Media person of the year 2025: Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson. Photo: Peter Stevens licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The World Meteorological Organisation’s COP30 2025 climate report paints a stark picture of accelerating warming, with 2025 the second or third warmest year on record, driven by record greenhouse gases and ocean heat, leading to more extreme weather, retreating ice, and rising sea levels. The WMO said weather and climate-related extreme events including devastating rainfall, flooding, brutal heat and wildfires, had cascading impacts on lives, livelihoods and food systems and contributed to displacement across the world, undermining sustainable development and economic progress. This represents a serious global crisis, yet for the first time in 30 years of UN Conference of the Parties, the US had no official representation at COP30. This was in line with president Donald Trump’s disdain for the climate crisis, which he called, without evidence, a “hoax” and a “con job”.

Given the United States’s immense contribution to carbon emissions, Trump’s climate actions have made the world more dangerous and selfish. Yet despite his “America First” philosophy, it is the United States which suffers the brunt of Trump’s policies with its authoritarian tendencies, threats to institutions and the erosion of democratic norms. America’s shrinking media has not been up to the challenge of dealing with creeping fascism. Reporters Without Borders say Trump’s second term has led to an alarming deterioration in press freedom, while weaponising institutions, cutting support for independent media, and sidelining reporters. “With trust in the media plummeting, reporters face increasing hostility,” Reporters Without Borders said. “At the same time, local news outlets are disappearing, turning vast swaths of the country into news deserts.” The New York Times normalises Trump’s behaviour with endless “bothsidesism” and fellow flagship the Washington Post was captured by the vested interest of uber-wealthy chokepoint capitalist Jeff Bezos. Murdoch’s Fox News and New York Daily Post are more worried about the “Marxist-Leninist” mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani than they are about the disaster of Trump’s Maga-nomics.

Still, there have been voices raised in protest at the rising American fascist state and this year’s Woolly Days media person of the year goes to one of the most persistent and persuasive of those voices. That is American academic Dr Heather Cox Richardson, who has long done magnificent work in alerting America and the world to the dangers of authoritarianism. Richardson is a historian interested in how the world deals with change. This year Richardson went well beyond the call of duty with her critically important and almost-daily detailed diary documenting the bewildering turmoil inside Trump’s America. Richardson said her writing represented an older model of American media where “somebody who has an idea they think is important and writes about it”. Richardson said that in the 19th century people would buy a printing press and hoped to get printing contracts or subscribers to survive. She said American democracy rested on the principles of the Enlightenment, “the idea that if people understand what is factually happening, they will make good decisions about it for their own lives.”

Richardson began writing a daily synopsis of political events during Trump’s impeachment inquiry in September 2019. It proved popular and after Trump’s farcical response to the global COVID pandemic, it evolved into a daily Substack newsletter, entitled Letters from an American, with over 1.3 million readers by 2024. In 2023, Richardson’s newsletter writings formed the basis of her seventh book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. The book examines the roots of fascism in America leading to the democratic backsliding that many fear could bring the country to the brink of dictatorship. The book makes the case that Trump was no outlier, but inevitable given the Republican Party support to Christian nationalism, racism, and corporations over the previous 70 years. Richardson said authoritarians rise by proclaiming the American myth and the book sought to reclaim “both American history and language about who we are.”

Trump has a different understanding of history and language and given his intolerence of enemies, it is not hard to imagine Richardson being driven underground. As I noted when I gave my 2024 award to the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny (whose name has almost been totally forgotten in the last 12 months), 2025 was always going to be difficult. Before his re-election Trump had openly promised an outright fascist government and he has delivered in spades. This time last year I wrote that America’s incompetent media ignored Trump’s disastrous four years in office with the self-interested help of Silicon Valley billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and thanks to conspiratorial nihilism, rejection of reason and dread of change, “the nightmare has now returned with a vengeance”.

Once back in office, Trump went berserk. He pardoned January 6th individuals and allowed Elon Musk to ride roughshod over government in cruelly misnamed “efficiency departments”. Trump’s budget chief Russell Vought admitted he wanted government employees to “be in trauma”. Trump ramped up deportations and tariffs, appointed a series of unqualified far-right cabinet secretaries, and dismissed women and people of colour from senior positions. Most critically he dismantled American leadership in climate change and disease control, allowing China to proclaim itself as a clean energy superpower even though it emits over a third of the world’s fossil fuels.

Richardson captured the tone of the new presidency on January 20 when she wrote that Trump moved his inauguration into the Capitol Rotunda, where his supporters rioted in 2021. Prime spots went to billionaires: “Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google chief Sundar Pichai, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who appeared to be stoned.” Rupert Murdoch was there, as were “popular podcaster Joe Rogan and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk.” Trump’s inaugural address repeated his 2024 presidential campaign lies. The Justice Department was “weaponised,” America provided “sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals” and the Biden government treated storm victims in North Carolina poorly. Trump would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” he would bring down inflation, bring back manufacturing, end investments in green energy and re-introduce tariffs. Guardian fact-checkers said the speech was full of “false and misleading claims.” Trump held a rally instead of the traditional presidential parade and Musk threw salutes that right-wing extremists interpreted as Nazi salutes.

Trump appointed Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth as the defense secretary, despite accusations of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement. Vice president J.D. Vance needed to break a 50-50 tie to confirm the appointment. Richardson said Hegseth could never have been nominated, let alone confirmed, under any other president, but “Republicans caved, even on this most vital position for the American people’s safety.” On the same day Trump fired 15 independent inspectors general of government departments.

On February 3 Richardson wrote about the havoc the unelected Musk was wreaking in the machinery of government, making Congress superfluous. Richardson said it suited Republicans to allow Musk to run amok. “Trump has embraced the idea that the American government is a ‘Deep State,’ but the extreme cuts the MAGA Republicans say they want are unpopular with Americans, and even with most Republican voters. By letting Musk make the cuts the MAGA base wants, they can both provide those cuts and distance themselves from them,” she wrote. One critic called Musk’s actions “a full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire.”

On February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his visit to the White House. Josh Marshall called it a “mob hit,” with Trump and Vance spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelenskyy into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without security guarantees. Vance wanted to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, incorrectly accusing Zelensky of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was disrespectful to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” though the White House set up the event. Trump became unhinged when Zelensky suggested that the US would suffer with continued war. You don’t know that,” Trump erupted. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.” He described the meeting as “great television” before ejecting Zelenskyy from the building. South African president Cyril Ramaphosa suffered a similar fate in May when, as Richardson wrote, Trump echoed the language of American enslavers in 1859 “when he insisted—falsely—that white South Africans are facing white genocide”.

On the 60th anniversary of the Selma protest to gain civil rights, Richardson that black voting rights are in retreat. In 2013 the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to get approval from the federal government before changing voting rules. A 2024 study of vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing twice as fast in places that were covered by the preclearance requirement. Democrats have tried to pass a voting rights act since 2021 but have been stymied by Republicans, who oppose protections.

In April Richardson discussed Trump’s tariff policies. Tariffs are a blunt but legitimate weapon of international trade negotiations and are usually imposed on products. The White House placed them on nations used a nonsensical formula reached by artificial intelligence, including the nonsensical 10% tariff on goods from Australia’s uninhabited Antarctic Heard and McDonald Islands. There was no policy behind the tariffs and the US is unlikely to ramp up domestic manufacturing that Trump wants. Corporations cannot invest in manufacturing without projecting costs, and Trump is too unpredictable to do that with confidence. Trump’s tariffs are sanctions on the rest of the world. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States is over,” Canadian PM Mark Carney said.

On May 8, Richardson noted the election of the first American pope, Robert Prevost who chose the name Leo XIV. Leo XIII, pope during the Gilded Age from 1878 to 1903, wanted the church to address social and economic issues, emphasising the dignity of individuals, the common good, community, and taking care of marginalised individuals. Prevost’s election was a deliberate rejection of hard-line Catholics like Vance who use their religion to support far-right politics. MAGAs responded to the new pope with fury. Laura Loomer called him “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican” while Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “open borders globalist installed to counter Trump.” Meanwhile Trump posted a picture of himself dressed as a pope.

Later that month, the White House issued an executive order called “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” The order cited COVID-19 guidance about school reopenings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to claim that the Biden government “used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner” even though schools closed in March 2020 under Trump. The document ordered that “employees shall not engage in scientific misconduct” and gave political appointees the power to silence any research “based on their own judgment.” They also have the power to punish scientists whose work they find objectionable.

