Compared to the late 1960s and early 1970s, over a typical January we now enjoy almost 50% more hours of sunshine. Over the whole year, we get about 13% additional hours of sunshine. That amounts to more than 30 extra minutes of sunshine per day.

Ironically, these changes appear to be rather more to do with the absence of pollution than because of it. And surprise, surprise, more sunshine equates to higher temperatures.

Climate change is not really my bailiwick, so apologies to our in-house boffins, Ben Pile, Tilak Doshi and Chris Morrison.

However, sunshine is an area where I have skin in the game. We’ve just spent our first summer in a house with three, metre square skylights in the kitchen roof. Unless you too have skylights in the ceiling you’d struggle to imagine how much heat they generate, by breakfast time the kitchen is effectively a no-go zone. We largely solved the problem by covering the skylights with car covers, creating shade. Instantly the temperature dropped from tropical to temperate. The difference is, literally, night and day, dark and light!

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• “Backlash at Labour’s Net Zero ‘madness’ as BP pulls out of North Sea” – Andy Burnham is facing demands to end Labour’s Net Zero “madness” and axe a controversial windfall tax after BP’announced it is pulling out of the North Sea, reports the Mail.

• “BP deals hammer blow to hopes of a North Sea revival” – BP’s decision to quit UK waters casts serious doubt over Andy Burnham’s ambitions to reverse the North Sea’s decline, says Jonathan Leake in the Telegraph.

• “As BP pulls out of North Sea oil, how Aberdeen turned into a doom town” – Once home to Britain’s biggest concentration of millionaires at the height of the North Sea boom, Aberdeen has suffered a stark decline – and BP’s exit threatens to make things worse, writes Gavin Madeley in the Mail.

• “Big Tech on the path to Net Zero” – On his Manhattan Contrarian blog, Francis Menton argues that the tech giants who once couldn’t stop preaching about climate change are now quietly walking back their Net Zero pledges as the huge energy demands of AI catch up with them.

• “The heatwave deaths we can’t see” – On their TTE Substack, Dr Tom Jefferson and Prof Carl Heneghan argue that the real-world mortality figures don’t match the models predicting thousands of heatwave deaths.

• “How the UK’s extreme heat is shifting the conversation about air-con” – Britain’s record temperatures are forcing a national debate about whether to embrace air conditioning despite its costs and consequences, says Matt McGrath at the BBC.

• “The heat is on: how to present estimates as reality (again)” – Remember the projections of deaths caused by heatwaves? On their TTE Substack, Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson examine how statistical estimates are routinely dressed up as established fact in health reporting.

• “Global temperature trend has cooled over the past 6,500 years” – Scientists have found the global temperature trend has actually cooled over the past 6,500 years, writes P. Gosselin on NoTricksZone.

• “The unspoken truth about wildfires” – In the Spectator, Matt Ridley argues that the greens (and everyone else) are wrong to blame climate change for the wildfires ravaging Europe.

• “Nine in 10 ‘wildfires’ started by human hands, French Government admits” – The French Government has admitted that an estimated 90% of so-called wildfires are the result of human activity rather than climate change, according to Breitbart.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Climate Skeptic Podcast | Episode 55” – On this week’s episode, Ellie Hodges sits down with the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor Chris Morrison to ask whether the Government’s new support for more North Sea oil and gas marks a real change of direction – or is just a change in words.

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• “‘Out of control’ Suffolk wildfire grows as ‘no risk’ to power plant” – A blaze on Dunwich Heath is spreading towards Sizewell B nuclear power station, roughly 2.5 miles away, as holidaymakers are evacuated, says Olivia Christie in the Mail.

• “Andy Burnham says Britain ‘can’t ignore’ the North Sea” – Andy Burnham has signalled he is ready to ditch Ed Miliband’s Net Zero stance, revealing he told Donald Trump he would take a “pragmatic approach” to fossil fuels, writes Greg Heffer in the Mail.

• “Net Zero scepticism is not climate-change denial” – In the Telegraph, Kemi Badenoch argues that conflating scepticism about Net Zero policy with climate change denial is a fundamental error that stifles legitimate debate.

• “Swap books for Kindles to hit Net Zero, government advisers say” – Government advisers have recommended that readers ditch printed books in favour of e-readers as part of Britain’s push to reach Net Zero, reports the Telegraph.

• “BBC new drama The Rapture used climate change storytelling consultants” – In her Substack, Charlotte Gill reveals that the BBC’s new drama The Rapture was shaped behind the scenes by Climate Spring, a well-funded organisation dedicated to embedding climate change narratives in popular culture.

• “US extreme weather and climate change dashboard” – On his Substack, Roger Pielke Jr. unveils a new dashboard tracking the relationship between US extreme weather and climate change.

• “Trump claims Burnham will ‘open up the North Sea’ for oil drilling” – President Trump has claimed that Andy Burnham told him he would “open up North Sea oil”, adding that it would make Britain “a really rich” country, reports the Times.

• “Should Burnham get an EV to cut No. 10 north to London commute cost?” – Andy Burnham, who champions public transport, faces a significant travel bill for commuting between No. 10 and his Northern base – raising questions about whether an electric vehicle might be a cost-effective solution, says the Mail.

• “Half of England in drought, says Environment Agency” – The Environment Agency has declared drought conditions across half of England, according to the Telegraph.

