Former chair of climate change committee says UK’s decision has encouraged other countries to keep exploiting fossil fuels
The UK’s decision to open a new coalmine in Cumbria was a “disaster” that encouraged other countries to press ahead with fossil fuels, and the continued expansion of North Sea oil and gas is likely to continue the harm, a former chief adviser to the government has said.
Other countries are using the UK as an excuse for pressing ahead with fossil fuel projects despite their climate commitments, according to Adair Turner, the first chair of the Committee on Climate Change and a former head of the CBI.
Lord Turner told the Guardian that he had “literally been involved in discussions” in China and India where UK decisions had been given as a reason for not moving faster on the climate.
“I can tell you that [the Cumbrian coalmine] was a disaster globally, and in China and India, where I was engaged in debates [on reducing greenhouse gas emissions], I have had people say ‘yeah, but you’re building a new coalmine in the UK’,” he said.
“So that was a disaster for our reputation, and it provides arguments for the people within government or within interest groups in China and India to say ‘oh look, the UK is supposedly committed to net zero, but it’s not serious, it’s building a new coalmine’. And the same occurs with new oil and gas fields in the North Sea.”
Turner is now chair of the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC), a thinktank that on Thursday published a report that says the production of and demand for fossil fuels must be reduced rapidly, and that this is achievable. “Unabated” fossil fuel use must be phased out, and there is only limited scope for the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS), the report finds.
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Reacting to news that the Supreme Court has blocked government plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said:
“This is welcome news. The government must now admit that its cruel and inhumane policy is finished and drop it.
“The new Home Secretary has the chance now to turn over a new leaf and make clear that there is no intention to quit the European Convention on Human Rights.
‘He should pledge to create an asylum system that works. That is one with clear, open, safe and legal routes for applicants, quick and efficient determinations and support for resettlement into local communities with properly funded local services.”
An injured child is brought to al-Shifa Hospital after Israeli attacks in Gaza City, Gaza on October 21, 2023. (Photo: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The protection of newborns, patients, medical staff, and all civilians must override all other concerns,” said Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator.
The head of the United Nations’ emergency relief operations said Wednesday that he was “appalled” by news of the Israeli military’s raid of Gaza’s largest hospital, where hundreds of patients and healthcare workers and thousands of displaced people are sheltering.
“The protection of newborns, patients, medical staff, and all civilians must override all other concerns,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, wrote on social media. “Hospitals are not battlegrounds.”
Israeli forces’ raid of al-Shifa Hospital early Wednesday came days after they encircled the facility and began bombarding it, accusing Hamas of using the hospital and tunnels beneath it for military operations.
The U.S. backed Israel’s assertion on Tuesday, with National Security Council spokesman John Kirby telling reporters that “we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and support their military operations and to hold hostages.”
Asked to provide specific evidence, Kirby cited “a variety of intelligence sources” but declined to publicize “a whole lot of granular detail on that.”
Hospitals are protected from military attack under international law and can only lose their protected status if they are shown to have been used for “an act harmful to the enemy.” Human Rights Watch argued in a report released ahead of Wednesday’s raid that the Israeli government has not provided sufficient evidence to justify its attacks on al-Shifa and other northern Gaza hospitals, most of which have ceased functioning due to a lack of fuel and other supplies.
An emergency room employee at al-Shifa toldAl Jazeera that during their raid, Israeli soldiers “detained and brutally assaulted some of the men who were taking refuge at the hospital.”
“Israeli forces took the detained men naked and blindfolded,” the worker added. “[They] did not bring any aid or supplies, they only brought terror and death.”
Here’s a recorded conversation between a doctor working inside al-Shifa Hospital and Israeli forces just before Gaza’s largest medical complex was raided. pic.twitter.com/O0Il2VjQaX
On Tuesday, according to Gaza officials, around 170 bodies were buried in a mass grave in the courtyard of al-Shifa, as there was no other way to safely bury them outside the hospital compound because of Israeli attacks and firefights with Hamas. A surgeon at the hospital toldReuters that, due to lack of refrigeration, the bodies “were generating an unbearable stench and posing a risk of infection.”
