If you care about the world we are handing on to future generations, the news on Thursday morning was dramatic. This January was the warmest on record; temperatures in 18 of the past 19 months have exceeded pre-industrial averages by 1.5C. There can be no comfort that the epoch-changing climate crisis is 20 or even 10 years away. It is already upon us.

Temperatures should have been moderated this winter by cooler air over the Pacific; it did not happen. Scientists are bewildered and scared. James Hansen, doyen of climate crisis research, believes that, unless this pace of deterioration is reversed, warm ocean waters flowing from the southern to the northern hemisphere will be trapped as vast sea currents cease. Sea levels will rise to impose a civilisational threat. It is a global imperative to dial down the rate of carbon emissions.

Yet this, according to President Trump, is just climate change fanaticism. Hence his withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement, the evisceration of the country’s environmental protection regulation to boost American fossil fuel production by at least another 3m barrels a day, and Friday’s suspension of Biden’s $5bn electric vehicle (EV) charging programme. The injunction is to drill, baby, drill. Burning fossil fuels is somehow manly and pro-economic growth; American banks and investment houses that just a few years ago were signing up for concerted climate action are now taking their cue from Trump and resigning their membership in droves.

There are echoes in Britain. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party regards the climate crisis as a scam, derides spending money on it and calls for a referendum to end the statutory commitment to achieve net zero by 2050. Ditto Kemi Badenoch, who talks of “eco-nutters”. Rachel Reeves, not to be outflanked by the right, declares that any tensions between commitments to act on climate change and measures to boost economic growth and secure financial credibility should be resolved in favour of the latter – hence her backing a third runway at Heathrow. On Radio 4’s Today programme, the premise for Friday’s interview with the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, was that tackling climate change necessarily meant less growth – a syllogism he failed to recognise.

It is as if events in China are on another planet. Here, the leadership – obviously fanatical “eco-nutters” – defines the drivers of its economic growth as the “new three” – solar cells, lithium ion batteries and electric vehicles (the old three were household appliances, furniture and clothing), in all of which it is the dominant producer. Thus the cost of solar panels has fallen by more than 90% in the past decade as China has scaled up production in every component, innovatively transforming the underlying technology; the resulting energy is so cheap that in the Gulf, where there is plentiful sun, solar-produced electricity is regarded as free. Even in Republican Texas, solar energy is taking off.

China has made parallel commitments in EV and battery production. Because of the climate crisis, producing EVs was obviously the future: the Chinese EV producer BYD now outproduces Elon Musk’s Tesla, with a better range of cars. Its Seagull, for example, retails for $9,700 (£7,800) and, using solar electricity, is very cheap to run. The production of lithium batteries for EVs is another strategic necessity where China dominates, driving the price down by 90% over the past 10 years. It is not regulation, high taxes and eco-fanaticism that has laid the European car industry so low, as Trump and co like to argue; it is that Europeans did not grasp the growth possibilities of beating the climate crisis fast and aggressively enough. Heading off civilisational disaster and promoting growth are not at odds; they are two sides of the same coin.

Here, Labour could have been the European exemplar, but it has volunteered to box itself in with pledges to appease the right. Some of the pledges that constituted its once bold commitment to the green new deal and just transition still stand – it remains committed to clean energy production by 2030 and achieving net zero by 2050 – but the narrative is compromised. Thus, for example, it could have accompanied its support for letting the assessment for a third runway at Heathrow go forward by simultaneously announcing a tax on private jets not using sustainable aviation fuel and huge rebates on increased air passenger duty for commercial operators that do the same. If the exploitation of the Rosebank oilfield is to proceed, then at least insist that the Norwegian operator Equinor restores cuts to its renewable energy programme and hypothecate tax revenues to boost the national wealth fund.

In future, British cheap, sustainable electricity will come from two principal sources: renewables and the new generation of small nuclear modular reactors (NMRs), safer and cheaper than their larger rivals and where Rolls-Royce is among the market leaders. The Czech Republic has signed a memorandum of understanding with Rolls-Royce to buy three of its reactors on the private understanding that the British government will buy as well; but even as Keir Starmer rightly extolled NMRs on Thursday at Lancashire’s National Nuclear Laboratory, there was still no commitment. Labour should just declare its intent to buy. Britain could be as dominant in this technology as China is in its “new three”. Meanwhile, the imaginative Xlinks project, proposing to pipe electricity from solar panels in Morocco to Britain, which could supply 8% of our electricity, should be turbo-charged.

There is too little sense of urgency; too much fear of offending the right and Trump. When Treasury officials debate the merits of paying for energy resilience by developing British capacity in renewables and NMR, or just buying in from China or the US to get “value for money” and so reduce inflation risk, they lean into the latter, confident they will win the chancellor’s support. But this is Labour’s opportunity to face down its critics. The American and British right are plain wrong. Growth, cheap energy and averting the civilisational threat of the climate crisis are all possible. Labour should recover its convictions and find the courage to act.