• “Wildfire alert as UK on brink of breaking 50-year drought record” – The Met Office has warned that fires could become “severe” across much of England and parts of Wales as temperatures climb towards 35C and Britain edges towards its worst drought in half a century, says the Times.

• “Cost of Net Zero will hit £40 billion by the end of the decade” – The total spent on eco policies has risen six times since 2010 and is driving up household bills, with Net Zero costs set to reach £40 billion by the end of the decade, according to a new report for the Prosperity Institute by the Daily Sceptic’s David Turver, reports the Mail.

• “Badenoch: climate change is real, Net Zero by 2050 is fiction” – Kemi Badenoch has declared Net Zero a “political fiction bankrupting the country” in a letter setting out her starkest rejection yet of the 2050 target, says the Telegraph.

• “Britain can’t stop climate change – scrap Net Zero” – Despite slashing its own emissions by 44% between 2000 and 2023, Britain has made no discernible dent in global warming, according to Allister Heath in the Telegraph.

• “Our reckless lack of gas storage invites disaster” – Britain’s decision to keep just two or three days’ worth of gas in reserve is a catastrophic failure of energy policy that leaves the country dangerously exposed, writes Juliet Samuel in the Times.

• “Data centre projects face crackdown to free up power grid” – The energy regulator has launched a crackdown on data centres in a bid to cut the growing backlog of projects waiting to connect to the electricity grid, says the Telegraph.

• “MoD spends £600k on protecting rare wildlife” – Taxpayer money has been used to fund schemes researching bees, birds and dolphins under a directive from the previous Welsh Labour government, reports the Telegraph.

• “Biden bucks: climate change funds a bonanza for state outfits” – In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reveals how Biden-era climate funding transformed small state energy offices into sprawling bureaucracies, with Colorado’s energy office among those gorging on the bonanza.

• “Bear Grylls: I used to be vegan, now I tell my sons to eat offal” – Former vegan Bear Grylls says he has converted to an all-out carnivore diet of steaks, liver, and offal – and is now urging his sons to follow suit, says the Telegraph.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Britain’s Collision Course With Trump’s Energy Counter-Revolution” – Ed Miliband is now Britain’s man at the World Bank – just as Washington begins stripping climate ideology from global finance. A Net Zero zealot meets an energy realist superpower. What could go wrong? asks Tilak Doshi.

Ed Miliband has spent his career as one of the world’s most committed climate zealots, and he now finds himself installed as Foreign Secretary in Andy Burnham’s new government, personally taking up the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced this week that the former Energy Secretary would personally occupy the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank, a job normally left to a junior minister, so that the “climate crisis” and overseas development sit at the very heart of British foreign policy. “International development is not an add-on to British foreign policy – it is central to it,” Miliband declared. “By taking on the role of UK governor to the World Bank, I want to send an unambiguous signal that this Government is serious about its global leadership on development and climate.”

He arrives there determined to push the Bank back toward the climate agenda it has just spent a year being forced to retreat from under the Trumpian energy agenda of “drill baby drill” and “energy dominance”. It sets Miliband, and the Burnham Government behind him, on a collision course with the Trump administration’s deliberate campaign to strip the ‘globalist’ climate agenda out of the very institutions Miliband now intends to use as his platform.

The Trumpian energy counter-revolution

Since Donald Trump’s return to office, his administration has waged a sustained campaign to wrest the great multilateral institutions back from the ‘globalist’ climate agenda that captured them over the past two decades. Washington threatened outright withdrawal from the International Energy Agency unless it abandoned the Net Zero fantasies embedded in its 2021 “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap; the IEA duly reintroduced its Current Policies Scenario, quietly shelving two decades of advocacy dressed up as forecasting.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has led the same campaign more bluntly still with respect to the Bretton Woods twin institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). The Treasury Secretary told the IMF and World Bank that fossil fuels remain critical for developing nations and, reading between the lines, that the eco-zealots’ stranglehold on global finance had to end. Last October, Bessent told the World Bank directly to refocus on affordable energy, poverty reduction and country self-reliance; by this April he was warning the IMF that “mission creep” into climate, gender and social issues had left it disconnected from its core mandate.

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• “Net Zero ‘will cost households £1,400 a year by 2030’” – Britain’s energy network will cost consumers £40 billion a year by the end of the decade, reports the Times.

• “Grid bosses tried to water down rules before blackout scare” – NESO reduced the number of shock absorbers used to stabilise the grid in the period leading up to a near-blackout event, says the Telegraph.

• “Have the events of June 23rd exposed failures in Ofgem’s approach to regulation?” – On her Watt-Logic blog, Kathryn Porter argues that Ofgem is putting itself at risk of breaching its own statutory duties by refusing to launch an independent review of the energy security failures of June 23rd.

• “National Grid operator uses fax machines, fails to file crucial risk reports, Ofgem report claims” – According to an Ofgem report, the National Grid operator is still using fax machines and has failed to file crucial risk reports, says This Is Money.

• “Badenoch must reverse course on Net Zero before she destroys the Conservatives” – Kemi Badenoch’s so-called ‘green purge’ is a threat to the future of the Conservative Party and must be urgently reversed, according to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph.

• “Why warnings over gas storage could push up energy bills this winter” – Warnings over inadequate gas storage levels are set to push energy bills even higher this winter, says This Is Money.

