Iran conflict windfall over three months reignites calls for companies ‘cashing in on human misery’ to pay for environmental damage
“Saudi Aramco’s fossil fuel production has made it responsible for more carbon emissions than any company in history, according to the database Carbon Majors, followed by Chevron and ExxonMobil and with Shell and BP in the top 10. Saudi Arabia has for decades led successful efforts to block and delay international climate action.”
“…. Patrick Galey, the lead on fossil fuels at Global Witness, said: “BP’s sky-high profits are a scandalous reminder of who’s been cashing in on human misery this year. While wildfires threaten communities across the world, drought bites and energy costs spiral, ordinary families are paying the price for big oil’s prioritisation of shareholder wealth over a livable planet.”
UN forecasters warn of worsening conditions in 45 countries currently experiencing severe food insecurity
“Even if the forecast El Niño is less strong than some models predict, it will tip many countries over the edge, adding more than a fifth to the 225 million people in 45 countries currently in acute food insecurity, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Wednesday.”
Current blazes roaring across country more than twice as likely to occur because of fossil fuel-driven global heating
“Time and again we see the same results: climate change is a key driver behind uncontrollably large and unprecedented fires. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The science has been clear for decades: burning fossil fuels is making these wildfires more frequent, more intense and more difficult to contain.”
Agreement with RWE is fifth deal Trump team has made with energy companies, offering payouts to give up projects
Billions of citizens’ tax dollars to cancel the long term plan to develop sustainable, renewable resources and instead invest in fossil fuels with proven records of causing harm to our environment and our people.
We are seeing sustained unusually high temperatures for far longer than we usually do, with an extreme weather warning issued so many times over the last few weeks I've lost track. We're looking at our 6th heatwave coming up. This isn't a joke - a record-breaking 3500 people have lost their lives already to the unbearable weather conditions and counting (almost 3000 in May and June alone).
In 2025, an emergency briefing on the UK's role and future regarding the climate crisis with ten experts was held and recorded, and a 50-minute film of key points from this has been produced. There is now a petition and an Early Day Motion for it to be televised on prime-time TV. You can find out more here, and watch some of the key parts here, or on YouTube.
THINGS YOU CAN DO
Check if your MP/equivalent has signed the EDM yet, and if not, email them urging them to watch the documentary and sign the EDM
Sign the gov.uk petition
Contact relevant people in your organisation to urge it be shown within
Watch or host a screening of the briefing
See the website for more you can do to get involved.
Check on your UK friends. We're not doing well.
Share this post/these links
People are dying. Now is not the time for trolls complaining about "Brits not knowing what real heat looks like" - you have no idea what it's like to be in a country where all our houses are built to keep the heat in. To have infrastructure built to preserve life only in the cold, to have this level of humidity, and to not have bodies primed for this kind of heat. I have friends whose lives are at risk here because they're disabled or homeless and living through this heat, get off my damn post.
Doomer men explain climate to me (I don't think of myself as a climate expert, and I'm definitely not a climate scientist, but I have been paying attention for a while). The climate situation is grim. But it's not hopeless, there's every reason not to give up, and making it sound worse than it is, or making human nature sound worse, as three of the men here do, encourages surrender. Which I'm against.
Something that I've noticed for a long time is: people actually in the climate struggle are not defeatist, but people who are not and are not informed often are; defeatism may be a reason not to join it, whether sincerely held or wielded as an excuse. Part of why I found the film Don't Look Up unfortunate is that it, like some of the reply guys, seemed to want to blame human nature broadly rather than the minority blocking climate action and the energy transition.
Summer is not what it once was. We have been robbed of one of life’s great joys
Rebecca Solnit
My Guardian editor asked me to write about what happened to summer. Also just out: news that three lions in Tokyo's zoo died of heatstroke. I wrote:
Far beyond the fires raging across Europe and North America, the smoke, dangerous to breathe, hangs in the air, dimming the view, changing the very color of sunlight into something grimly unsettling.
An estimated 20,000 are said to have died in the extreme heat in Europe earlier this year, and heat is climate change’s quiet killer, compared to the dramatic violence of death by fire or flood. In eastern Washington, 600 homes have just burned down, and in both Europe and North America, firefighters have died in the effort to contain the climate-fueled firestorms.