In June, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s security staff assaulted Democrat Senator Alex Padilla, forcing him to the floor, and handcuffing him as he tried to ask Noem a question. Padilla is the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration and border safety. Padilla was in LA for a federal briefing when he heard Noem was there and wanted to question her on the lack of information about extreme immigration enforcement actions. “I began to ask a question. I was almost immediately forcibly removed from the room. I was forced to the ground, and I was handcuffed. I was not arrested. I was not detained.” Padilla said that if this was how Trump’s administration responds to a senator, “you can only imagine what they’re doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the community.”

Later that month Richardson compared the No Kings protests to Trump’s military parade. Five million Americans turned out for peaceful and festive protests at over 2000 events while the military parade in Washington DC was “a bust.” Trump claimed it was a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the American Army but it was primarily a celebration of his 79th birthday. Soldiers shuffled, with questions over whether they had “at ease” marching orders or whether they were silently protesting. Photographers recorded empty bleachers and thin crowds. Few Republicans attended and cameras caught Trump looking miserable and Secretary of State Marco Rubio yawning.

In July, Richardson reported how Trump’s officials were using immigration to establish a police state. That day Los Angeles was invaded by armed masked agents from Customs and Border Patrol, the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in trucks, armored vehicles, a helicopter, on foot, and on horseback, accompanied by a gun mounted on a truck. Fox News were embedded with them and broadcast throughout the operation, suggesting that it was designed as a media show of force to intimidate opponents. The operation ended after intervention from LA mayor Karen Bass. A week later Richardson noted how Republicans embraced the Great Replacement theory: the idea that immigration destroys a nation’s culture and identity. Trump demonised immigrants with absurd lies. He said Aurora, Colorado was a “war zone” run by Venezuelan gangs and Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats. “They are eating the pets of the people that live there,” he claimed.

In August Richardson wrote about how Republicans “came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.” Republicans began purging voter rolls in the 1990s and Florida passed a law that erased 100,000 Black Democrat voters. In 2000, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by half a million votes but fell four votes short in the Electoral College. The confusing Florida ballot siphoned 10,000 Gore votes to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan. A hand recount reduced Bush’s lead when Republican operatives attacked the venue claiming “voter fraud.” The five Republican-appointed justices of the Supreme Court gave Bush the victory. The world is still paying the price while Trump’s Supreme Court right-wing majority is now 6-3. Its decisions are full of activist judicial overreach and “shadow dockets” to bypass scrutiny while justices dodge claims of ethical misconduct and conflicts of interest.

Also in July, Richardson documented the dysfunction in the White House. The real power is deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is driving the administration’s focus on attacking immigrants. Secretary Noem defers to Miller while Attorney General Pam Bondi is focused on Fox News appearances. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles cares less about policy than about “producing a reality TV show every day”. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is clueless on foreign policy while Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio has little power in the White House. It leaves decisions in the hands of underlings with little guidance from above. This is common in authoritarian regimes, “where the top levels of government tackle the one or two big things the leader wants done and everything else tumbles down to other functionaries, who can drive issues to their own preferences. No one is in charge except Trump—which means that on most days, and regarding many issues, no one is in charge.” This leads to chaos or deliberate bastardry such as the burning of tons of emergency high-nutrition biscuits that could feed about 1.5 million children for a week. The US Agency for International Development bought the food for distribution to children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was in storage when Trump gutted USAID. Rubio assured the House Appropriations Committee that the food would get to the children before it spoiled but the order to burn the biscuits was sent out because the State Department said providing food to Afghanistan might benefit terrorists (there was no stated reason for destroying food destined for Pakistan).

On August 31 the Transportation Department cancelled $679m for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy withdrew a $716m loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for a New Jersey offshore wind project. The Interior Department stopped construction of a wind farm off Connecticut that was 80pc complete. The cancellations reflect Trump’s determination to kill off wind and solar initiatives so America re-depends on fossil fuels. ExxonMobil and Rosneft have been in secret talks to resume a partnership to extract Russian oil, including in the Arctic, on hold since Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022. Trump says windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power. His decisions could cause catastrophic job losses. In 2023, 3.5m Americans worked in the renewable energy sector which grew at more than twice the rate of other sectors in a strong labour market. Coal production peaked in 2008. By 2021, employment in coal mining fell by almost 60pc in the East and almost 40% in the West, leaving 40,000 employees. Electricity prices jumped 10pc in 2025 which Trump blamed on renewable energy, but nearly all electricity in America’s largest grid comes from natural gas, coal, and nuclear reactors.

The Utah murder of Charlie Kirk on September 10 ratcheted up tensions with Trump blaming “the radical left” for the shooting. Kirk was a conspiracy theorist and demagogue whose database doxed academics he disliked (including Richardson). Commenters falsely portrayed Kirk as someone embracing reasoned debate, “eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence.” A month earlier, FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino forced out Salt Lake City field office leader, Mehtab Syed, a decorated female Pakistani American counterterrorism agent. Patel and Bongino were both MAGA influencers without law enforcement experience and focused on purging the agency of those they considered insufficiently loyal to Trump or “DEI hires.”

In October, Richardson wrote about the Pentagon’s murderous shipping strikes using the dubious excuse they are stopping drug-smuggling operations. In the eighth strike made public, two people were killed on board for a total of 34 deaths. Hegseth said it occurred in the eastern Pacific, widening the zone the administration is patrolling. He claims the victims are enemy combatants but Democrat Senator Mark Kelly said that when administration officials briefed Congress, they “had a very hard time explaining to us the legal rationale, and the constitutionality.” Officials said they have “a secret list of over 20 narco organisations, drug trafficking cartels,” but did not share the list. National security scholar Tom Nichols said Trump is establishing the principle that he can order the murder of anyone he deems a threat. “Congress is letting it happen.” That day, the Pentagon announced a new press corps after the entire pool including Hegseth’s former employer Fox News, quit rather than agree to publish only approved Defense material. The new corps consists of right-wing outlets, including LindellTV, run by MyPillow CEO and election denier Mike Lindell, and podcaster Tim Pool, who Russia funded before the 2024 election. Meanwhile, Trump was busy bulldozing the White House east wing while demanding his Department of Justice appointees hand over $230m for investigating the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives and for violating his privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in 2022.

In November the Republicans were crushed in elections, including Mamdani’s win in New York. Richardson said it may spell bad news for the Republican gerrymandering in states like Texas where they moved Republican voters into Democratic-leaning districts, weakening safe Republican districts. That could backfire in a blue-wave election. Trump admitted that the government shutdown hurt Republicans but rather than compromise, he promised to make sure Democrats can never again hold power. He demanded Republican senators end mail-in voting and require prohibitive voter ID. Democrats will “most likely never obtain power because we will have passed every single thing that you can imagine,” Trump said. That day he posted 30 social media posts and choppy videos in which, standing in a dark room and slurring his speech, he read from posts, touted accomplishments, railed against Barack Obama and threatened Nigeria with war. His mental acuity was further questioned by a rambling incoherent speech to America Business Forum where he said Miami was a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa. “I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in parts of South Africa. Look at South Africa, what’s going on. Look at South America, what’s going on. You know, I’m not going there. We have a G20 meeting in South Africa.”

Trump’s descent into madness might be hilarious were it not for the menacing consequences of his enormous power. On December 17 Richardson reported that the Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. NCAR scientists study atmosphere, meteorology, climate science, the sun, and the impacts of weather and climate on the environment and society. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said dismantling NCAR “is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.” Budget commissar Russell Vought said NCAR was “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country”. Colorado Democrat governor Jared Polis said it was an attack on public safety and science. “Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods.” The closure is as vindictive as it is driven by climate change denialism. Trump has repeatedly attacked Polis since his refusal to pardon a former Colorado election official convicted for state crimes in facilitating a data breach in her quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The same day as the NCAR announcement, Trump cancelled $109 million in grants to Colorado.

Twelve months into the presidency from hell, the exhausted world is left wondering how this can possibly last three more years. If Trump is forced to quit due to health issues or dies in office, he leaves behind a strident and fascistic administration with no regard for truth, democracy or the health of the planet. Richardson is aware of that larger post-Trump challenge when on December 21, she wrote that like during the American civil war, “once again, we are watching a minority trying to impose its will on the majority, with leaders like J.D. Vance trying to rewrite American history.” Let’s hope Richardson has the stamina and fortitude to keep up her critical work as Vance, Miller, Hegseth, Patel and Vought take increasing command. MAGA is unlikely to go gently into the night in 2028.