• “Fourth 35°C heatwave hits sun-scorched Britain amid wildfire fears” – Britain has entered its fourth heatwave of the year, with temperatures predicted to soar to 35°C today and fears of wildfires breaking out in drought-hit regions, reports the Mail.

• “No, it’s not ‘climate change’ burning Europe: it’s the fuel” – Why do these big fires near urban interfaces only happen in nations with overwhelming green policies? wonders Monica Showalter in the American Thinker.

• “Are the recent Northwest wildfires a sign of global warming? The science says no” – A detailed US meteorological analysis finds no credible evidence linking the recent spate of Northwest wildfires to climate change, reveals the Cliff Mass Weather Blog.

• “Climate change is real, but it is an unfortunate fact that renewables are useless” – The claim that a green energy revolution is underway simply does not stack up, says John Constable in the Telegraph.

• “Be honest, Popular Mechanics, air conditioning saves lives with no threat of doom” – In ClimateRealism, H. Sterling Burnett takes aim at Popular Mechanics’ claim that air conditioning could “doom us all”.

• “Comments on golden eagle errors in Wyoming’s wildlife action plan” – At CFACT, David Wojick warns that Wyoming’s draft State Wildlife Action Plan contains serious errors that leave golden eagles dangerously exposed to being killed by wind turbines.

• “Sea views get blocked after council swapped petrol strimmers for goats” – According to the Mail, sea views at one of Britain’s biggest holiday resorts have been blocked by foliage and overgrown hedges after a council’s green initiative led to petrol strimmers being swapped for mountain goats.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Ed Miliband seeks a global economic suicide pact” – Ed Miliband has demoted himself to the Foreign Office to push green ideology through global institutions – just as the rest of the world is starting to see through the nonsense, says Ben Pile.

“The case for EVs has failed” – The case for EVs has failed, says Professor Gautam Kalghatgi. With lifetime emissions scarcely better and net health impacts three-fold worse than combustion vehicles, destroying our car industry cannot be worth it.

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On some accounts, the removal of Ed Miliband from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to the Foreign Office allows the new Prime Minister to put a noisy and disruptive potential competitor, with his own agenda, out of his way by sending him overseas. There is much to this argument, and there have been some sighs of relief as the crazy zealot was replaced by a relative nobody, who will likely struggle to marshal such support in Cabinet and in the party. However, though you can take the climate brief away from the minister, you can’t take green ideology from his outlook. This week, Miliband has vowed to “take personal leadership of the UK’s work on development and climate” using the UK’s position at the World Bank to “ensure the UK plays a leading role” in sustaining both climate and development at the centre of foreign policy. But what if the world has other ideas?

Much is made about Miliband’s position of “UK governor” at the World Bank in a Guardian article following an announcement by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). “Miliband will play an active role in shaping the changes to the World Bank that developing countries have called for, and ensuring the climate remains a core focus for overseas aid”, explains Fiona Harvey. The problem, however, is that there are 189 such positions at the Bank – one for each member country of the intergovernmental agency. Miliband’s role is unexceptional, other than for the fact of the billions of pounds that he would like to make available to other members, to grease the green agenda’s passage through global political institutions.

But that’s not really news. Despite later complaints from green blobbers claiming that the Government had effectively nearly halved its commitments to International Climate Finance (ICF) to £2 billion a year, and despite the Government having to reduce its aid and development spending from 0.7% to 0.3% of GNI, “climate finance” remains a vast slush fund for a global political agenda, with no obvious ‘aid’ or ‘development’ deliverables visible from outside the green perspective. The only noteworthy thing about the story is that the role of UK governor to the World Bank typically falls to a junior minister, not to the Secretary of State. Miliband, who believes that abolishing cheap and plentiful energy is the key to dismantling the forces of inequality and to building in their place the institutions of global social democracy, has demoted himself in order to better push climate through global political architecture.

Yet perhaps the Guardian hack might be forgiven for having been misled by the FCDO’s excessive hyperbole, it claiming that:

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This is the 12th in a series of 13 articles challenging climate change orthodoxy commissioned by Professor Gwythian Prins. We will be publishing the articles at a rate of one a week (read the first article here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here, the seventh here, the eighth here, the ninth here, the 10th here and the 11th here). The hope is that they can be collected into a book for Sixth Formers and university students.

UK Net Zero policy aims at balancing the production and removal of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane and nitrous oxide by 2050. The primary greenhouse gas from transport is CO₂ produced by burning fuels containing carbon such as petrol and diesel in conventional internal combustion vehicles. The entire Vehicle Excise Duty regime pivots on this single metric. Current Government transport policy is aimed at reducing CO₂ emissions to help meet Net Zero targets. In addition, Government documents also mention as objectives reducing local pollution from transport, improving connectivity across Britain, growing the economy by enhancing the transport network and increasing the global impact of the UK to boost influence and maximise trade. However, these other objectives are not clearly prioritised, the costs and challenges of implementation are not specified and flagrant contradictions between these different aims are simply ignored.