Once, across much of the the world’s temperate zones, we looked forward to summer as a time of delights, from summer’s bounty of fruits, long days, warmth, school holidays, activities like camping and swimming, travel and adventure. Now many of us dread it.
Wildfires are raging – and the world has junked 45 climate pledges. Disaster looms, and little wonder.
Summer was the sweet season celebrated in poetry and song, often pictured as a gentle goddess; now it is too often a threat and a misery. All this makes me think of Bill McKibben’s 2011 book Earth, a proposal that we can understand climate change as equivalent to moving to a more perilous, unwelcoming planet than the gentle, stable one we evolved over the 12,000 years since the last ice age.
I know that there are parts of the world where summer was already harsh, intense – 20 years ago, my friend Mark Klett, a photographer living near Phoenix, Arizona, joked: “Phoenix has two seasons: summer and hell,” summer being January and February; hell being the rest of the year.
But even in Phoenix, summer is now more intense; there, people get severe burns from falling down on superheated asphalt. It’s changed everywhere.
I’ve driven to New Mexico almost every summer since 1989. A few years ago, I found that I feared heat for the first time: the temperature in Needles, a California desert town on the Colorado River near the Arizona border, was going to be 116F (46.6C). I didn’t know if my car could survive temperatures like that, and I feared what survival would look like for me if the air-conditioned car broke down on the highway. (I managed it by staying on the edge of the Mojave Desert the night before and darting across the low desert to Flagstaff, which at 7000ft elevation stays cooler, and pressing on to New Mexico the next day.)
I’m in New Mexico now, as I write, enjoying the beauties of its incomparable skies and summer thunderstorms, but 37 summers since I started coming, summer is not what it used to be. It’s hotter.
The monsoon rains are less reliable and often more violent when they come; one New Mexico town, Ruidoso, has over the past few years been beaten up repeatedly by flood and fire. Like so many westerners, I have too often breathed in the toxic smoke of burning forests, have followed the news of forests and towns being consumed by flames, have friends whose homes have been reduced to ash and rubble, have seen brick chimneys standing above the blackened ruins of a neighborhood.
As I hear about summer tourists sweltering miserably from Japan to Spain, I wonder if, going forward, travelers will shift peak vacation times to spring and fall, if schools will change when students have their holidays.
Keeping them indoors in air-conditioned spaces may be even a safety measure for those who lack such protection at home. Summer has too often, in too many places, become to brace against, prepare for, and dread: the season of danger, heat, fire, misery. The New Yorker reports: “ A conflagration west of Bordeaux, described as four times the size of Paris, prompted the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history: 220,000 people.”
It’s as if we launched a war against nature, and that has turned place after place into something that resembles a war zone. The climate movement is a peace movement, a movement to end this war and its casualties.
We often talk about what climate change has wrecked in terms of what’s material, tangible, structures lost to fire, flood, or sea level rise, trees dying, species threatened, glaciers melting in warmer weather. But summer was an immaterial treasure and joy that belonged to all of us.
There have been youth-led lawsuits against the producers of climate chaos and the governments who’ve refused to act adequately – essentially for robbing them of their future. Robbing us all of the immeasurable joys of summer as it was is part of that theft. It’s not the main reason that climate action matters so much, but it’s a reminder that what we’re losing is not only the terms of our survival and our safety, but our freedom and pleasure.
An “exceptionally serious” drought has hit half of England after successive heat waves parched the land, shrivelled rivers and put huge pres
“Last winter was England’s eighth wettest on record, with rainfall 42% higher than the long-term average for the season…..”
Now?
“In addition to rolling heat waves, the country has been grappling with a dearth of rain — just 7% of the average for this time of year, falling to 1% in some parts of the south. And there is no substantial rain forecast….
Scientists say the swing between wet and dry extremes — often called “weather whiplash” — is becoming more frequent and intense. It’s “indicative of what we expect in a warming world,” said Jamie Hannaford, head of water resources and drought at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology….
As human-driven climate change fuels more frequent extreme weather, experts say more must be done by governments to protect people, communities and the environment from disaster….”
