted kind of energy radiates instead off the soul cycling mothers and marathon-running octogenarians, the entertainment lawyers glued to their iPhones and the moguls building five “individualized” condo townhouses where once there was a hospital.

Smith asked back then: “what comes next?” She argued that we could deceive ourselves into, “thinking of Manhattan as an isle of writers and artists – of downtown underground wildlings and uptown intellectuals – against all evidence to the contrary.” She concluded: “they are all of them, every single last one of them, in Brooklyn.”

A few short years later, they are fast disappearing from Brooklyn too. Anecdotally, I seem to know an ever-expanding pool of people who have crossed both the East River and then the Hudson into Jersey City and further inland, to avoid Brooklyn’s rent hikes. They have moved out to the periphery to commute in to work in New York City; to produce urban life in a place they have been priced out of.

Building on Lefebvre, CUNY’s David Harvey argues that the right to the city should be understood through how our public spheres can be moulded by “the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization” rather than merely being a ‘right’ to access the public services a city provides. So, to achieve a collective vision of urban life, we need some form of collective resistance. This has taken the shape of grassroots movements fighting back against displacement. An example of this is the coalition of activist organisations formed under the Right to the City Alliance, which has mobilised to demand tenant protections, fight against luxury developments, and preserve affordable housing. This movement deserves more attention – and support – than it gets.

In Bed-Stuy, local residents have championed urban agriculture and land reclamation as tools of resistance. Across Marcy Avenue from the impromptu house music party I’m treated to at Herbert Von King Park, the Hattie Carthan Community Garden stands as a powerful example of community-led spatial production. It is named after Carthan, a local resident environmentalist who helped found the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood Tree Corps in 1971 as a way to teach young people how to care for trees, later becoming chairwoman of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee. This initiative eventually added more than 1,500 trees to the neighbourhood. The community garden itself, once a neglected lot, has been transformed into a vibrant hub where residents grow food, organise educational programmes, and assert a degree of agency and control over local development. Through these efforts, long-time Bed-Stuy residents continue to reclaim their right to the city. They show how we can be active producers of space and urban life.

Despite these green shoots, a depressing irony is inescapable. The very culture that was born during (and often in response to) Bedford-Stuyvesant’s ‘redlined’ subjugation – its jazz clubs, block parties, and deep communal ties – is now leveraged as a selling point for those displacing its long-term residents. In Lefebvre’s terms, this is the abstract space of capitalism, where lived experience and history is overwritten by the need to extract profit. Whereas in the late 1980s Biggie Smalls selling crack on Fulton Street was considered a menace to society, today his story has become a commodity for realtors to exploit.

As the day draws to an end, the sky’s shade begins to turn but the brownstones remain constant. However, I study them closely and start to notice the variations in detailing: their hues are not uniform and their style can change from one row to the next. Some have decorative brackets beneath the roofline, others don’t. Some have mansard slate roofs, most are flat. Some are not even clad in a sheet of brownstone at all, but are exposed brick with only the brownstone itself evident in doorway and window lintels.

To spend any time strolling through Bed-Stuy, neighbouring Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, or further beyond in Brooklyn Heights, is to be treated to the full plethora of brownstone styles, charting the history of 19th century Brooklyn architecture. The earlier Greek Revivals are easy to identify, as are the later Romanesque Revivals or Queen Annes, whose bay windows remind me of the Victorian terraces I grew up with back across the Atlantic. I find it can get tricky distinguishing a Second Empire from an Italianate with any confidence. The tall, narrow windows of the Neo-Grecs, like the Greek Revivals, seem more austere, angular and masculine compared to the more ornate curved detailing of Italianate window mouldings. However, the later Italianates, like the ones I saw earlier on Hancock Street, can seem to fuse with the Neo-Grecs.

I try to test my self-taught knowledge on the styles as I walk back in the direction of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, where I’m staying. Much of it is still guesswork for me. What becomes less puzzling than my nascent architectural acumen is the clear sense that I’m traversing a contested territory; navigating power, history, and a sense of belonging. With each step my walk starts to feel like it’s been a quest all along. I study these buildings, but why? What am I seeking clues for?

It dawns on me: I’d love to figure out how communities can reclaim these urban spaces and architecture. This is the quest that has emerged from my afternoon stroll through this charming pocket of Brooklyn. In short, I need to search for ways in which those who are ‘left-behind’ can take the initiative to shape their futures; and in so doing, create a sense of power through agency. A quarter of the way into the 21st century, I believe it imperative that communities fight back and protect themselves from drowning under the waves of privatisation engulfing our metropolises. We should not, in my view, allow our great cities to be exclusive playgrounds for the rich.