The scale of the challenge of ‘decarbonising’ transport is very large. Transport accounts for 26% of total UK emissions, which is 0.27% of total global emissions. As a rough guide from Government statistics, the major contributing sectors to transport emissions are road transport (70%), aviation (20%) and marine (8%). In Great Britain, there are around 42 million registered road vehicles – 34 million cars, five million vans and 0.8 million heavy goods vehicles and buses. Of these vehicles, as of March 2025 only 1.5 million were pure battery electric vehicles. Cars and vans account for about half while heavy goods vehicles and buses account for 15% of total transport CO₂.

In 2024, 28 billion litres of diesel and 18 billion litres of petrol were used on British roads. Alternative fuels like biofuels cannot fully replace such large volumes and have significant performance and environmental downsides. Being forced by regulations to ‘cut’ pure fuel with bio-ethanol adversely affects fuel power density and also allows algal growth in storage tanks. It perishes seals and can block pipes and filters unless powerful biocides are routinely added to stored fuel, as farmers are now obliged to do to protect their tractors. Growing crops for fuel is also an opportunity-cost against growing food. In short, imposing ‘bio-fuels’ is a functionally pointless and potentially dangerous vicious circle. If air pollution is actually the concern, running ICE (Internal Combustion Engines) on LPG is a much superior solution: super-clean with zero tail-pipe particulate. But empirically there seems to be a sly conspiracy by the regulatory bureaucrats to kill the LPG fuelling network because it competes with EVs – though these are inferior in efficiency and create more environmental harms.

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The most common alternative technology for transport is electrification using batteries. Fuel cell vehicles running on hydrogen are very far away from practical implementation at scale. There are different degrees of electrification. Only pure battery electric vehicles do not have a petrol or diesel (internal combustion) engine, and all the motive energy comes from the electricity grid and is stored in the battery. A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle has a small battery which allows a limited range on stored electricity in the battery but also an internal combustion engine which will power the vehicle if the battery charge runs out. ‘Self-charging’ hybrid electric vehicles like the Toyota Prius get all their energy from their petrol engine, while partial electrification with a small battery enables the fuel energy to be used more efficiently. They also recover energy regeneratively that is normally lost on braking. This technology can reduce fuel consumption and hence CO₂ emissions by up to 25%, particularly in stop-start city driving.

Realistically only cars and vans can be run fully on batteries. It is not practical to have battery powered long-range heavy goods vehicles or buses because of the large battery size needed. Aviation and shipping also cannot be run only on batteries. For instance, for a mid-range jet like the Airbus A320, a lithium-ion battery with the same energy content as the fuel it carries would weigh 19 times the maximum take-off weight of the plane. So, most of transport will still be powered by internal combustion engines running on petroleum-based liquid fuels for decades to come. If in the future all cars and vans are forced to run on batteries, the battery capacity needed will have to increase by around 30 times compared to now. However, this would account for only about half of the U.K. emissions from transport or 0.14% of total global emissions. Massive disruption for risible gain.

The most visible central Government policy is the intention to ban the sale of new internal combustion engines from 2035. In addition, there are many anti-car local policies such as low emissions zones and low traffic neighbourhoods.

However, battery electric vehicles do not offer any significant benefit in terms of CO₂ unless their use and manufacture are with energy that is CO₂-free. If natural gas or coal is used to produce electricity, CO₂ emissions from electricity production will be high. Even if wind, solar and nuclear provide a large share of the electricity, the extra electricity demand from electric vehicles has to be met with marginal (backup) electricity generation which is always available and can quickly respond to changing demand. In the UK it will be from natural gas and produce more CO₂ emissions than the average for the renewable electricity grid.

Battery manufacture needs much more process energy and produces more emissions compared to the manufacture of internal combustion engines. A recent estimate for battery manufacture from China, where over 70% of the batteries are made, is an additional 125 kg CO₂ per kWh of battery capacity. So, a Nissan Leaf, with a 40 kWh battery will start with a deficit of five tonnes of CO₂ and would need to drive many thousands of miles on CO₂-free electricity before it can have any benefit over an equivalent conventional vehicle in terms of CO₂. In the UK, a small pure electric vehicle might be better than an equivalent conventional car for CO₂ by about 30% over its lifetime but its emissions will not be zero. Bigger vehicles with bigger batteries will show much less lifetime benefit, if any. Furthermore, given that battery EV service life is much shorter than that of a well-made ICE vehicle (eight years as against 20 or more) the life-time EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) favours the well-maintained long-lived ICE vehicle, especially running on LPG.

On top of this, the impacts on human health, on water and high eco-toxicity associated with mining of metals needed for batteries are very significant. The net health impacts for EVs are estimated to be three to five times worse than for conventional ICE vehicles. These health and environmental impacts of battery electric vehicles are currently exported to where the mining takes place and materials are processed (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, China) where environmental controls are lax and child and slave labour are also of concern. The bigger the battery, the worse the impact. Mining also requires moving large quantities of earth and rock – on average 500 times the weight of the battery. Thus a 40 kWh battery, which weighs around 300 kg could require roughly 150 tons of rock and earth moved. The footprint of oil production to power ICE vehicles is very much lower.

Local air quality is impacted by emissions of particulates, nitrogen oxides, unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide from petrol and diesel exhausts. These emission levels are zero for pure battery EV and near zero and for the most modern conventional vehicles with particulate filters, especially running on LPG, the most eco-friendly fuel which the eco-lobby seems to seek to drive out of the market. Other sources such as tyre-wear then become much more important for particulate levels; and these will be greater for pure battery electric vehicles because they weigh 25-30% more than comparable conventional vehicles because of the weight of the battery.