Previous “media person of the year” winners:

• 2009 Mark Scott
• 2010 Julian Assange
• 2011 Alan Rusbridger and Nick Davies
• 2012 Brian Leveson
• 2013 Edward Snowden
• 2014 Peter Greste, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Basher Mohamed
• 2015 Clementine Ford
• 2016 David Bowie
• 2017 Daphne Caruana Galizia
• 2018 Donald Trump (the only time I issued the award as a warning not as praise)
• 2019 Greta Thunberg
• 2020 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
• 2021 Grace Tame
• 2022 Volodymyr Zelenskyy
• 2023 The Spanish women’s football team
• 2024 Alexei Navalny

A new soul: The Young Ireland movement

A coatee which Young Irelanders would have worn at 82 Club functions, now on display at the Waterford Treasures Museum, Bishop’s Palace. Photo: Author’s collection

In September 1863 American Union general Thomas Francis Meagher wrote to former colleague, John Blake Dillon telling him that “Young Ireland looks up finely in the mild autumn of his days.” It was 15 years since the failed 1848 rebellion that had scattered Young Ireland to the winds, but many of its leaders had prospered. Meagher was an American war general while further north Thomas D’Arcy McGee was helping to create a new Canadian Confederation. In Australia William Smith O’Brien wrote a constitution for Tasmania while Charles Gavan Duffy was about to become premier of Victoria and Kevin O’Doherty was a respected Queensland MP. In Ireland, Dillon and John Martin were elected to Westminster. Writing many years later, Duffy said Young Ireland was a generation “with whom it was said a new soul came into Ireland”. Richard Davis’s The Young Ireland Movement (1987) is a key text about an underresearched topic in Irish history.

When German traveller Johann Georg Kohl visited Dublin in 1842, he saw a country full of “ruin, decay, rags and misery”. That summer three young Irish lawyers were determined to lift Ireland from its misery. One was Charles Gavan Duffy, a Monaghan-born publisher of a Catholic newspaper in Belfast, the second was Cork-born Protestant Thomas Davis, and the third was a Connacht-born Catholic John Blake Dillon. They wanted to set up a new nationalist newspaper to promote Irish affairs. Davis’s father was a Welsh-born army surgeon while his mother descended from Cromwellian settlers in Ireland. Davis was called to the bar in 1838 and spent a few years travelling in Europe where he devoured French and German literature and watched as Britain was in ferment over Chartism while Italian nationalist Guiseppe Mazzini inspired with his Young Italy movement. Davis signed his newspaper poetry as The Celt and advocated Ireland as a distinct country from England. Davis and Dillon joined Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association in 1841, and they joined the general committee.

The new Duffy-Dillon-Davis newspaper, the Nation, came out in October 1842. Though Duffy had the financial and journalistic expertise, and Dillon was closest to the land problems of the Irish majority, it was the Protestant Davis who took the lead. He wanted a “NEW MIND” to replace sectarian ascendency and said Ireland needed a “lofty and heroic love of country”. Editor Duffy demanded Ireland lose its “mendicant spirit” while Dillon attacked Irish landlords as “the real cause of this unnatural, monstrous combination of poverty and profusion”. The paper was immediately successful and distinguished itself from the staid O’Connellite paper the Pilot which equated Irishness with Catholicism. O’Connell was ambivalent, satisfied with the Nation‘s pro-Repeal stance though concerned it might preach radicalism. The Pilot jealously noted that a Nation clique attended secret supper parties each weekend. The clique included the three founders and several young lawyers. There was also an older head in Michael Doheny, lawyer to the borough of Cashel, who was admired for his sincerity and zeal for Repeal. Influenced by Father Theobald Mathew‘s temperance ideas and the literary style of Thomas Carlyle, these gatherings became known as “tea and Thomas” and Davis was in his element.

Davis promoted an Irish literary renaissance and Duffy encouraged him to write poetry for the paper adding to verse by gifted poet John Clarence Mangan. The nationalist poetry was popular and by early 1843 was published separately as The Spirit of the Nation with contributions from O’Connell’s sons John and Maurice. But signs of a rift with O’Connell grew after Davis anonymously published “Letters of a Protestant on Repeal” which stressed Protestant involvement in an independent Ireland. The Pilot repudiated this, claiming Protestantism was dying out, even in Ulster.

O’Connell declared 1843 to be the Year of Repeal. He wanted to carry it with moral force and aimed to recruit three million Irish “of every persuasion” with large-scale public meetings. The Nation was supportive. Davis’s editorial the “Morality of War” defended achieving political aims by violence. O’Connell issued his “Mallow Defiance” a few days later, reflecting the ambiguity in the Repeal organisation between passive resistance and the military impulse. Unionist newspapers saw it clearly, the Warder greeting the monster meeting at Cashel as “the Repeal insurrection”. The horrified Times noted that the men of the Nation were to O’Connell as “the heads of the public service are to the cabinet”.

O’Connell planned a final monster meeting at Clontarf in October 1843 but advertisements about “Repeal cavalry” gave the government a pretext to cancel it. O’Connell was arrested for sedition as were his key allies and the editors of Repeal newspapers, including the Nation‘s Duffy. This vulnerability led to Duffy’s resignation from the Repeal Association in 1844. The newspaper abandoned talk of repeal and concentrated on popular education.

One note of optimism was the accession of William Smith O’Brien. The aristocratic Protestant Limerick MP supported Thomas Wyse‘s education campaign but remained aloof from O’Connell. He was disillusioned by Prime Minister Robert Peel’s response to the Repeal campaign and he joined the association in protest at O’Connell’s arrest. O’Brien was invited to chair Repeal committees while the Liberator concentrated on his legal problems. O’Brien created a parliamentary committee to watch Westminster proceedings and make recommendations for Ireland. The Nation writers eagerly served on O’Brien’s committees. When O’Connell was found guilty and imprisoned in May 1844, O’Brien became de facto Repeal leader.

Duffy continued to edit the Nation from Richmond Gaol. He hired a new and energetic correspondent, John Mitchel, another Protestant lawyer based in Co Down. Mitchel and Davis cooperated on a Nation editorial which urged Ireland to get ready to achieve Repeal with “a strong hand”. Mitchel joined the clique which gained a new nickname. The Unionist Warder noted that O’Brien in his forties was “Middle Aged Ireland” sitting between the “Old Ireland” supporters of the listless and ancient O’Connell and the newer vigorous men of the Nation which it called “Young Ireland”. While there were similarities with Mazzini’s Young Italy and Disraeli’s Young England, it would be a while before the Nation group accepted the Warder‘s label.

In September 1844 the House of Lords judges reversed the convictions of O’Connell and the others. O’Connell embraced the idea of federalism which promised limited self-government while retaining Irish MPs at Westminster. While the Nation had also previously raised the possibility of a federalist solution, Duffy opposed it, saying it was a sell-out. O’Connell backed away from it too, but this criticism added to his distrust of Young Ireland. It was heightened by the debate over Peel’s Charitable Bequests Bill which moderate Irish Catholic bishops supported but was opposed by the fiery Archbishop of Tuam, John MacHale.

With O’Connell in his late sixties, it became a battle to lead Repeal in the next phase. Young Ireland trusted O’Brien while old Irelanders preferred the Liberator’s favourite son John O’Connell, a fellow barrister and an MP since 1832. While initially favourable to the Nation he differentiated himself from O’Brien by favouring the MacHale faction and promoting Repeal as a purely Catholic organisation. The flashpoint was another Peel initiative in 1845, the so-called Colleges Bill to introduce non-religious third level education in Ireland. The Catholic archbishops of Dublin and Armagh favoured an accommodation with the government. However MacHale and both O’Connells condemned the idea calling them “godless colleges” and painting advocates of educational integration as enemies of Christianity. Repeal meetings became fractious. Davis admired the bill’s lack of sectarianism and believed it just needed to add religious safeguards. Moderate Catholic bishops agreed. O’Brien also supported ecumenical education and condemned the strong language of condemnation used in the O’Connellite Pilot.

The crisis erupted at an Association meeting on May 26. O’Brien laid out Young Ireland’s position that mixed education was healthy and said Catholic bishops had given “tacit sanction” to the proposal. But O’Connell denounced the bill. Tempers rose and when O’Connell supporter Michael Conway referred to a Young Irelander as a hypocrite and a bad Catholic, Davis sarcastically called him “my very Catholic friend”. O’Connell interpreted this as an insult to Catholicism. He said the Nation was not “an organ of the Catholic people” and claimed a Young Ireland party had been set up to oppose him. “I shall stand by Old Ireland and I have some slight notion that Old Ireland will stand by me”. O’Brien got O’Connell to withdraw the implication they were enemies, while Davis broke down and wept. It was a temporary truce and served only to bring hostilities into the open.