My hunt for solutions led me to Lefebvre, who taught us that space is never passive. The brownstone avenues of Bed-Stuy, once marked by exclusion and later reclaimed through community resilience, have in recent years faced a new wave of spatial production: driven by capital rather than culture; in what has come to be known as ‘gentrification’ in the common vernacular. If the right to the city is worth having, it is worth fighting for. That fight starts with community; it should be channelled through the collective reimagining of urban life itself.

I walk on and peer up at the now lit windows of these enchanting dwellings whose original purpose was shelter, not financial speculation. I wonder, whose brownstones will these be in the decades to come? Who will they belong to … and who will belong in this place?

References:

1. Lefebvre, Henri. (1991). The Production of Space (translated by D. Nicholson-Smith). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell

2. Lefebvre, Henri. (1968). Le Droit à la ville (2nd ed.). Paris, France: Anthropos

3. Smith, Zadie. “Find Your Beach”. The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014 issue

4. Harvey, David. “The Right to the City”. New Left Review, 2008. II (53): 23

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My arms make arcing breaststrokes in tepid turquoise water, slicing through its smooth thickness which envelops my skin like silk. I bob down 15 feet or so to the seabed, where the water turns darker blue, cold, invigorating. I pinch my nose as I twist my body to look upwards at the light above. As a child I feared the salt stinging my eyes, but now it no longer bothers me. Did I change, or has the water?

As I rise back up, so does the temperature. I emerge to a pastel pink sky, flush with the calm sheet of slate-silver disturbed only by the small ripples caused by my movement: I am but one human disrupting nature. A couple of candyfloss clouds hang lightly, motionless as the setting sun illuminates their crimson and purple hues.

I turn from the expanse of Mediterranean Sea to face the golden sand shoreline, formed in small calas demarcated by rugged red rock outcrops rising from the sea to form small cliffs. The air merges seamlessly with the water and I don’t feel it on my wet flesh. But its fragrance fills my nostrils: warm sweet pine; a scent unfailingly evocative of childhood holidays in France and Greece.

That same air carries a continuous chorus from unseen cicadas, hidden within the thin canopy of pinus pinea that line the clifftop. They create a surround-sound stereo effect, a constant reminder of being somewhere warm and exotic; of not being in the southern England I was born – but would never quite fit – into. Inhaling familiarity, a reassuring sense of belonging to this place is growing within me.

Ocean swimming makes me feel connected to all parts of the world. Here, in this sea, I feel reinvigorated, reconnecting with nature and my own purpose. In this age of excessive individualism and worship of the self, I need to rebel. I am the product of a secular European society; science and nature are my gods. I worship truth, fact, evidence. I honour the reality of my place in the universe, which is as inconsequential as each grain of sand on the beach.

I turn on my back, stretching my limbs so I can float, water lapping at my ears. I gaze up at the now violet sky that is becoming navy, as stars start flickering in its vast darkening canvass. Those far away tiny lights hold so many people spellbound; in moments like this I can briefly share in their celestial fascination.

Dusk now firmly arrived, I have this stretch of Tarragona shoreline virtually to myself, save for the silhouette of a lone figure with two rods cast out to catch a bounty of marisco Catalán. The moment feels idyllic and I ponder why nobody else is swimming on this July evening. Perhaps they are all too busy to take time out; perhaps I am odd for wanting to swim in darkness. My rationalist mind wrestles with a dawning sense that I might carry a hitherto concealed spirituality within me. Perhaps.

The mind wins: there is no mystery to the evolving colours above me, it can all be explained by science. The sky turns pink for a variety of reasons, including due to dust or other particles in the air. As sunlight is filtered through Earth’s atmosphere, tiny air molecules cause it to ‘scatter’ (Rayleigh scattering) and this increases as the wavelength of light decreases.

During the day we see blue photons scattered by the atmosphere away from the sun. In the evening when the sun sinks low on the horizon its beams have to travel further and pass through a greater thickness of that atmosphere to reach the observer; the blue photons are taken out, leaving reddish pink. Red light has longer wavelengths and isn’t scattered as much – so it’s more concentrated in form and can have more visual impact.

The interaction with other variables is what can make for a dramatic sunset (or indeed sunrise) on a given day. For example, depending on their precise crystal composition, the clouds themselves could be adding to the mesmerising reddening effect in the sky. This can be enhanced by another possible contributor to all that I see above me: the level of pollutants in the air.

As the tones I see are not strong on the red colour spectrum, and given my coastal location, I convince myself (without evidence) that the air quality here is probably not too bad. More certain is that the water I swim in will contain microplastics imperceptible to my human senses. Indeed, my own body and those of the stranger’s catch will contain those same plastics.

