What’s the link between the global economy and the climate? Consumption drives extraction and carbon emissions. But there is more.

The inequalities of the global economy don’t just shape what goes into the atmosphere. They affect our understanding of the climate and our perspectives when it comes to possible solutions. The lenses through which we see the world reflect the inequalities within it. The greater the centralisation of power, the greater the control over our knowledge about it.

This was a conclusion that the writer and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci reached, while languishing in prison after a failed revolution against the fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Unable to understand why ordinary people didn’t rise up against the dictator, despite their clear economic interest in doing so, he coined the term “hegemony”: the conflation of power and knowledge, whereby the views and interests of a political economic elite are adopted by the rest of society as common sense.

This perspective explains a lot about our seeming inability to escape the environmental status quo.

Successive polls indicate overwhelming public support for resolving excessive carbon emissions and the problems this excessive use of fossil fuels is creating for communities around the world.

In the UK, 60% of people support net zero. In Germany, 81% of the population want to expand renewable energy, while 55% cite it as “very important to them”. In Italy, 80% of people support a renewables only energy policy. Even in the US, 57% want the government to do more to address climate change.

With the exception of the US, this majority is greater than that which has elected any political party since the turn of the 20th century. So with a super-majority in favour of decarbonisation, how does the world remain stuck on such a steep upwards trajectory of carbon emissions?

Almost every country has a stated commitment to decarbonisation. Wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy in history.

Yet a record quantity of carbon was pumped into the atmosphere last year. And record amounts of coal, oil and gas are still being extracted from the Earth.

Statistics like this can make even thinking about climate change a demoralising business. This is precisely the problem. Our overwhelming political will is sapped by being locked into a system that obscures the most effective pathways (phasing out fossil fuels, for example), while continually moving us towards less effective ones.

If you’re worried that global garment production is on course to triple in size by 2050, common narratives suggest that simply choosing the “greenest” brand will help fix the problem. Worried about the carbon cost of flying? Never fear: a budget airline’s apocryphal claims to be sustainable can assuage that nagging guilt.

Feeling the heat?

But the politics of climate change isn’t just about what we buy. It’s a full-body experience.

Take heat stress. According to the UN’s International Labour Organization, 70% of workers experience heat stress throughout the year. That figure falls to 29% in Europe and rises to 93% in sub-Saharan Africa.

These two continents have big differences in temperature, but temperature is in fact only a small part of the problem.

The largest determinant on whether a person becomes heat stressed (the point at which their body is pushed beyond its normal thermal limits) is the work that a person does. People working in construction, agriculture and other high-intensity roles – the kind that dominate in developing countries – are at the highest risk. Sedentary service sectors, or office jobs to you and me, are the safest in terms of heat stress.

When it comes to the environment, what you feel depends on what you do.

My new book, Climate Hegemony, highlights how a farmer is almost twice as likely as a garment worker to experience changing rainfall patterns, because everybody’s experience of the environment is filtered through how they spend their life.

That’s the problem. The populations of the developed world, consumers of most fossil fuels globally, may favour climate action. But as long as they continue to benefit from a global economy that reduces their risk through air conditioning and wealth, tackling climate change will remain alongside world peace and eliminating global hunger: moral aspirations, rather than tangible policy.

It is a testament to the persuasive powers of the fossil fuel industry that this hegemony is sustained – even in the face of precipitously falling renewable energy prices. Campaigns outflank arguments for renewable energy through widespread political lobbying and by support for conservative thinktanks and social movements, such as the campaign against net zero.

Individually, these activities might seem nefarious, but together they present as common sense, just as Gramsci complained from his cell in 1929.

As Gramsci found out, it is not easy to change minds. Yet by challenging the deeply embedded norms and assumptions of our current environmental impasse, it is possible to access something many environmentalists have felt starved of in recent years: hope.

The changing climate acts not only through emissions, but through everything we do, make and think. With different assumptions about which climate actions are possible, we arrive at different politics and different outcomes.

So, however much it might feel like it, the climate impasse is far from insurmountable. A world of ways to reshape our relationship to the environment are waiting, if only we can learn to see them.

Laurie Parsons receives funding from The Wellcome Trust and UK Research and Innovation.

