This morning the Green Party leadership, Green MPs and Green peers co-signed a letter to the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, to urge her not to approve the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, citing the fact that it will not reduce energy prices, protect jobs, or give the UK energy sovereignty.
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The full text of the letter is as follows:
Dear Miatta,
Do not approve Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea.
We are writing in response to alarming reports that you intend to give the go ahead to the Jackdaw gas field as soon as next week. As Green MPs and peers we cannot sit back and watch you proceed unchallenged with this act of climate vandalism.
Approving new drilling at Jackdaw will not take a penny off energy costs nor protect jobs. As you said last month, “if you care about affordability, North Sea does not solve that problem for you”, with UK bill-payers still facing the highest energy prices in three years this winter, as a result of our continued exposure to volatile global gas markets. Further, jobs in the North Sea have been in decline for two decades. Jackdaw would only create 27 direct full-time jobs, with the platform unstaffed for most of its operating life and much of the construction already having taken place in Norway. It is completely dishonest of your government to use the legitimate concerns of job security and the cost of living to falsely justify more fossil fuel extraction.
Approving Jackdaw will not give the UK energy sovereignty. Even under the most optimistic scenarios Jackdaw is projected to contribute just 2% of UK gas demand over its lifetime (Uplift, 2026). We know that the only way to achieve energy sovereignty is to get the UK off fossil fuels as fast as possible, by significantly scaling up renewable energy and electrification.
Approving new oil and gas will add fuel to the fire of the climate emergency. Last week, the UN Environment Programme warned that “immediate and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions” were crucial to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown. Approving more fossil fuels, at a time when the UK has just experienced record-breaking and deathly heatwaves and wildfires, is a complete dereliction of responsibility.
Approving Jackdaw will line the pockets of shareholders. The operating company, Adura, a joint venture between Shell and Equinor, has been criticised for potentially allowing Shell to write off £1.3 billion in UK tax (Global Witness, 2025). Shell has also faced criticism that it paid little or no tax in this country over several years despite huge global profits. Instead of new drilling, we need to ensure that the existing tax instruments, like the windfall tax, actually bring in the revenue that was promised, and end the subsidies that multinational oil and gas companies have received at UK taxpayers’ expense.
We are therefore urging you to be straight with the public – and instead focus on measures that would actually bring down bills and create secure jobs, like scaling up cheaper home-grown renewables, rolling out a fully-funded national home insulation programme, fully decoupling the price of electricity from gas, and ending rampant profiteering by energy companies.
Your government promised change, not continuity. Approving Jackdaw, after the hottest summer on record, isn’t doing things differently. The new Prime Minister must not repeat Keir Starmer’s mistake of treating climate and nature as second order. Change starts with ruling out all new oil and gas.
Yours sincerely,
Carla Denyer MP Dr Ellie Chowns MP Adrian Ramsay MP Hannah Spencer MP Siân Berry MP Zack Polanski, Leader of the Green Party Mothin Ali, Deputy Leader of the Green Party Rachel Millward, Deputy Leader of the Green Party Anthony Slaughter, Wales Green Party Leader Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
A wildfire burning near the coast of Syracuse in Sicily, Italy, toward the end of last month. Photograph: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters
WMO report details extreme weather events causing climatic feedback loop with serious health consequences
Big increases in wildfires and heatwaves supercharged by the climate crisis are hindering improvements to air quality around the world, UN experts have said.
Regions that had recorded a fall in pollution emitted by cars and industrial sites are facing new threats to air quality because of exposure to smoke from wildfires, according to a new report, while rising temperatures caused by intense heatwaves are causing a surge in ground-level ozone.
In turn, the pollution generated by these climate-linked events is itself contributing to climate breakdown, creating a feedback loop that risks dragging the world deeper into environmental catastrophe.
“Air quality and climate cannot be treated as separate subjects; they are deeply intertwined and have to be treated together,” said Lorenzo Labrador, a scientific officer of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which issued the report.
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The extreme heat of the summer weather in France has caused grapes to wilt and be scalded. Photograph: sportpoint/Alamy
Estimates suggest drop in production with vineyards also concerned ‘smoke taint’ from wildfires may affect quality
French vineyards hit by severe drought and heatwaves are expected to report a 30-year low in wine production after the country’s hottest ever recorded summer, according to the agriculture ministry.
Initial estimates suggest winemakers will produce just under 34m hectolitres from this year’s harvest: a drop of 6% on last year, and 17% less than the 2021-2025 average.
Agreste, the government’s farming food, forestry and fishing statistics body, said the drop was partly caused by a reduction in the number and size of vineyards, but mostly the result of extreme weather conditions.
