The Economist Magazine Cover For 08/02/2025

The Economist Read in browser August 2nd 2025 How we chose this week’s image SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image The Economist Edward Carr Deputy editor Each summer we publish a digital-only issue and it’s a chance to experiment. This year, in what we call e-week, our cover is about the greenlash against climate-change policies. As you’ll see, we had a few ideas for jazzing it up. But let’s start with a straight-up-and-down cover that we might have used in print—or p-week, as I suppose we should call it. The voters are revolting and they are lobbing Molotov cocktails into the whirring arms of a windmill. An increasing number refuse to believe that strict net-zero targets are in their interest or, indeed, that they will bring benefits to anyone else. Some think they are being taken for chumps, paying good money to meet bad targets while businesses and people elsewhere are belching out carbon. Seeing an ever-more-powerful China emitting more than Europe and America combined makes them seethe. The red light signals a stop to climate policies, the heating of the planet and a warning to humanity all at the same time. The scientific rationale for net zero is inescapable, whatever the greenlashers wish to believe. An end to warming requires the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stop increasing. That means either a world with no such emissions or one which takes as much greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere as it puts in (the “net” in net zero). Cramming so many meanings into a single image is impressive. Despite that, the symbolism of all those reds and greens risks being confusing. The carriageway swerves to avoid a windmill, but it ploughs on. The greenlash will not deprive the world of its technical ability to decarbonise a great deal of its economy. Extra demand has driven the virtuous cycle of larger volumes and lower prices that have seen wind, solar and batteries become more available and cheaper. Costs are now so low that unstimulated demand will drive them even lower. Even post-Big-Beautiful-Bill America will see its emissions shrink, albeit more slowly than they could have. This cover is also a bit confusing. The windmill is being avoided, whereas we are arguing that solar and wind will continue to do all right despite the greenlash. This cover also squanders the opportunities a digital cover creates for movement and colour. We started by making this a-week, with some animation. We have set an axeman loose on a wind turbine that has sprouted at Sycamore Gap. That is the place next to Hadrian’s Wall, in northern England, which made headlines around the world when a tree was chopped down for a lark by a couple of local idiots. It’s vandalism and the axeman is not making any progress. It’s also rather beautiful. The trouble is that this cover makes the greenlash seem like an act of nocturnal sabotage whereas, in reality, it’s a fairly common reaction to a political strategy being carried out in the full glare of the noonday sun. We could also make it c-week by making full use of colour. Here you can see how printers can reproduce only parts of the spectrum. The inks—cyan, magenta, yellow and key (jargon for black)—combine in the CMYK colour model to create a more limited palette than the red, green and blue (RGB) pixels of a digital screen. Last year for e-week, we chose a brilliant red, reminiscent of the Chinese flag. Here is an electric green for g-week, and beside it how a printer would have rendered our eventual design, of a turbine being pulled towards the ground Gulliver-like by Liliputian greenlashers. For rich countries to abandon stringent net-zero targets outright would demoralise greens, energise climate nihilists and make sensible reforms harder. Better to find ways to ease them into the “more of a guideline” category. “The art of the possible” may sound flat. But a politics of new possibilities could put climate policy on a more sustainable footing, as well as offering hope. The coal was wrong for this message (although the tyre-tracks are a nice touch). Its time has passed, even in America, however much Donald Trump exalts it as a symbol of a lost age. But the turbine worked and this design was very nearly there. It needed only a few more ropes: just a t-week. You can browse all of our covers from 2024—and learn about the creative decisions that went into each one—in this interactive Cover Story annual. Ad for The Economist app: Carry clarity. Listen on the go. Download app. Related stories → The climate needs a politics of the possible (Leader) → Donald Trump’s war on renewables (Briefing) → The humbling of green Europe (Briefing) → The remarkable rise of “greenhushing” (Business) Cover image