“The Health Ministry said 40 patients, including three babies, have died since Shifa’s emergency generator ran out of fuel Saturday,” The Associated Pressreported Wednesday. “Another 36 babies are at risk of dying because there is no power for incubators, according to the ministry.”
Israel’s bombing campaign, ground invasion, and siege have killed more than 11,000 people across the Gaza Strip, but the recent attacks on the enclave’s hospitals have made it impossible for Gaza health officials to reach the facilities to count the dead and wounded. Thousands more are believed to have been killed since the death toll was updated last week.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said early Wednesday that “we’ve lost touch again with health personnel” at al-Shifa amid Israel’s raid.
“We’re extremely worried for their and their patients’ safety,” he added.
Facing growing accusations of war crimes, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) called its raid on al-Shifa a “precise and targeted operation against Hamas.” In the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel last month, the IDF has claimed repeatedly that it is targeting militants even as it has decimated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, bombing homes, medical facilities, schools, bakeries, and the strip’s largest refugee camp.
A confidential memo from the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv states that Israel is “deliberately causing massive destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers” of Gaza in an effort to “showcase credible military force” to “Iran and its proxies,” according toPolitico.
Israel’s strategy, the memo states, violates “international treaties and laws of war.”
An updated database shows that more than 1,000 oil and gas companies around the world are planning to expand their planet-wrecking infrastructure.
More than a thousand fossil fuel companies around the world are currently planning to build new liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, or gas-fired power plants even as scientists warn that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with efforts to prevent catastrophic warming.
That’s according to an updated database released Wednesday by Urgewald and dozens of partner groups. Described as the most comprehensive public database on the fossil fuel industry, the Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) covers 1,623 companies that are operating in the upstream, midstream, or gas-fired power sector and collectively account for 95% of global oil and gas production.
More than a thousand fossil fuel companies around the world are currently planning to build new liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, or gas-fired power plants even as scientists warn that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with efforts to prevent catastrophic warming.
That’s according to an updated database released Wednesday by Urgewald and dozens of partner groups. Described as the most comprehensive public database on the fossil fuel industry, the Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) covers 1,623 companies that are operating in the upstream, midstream, or gas-fired power sector and collectively account for 95% of global oil and gas production.
JUST RELEASED The Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) with fresh numbers: Despite the climate crisis, almost every upstream company is still developing new oil&gas fields. In addition, 1,023 companies planning new LNG terminals, pipelines, gas power plants. https://t.co/DsBgFMR7QZpic.twitter.com/BCUGpd5PYJ
According to the 2023 GOGEL, 96% of the 700 upstream oil and gas companies in the database are exploring or actively developing new oil and gas fields, projects that Urgewald said “severely jeopardize efforts to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C.”
Nearly 540 companies in the database are collectively planning to produce 230 billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) over the short term, the database shows.
“The seven companies with the largest short-term expansion plans are Saudi Aramco (16.8 bboe), QatarEnergy (16.5 bboe), Gazprom (10.7 bboe), Petrobras (9.6 bboe), ADNOC (9.0 bboe), TotalEnergies (8.0 bboe) and ExxonMobil (7.9 bboe),” Urgewald noted. “These seven companies are responsible for one-third of global short-term oil and gas expansion.”
The database also shows that fossil fuel companies are planning to expand global LNG capacity by 162%, a significant threat to critical climate targets. A United Nations-backed report published last week warned that fossil fuel expansion plans are “throwing humanity’s future into question.”
Urgewald pointed specifically to the LNG boom in the U.S., which the group said is “cementing its position as the world’s largest export hub for LNG” with 21 new export facilities planned along the Gulf Coast. Those facilities account for more than 40% of worldwide LNG expansion documented in the GOGEL database.