In early 1845 Davis envisaged a new organisation called the 82 Club as an elitist auxiliary of the Repeal Association. Its name and expensive green and gold uniforms evoked the success of the 1782 Irish Volunteers in obtaining temporary Irish freedoms during Grattan’s parliament. The 82 Club saw the rise of two new brash Young Irelanders Thomas Francis Meagher and Richard O’Gorman while Mitchel was also in his element here with northern friend John Martin. Richard Davis said these young men confused the rhetoric of revolution with the substance of revolution. They all adored Thomas Davis, and were shocked when he died suddenly in 1845.

Davis had been busier than ever, preparing a report against a Tory land bill while editing the Nation as Duffy took holidays. But on September 9 he contracted scarlatina and he died a week later. His death temporarily reunited Repeal factions but it also opened the way for John O’Connell to assume overall leadership. Young Ireland wanted O’Brien to lead but he remained aloof. Duffy brought in Mitchel and Thomas D’Arcy McGee to help write the paper. Then came the first potato blight. The Nation addressed the disaster but it was distracted by the political battle within Repeal.

When an English article suggested that the new railways could be used to put down an Irish revolt, Mitchel wrote a response showing how railways could be neutralised and trains could be ambushed. While he tried to cover himself by saying “Tis but a dream” the article caused a storm of protest. O’Connell banned the Nation from reading rooms while England opinion was incensed. Duffy was prosecuted as editor but with Catholics on the jury, the trial was deadlocked and Duffy escaped jail. His supporters accused O’Connell of “felon setting” and mistrust grew between the two groups.

In April 1846 O’Brien acted on an earlier Davis suggestion for Irish MPs to boycott Westminster. O’Connell initially supported this idea but by the time O’Brien carried out the threat O’Connell was negotiating with Whig leader Lord John Russell to support him if the Peel government fell. So when parliament censured O’Brien, O’Connell did not support him. O’Brien was confined to an improvised dungeon in the parliament building and Ireland called him “the hero in the cellar”. The 82 Club sent a delegation to visit him in his cell but the Liberator ignored their invitation to join them. Though O’Brien was released after 25 days it further heightened mistrust.

The Peel government fell in June 1846 when Tory Protectionists voted with Whigs and O’Connell’s MPs against an Irish Coercion Bill. O’Connell supported Russell, but the Nation condemned the alliance. Meagher led the charge calling the Whigs opposers of Repeal. O’Connell condemned “juvenile orators” blocking a path to agreement. He set a trap to remove Young Ireland from the movement with a resolution reaffirming rejection of physical force. The so-called “peace resolution” had two parts. The first reaffirmed Repeal policy that sought to achieve action by “peaceable and legal means only”. The second one, “abhorring all attempts to improve constitutional liberty by force, violence or bloodshed”, was more controversial. O’Connell left a loophole that allowed for self-defence “against unjust aggression” but he clouded the issue saying he was more peaceloving than Quakers who always turned the other cheek. Mitchel asked if O’Connell accepted the American Revolution was defensive. O’Connell ignored the argument because his real purpose was to draw a line between Old and Young Ireland. Meagher and O’Gorman would abhor the abhorring and would resign rather than agree with it, which was precisely what O’Connell wanted.

Duffy pointed out the discrepancy between O’Connell’s Quakerism and his doctrine that England’s weakness was Ireland’s opportunity. O’Brien said that that physical force could not be condemned at all times and he could not stay in the Association with such a rule. Mitchel denied Young Ireland was creating dissension and agreed they needed to act within the law. The climax came with a two-day meeting in late July 1846. Daniel O’Connell was in London but in a letter he reiterated the need to agree to the resolutions. O’Brien repeated his opposition and said the Whigs were little better for Ireland than the Tories and they had no plan to provide against a likely second failure of the potato crop that autumn. John O’Connell said Young Ireland needed to be excluded as a practical matter to preserve the Association from prosecution. Tempers frayed as hardliners interjected and the meeting was deferred for 24 hours. The next day began with a letter from Duffy arguing that the Nation had advocated what O’Connell argued for in 1843 speeches in Mallow, though John O’Connell denied this. Mitchel said that Catholic priests had used bellicose language in 1843, but he was howled down. Then Meagher took to the floor and attacked the Whig alliance before launching his famous paean on the sword. “Abhor the sword? Stigmatise the sword? No!” and he asserted that violence was often necessary for liberty, such as the American, Belgian and Tyrolean revolutions, where physical force helped gain national freedom. When John O’Connell cut Meagher off, O’Brien walked out, declaring Meagher’s views to be “fair and legitimate”. Most Young Irelanders followed him out of the hall. Meagher may have made a mistake when he celebrated the sword not only for defence but “the assertion of a nation’s liberty” but according to Richard Davis, it may have been deliberate to force O’Brien to commit to Young Ireland.

Daniel O’Connell regretted the departure of O’Brien but he extinguished hope that the split was temporary with a ferocious attack on Young Ireland’s “filthy partisans”. Those that tried to stay inside the organisation like Mitchel’s friend John Martin were denied a hearing. O’Connell insisted the Nation remain out of Repeal reading rooms. Meetings descended into chaos. The Tory Warder gleefully said “vehement and undisguised mutiny” ruled at Repeal gatherings. A group of Dublin tradesmen known as remonstrants expressed support for the rebels and held a meeting in December to create a new body, with most of the leaders present except for O’Brien. But Young Ireland had little support outside the cities. Few Catholic priests supported them while the bishops closest to their education policy were not supporters of Repeal. Moderates including Dillon arranged to meet O’Connell to discuss reconciliation but discussion stalled over the “peace resolutions”. O’Connell told a Repeal meeting that he had set Young Ireland “at defiance”. The rebels began to consider creating their own political body and Duffy wooed O’Brien to become the leader of “the Irish Party”.

On January 13, 1847 O’Brien addressed a meeting to discuss that body. He explained that the Irish Party name was sullied by a similarly named landlord group and suggested they become the Irish Confederation. He claimed it was not antagonistic to the Repeal Association and that their policies were the same. They were dedicated to peaceful change but would have “moral courage” and would be non-sectarian. Its accounts would be open, unlike the Repeal Association’s inscrutable dealings, and it encouraged artisan membership. It created a bloated council of 39 members which included all the leading Young Irelanders. They set up committees on the famine, finance, trade, elections and parliament but the bickering with O’Connell’s organisation continued in the editorial columns of the Nation and the Pilot. The Confederation supported a Repeal candidate in a Galway by-election. Meagher, Mitchel and others campaigned on the hustings, but the candidate lost by four votes.

O’Brien’s involvement was a constant source of tension. O’Brien focused on parliament or his Limerick constituency but Young Irelanders wanted him in Dublin to address the famine crisis and help develop the new party which was bedevilled by disagreements on external issues like American slavery and British chartism. At Westminster O’Brien worked well with John O’Connell despite the split and they supported a Tory railway bill for Ireland (which the Whig government rejected). As Repeal rents plummeted, O’Connell admitted that perhaps the “peace resolutions” were unwise. While O’Brien remained friendly to the O’Connells, he insisted that the Whig alliance remained a stumbling block towards reuniting. John was unwilling to take action without his father’s agreement.

In Dublin a new vital force emerged from obscurity. Laois-born James Fintan Lalor was a sharp-minded but reclusive son of a Repeal MP. In early 1847 he wrote six letters in the Nation which said the land question was more important than Repeal of the Union and landlords should act before people took the law into their own hands. As Lalor was co-opted on the Confederate Council, came devastating news that Daniel O’Connell had died in Genoa. Few people knew he was ill and his death shocked Ireland. The Irish Confederation expressed sorrow and the Nation respectfully decked itself out in mourning bands. But radical priest John Kenyon undid the good work saying O’Connell was a time-server who had failed in his mission and his death was “no loss whatsoever”. Duffy added an editor’s note criticising Kenyon, but the damage was done. The Pilot claimed that Young Ireland had burst the Liberator’s “mighty heart”. John O’Connell used it as an excuse not to invite Young Irelanders to his father’s funeral. He also delayed the funeral to derive political advantage in the autumn general election. Offers for Meagher to stand for election were revoked. Kenyon foolishly proposed O’Gorman to stand in Limerick against O’Gorman’s wishes, and he was trounced by John O’Connell. O’Brien had to be cajoled to stand and he scraped back in by 14 votes. The election was marred by street violence. Confederation members were attacked on the streets as they returned home from meetings. When O’Brien, Meagher, Mitchel and McGee went to Belfast the opposition came not from the Orange Order but from Old Irelanders who attacked them on stage.