These environmental issues, which are currently ignored, will inevitably come to the fore as the number of battery electric cars increases. The true impact of competing technologies should be assessed on a life-cycle basis, honestly accounting for manufacturing, in-use and end of life emissions. The environmental benefits of battery electric vehicles will depend on the battery size, on how it is made and how the electricity to fill it is generated and will not be zero.

The infrastructure and material requirements for battery EVs are very large. Convenient public charging points need to be built for around 10 million cars which must park on the street. Suppose, by 2030, of all the electric vehicles, there will be a million cars which want to charge at the time of peak electricity demand – in the evening after people return from work. If allowed at the 7kW Level 1 charging rate, this will require an additional seven gigawatts (GW) of electric power which needs to be CO₂-free. This is equivalent to over two new nuclear power plants of 3 GW – impossible to build over such a short period. Battery charging is inconvenient – it can take many hours depending on the rate of charging, compared to a few minutes required to fuel a conventional car.

It will become steadily more difficult to source critical materials like lithium salts, copper and cobalt needed for battery manufacture if the demand is going to increase to the level required to run all cars and vans only on batteries. China has set out to corner many of these markets. This materials crunch will be worse if there is also increasing demand for grid-scale storage batteries to cover the intermittency of wind and solar. The scope for recycling old batteries to recover critical materials is very limited given the resins, complexity and weight of the batteries.

Then there is increasing evidence of spontaneous anaerobic fires in batteries which are extremely difficult to extinguish. As the number of electric vehicles grows and charging rates increase, this problem will also become more prominent. All the issues discussed above will be more difficult to ignore as the demand for batteries increases.

The current cost of an electric vehicle is significantly higher and there is increasing evidence that the depreciation rate is also higher compared to an equivalent conventional car. As battery materials increase in price in response to increasing demand, battery prices are unlikely to come down as fast as they have done in the past. As the number of electric vehicles increases, government subsidies and tax and other benefits to promote them will become unaffordable. Fuel taxes contribute around £40 billion to the exchequer. At least a part of this will have to be recovered by taxing electric cars. Some calculations show that the total cost of ownership is lower for electric cars. Such calculations assume that the cost of electricity, in relation to fuel costs for conventional vehicles remains low. In any case, individual buyers are likely to base their buying decision on up-front costs and the utility and convenience such as the availability of charging infrastructure and time needed to charge. All evidence is that in an open market battery EVs are turkeys – so fanatics like Ed Miliband respond by rigging the markets, as I have explained.

Western, particularly European strengths are in advanced high-tech ICE cars. Great Britain has a strong research and development reputation in the automotive sector. China recognised this and focused on ‘new energy vehicles’ and has now mostly cornered the supply chain needed for electric vehicles and builds them on a coal-fired grid. Western auto manufacturers will also not be able to compete with China on costs of electric vehicles. If transport in Britain were to focus only on battery EVs as current policies seek to coerce, the automotive industry will be killed under any kind of free trade. Furthermore, if consumers do not buy new electric cars because of up-front cost, faster depreciation, charging anxiety and inconvenience but still the sale of new internal combustion engines is banned, the British auto industry will be destroyed even without Chinese intervention. As professor Kelly also asks, on what planet does that make sense?

‘Green’ policies require enormous investments in infrastructure and even if all British cars and vans are replaced by pure battery EV – a 30-fold increase compared to now – and ignoring lifetime emissions, this would reduce global emissions by less than 0.14%. There are various points of conflict with other Government objectives. Private transport will become unaffordable except for the rich – and for the nomenklatura. Other anti-car policies will reduce connectivity and impact economic growth. Leadership in the automotive sector will be ceded to China. British trade and influence will wane.

All technologies relevant to transport including manufacture and different fuels need to be honestly assessed over their full life EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) cycle, sensibly deployed and continuously improved. However, in a rigged market, research and development into further improving internal combustion engines will stop even though most transport will still be relying on that technology for decades to come. The British auto industry will be sacrificed on the altar of the green cult but will yield negligible reduction in global emissions; and in conflict with our authoritarian enemies, in the land of Net Zero, the man in the diesel tank is king. No wonder Mercedes and VW are defying the EV target mandate and Land Rover is following suit. Don’t Ministers know that setting production targets in the former USSR didn’t end well? Maybe they don’t. Worse. Maybe they do.

Professor Gautam Kalghatgi is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers. He has been a visiting professor at Oxford University and Imperial College London and is Chairman of the Academic Advisory Board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

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• “Energy minister accused of misleading MPs over blackout threat” – Energy minister Michael Shanks has been accused of misleading Parliament about the risk of blackouts to Britain’s power grid, says the Telegraph.

• “Don’t sit under trees in heatwave, park tells visitors” – Park visitors have been warned not to sit under trees during Britain’s fourth heatwave of the summer, over fears that branches may snap and fall on them, reports GB News.

• “Is this Labour’s maddest Net Zero project yet?” – The Government is exploring a plan to strip carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere at eye-watering public expense, says Jonathan Leake in the Telegraph.

• “London loses £5.7 billion energy giant in US takeover” – DCC Energy is set to become the latest FTSE 100 company to abandon the London Stock Exchange after agreeing to sell to private equity, reports City AM.