Even in a moment as consciously connected with nature as this, there is no escaping the reality that humans continue to leave an indelible imprint on this planet. The idea that the world can be free from materials we (humans) have been using is as naive as it is unreasonable. Everything we do modifies the environment in some way. The question is how and to what degree. If the impact is negligible or modest, we can live with it. If it is more, we can agree ways of managing it. Perfect solutions do not exist – not in nature, not in science, not in human endeavour.

Beyond the pine trees is the first line of apartment blocks, and then the second, merging into the grid of streets which stretches through a coastal plain municipality lying between the Serra de Llaberia mountains and pristine, crystal Balearic waters; all powered by the Vandellòs nuclear plant. About 40km north is the city of Tarragona, reached by equally pristine motorways: the N-340 running parallel to the coast, converging with the AP-7 autopista that continues further north to Barcelona.

This municipality nestled between sea and mountains is an ecosystem comprised of living organisms and the physical built environment, a fusion of biotic and abiotic interacting, co-existing. Species survive and thrive within this mixed system, protected by human laws and regulations enacted to conserve biodiversity and the environment; human schemes devised to counteract population growth, habitat destruction, pollution. Living organisms interact to regulate the atmospheric composition, constant and constantly evolving, gradually through biogeochemical cycles. Farming and agriculture serve a simultaneous dual purpose of exploitation and conservation: of land, animal, culture.

Humanity has shaped this landscape but it still retains its natural beauty. There is the familiar mix of industrial and residential, work and leisure. Natural life combines with man-made constructions, but everything is from and of the earth. Manufactured life coexists with naturally occurring life, plant with chemical, synthetic with organic, technological with manual, digital with analogue. Trees, buildings, railroads, batteries, cars. Flowers, insects, birds. Brick, steel, concrete, glass. All from Earth, some processed and produced on Earth – by us humans. The common thread is that it all requires energy to form, grow and function.

And function it does, here in this municipality of clean orderly streets and recently upgraded high-speed rail line. This interconnected grid, plugged in to all modern-day forms of communication. This place just seems to work.

But what would happen if the systems holding it all together should break down?

It’s the summer of 2023 and not so far across the sea I swim in, red alerts are issued in 16 Italian cities. This is in response to an extreme heatwave dubbed “Cerberus” by the Italian Meteorological Society – so named after the three-headed monster featured in Dante’s Inferno. A little farther east, with scorching temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, the Acropolis in Athens is closed to visitors at the start of peak tourist season. A debate rages on the naming of the coming heatwave to follow this current one. Some favour “Xenia,” whilst others prefer “Cleon.” In the end, it will arrive as an anticyclone and be named “Charon,” after Greek mythology's ferryman of the dead. In the days to follow, in Rhodes an horrific inferno leads to the largest ever wildfire evacuation in Greece, with more than 19,000 people rescued from the island.

There is nothing mythical about these extreme weather incidents. They are the latest in a growing list of adverse climatic events wreaking havoc and displacing people; 2023 looks set to be the hottest recorded year in history.

A little farther beyond Mare Nostrum, the war in Ukraine rages on. The earlier destruction of a dam on the Dnipro River in the south of the country causes a media frenzy; in which nobody says hydroelectric power is vulnerable to attack but instead question the safety of nuclear energy. The incident raises fears for the water source used to cool reactors and spent fuel rods at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Despite the International Atomic Energy Agency being sufficiently reassured of the plant’s safety following its inspection, the media is full of sensationalist and inaccurate reporting about risks to the site.

The subject is at the forefront of my mind, having just released an episode of the Gridlocked podcast entitled, And Now for Nuclear.

Far from being a cautionary tale, Zaporizhzhia shows us – as did Fukushima in 2011 – just how robust nuclear safety measures are. But we can always favour false lessons and choose to draw the wrong conclusions. As is commonplace in this age of narrative trumping fact, the anti-nuclear lobby seizes the opportunity to spread misinformation and fear about sabotage and radiation leaks … the occurrence of which are unlikely and inconsequential.

Farther away, west across the Atlantic, against the backdrop of a stubbornly challenging economic outlook, the firing guns of the presidential primary season start to sound. The politico-media circus will fill the remainder of 2023 and all of 2024.

Climate change will not feature prominently in the election debate, as though the USA is somehow immune from it. To the extent it is discussed, some will weaponize climate science denial as part of a broader culture war politics tearing through America. Others will promote false environmental policy prescriptions and ignorance about what different energy technologies can actually deliver.