The attacks forced Young Ireland to form new clubs for protection. These clubs represented a decisive break with Repeal as they maintained antagonism at a local level. They also attracted spies like John Donnellon Balfe who was trusted by O’Brien but who informed British authorities against him. As famine worsened, the British responded with coercion measures. Mitchel and Lalor called for the Confederation to support tenant rights but moderates like Duffy and McGee and the landlord O’Brien were opposed. The clash between Duffy and Mitchel grew as the latter saw the famine as a deliberate British plot to exterminate the Irish people. Mitchel complained that Duffy censored his work. In early 1848 Mitchel resigned from the Nation and the Confederation council. O’Gorman called Mitchel’s faction “infant Ireland” but it attracted widespread support. At a meeting on January 31 the Confederation narrowly adopted O’Brien’s moderate constitutional proposals by 318 votes to 188. Irish nationalists had again split over the issue of supporting violence. “There is no opinion in Ireland worth a farthing that is not illegal,” said Mitchel in his new newspaper called the United Irishman. Like the Nation in 1842, the Irishman’s unashamed defiance was immediately popular. Mitchel’s first editorial called the Lord Lieutenant a “bloody butcher”, almost begging a reaction from authorities. London was wary and realising that Mitchel was setting a trap, the government demanded forbearance. They were happier in February when Thomas Francis Meagher was soundly defeated in a Waterford by-election, after Old Irelanders turned on him.

Matters changed after a successful bloodless French revolution set off copycat rebellions across Europe. Ireland was eager to get involved in “the Springtime of the Peoples“. Even moderates spoke of open rebellion. Duffy escalated rhetoric in the Nation, there were military marches in Dublin, and O’Brien and Meagher were arrested for seditious speeches. Mitchel was prosecuted for United Irishman articles. O’Brien and Meagher were released on bail and went to Paris seeking support from the new French government. But the British pressured French leader Lamartine and France would not support an Irish revolution.

The Young Irelanders were over-intoxicated by Meagher’s spellbinding rhetoric and Mitchel’s crackling prose. Rural Ireland was exhausted by famine and there was no desire for revolution. Clerics and politicians worked to unite the Old and Young Ireland factions but Mitchel remained contemptuous in the United Irishman. London was outraged by the Confederate mission to France, passing a new Treason Felony Act and O’Brien was heckled when he returned to Westminster. Back in Limerick, an Old Ireland mob attacked and stoned him, incensed by Mitchel’s appearance at the same location.

The sedition trials of O’Brien and Meagher were held in May. In each case a juryman failed to convict so both were released. Before Mitchel came to trial, he was re-charged under the new Treason Felony legislation and the jury was packed against him with 12 Protestants. In a sensational trial his octogenarian lawyer Robert Holmes (brother-in-law of Robert Emmet) invited his own indictment while Mitchel called for the endorsement of supporters in court. He was convicted and sentenced to 14 years transportation. Mitchel hoped supporters would launch a rescue mission but Duffy believed the Dublin clubs were not strong enough and a premature outbreak would be disastrous. Mitchel was hauled off to begin his famous Jail Journal and he never forgave Duffy. Mitchel became Young Ireland’s first hero-martyr and two other subversive publications quickly replaced his United Irishman. John Martin edited the Irish Felon with help from Lalor, and poet Richard D’Alton Williams and medical student Kevin O’Doherty edited the Irish Tribune. Both were quickly suppressed.

Mitchel’s departure led to two other incompatible developments, one public and one secret. The public one was the reunion of Repealers. After 14 days of negotiation the two organisations agreed to disband and be replaced by a new Irish League. Unwisely, Duffy and O’Brien announced it as a victory for the Confederation. This alarmed John O’Connell. At the last moment he resurrected the “peace resolutions” fearing that Meagher and the armed Confederate clubs would commit him to a violent policy. After two weeks silence, he denounced the League and the clubs and walked away from the agreement.

The second development was to merge Young and Infant Ireland. Duffy and Dillon met with radicals Martin and Kenyon to secretly plan a revolution. While Dillon merely believed in a “show of force”, it was a dangerous double game while negotiations continued with O’Connell. On the same day that O’Connell reneged, news came from France that protesters had killed the Archbishop of Paris. Old Irelanders wondered if Confederates would kill Catholic priests. Kenyon was disciplined by his bishop and withdrew. Chartist support in England evaporated after parliament rejected its monster petition. Parliament rushed through a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act after Meagher and Michael Doheny held a mass meeting at Slievenamon in Tipperary. With Young Ireland leaders facing immediate arrest, Meagher and Dillon argued that Dublin was too well-defended to start the revolution. They went on the run and found O’Brien in Wexford. A reluctant revolutionary, O’Brien said his subsequent actions were driven by honour and the forlorn hope that there was mass support for rebellion. They roamed the south seeking support without success. On July 29 the rebellion ended in anti-climax at Ballingarry. O’Brien’s small ragtag army was defeated by a well-armed force of police using children as hostages in a heavily defended house. John O’Mahony and Patrick O’Donohoe blamed O’Brien’s irresolute leadership for the failure and O’Mahony continued the fight near Carrick-on-Suir while Richard O’Gorman tried to raise Limerick. Sporadic violence continued until Lalor organised a final failed assault on a Cappoquin police barracks in 1849.

O’Brien was arrested, tried, sentenced to death, and then had his sentence commuted to life transportation. The same fate befell Meagher, O’Donohoe, and Liverpool-based Young Irelander Terence Bellew MacManus. Martin and O’Doherty were found guilty of Treason Felony and joined them and Mitchel in Van Diemen’s Land. Dillon, McGee, Doheny, O’Mahony, and James Stephens escaped to America or France. Only Duffy, tried five times without success, remained in Ireland. Defeated in Irish battle, Young Ireland would burn brightly in the writings and achievements of its exiles. Mitchel escaped to America where he ran a succession of influential newspapers, was a propagandist for the American south, and assisted the Fenian movement before returning to Ireland on his deathbed to win election to the parliament he despised. John Dillon became an MP in 1865. When John Martin returned from exile in Australia he was elected as the first MP for Isaac Butt‘s Home Government Association (which evolved into the Home Rule party under Parnell.) Meagher also escaped to America where he led the Irish Brigade into battle in the civil war and ended up as acting governor of Montana Territory. D’Arcy McGee moved to Canada where he helped to achieve Confederation in 1867. Though O’Brien was a miserable failure as a revolutionary, he was superbly equipped to become a patriotic martyr. He was the symbol of the Irish prisoners in Van Diemen’s Land and helped write Tasmania’s first constitution. O’Doherty and Duffy ended up as Australian MPs, O’Doherty in Queensland and Duffy in Victoria where he became premier in 1871.

According to Christopher Morash, Young Irelanders exploited opportunities opened by the telegraph, newspapers, the railways and the steamer to enable the emergence of a global Irish nationalist awareness. As Richard Davis wrote, Young Ireland had in time amply proved its fitness for government. Though in the 1840s, they never emerged from O’Connell’s shadow and were, said Mitchel, “merely Repeal with a new coat”, they later created a fund of national ideas and debate that subsequent Irish nationalist generations have drawn on, often without acknowledgement. Despite their ecumenism and good intentions, Young Ireland never attracted strong Protestant support. The 1848 rebellion increased the power of the Orange Order though subsequent generations of Irish nationalists have done no better in this regard. Young Ireland’s pluralism remains its finest legacy to 21st century Ireland.

The hydrogen revolution will not be televised

Marco Alverà’s The Hydrogen Revolution was written in 2021 when it seemed like hydrogen was indeed as its subtitle promised, “A Blueprint for the Future of Clean Energy”. The Italian businessman Alverà has long been involved in funding climate solutions. His home city Venice suffered catastrophic flooding in 2019 and “has become a symbol of all that we have to lose from climate change and rising sea levels”. Alverà recognises the progress renewable energy has made but it still accounts for just 20pc of energy use. Transport, industry, and heating relies mainly on coal, oil and natural gas. Some sectors like heavy transport, industry and winter heating are particularly difficult to switch. Hydrogen had been almost absent in discussion. Alverà’s epiphany came in 2018 when he did a European 2050 net zero scenario plan and realised the importance of the role of hydrogen.

Hydrogen power is an old idea. Jules Verne’s novel The Mysterious Island (1875) said that “water will one day be employed as fuel”. The dream still seemed far away in 2004 when Alverà attended a World Hydrogen Energy Conference. He calculated that a three-hour car journey powered by hydrogen would cost $3000. By 2018 however, that cost went down due to the decreasing price of renewable power. The cost of equipment to convert electricity into hydrogen was also decreasing. By 2050 hydrogen would be cheaper than today’s prices for oil, coal and nuclear power. Alverà said hydrogen’s mission was to help harvest sunlight and wind where they were plentiful, then transport them cheaply, and use it to power homes, factories, and transport. Hydrogen helps renewable energy transcend its limits and become the “great energy connector”. This is vital as the world figures out how to get to net zero while juggling a growing population, and the development of emerging economies.