• “We don’t need to trash the economy to save the planet” – Mandating electric cars, heat pumps and solar panels too quickly is counter-productive, and the transition should always rely on the carrot rather than the stick, says David Frost in the Telegraph.

• “Europe’s ‘green’ energy transition is a delusion, global data shows” – Samuel Furfari argues in Climate Change Dispatch that Europe’s expensive energy transition is falling short, with a new Energy Institute report showing fossil fuels still powering record growth around the world.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Wildfires show the ‘Online Right’ needs to embrace Net Zero, says Tim Stanley – but all his ‘facts’ are wrong” – The wildfires in Europe have prompted Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley to claim that the “angry Online Right” needs to accept Net Zero. But all his ‘facts’ are wrong, says Paul Homewood.

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According to the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley:

The Online Right is going wrong, eschewing compassion or charm, talking itself into corners of angry irrelevance. The evidence is stacking up – we only have to look out of our windows.

Take climate change. This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.

As with so many of his ilk, Stanley confuses weather with climate. Take the latest fires in France.

Yes, the wildfires are running above average this summer in Europe, but there have been other years as bad and worse. But much more importantly, the data since 1980 show that wildfires around the Mediterranean have not been getting worse:

Stanley cannot even get his facts right, claiming that in past times France endured roughly 15 fires each year. The true figure is around 100.

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• “Don’t fall for British Gas’s great AI ploy” – Customers still prefer humans to chatbots, and claiming otherwise, as the CEO of Centrica has, is merely an excuse to cut staff, says Melanie McDonagh in the Telegraph.

• “Labour’s Net Zero drive risks leaving Britons with blackouts and soaring energy bills, leaked report warns” – A confidential review has uncovered major flaws in Britain’s electricity grid, with a whistleblower warning that “we are risking total blackout”, reports GB News.

• “East Yorkshire electric buses being charged by diesel generators” – East Yorkshire Buses is resorting to diesel generators to charge its electric fleet as a short-term fix while electricity infrastructure delays persist, according to the BBC.

• “Glut of wind farm power adds nearly £1 billion to household energy bills” – New figures show that an oversupply of wind farm power has triggered compensation payouts of £900 million, adding nearly £1 billion to household energy bills, says the Telegraph.

• “The Net Zero machine laid bare” – On his Substack, David Turver reveals how the law, civil service and quangos work together to enforce Net Zero.

• “Scientists who believe in God are challenging the expert establishment” – The rise of religiously oriented scientists is mounting a direct challenge to the credibility of the ultra-secular scientific establishment, notes Joel Kotkin in the Telegraph.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“New PM Andy Burnham has backed a 90% cut in hydrocarbon use within 10 years” – As Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham wanted to slash hydrocarbon use by 90% in 10 years. Now the new Energy Minister is making similar noises. Chris Morrison wonders if destroying modern society is still the plan.

“The International Court of Justice climate liability ruling sets a worrying precedent for pandemics and public health” – The International Court of Justice climate liability ruling sets a worrying precedent for pandemics and public health, says Professor Ramesh Thakur. These new ‘legally binding’ duties are quickly going to multiply.

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Praise the Lord, a Saviour from the North walks amongst us. The UK’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has apparently hinted that a tad more oil and gas might be taken from Britain’s remaining treasure trove lying undisturbed in the North Sea. Is this a pushback on fanatical Net Zero treason, as some commentators have suggested? Probably not. As always, there is no need for conspiracy theories – just look at what they supported and said in the past. The new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh is a green blob-funded whack job straight out of central climate casting, while the new tee-shirt-wearing top dog is all signed up to the evil, society-destroying Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill.

It didn’t take long for the bill promoter Zero Hour (ka-ching, Green Blob money) to list the new Prime Minister as one of 193 MPs who support the proposed private member’s CAN legislation that will cut the country’s entire use of hydrocarbons – domestic and overseas – to just 10% within 10 years. Zero Hour notes of Burnham: “In 2024, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he backed the Climate and Nature Bill because he recognised that Britain needed bold, science-led action to tackle the climate and nature crisis”.

Other more accurate interpretations are available along the lines that the bill is an abominable neo-Marxist Trojan horse that would lead to mass starvation, death and almost immediate industrial and societal collapse. With little or no hydrocarbons available from any source, food supplies would be cut in half due to a lack of fertiliser, while most medicines would be unavailable. In the regular periods of wind and solar drought, particularly in the winter, thousands would die in their blacked-out and unheated homes. Thankfully, the bill failed in the House of Commons when it was debated last year, but a terrifying 200 MPs agreed with its vile contents. Over 90 Labour MPs, all the Greens and LibDems plus two crackpot Tories said they supported the bill.

We can but pray that the two unhinged Tories, Sir Roger Gale and Simon Hoare, are currently receiving sympathetic re-education treatment as the Kemi Badenoch-led Conservative party now rushes towards the Net Zero exit. Similar classes are of course required for wayward Tories who believe that men can become women and that open borders lead to civilisational contentment.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the US will dismantle the International Criminal Court and restore the rights of “sovereign states over globalism”. The think tank Policy Exchange, in a new report that contradicts much of its earlier approach to climate policy, warns that a 2025 International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling requires the UK to “arrest” the “trend of abuse of the ICJ’s advisory jurisdiction”.