In this “post-truth” era, both sides will push falsehoods in equal measure, only seeing the ills of their opponents’ ways and failing to recognise their own. A campaign will happen, but there will be very little by way of genuine exchange of ideas. Too many of us refuse to hear opposing views or engage constructively in debate anymore. We no longer care to listen.

Taking time out to swim on a quiet Catalan evening helps me gain perspective on the times we are living in. Much heat and noise; too little light. Our societies seem to be getting more and more divided, with each passing year – like the temperature records – outdoing the previous one. I’ve been as guilty as the next person, adding my own hot air to fuel the growing angst many of us sense, but cannot shift.

All the while, we’re not on track to ‘solving’ climate change. My thoughts turn to how I can deliver on my purpose: to see a more equitable world operating sustainably to ensure that future generations can inherit viable societies on a liveable planet. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but it has become my mantra. In these waters that connect me with the entire world, I feel tiny and insignificant under the now starry night sky … and I know that my vision for a sustainable future could be fading from view.

This is a difficult chapter in history. The narrative arc seems to be bending away from us; away from light into darkness. I feel compelled to investigate the plot – to seek clues as to how we might find a positive twist. I resolve to find a way to be a little shard of light, piercing through the hot dark noise of contemporary discourse.

I dive back down to the cool depths, immersing myself once more in still, silent reflection. Down here in solitude I can empty my thoughts momentarily, hoping to resurface with clarity on how to play my small part in fixing the 21^st century. The broken century.

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Humanity is at an inflection point, seemingly unable to cut through division and societal angst. A toxic combination of demagoguery and oligarchy is challenging the democratic norms many of us have taken for granted throughout our lives.

Climate change is not being tackled; our economies only work for an ever-shrinking number of us; and the post-Cold War global system is unravelling. We are hoping that 20^th century solutions will somehow fix 21^st century problems and, in a sense, this ‘reflex thinking’ fits with what humans have always done.

Throughout history, we have understood our lives through stories. When existing stories fail to keep pace with change, or even start hurting us, new ones emerge with a vision for a brighter tomorrow. History is made when we stop dealing with yesterday’s problems, but instead try to fix the future.

Gridlocked is created as an ideas platform for fixing the 21^st century, delivered through original writing, interviews, podcasts and (soon I hope) documentary films. Join me in exploring how to address critical issues facing humanity, in depth and away from the ‘noise’ of standard social media echo chambers or fickle-natured, fast-paced 24/7 news cycles.

Our systems are broken: we are not on track to combat climate change; produce the five-fold increase in clean energy required by the middle of this century to keep pace with demand growth; or transform our failing economies. The negative knock-on effects of all of this cannot be understated. Is it any wonder that the geopolitical risk outlook looks so scary right now?

Even without the climate challenge or any geopolitical crises, neoliberalism as the prevailing political-economic ideology – free markets, deregulation and shrinking of the state – isn’t working. The 2008 crash should have been the final wake-up alarm call that something needed to fundamentally change. But we decided to hit snooze, and have been dozing ever since.

There are few examples of grand strategies failing so spectacularly as the current net zero agenda. The only thing that isn’t wrong about it is the end objective of averting climate catastrophe. However, trying to do so with the wrong tools, guided by the wrong metrics, and following a failed economic philosophy is getting us nowhere fast. It just encourages climate science deniers to wreak havoc with our children’s futures, not to mention those of the generations to follow.

But the problem isn’t just down the track. It is now. Let’s face it, the severe weather events linked to climate change that we are already witnessing aren’t aberrations. They have become the norm. The pattern is clear: floods, hurricanes and wildfires are increasing in frequency and ferocity. The situation is already dire enough to demand drastic intervention. Don’t take my word for it: ask a resident of Valencia, Asheville or Los Angeles.

We need to change the narrative, but our political and corporate leaders are devoid of new ideas. In fact, giving unqualified and unaccountable business executives too much power and influence is a big part of how we reached this position. I’m not suggesting corporations have no role to play, but we cannot continue to allow those with vested interests in perpetuating the status quo to hold us back from making meaningful change.

So, where are the agenda setters who are actually proposing the alternative models that can address each of our fundamental problems; and preferably together at the same time?

Who is writing the new story we need?

Gridlocked is an attempt to do this, giving voice to fresh thinking from those whose ideas tend not to get the coverage they deserve. Or rather, to try to convey those ideas more effectively in ways that resonate with the everyday lives of ordinary people. Gridlocked aims to cut through beyond the academic or public policy realm without having to rely on mainstream media filters.

As such, Gridlocked favours human-centred storytelling told from a first-person narrative perspective; to distil technical content into plain English in relatable ways for a wider audience. I’m breaking my rule with this introductory piece, but the next one will conform to it!