Ulysses, a mild but disillusioned police officer, arrives in icy Minnesota to start an eight-week stint as substitute sheriff in the surprisingly prosperous small town of Normal. The previous sheriff has died in mysterious circumstances.

As he recovers from a traumatic episode in his own career, his aim is to serve out his time as quietly and uneventfully as possible and then leave the town pretty much as he found it. Unsurprisingly, events swiftly take a very different, not to mention ultra-violent, turn.

The snowbound setting, quirky but amiable inhabitants and swift intimations of a darker criminal hinterland all give off unmistakable Fargo vibes. Not least because the sheriff is played by Bob Odenkirk, an alumnus of Noah Hawley’s TV spin-off of the Coen Brothers’ classic 1996 picture. (In an obvious nod, Ulysses’ deceased predecessor, Gunderson, shares his surname with Frances McDormand’s cop in the film.)

The silent apparitions of the town’s near-legendary moose and much discussion of coffee also lend these sequences a certain Twin Peaks (1990-1991) flavour. Later on a severed ear is an obvious shout-out to another David Lynch project, Blue Velvet (1986).

Midway through director Ben Wheatley’s new thriller, however, the stylistic reference points shift from the Coens and Lynch to Quentin Tarantino and John Carpenter. A farcically botched Bonnie and Clyde-style bank heist hurls the film into a spiral of chaotic and very bloody violence which barely lets up for the remainder of the film.

The townsfolk, it transpires, have saved Normal from the blighted fate of other midwestern towns by striking an improbable Faustian bargain to warehouse piles of loot for the Japanese mob – the Yakuza.

Big body count

Once Ulysses stumbles across this dirty little secret, he finds himself pitted against virtually every single inhabitant of Normal as they battle to keep it quiet. An arsenal of guns, explosives, light artillery and a variety of improvised weapons overnight reduce the town’s main street into a blood-soaked, body-strewn wreckage.

Ulysses, along with the hapless pair of amateur bank robbers caught up in the crossfire, fights off hordes of opponents in the fashion of Tarantino’s From Dusk To Dawn (1996). And once the black-suited Yakuza reinforcements arrive, it resembles Kill Bill (2004). The gory violence, mostly played for blackly comic effect, has a comparably weightless feel.

The army of townsfolk stalking the beleaguered, outgunned trio recalls the zombie-like gang in John Carpenter’s B-movie classic Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Or perhaps even more the demented small-town denizens of George A. Romero’s The Crazies (1973).

As this string of allusions might suggest, Normal makes no great claims on originality. Written by Derek Kolstad, creator of the John Wick franchise – and also 2021’s Nobody, the vehicle for Odenkirk’s late-career swerve into action hero – the film delivers on its simple premise without any great care for complex plotting or plausibility. It serves up modestly inventive pyrotechnics in a businesslike, and at just 90 minutes, very concise fashion.

Fans of Wheatley’s previous efforts in this vein will enjoy his trademark, though not especially unique, combination of humour and extreme violence. Others may feel he does himself few favours with the constant overt nods to far superior filmmakers and risks making his film feel even more derivative and predictable than it confesses itself to be.

There’s certainly little here in the rendering of upstate Minnesota to compare with Roger Deakins’ crystalline cinematography in Fargo. Nor can Wheatley’s energetic but prosaic action choreography ever approach the stylisation of Kill Bill.

Violence aside, then, the film rests heavily on some apt casting and happily the performers are reliably engaging. Odenkirk’s trademark battered decency largely carries the film. But there are also deft supporting turns, notably from Henry Winkler as Normal’s oleaginous mayor and Lena Headey as a tough-dame barkeep. Reena Jolly and Peter Shinkoda are also endearing as the dishevelled slacker bandits (and solicitous dog parents). They vaguely recall the shambolic outlaws of One Battle After Another (2025).

Many of Normal’s influences have serious things to say about modern American life. Normal too gestures in passing to larger issues. The mayor presents the community’s turn to crime as a morally if not legally legitimate reaction to the desperate plight of “flyover states” devastated by industrial decline and corporate predation.

But really this is just window dressing. There isn’t a great deal more to the film than meets the eye, and there probably doesn’t need to be. In its rapid pacing, terse characterisation, brief run time and propulsive, hard-boiled action, Normal positions itself as a latter-day B-movie and mostly delivers on the unpretentious pleasures of that time-honoured form.

Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.