Unfortunately, that ruling can easily be extrapolated to the domain of global health. Yet, resources devoted to flagship green causes and to pandemic preparedness alike would save more lives if redirected to basic health, nutrition and economic development.

In response to a 2023 UN General Assembly request, the court published its Advisory Opinion a year ago. It concluded that states have legally binding duties to prevent significant environmental harm. Failure to do so leaves a country exposed to claims for restitution from those who have been harmed.

In many countries the Covid response mimicked the climate change playbook. The catastrophism of both agendas was based on models. Claims of scientific authority and existential crisis escalated the agendas into moral crusades and people were asked to bear sacrifices for the good of the collective humanity and the planet.

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State power expanded under that rubric to replace people’s and business’s freedom of choice with policy diktats. The same moralism and risks were used to launch personal attacks on critics and ridicule and censor dissenting opinions, even from experts in the field, by claiming a monopoly on truth and the best policies to manage the crises. The costs of the policies, risks of collateral harms and resulting need for policy trade-offs were dismissed.

Against this backdrop, my co-authors and I argue in ‘The Right to Health Sovereignty’, a recent report by the International Health Reform Panel, the world court’s climate liability opinion intersects with the issue of health sovereignty on multiple points.

First, falling trust in the competence, integrity and truthfulness of public institutions and media following the Covid experience has had a flow-on effect in a new willingness to question other policy domains, including climate change and Net Zero. This has also triggered a growth in support for centre-Right parties fighting against the growing erosion of sovereignty by globalist institutions.

Second, to ensure compliance with official policy, governments engage in narrative management whereby a false impression is deliberately fostered of scientific consensus, the policy option is said to be based in that settled science and efforts are mounted to censor dissenting opinions as misinformation. On May 15th 2025, Elisa Morgera, UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in the Context of Climate Change, submitted a report that warned of the need to “defossilise” information systems and called for criminal penalties on those peddling misinformation and disinformation.

Third, the ICJ justified its conclusion on the reasoning that the “adverse effects of climate change” “may significantly impair the enjoyment of certain human rights”, including “the right to health”. The “obligation to prevent significant harm to the climate system… applies to all states, including those that are not parties to one or more of the climate change treaties” (my emphasis). This sets an obvious precedent for the same argument to be repeated in a future pandemic contingency, even for states that may have opted out of the WHO pandemic accords comprising amended International Health Regulations and a new HO treaty.

Fourth, the opinion is not binding but will shape climate governance around the world in myriad ways in the years to come in academia, courts, bureaucracies and civil society. Vanuatu’s special envoy on climate change, Ralph Regenvanu, holds that the ICJ opinion will shift discussions from one of ‘voluntary commitments’ to reduce emissions, to one about binding obligations under international law. It will embolden activist courts and judges around the world who are committed to the climate crusade.

The logic underpinning the advisory opinion prepares the ground for individual liability, speech restrictions and legal intimidation. The exact same argument applies with respect to the compliance pull of the pandemic accords. Of course, just like an ICJ advisory opinion, WHO recommendations are not legally binding obligations on treaty signatories. However, nothing in the Covid experience inspires confidence about the willingness and capacity of political leaders to resist WHO recommendations. If by some mistake they should do so, public health activists could seek an advisory opinion from the ICJ that the health of no country’s citizens is safe unless that of the citizens of all countries is safe, and therefore every state, including non-signatories of the pandemic accords, incurs a legal responsibility of compliance. Failure to do so will leave a country exposed to claims for restitution from those who may have been harmed.

Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and a former United Nations assistant secretary-general.

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• “Yet another embarrassment from the National Academy of pseudoscience” – In the Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton argues that the National Academy of Sciences has once again undermined its own credibility, exposing it as an institution of pseudoscience.

• “The great Net Zero showdown: can’t afford to keep it, can’t afford to drop it” – In UnHerd, John Rapley writes that governments find themselves trapped in an agonising Net Zero dilemma, with the costs of pressing ahead and the costs of abandoning course both proving politically unbearable.

• “Net Zero race ‘risks blackouts and higher bills’” – A leaked report commissioned by the National Grid operator warns it is “flying blind” because it cannot accurately forecast supply from renewable sources, reports the Times.

• “BP to sell British solar farms to Kuwait in Net Zero retreat” – BP is refocusing on its core oil and gas business as it moves to offload British solar farms to Kuwait, says the Telegraph.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“The Climate Skeptic Podcast | Episode 54” – On the show this week, former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove sits down with Ellie Hodges to explain why he believes Britain’s Net Zero policy has become a national security liability.

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• “Andy Burnham ready to scale up oil and gas drilling in North Sea” – Industry sources expect swift rulings on the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields as the PM seeks to ease cost-of-living pressures this winter, says the Times.

• “Tories taunt ‘terrified’ oil minister for refusing to face the press” – Andy Burnham’s Energy Secretary hid from scrutiny on her first official visit to Aberdeen to meet oil and gas executives, according to the Mail.

• “Ageing nuclear plants given life extension to keep Britain’s lights on” – Two ageing nuclear power stations will stay operational until 2030 after EDF decided to extend their lives to help keep Britain’s lights on, says Reuters.

• “Britain’s oldest sugar factory shuts because of sky-high energy costs” – The closure of the British Sugar beet-processing plant, which could come as early as February 2027, lays bare the devastating toll that soaring energy costs are taking on British industry, says the Telegraph.

