The smoke from the wildfires twenty-six miles away drifted over the city in an unpleasant fug. The temperature was over thirty degrees. It was like living in a bonfire. Although maybe that’s not quite right, living in a smelting works, living in one of the factories that polluted swathes of various U.S. states mentioned in the book Murderland by Caroline Fraser. It was also the week I looked out the window to see recycling, garden waste and landfill tipped in the same bin lorry, confirming what I’d always thought: that recycling was just a term used as a balm to make us poor saps believe we were fighting the good green fight. Meanwhile parts of the coastline were no go areas because there were various sewage discharges. Hot, choking, landfill mountains getting higher by the day and can’t even swim or enjoy the beach to forget it all for a couple of hours. Welcome to UK 26. The headlines reflecting the fact that, phew, what a scorcher, less so the deaths caused by the heatwave. And even less that this is the climate change our business leaders have known about for years (and been responsible for) and, yep, done so little about. Sure, they’ve said the right things, but as we all know (or should by now) talk is cheap, and there’s nothing big business likes better than being cheap. Cheap with people’s health, with the true cost of what they do and how they go about protecting their own profit margins. And government? The people whose job it is to protect and keep its citizens safe? I’d like to say they’re naïve, but I wonder whether collusion is a better word. With COP (aka The United Nations Climate Change Conference) in its twenty-sixth year and the climate emergency getting worse by the day you question why politicians even bother attending. Especially when wildfires are burning out of control, the oceans are rising and heatwaves and weather events are getting worse. Meanwhile, the media, very cosy in the pocket of big business, is making sure the climate emergency stays firmly in that pocket. What’s the point in scaring the horses with stories of heat related deaths or massive spikes of airborne pollution?  The weird thing is, as much as the right claim the whole climate emergency is a left-wing conspiracy theory designed to rob oligarchs and big companies of their ill-gotten gains, most people, left, right and everyone in between understand what climate change is doing to the world and their place in it. Problem is, no one thinks politicians or anyone else has the answers, so fiddling while the whole world burns is an option many people choose. And that’s on who? That’s squarely on the business and political classes who dropped our lovely earth decades ago and thought someone else would pick it up, dust it down and give it back just like new.