We’ve had a summer of dangerous heat and wildfires. And this is just the start.

The government has told us to stockpile food. And this is just the start.

Winter flooding is becoming more and more common. And this is just the start.

The climate crisis is here and now, but how much worse it gets is still up to us. How much we endanger our food supplies depends on decisions we make now. How much of the planet becomes uninhabitable, how many cities are flooded by rising seas, how difficult we make life for our children and for theirs - those things are still up for grabs. They are still worth fighting for. 

Take our survey to tell Ed Miliband to stop this 

Too many people in the UK think we can’t really have much impact. As online reply guys endlessly remind me, Britain’s domestic emissions are less than 1% of the world’s. “What about China?” chirp these chumps.

The problem with this analysis is that it radically underestimates the UK’s impact globally. The British state and institutions it created essentially invented fossil fuel capitalism. It remains a vital ally of the oil industry to this day, in a whole set of ways I’ve been setting out in essays over the past year.

Throughout the year I was researching this series, one of the institutions I was looking at was the Foreign Office. I wanted to know how much our diplomats around the world are shilling for Shell and BP as they try to open up new oil and gas fields.

It seemed to me that this specific question is particularly important. Eleven years ago, at the Paris climate conference, I got Shell’s head of climate change to essentially admit to me something which climate scientists had already made clear: if all of the oil and gas in the reserves already being tapped by the world’s oil and gas majors were burned, then we would blow past the targets for planetary heating politicians a few rooms away from us were agreeing. 

In other words, the companies already understood back then that burning all the oil and gas they already had contracts for would destabilise the climatic conditions which made it possible for complex human civilisations to emerge. It would guarantee whole countries in the global south become essentially uninhabitable. It would mean that farms across the planet would be destroyed by floods, droughts and sea level rises, pushing food prices out of reach of hundreds of millions of people, and more of a stretch for almost everyone. It would ensure sea level rises sufficient to drown the homes of hundreds of millions more.

Those were the consequences of burning the fossil fuels in the fields they already had. To open up new oil and gas fields more than a decade later is such an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do that it’s almost impossible to write honestly about it without sounding hyperbolic. Perhaps it’s enough to say this: in between re-reading the research, I am looking up at my four-month-old and my three-year-old, and my eyes fill with tears. I feel like begging their forgiveness that we failed to stop the smooth-talking, besuited psychopaths of the fossil fuel lobby from ending the epoch of climatic stability.

And so what I wanted to know was, how did they do it? How, over the last decade, has big oil managed to convince governments around the world to grant them licences to open up the new oil and gas fields the burning of which will guarantee the end of the epoch of climate stability? Specifically, how much did our government help them? The UK is - alongside the US - one of only two countries which hosts more than one of the world’s oil supermajors - that is, the six biggest shareholder owned oil and gas firms. Of those two firms - Shell and BP - the latter has been particularly active over the last couple of years in hunting for new oil and gas reserves and lobbying governments for the right to extract them. How much were British diplomats paid by you and me - helping them?

As I set out before, the Foreign Office worked hard to make it as difficult as possible for me to get details of their meetings with Shell and BP representatives in the relevant countries through the Freedom of Information Act. They even told the Green MP Siân Berry that they didn’t have the relevant information - which turned out not to be true, meaning they lied to parliament to cover their tracks.

Despite this, the overall picture which emerged was very clear: British diplomats seem to think it’s their job to advise, lobby for, and launder reputations for the oil and gas giants while they have sought to open up new oil and gas fields, rendering any chance of averting climate disaster impossible.

We need to stop this. We cannot allow one of the world’s biggest and most respected diplomatic corpses to be weirded as a weapon of big oil in its war against our children’s future.

The new foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, has a history of action on climate change. As Energy Secretary, he banned new oil and gas contracts in the North Sea. Sign my petition asking him to stop his diplomats from helping open them up abroad.