Club members: It's not just the usual suspects -other countries are ramping up oil production

"Drill, baby, drill!" Donald Trump's avowal to pump up the US's oil and gas production should not be surprising. The US has ramped up fossil fuel production to become the world's biggest producer: its projected licences for 2024 could lead to 397m tonnes of planet-heating emissions.

- Jonathan Watts

This comes at a time when the UN secretary general has declared "code red" for humanity, and the International Energy Agency has warned that new oil and gas fields are incompatible with the Paris agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

To deliberately increase emissions in such circumstances is so contrary to the public good that it suggests a capture of politics by a powerful minority that represents fossil-fuel interests - the behaviour expected in a classic petrostate.

It does not seem to matter which party is in power. When the Democratic president Barack Obama was in the White House, he boasted that the US was pumping more oil than at any time in eight years. The Republican Trump picked up the pace. Then the Democrat Joe Biden opened the spigot even wider.