This new platform started as a docuseries podcast released in 2023, the first season of which focused on the need to ‘clean up’ energy production and consumption. It continues by looking at how humanity can combat climate change, while going further to build future economies that work for everyone. Perhaps inevitably, this leads to examining urbanisation processes and cities as the laboratories where ideas are explored and contested, and from where social and political change is enacted.

This is a crowded space: Gridlocked tries to stand apart by not only presenting alternative solutions, but by drawing a link between clean energy and broader societal divisions that threaten to destroy us before climate change ever does.

Part of this entails challenging conventional ‘climate conscious’ thinking which tends to be anti-nuclear, inaccurate and unrealistic about what other low carbon energy sources can actually deliver. It will be argued here that we cannot afford to be dogmatic in our efforts to decarbonise in order to avert climate catastrophe.

But energy is just the start. Gridlocked will go on to present outlines for new ways of doing things, providing the versatility that both our thinking and our systems require to not only combat climate change, but create economic prosperity in any community – especially those left behind by globalisation and urbanisation.

I cannot say how optimistic I feel right now, but I am convinced that we can make progress if we have the will to do so. Because, as someone once told me: nothing happens by accident; it all happens by design.

We have chosen to structure our societies in a particular way, guided by certain principles and perpetuated through policies we choose to pursue. None of this is set in stone: it can all be changed. Yet, bizarrely, we seem to act as though it can’t.

Humanity is blessed with an incredible wealth of advanced knowledge, expertise and sophisticated technology at its disposal. So why can’t we achieve the breakthroughs we require? Why do we accept dysfunctional systems that only work for a few of us while the rest, to varying degrees, struggle? We do not need to; there is nothing inevitable about the state we’re in.

Gridlocked will strive to shine a light on the new stories we need … the stories that tell us how we create tomorrow’s world, today. So, please do stay tuned.

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Suggested Links:

• Gridlocked

• Renovata

• Jacopo Buongiorno

• Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems

• Mothers for Nuclear

• MIT Media Lab

• Norman Foster Foundation

• MIT Lorenz Center

• Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of meteorology and co-founder of the MIT Lorenz Center; and

• Jacopo Buongiorno, MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems.

The panel builds on many of the issues raised in the previous Inflection Point episode of Gridlocked, addressing key considerations of how to decarbonize societies and combat climate change.

In the show, Kerry and Jacopo cover different approaches to tackling climate change from a scientific perspective. They discuss the importance of cleaning up energy production and why popular approaches favored by some environmentalists – such as energy ‘demand reduction’ – do not work. They also discuss the importance of empirical evidence in environmental academic research.

Our panelists discuss the costs and economic opportunities presented in efforts to clean up energy generation, together with examples of countries successfully reducing harmful emissions and the best energy mixes for achieving this.

Jacopo and Kerry talk about the considerations at play in communicating science to the wider public and what types of messaging resonates (or not) with audiences, noting the current challenges in public discourse with many folks being mistrustful of ‘experts’. 

The show ends with our guests talking about their levels of optimism for the future, and how hopeful they are that humanity will rise to the challenges presented by a changing climate.

Suggested Links:

• Gridlocked 

• Renovata

• Jacopo Buongiorno

• Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems

• Kerry Emanuel with the Dalai Lama

• MIT Lorenz Center

Suggested Links:

• Gridlocked

• Renovata

• Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems

• Mothers for Nuclear

• MIT Media Lab

• Isabelle Boemeke, founder and executive director of Save Clean Energy and creator of online persona Isodope; and

• Jacopo Buongiorno, MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems.

The panel builds on many of the issues raised in the previous And Now for Nuclear episode of Gridlocked, addressing key considerations of nuclear energy and the role it can play in helping us ‘solve’ climate change.

In the show, Isabelle and Jacopo discuss some of the perceived drawbacks of nuclear energy and the extent to which common objections to nuclear might be justified. These standard criticisms levelled at nuclear include the cost of building new nuclear plants, fears of radiation exposure and how nuclear waste (spent fuel) is handled and stored. 

Our panellists also talk about security and the current hot topic of the war in Ukraine and whether it should give us pause for thought: should we be concerned that nuclear facilities might be vulnerable to attack/ sabotage from either state or non-state actors? 

The show ends with Jacopo and Isabelle discussing the possibilities for nuclear and the extent to which right now might be considered to be nuclear energy’s “moment.”

Suggested Links:

• Gridlocked

• Renovata

• Jacopo Buongiorno

• Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems

• Save Clean Energy

• Isodope