“Most of the fossil gas that will be exported from these terminals stems from the Permian Basin, the heart of the U.S. fracking industry,” Urgewald observed.
The updated database shows that nearly 80 companies—including Exxon, Chevron, and BP—are currently operating in the Permian Basin, located in the U.S. Southwest.
Climate campaigners and experts have also sounded alarm over Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), a planned $10 billion LNG export hub that would ship up to 24 million tons of gas annually once it is completed.
“The fossil fuel industry wants to pave undeveloped wetlands all along the coast with LNG facilities like NextDecade Corporation’s Rio Grande LNG Terminal, Rebekah Hinojosa, a member of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network said Wednesday. “Besides their environmental implications, these plans violate Indigenous sacred lands, and people working in fishing, shrimping, and eco-tourism risk losing their jobs. Our communities refuse to be sacrificed for the fracking industry’s dirty gas exports.”
Millions of people in the UK are unable to meet their most basic physical needs: to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. This is known as destitution.
Recent analysis from charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) estimates that around 3.8 million people in the UK experienced destitution at some point during 2022. This is a 61% increase since 2019 – and a 148% increase since 2017.
Living in destitution means severe material hardship. The JRF’s 2022 survey of crisis service users in the UK found that 61% reported going without food in the month before the survey. They often put other needs, such as accommodation or feeding their children, over feeding themselves.
About half of the people surveyed were not able to afford adequate clothing and basic necessities, such as toiletries. Many talked of living in insecure and low quality housing.
One particularly alarming aspect of these most recent statistics is the steep increase in the number of children living in destitution. In 2022, around 1 million children lived in households who experienced destitution. This is an increase of 88% since the charity’s corresponding 2019 study, and a 186% increase since the 2017 study.
Impact on children
Destitution causes immediate suffering. But for these children, this experience of hardship at a young age will have consequences that last throughout their lives. There is little doubt that both money and environment (housing quality, parental mental health and nutrition, for example) contribute to inequalities in child development. Both of these factors are affected by living in destitution.
When children reach the age of three, stark differences are already evident between those who live in poverty and those who do not. Children from more well-off families have better developed skills in both cognitive tasks, such as understanding basic concepts like colours, letters, numbers and shapes, as well as socio-emotional skills, such as self-control and resilience.
Other factors that are important in shaping children’s skills include housing quality and parental mental health.
Inequalities so early in life can compound and widen over time. These differences between the disadvantaged and the better off can be seen in educational achievement, health and criminal activity.
These types of inequalities were also exacerbated by the pandemic. While pupils everywhere missed out on education, these learning losses were not equally distributed: young people from lower socio-economic background fell further behind.
Despite large increases in funding for the early-year sectors, socio-economic inequalities in child development have not generally narrowed, particularly in recent years.
And now, the sharp increase in the share of children living in destitution does not paint a optimistic picture for the future.
Making a difference
However, many of these issues can be changed by government policy. For example, we know that being hungry at school makes it difficult to concentrate and learn. Measures that address hunger, then, can make a difference. Analysis of a trial of breakfast clubs in English schools, which offered free breakfast to disadvantaged children aged six and seven, found that the free breakfast lead to the equivalent of two months’ extra progress in reading, writing and maths across the course of one year.
Research has shown that many early interventions – such as high quality childcare and education programmes for at-risk children – can have long-lasting positive effects. From an economic perspective, acting early to lift children out of poverty and improve their home and learning environments can be a cost-effective way of helping in the long run, both for individuals as well as wider society.
Another option would be reform of the benefits system to make sure families have enough money to live. In the 2022 Joseph Rowntree Foundation survey of people who used crisis centres, 72% did receive social security benefits – but were still destitute.
This rise in children living in household experiencing destitution must be given serious attention. Successive governmentsclaim to hold upward social mobility as a important goal – that is, the ability of people to move up the economic and social ladder, regardless of their own upbringing and social background. Reducing destitution would not only benefit children right now, but would help them throughout life.