Human-related climate change has a long and sordid history and we are pushing planetary limits with a possible sixth mass extinction event underway. Our reliance on fossil fuels has greatly increased carbon dioxide emissions as well as greenhouse gases like methane. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 415 parts per million in 2021 which is far higher than any time in the last 800,000 years. Monthly readings reached above 425 ppm in late 2025. While CO2 in the atmosphere helps provide a liveable amount of heat, we have far too much, and once trapped in the atmosphere it becomes everyone’s problem. Rainfall patterns are changing across the globe while worsening droughts in Asia and Africa are causing famine, mass migration and conflict. Four degrees of warming by 2100 would make vast parts of the planet uninhabitable and displace hundreds of millions due to sea level rises. It may also trigger tipping points in the Amazon rainforest, Antarctic ice sheets, and ocean currents, with perhaps the most dangerous of all outcomes being the thawing permafrost of Arctic regions releasing vast amounts of methane which would be a truly civilisation-changing event. It is to stop these almost unimaginable but very real outcomes that there is a broad consensus (Trump idiocy notwithstanding) to keep warming ideally below 1.5 Celsius, and at the very least below 2. These targets are hard because even if emissions stopped rapidly, temperatures will still keep rising for a while. It becomes urgent to achieve net zero emissions quickly, and implies a revolution in the way we produce and use energy.

We have known the rough outline of the climate problem for 30 years and yet we have made little progress. Effective lobbying by fossil fuel interest groups has obfuscated and delay action. But Alverà sees the bigger problem as the lack of a clear and positive goal. Solutions are costly and governments are afraid to take climate action for fear of causing job losses and increasing energy prices. Pathways towards climate change are also confusing with a fragmented energy industry, lack of cooperation, and a bewildering array of measures that make it difficult to compare outcomes between sectors. There is also deep-rooted inertia and hostility to change. The 19th century ran on wood, charcoal and cereal straw, with coal not taking over until the 20th century. Oil did not outstrip coal until 1964 and even today the US and Australia still use diesel for trucking despite the fact that natural gas is cheaper. A cohesive solution requires substantial momentum but global agreement on a carbon price seems out of reach. Distrustful individual nations play “Beggar thy neighbour” trying to fix their economic problems by implementing measures that harm their trading partners.

Yet Alverà says there is cause not to despair. Since Paris 2015 we have a goal: Net Zero. According to the Climate Action Tracker, as of October 2025, there are 145 countries with or considering net zero targets, including China, the EU, and India, covering 77pc of global emissions. Writing in 2021, Alverà was optimistic that thanks to the next generation leadership of young adults like Greta Thunberg, the EU had led the charge. Under Biden, the US had a “renewed commitment”. However that latter gain was almost entirely forfeited by the re-election of Trump in 2024. The Climate Action Tracker now ranks the US’s overall rating as “critically inefficient”. Australia is ranked as “inefficient” and though it has a 2050 target, its comprehensiveness is rated as “poor”. This is even before the main opposition political party announced it was dropping net zero commitments.

Renewable power is the main driver of net zero. But Alverà calls solar and wind power “tantalising resources”, freely provided by nature but unable to be used directly, and requiring technology to convert light and movement into electrical power. Solar cell technology was refined in the 1940s, but was eye-wateringly expensive and the preserve of well-funded space agencies. The 1970s invention of photovoltaic cells brought prices down but it wasn’t until Europe set a 20pc renewable target in 2009 that markets were incentivised to switch. Suppliers scaled up factories and supply chains, driving costs down, and sparking feedback loops, with China providing most of the hardware. Alverà sees likely breakthroughs in perovskites, crystal structures that reduce the cost of converting solar to electricity, though early adopters like Japan are finding cost and performance disadvantages.

In wind power, it is the turbines that have scaled up. First demonstrated in 1887 in Glasgow by James Blyth, wind has powered electricity grids since Vermont in 1941. In the 1970s University of Massachusetts professor Bill Heronemus produced the first plans for wind turbine arrays and he coined the term “wind farm”. The shallow water Dogger Bank Wind Farm will be world’s largest offshore farm when complete in 2026 and avoids the social issues of visual impact of wind turbines, by being far from shore. These developments are making solar and wind cheaper than fossil fuel in some countries. However some economists question the Energy Return on Energy Invested equation of renewable power at scale.

Alverà thinks that renewable power will not be enough to get to net zero. Solar and wind are not constant. Batteries and other storage systems are limited (especially when dealing with seasonal or sudden demand). Storing and transporting energy as electricity is difficult and in some industries direct electrification won’t work. Batteries have greatly improved but don’t have a great energy to weight ratio, a factor especially important in airline, shipping, and trucking. Steelmaking needs fossil fuels to synthesise products. These hard-to-abate sectors account for 30pc of energy-related emissions. Electricity seeps over distance and around 8pc is lost between power stations and homes. The further the supply line, the larger the wastage, a problem exacerbated by renewable sources which may be far from the populations that need them. The sun does not shine at night and sometimes even very windy areas are calm, while when wind conditions get too extreme many turbines shut down for safety. The cost of moving electricity does not compare well to the cost of moving coal, oil or gas, which take little energy to push through pipelines or cargo ships.

Balancing the grid is another issue. Power station turbines work as gigantic flywheels spinning 3600 times a minute. It only takes 15 seconds of failure of supply to cause problems. Dispatchable power like gas-fired or hydro plants can ramp up quickly to meet the demand. But this is not efficient. Gas-fired plants don’t run all the time but if shut down would lead to blackouts. Consumers pay the cost of this luxury in power bills. Extreme weather adds to issues. The Texas polar vortex of 2021 produced a huge spike in demand as wind turbines were pushed offline due to the cold while 40pc of fossil fuel capability was unavailable due to frozen equipment. Spot power prices rocketed to their administrative cap and a third of the grid was left without power. Blackouts and brownouts are frequent in the developing world due to underfunded infrastructure, high demand, mismanagement, and climate impacts.

Alverà says the impact of these events will increase in a “hyper-connected world“. Increasing the size of the power grid is one solution as it will probably be always sunny or windy somewhere. That will increase the storage problem and the best solution to that is pumped hydro which require upper and lower reservoirs. Such places are scarce, while construction is not cheap. A second option is better batteries. Lithium-ion batteries have improved but solar plus batteries remains more expensive than gas-fired power, though has better net zero outcomes. Batteries also use hard-to-get metals and lithium mining causes contamination of soils and rivers, while batteries are difficult to recycle. One innovative solution from British-based Octopus Energy may be to store spare power in the batteries of electrified cars. But what is needed is something which can store energy and dispatch energy when required and delivered though existing pipeline infrastructure and reach hard-to-carbonise sectors. That something is a molecule which can move fast, and which unlike nebulously quantum electrons, can store energy for millions of years in liquids like oil, solids like coal, or even a gas.

This is where hydrogen comes in. Hydrogen is the commonest element in the universe and is the main ingredient of stars and of gas clouds where it combines with other hydrogen molecules in the form of H2. Its one proton and one electron make it a great connector of energy. Paracelsus documented hydrogen in the early 1500s by reacting iron with sulphuric acid, noting the mysterious gas given off. In 1766 Henry Cavendish did similar experiments and noticed the by-product of water. In 1781 Antoine Lavoisier gave the gases their names hydrogen (water-forming) and oxygen, beginning modern chemistry. Hydrogen’s flammability hinted at its enormous energy potential. In 1792 Alessandro Volta created the first battery by generating an electrical current between two metal plates separated by paper or cloth soaked in salt water or sodium hydroxide. That led to an electrolyser which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, a device which enabled the generation of hydrogen using renewable power. It led to fuel cells that convert chemical energy from hydrogen into electricity through electrochemical reactions with oxygen. Danish inventor Paul La Cour built wind turbines in the late 1800s to generate electricity, which produced hydrogen by electrolysis. The hydrogen fuel powered lights and experiments at his high school.

Despite La Cour’s success, hydrogen did not catch on. Its low density made it hard to handle and it remains difficult to isolate from other elements. It was used in hot air ballooning, though known as dangerously flammable. German engineer Ferdinand von Zeppelin created a flying weapon in 1891 filled with hydrogen. Travelling at 135kph an hour and carrying two tons of bombs, zeppelins terrorised Britain in the First World War. Zeppelin’s designs were later modified for passenger navigation and airships briefly ruled the skies until the crash of the Hindenburg in New Jersey in 1937. Captured on camera and live radio broadcast it created a strong association between hydrogen and raging infernos that ended the industry almost overnight.