• “First drought declared after record heatwaves” – Drought has been declared in parts of North Wales and the Upper Severn catchment following a summer of record-breaking heat, reports Sky News.

• “Solar for the soul or for the senses” – At CFACT, Kelvin Kemm argues that the modern cult of solar energy owes more to quasi-religious reverence for the Sun than to rational scientific thinking about how best to power civilisation.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“Trump is right to take on the climate litigation complex” – President Trump has laid into a new report from the National Academy of Sciences that purports to support ‘extreme weather’ climate litigation. He’s right to do so, says Dr Tilak Doshi.

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There is a particular kind of institutional decay that announces itself not through incompetence but through overreach — the moment a body built to advise quietly converts itself into an advocacy outfit. That moment arrived in plain view last week when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a 253-page report claiming that scientists can now attribute individual heatwaves and rainstorms to man-made emissions “with a high degree of confidence”, and wildfires, droughts and cyclones with “moderate confidence”. Two days later President Trump did something no prior occupant of the White House had quite dared to do: he called the report what it is on Truth Social: “Fraudulent, biased and misleading,” ordering federal suspension and debarment officials to review the Academies’ conduct and taxpayers’ exposure to what he termed “Climate Fraud”.

The howls of outrage were immediate and predictable. But strip away the theatre of a Presidential Truth Social post — capital letters, “Radical Left Dumocrats”, the invented spelling — and what remains is a serious institutional question that deserved to be asked years ago: has the National Academy of Sciences become an advocacy organisation wearing the borrowed authority of ‘consensus science’?

From weights and measures to trial-lawyer auxiliary

Congress chartered the National Academies in 1863 for a modest and useful purpose: advising the government on technical matters such as the calibration of currency and the protection of ship hulls from corrosion. It is worth dwelling on how far the institution has travelled from that brief. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board observed in its own broadside against the report, published the same weekend under the pointed headline ‘A Climate Coup at the National Academies of Science’, the new document explicitly frames itself as “relevant to policy and legal decisions pertaining to climate change and liability for losses sustained as a result of extreme weather and climate events”. That is not the language of scientific advice. It is the language of a legal brief.

The report goes further, noting that its methodology could help state and local governments demonstrate the “concrete injury” needed to establish standing in lawsuits against fossil fuel producers, and that it might “inform” measures such as Vermont’s climate superfund law — which empowers state officials to calculate the “financial impact” of greenhouse gas emissions and then demand payment from energy companies to cover it. As the Journal‘s editors put it with admirable bluntness, “the point is to put a scientific gloss on a coercive exercise of government power”. The scientific gloss provides a legal strategy, built to order, for a litigation campaign that has been running for the better part of a decade against the companies that keep the lights on.

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• “Blue states join lawsuit against Trump’s wind energy freeze” – Oregon and Washington have joined a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s freeze on wind energy development, reports the Daily Caller.

• “Soros-funded group E3G crows over dystopian ‘climate security’ subterfuge it helped build” – The Soros-funded eco-extremist group E3G is boasting about its role in reshaping the global regulatory framework around so-called climate security, writes Joseph Vazquez at Newsbusters.

• “New Energy Secretary opposed Rosebank oil field in previous job” – Miatta Fahnbulleh, who previously led the New Economics Foundation, attacked new fossil fuel projects as “irresponsible and shortsighted” before taking charge of the nation’s energy policy, says GB News.

• “Heatwaves caused by fall in pollution” – Met Office and Spanish researchers have concluded that Britain’s scorching heatwaves are being driven by cleaner skies after pollution was stripped from the atmosphere, according to the Telegraph.

• “The European Climate Foundation: the dark green lobby shaping EU climate policy” – In Clintel, Marcel Crok examines how the European Climate Foundation has become one of Europe’s most powerful climate lobbying organisations.

• “Want a free $20,000 luxury holiday in Fiji or Turkey? You also have to show your face at a climate conference” – Australian taxpayers are funding luxury $20,000 trips to Fiji and Turkey for representatives of “underrepresented groups” – provided they agree to attend a climate conference while there, writes Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?

• “Energy security and climate realism usher in coal’s rise” – Global energy realism is driving a resurgence in coal demand as the limitations of solar and wind power continue to undermine claims that fossil fuels are on their way out, says Vijay Jayaraj for CO2 Coalition.

From the Climate Skeptic today:

“BBC claims the World Cup took place in ‘dangerous extreme heat’. No, it didn’t” – “Extreme heat in the US could make World Cup matches unsafe,” declared the BBC amid claims of record temperatures. In fact, says Paul Homewood, there was nothing unusual about the weather in America this summer.

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‘Extreme heat in the US could make World Cup matches unsafe.’ That was the BBC headline the day before England played their World Cup last 32 game against the Congo in Atlanta three weeks ago.

We were warned of ‘record temperatures’, with New York hitting 100°F, Atlanta 96°F and Dallas 97°F.

The BBC has in fact been scaremongering for a few years about the effects of climate change on the World Cup in North America, with tales of extreme weather, heatwaves, storms and wildfires, all, according to the corporation, made much more likely by climate change.

Stories have regularly used terms as ‘dangerous’ and ‘brutal’. There were claims that FIFA was playing recklessly with the health and safety of players and that players were at risk of serious harm.

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