Hydrogen was outcompeted by abundant and cheap fossil fuels. Unlike fossil fuels, hydrogen could not be dug out of the ground and burned. Hydrogen easily forms bonds with other elements and 75pc of it is found in water. Breaking hydrogen bonds takes almost as much energy as burning it. But hydrogen and fossil fuels were not competing on an even playing field. Fossil fuels are limited and once we use them they are gone forever. Secondly, the hidden costs of coal, oil and gas were ignored and never factored into cost equations. Pumping carbon into the atmosphere has environmental costs that we all pay for. The costs will only increase if there is no abatement. Hydrogen’s great characteristics make it an ideal partner for renewable energy.

Hydrogen is a colourless gas but its production method comes in many different “colours”. Grey hydrogen comes from natural gas (mostly methane), oil or coal through electrolysis and is used for fertiliser. It contributes around 2.2pc of global carbon emissions. If you capture and store the carbon dioxide instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, this is called blue hydrogen. If you use renewable power to make it, you get green hydrogen, while dark green hydrogen comes from biomethane plus carbon capture. Pink hydrogen is made from electrolysis using nuclear power. Turquoise hydrogen comes from natural gas via pyrolysis, an experimental process that heats substances to high temperatures to break them down into constituent parts. Alverà expects more hydrogen colours as more technology options emerge but to get to net zero by 2050 the paths mainly involve green and blue hydrogen. All hydrogen is identical so it will need agreed standards to show its “colour”. This gives it a big advantage over oil, which has distinctive reservoirs and different refining techniques. This will give liquidity to the hydrogen market and make it easier to trade.

The key to green hydrogen will be finding a cheap and efficient electrolyser. Alverà says the two main kinds are alkaline and PEM. Alkaline electrolysers are a century-old stable technology. Liquid alkaline solution electrolysers produce fertiliser, chlorine and caustic soda. They are cheap and reliable but bulky, and liquid can become corrosive. PEM electrolysers began in the 1960s to produce electricity for NASA’s Gemini program. They have solid polymer electrolyte membranes that conduct positively charged ions, while blocking negatively charged electrons. Protons cross from the anode to the cathode picking up electrons to become hydrogen. It gets going quickly which makes it ideal for harvesting intermittent solar and wind sources and efficiently converts 80pc of electrical power to hydrogen. Downsides are wear and tear of costly membranes and its use of hard-to-get platinum, though the required platinum quantity is dropping fast.

Hydrogen needs to be compressed before being pushed through pipelines. Hydrogen can flow through natural gas infrastructure though there is a concern that hydrogen could make the pipelines brittle by infiltrating their carbon steel. Alverà says that the technical standards for hydrogen pipes in Italy are largely identical to gas pipelines. While a cubic metre of hydrogen contains a third of the energy of a cubic metre of natural gas, hydrogen has low viscosity so it can make up flow speed. With high compression, its maximum energy capacity can reach 80pc of gas. Compressor stations will be required but otherwise the cost of refurbishing a gas pipeline to hydrogen will be 20pc of building a new one. Hydrogen can be stored in the pipes but will also need to be stored underground at pressure in cavities like salt caverns or depleted gas fields. If cooled enough (-196C) hydrogen can be stored as a liquid, and though technically challenging, it could work similarly to the way LNG is liquefied, stored, and transported, around the world, possibly even by converting LNG facilities.

Once stored, hydrogen can easily be burned in the same way as gas, and used to heat homes and cook meals. It could be converted to electricity using a fuel cell to reverse electrolyse hydrogen into electricity and water. Solid oxide fuel cells with high running temperatures will be needed for heavy duty work and steam can power turbines. Alverà says hydrogen power-to-gas or power-to-liquids, and their reverse back to power, will be a key feature of any decarbonised energy system. Writing in 2021 he said the Dogger Bank Wind Farm would electrolyse hydrogen which would then power Germany’s heavy industry. But in 2024 Dogger Bank’s owners scrapped the green hydrogen plan and will now connect directly into the UK National Grid via a new substation. Economic viability was part of the decision as hydrogen production remains stubbornly expensive. In 2025 Queensland scrapped its major green hydrogen initiative at Gladstone due to cost blowouts (a new pro-fossil fuel state government hasn’t helped). Australian hydrogen expert Alison Reeve noted five major challenges in developing a hydrogen industry including a steep learning curve, limited demand, a users and volume “chicken and egg problem”, global economic and political turmoil, and probably the most important factor, its sheer expense. Reeve says hydrogen projects require a lot of capital, and investors get nervous when it does not have bipartisan political support. Alverà thinks stability, standardisation and ubiquity will lower investor risk though they may never see the high returns of the fossil fuel industry.

What is needed is a carbon price. One reason fossil fuels were so lucrative to investors was that they were not paying for the externality of releasing greenhouse gases. A global carbon price would immediately eliminate the cheapest fossil fuels and the taxes raised could be used to build more abatement options. Alverà calculated that 40pc of global emissions could be eliminated at a low carbon price, below $50 a tonne. Piecemeal systems like the EU’s emission trading system will gradually make hydrogen competitive. But gradually is not good enough. We need to act now with incomplete information and risk bad investments, as the cost of inaction is runaway climate change. Alverà believes we need to mandate green hydrogen in the gas network, blending it first, and eventually replacing it. We also need to act on low-hanging fruit early such as heavy road transport and shipping but it needs incentives and mandates. Consumer action is critical. Alverà says an education campaign is needed to show how much carbon dioxide is in everyday products, so informed decisions can support slightly more expensive carbon-free options. Political action is also critical at every level of government. Do local transport routes operate hydrogen buses and if not, why not? Alverà urges readers to write to local representatives, mayors and city authorities. Convincing politicians to change attitudes may not be especially hard if the cost of cutting out carbon is a small fraction of a product’s price. Alverà has shown a tantalising glimpse of a net-zero system “that could fuel economic development, create jobs, spark innovation and foster international cooperation and trade.” It is ambitious, but so is saving the planet.

Many worlds: The quantum leaps of Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and Hugh Everett

The Schrödinger equation is the fundamental building block of quantum physics. In his 2020 book When We Cease to Understand the World author Benjamin Labatut calls it “one of the most powerful equations the human mind has ever created”. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger first presented it in Munich in 1926 as a way to describe the interior workings of atoms. The theory seemed to confirm that elementary particles behaved in the same way as waves. Labatut called it “a Promethean fire capable of dissipating the darkness of the subatomic realm”.

The theory made Schrödinger an international superstar and gained him the adulation of every physicist in the world. All except one, that is, Werner Heisenberg. Then 23 years old, Heisenberg was broke in 1926 and had to borrow money to attend the Munich event. He had gained the reputation of a young prodigy but while Schrödinger came up with one elegant equation to describe all of physics and chemistry, Heisenberg’s ideas and formulations were so abstract and complex that only a handful of mathematicians could understand them. Heisenberg interrupted Schrödinger’s lecture to shout out that electrons were not waves. Though Schrödinger was prepared to listen to him, others were not, and when Heisenberg attempted to take over a blackboard, he was thrown out of the room. Unbowed, he later wrote to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli. “The more I reflect on the physical part of Schrödinger’s equation the more disgusting I find it…I think it is bullshit”.

Isaac Newton had laid out the rules of classical mechanics in 1667. Newton’s law of universal gravitation and three laws of motion describe the universal relationship between objects and the forces acting upon them. However Heisenberg was tormented by what he believed was a fundamental flaw in Newton’s theories, which fell apart when applied to the interior of the atom. Using pure mathematics Heisenberg replicated in the subatomic world what Newton had done for the solar system. When Heisenberg completed his thesis at Gottingen University he gave it to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr to review. Bohr realised that the findings were revolutionary. He told Albert Einstein it was “rather mystifying” but profound and had “enormous implications”. In 1925 Heisenberg published On a Quantum Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations. It was the world’s first formulation of quantum mechanics. It showed that what we see when we look at the world is fundamentally different from what it actually is. Unlike in classical mechanics where the state of a system is defined by its position and velocity, the quantum state of an electron cannot be stated with perfect confidence. The best we can do is predict the probability of its location or velocity.

Heisenberg’s idea left people stupified. Einstein called it brilliant and hard to disprove but said it was “a devilish calculation” and it was incompatible with common sense. As the founder of relativity, Einstein was a master of visualisation but Heisenberg’s reality was beyond comprehension and threatened to obscure fundamental laws that governed the physical world. The charged particles known as electrons were first discovered in 1897 and Ernest Rutherford showed they existed in atoms postulating a “solar system” model of electrons orbiting a nucleus. Then Max Planck proposed the idea that every time light was emitted, it came in a fixed quantity called a “quantum” of energy which was related to the frequency of the light. Planck’s constant defined the proportionality of the quantum of light to its frequency. Einstein used this to formulate his idea that light comes in particle-like quanta of energy, and it was further refined by Niels Bohr’s work on electron orbits.

Louis de Broglie’s 1924 thesis had postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter had wave properties, confirming Einstein’s 1905 proposal of particle-wave duality. A year later the head of theoretical physics at Zurich University read de Broglie’s thesis. That man was Erwin Schrödinger. Like Einstein, Schrödinger recognised the brilliance of de Broglie’s work and thought it could help quantum mechanics be brought under a classical schema. Schrödinger suffered tuberculosis and checked into a sanatorium where he worked on an equation to prove de Broglie’s theory. Schrödinger include an imaginary number in his calculations, the square root of minus one. This meant that a part of the wave his equation described had escaped the three dimensions of space.

Schrödinger called this a “wave function” and the equation that now carries his name says the rate of change of a wave function is proportional to the energy of the quantum system. As Labatut wrote, Schrödinger’s waves were “not of this world”. When he recovered, he wrote five articles in six months creating a complete set of mechanics around his equation. He was hailed as a genius though many were troubled whether his wave function described reality. The problem was that upon measurement the wave function collapses and however spread out it may have been pre-measurement, afterwards it is concentrated on the result obtained. The most persistent critic was Heisenberg. Schrödinger published an article saying their ideas were mathematically equivalent and were just two different ways of approaching the problem.

Heisenberg went to work for Bohr’s institute at the University of Copenhagen. Bohr was happy to embrace the contradictions between the two theories and he and Heisenberg argued over their merits. Schrödinger’s mechanics showed all the states an electron could inhabit but only as probabilities but if you considered his and Heisenberg’s theories together, as Bohr did, the results were absurd and intriguing; an electron that was both a particle confined to a point and a wave extending through time and space. Heisenberg concluded there was an absolute limit about what we could know about the world. Quantum objects had no fixed identity but lived in a space of possibilities. The conundrum that position and momentum could not be certain at the same time became known as the uncertainty principle.

In 1927 the great physicists of Europe met at Brussels’ Solvay Institute to thrash out the problems posed by quantum mechanics. The Solvay conference was a gathering of geniuses with 17 Nobel laureates present including Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Planck, de Broglie, Paul Dirac and Marie Curie as well as the protagonists, Heisenberg and Schrödinger. De Broglie told the conference about his new theory of pilot waves which tried to explain electron movement as if they were surfing waves. Schrödinger attacked this idea mercilessly. Then Schrödinger described his theory that waves were real and not probabilities, and it perfectly described electron behaviour but he too was unpersuasive. Heisenberg and Bohr then presented what would become known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. Reality, they said, does not exist separately from the act of observation. An electron is not in a fixed place until it is measured. It is the act of measuring that makes particles real objects. Heisenberg said this not only changed our vision of reality but even “the behaviour of its fundamental building blocks” and the underlying physics and mathematics were no longer amenable to modification. Einstein had been quiet to this point but now he exploded, saying this was a betrayal of the spirit of science. Physics had to describe cause and effects and not merely of probabilities, Einstein said. There had to be something deeper. Chance could not be enthroned at the expense of the notion of natural laws. “God does not play dice with the Universe.” he told Bohr. But Bohr provided answers to all Einstein’s questions and the Solvay conference adopted the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Einstein hated the chaos this imposed on theoretical physics. He continued to search for a hidden order that would unify his relativity theory with quantum mechanics. More surprisingly, Schrödinger also grew to hate his own theory. He devised the famous thought experiment the result of which was the impossible creature of a cat that was at once alive and dead. While he intended it as ridicule, the Copenhagen scientists told Schrödinger he was absolutely right. Though ridiculous and paradoxical, the cat, like any elementary particle, was both alive and dead, at least until such time as it was measured. Schrödinger’s name would forever become associated with this failed attempt to negate the idea he himself gave rise to while his daughter Ruth once mused “I think my father just didn’t like cats”. Schrödinger continued to contribute to science, including a long stint in Dublin at the behest of his admirer Eamon de Valera, but never achieved the brilliance of his quantum work. His equation remains a pillar of modern physics though no one has yet unravelled the mystery of the wave function. Heisenberg received the Nobel Physics prize in 1932 and the Nazis ordered him to investigate a nuclear bomb in 1939. He concluded that it was impossible and was shocked in 1945 to hear about Hiroshima. Yet as Labatut wrote, Heisenberg continued to develop provocative ideas for the rest of his life and his uncertainty principle has never been disproved.

As Sean Carroll writes in Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime (2019), quantum mechanics is now ubiquitous in modern technology. It provides mindbogglingly precise predictions and semiconductors, transistors, microchips, lasers, and computer memory all rely on it. Quantum physics, he says, the “deepest, most comprehensive view of reality we have”. And yet we still do not understand it properly and physicists don’t agree on what it actually says. The textbooks ignore the problem. The position of universities seems to be “shut up and calculate”, while research grants go to concrete, quantifiable outcomes instead of exploring the big picture issues.

Carroll says the fundamental problem in understanding quantum mechanics is the wave collapse observed during measurement. Electrons have no fixed position, merely a wave function. They exist only in the quantum state, which can be thought of as a superposition of every possible outcome of observation. For any one particular outcome the wave function assigns an amplitude measuring the wave’s energy and the probability of getting that outcome is the amplitude squared. This is called the Born rule for physicist Max Born who was also at Solvay. At that conference Heisenberg and Bohr proposed that there was a gap between the classical realm of the observer and mechanical measurement apparatus (the human eye, camera, microscope, or whatever) and the quantum realm of the electron and the line of division has become known as the “Heisenberg cut”. But Carroll says that the Heisenberg cut does not exist. One startling feature of quantum physics is that in any system there is only one wave function describing both the thing that is being measured and the thing that is measuring it. This is the quantum phenomenon known as entanglement. There are not only multiple electron positions but also multiple observers, each with a definite idea of where the electron was seen.

This is the Many Worlds formulation, put forward by Hugh Everett in 1957. Carroll says this is the simplest and most elegant theory of quantum mechanics and does away with the problem of wave collapse. It does, however, introduce the unsettling idea that there are many copies of “the universe”, each slightly different but each truly real in some sense. Carroll calls the Everett approach “courageous” but it raises many obvious questions of its own, not least that God now seems to be playing dice with many worlds.

Hugh Everett studied at Princeton under John Archibald Wheeler, who would later advance knowledge on wormholes and black holes. Wheeler had worked with Bohr on quantum problems and Everett’s proposal followed Wheeler’s principle that theoretically physics should be “radically conservative” and experimentally testable. Wheeler and Everett were trying to fit gravity into quantum theory (a problem yet to be solved in the 21st century) and Everett came to the conclusion that there was only one quantum state, a “universal wave function”. He argued that the Copenhagen interpretation was incomplete due to its reliance on classical physics and argued against wave collapse. He said both parts of the final wave function were still there, but they described separate worlds, never to interact again. In the example of Schrödinger’s misfortunate cat, there are two branches of the wave function by the time the experimenter checks the box, each with a single cat and single experimenter, not a superposition of both.

Everett had trouble getting people to accept his ideas and even Wheeler was doubtful, while Bohr rejected it in 1956. Wheeler and Princeton convinced Everett to modify his PhD dissertation to paper over his disagreement with the Copenhagen Interpretation. Everett quit in exasperation and left to study nuclear weapons for the US Department of Defence. Everett’s theory was helped by a later discovery. In 1970 German physicist Hans Dieter Zeh introduced the idea of decoherence. the process by which a quantum system entangles with its environment, causing the wave function to branch. That same year Everett’s work was resurrected with Bryce DeWitt’s influential article which first called it the “many worlds” theory. Following the discovery of decoherence, Everett’s theory was formalised in a 1973 collection called The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which included his original uncensored PhD work.

Carroll says the virtue of the Many World approach is its simplicity of formulation and it is the best way of answering the puzzles raised by the measurement problem. The picture of branching as “creating” a new copy of the universe is vivid, but not quite right. Carroll says it is better to think of it as dividing the existing universe into almost identical slices, each with a smaller weight than the original. As counterintuitive as Many Worlds seems, it does not change how we live our lives in the classical “single universe”. And while the physical process of thinking remains poorly understood, Carroll says human decisions are classical events not quantum ones and the outcomes are encoded in the brain. We just need to live with the annoyance of other copies of us being produced all the time.