“The summer was particularly hot and dry: soil drought has intensified throughout the country and heatwaves have caused localised sun scald, scorching, defoliation, and wilting of the grapes, reducing harvest volumes,” it reported.
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As the latest UNEP reports we will blow past 1.5°C, we must prioritise solutions that work, rather than focusing on complex, unproven technologies
For anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s no surprise that the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reports that we will now inevitably blow past the global average temperature threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Climate scientists like myself have been warning for years that we are about to cross this invisible red line, while quietly worrying that global average temperatures will end up being double that. Personally, I said goodbye to 1.5°C several years ago, but it still feels momentous to see it written in print, and that too by the UN.
The target to keep warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures isn’t some hard red line in the sand, because all warming carries some risk, but it’s relevant because limiting warming to 1.5°C gives us a good chance of avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate heating. We’ve already had a glimpse of what this looks like in the myriad heatwaves, wildfires, floods, droughts and storms that have made headlines this year.
Every tenth of a degree of heating means real-terms impacts for peoples’ lives, livelihoods and property, and increases the risk of the extreme events that we’ve already seen tragically claim so many lives. It also increases the likelihood of exceeding critical tipping points such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, beyond which there’s no return.
We’ve already had single years that have exceeded the 1.5°C limit, but the widely discussed Paris Agreement target is a multi-year average. That means we won’t know we’ve reached it until it’s in the rearview mirror, but it’s also possible to “overshoot” 1.5°C, temporarily peak at higher temperatures, and then bring them back down – and that’s now the best-case scenario outlined by UNEP.
This would mean we would have to take drastic action to bring temperatures back down again rather than continuing to drive them ever upwards. Which, in the current political climate, feels like a bit of a stretch.
Temperatures won’t stabilise until we reach net zero emissions, where we remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as we add to it. Until then, we will still be increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and turning up the dial on the thermostat. Net zero isn’t a nice to have, despite what certain parts of the political spectrum would have you believe, it’s an essential if we want to have a liveable planet.
In fact, UNEP’s latest report points to the need to take action beyond net zero:
Once we have limited heating to 2°C or below — which currently feels optimistic — we will have to roll out carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to reduce temperatures on an enormous scale.
CDR often connotes high-tech solutions to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but it can also mean one of the oldest technologies in the world: trees. That’s why restoring nature and preventing deforestation is so important for climate action.
But UNEP reports that CDR only works if we limit heating to 2C or below. As the stakes of climate heating continue to rise, another idea is moving from the sidelines to centre-stage: geoengineering, or deliberate technological interventions to alter the Earth’s climate.
Geoengineering is a spectrum, ranging from the comparatively reasonable and well-researched (injecting particles into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight and cool the surface, much like major volcanic eruptions have done) to downright barmy (launching mirrors into space – you can imagine which silicon valley billionaires love that idea). And while there are sensible (if heated) scientific discussions about how to actually do it, there are also some very serious ethical and governance hurdles to overcome.
The tech bros will tell you that geoengineering will save us and allow us to keep doing what we’re doing while still ‘fixing’ climate change. But beware any arguments that downplay the importance of emissions cuts. We can’t simply geoengineer our way out of this crisis.
For example: who decides when to deploy? What happens if an intervention makes things better for some and worse for others? How do we safeguard against bad actors acting unilaterally? These questions are largely unanswered, and that’s before we get to the scientific questions around unintended consequences, like disrupting the Arctic food chain while trying to refreeze ice, or what happens if we stop the intervention, resulting in a so-called termination shock, where temperatures would shoot back up with devastating effect.
In some senses the climate crisis is relatively simple: we’re pumping planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and it’s heating the planet. To reverse it, we need first to stop adding planet-heating carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and then to start removing it.
The good news is that we do know what we need to do to achieve that. Climate action is less a knowledge problem, and more an implementation one.
Proponents of geoengineering argue that it’s not an either/or between emissions cuts and major interventions. But in a world with finite resources, expensive and unproven geoengineering solutions should not be a priority, rather, we should prioritise the simple stuff we know works: decarbonising energy production, improving public transport, retrofitting and building greener housing, reducing meat and dairy consumption, restoring natural ecosystems.
That said, we are now committed to some level of change, and we need to behave as such. That means we need to prepare for the sea level rise that’s to come, and adapt societies, behaviours and infrastructure to a less predictable and more extreme climate.
If the summer of 2026 has taught us anything in the UK, it’s that our houses, schools, offices, railways, emergency services, power networks and public transport are simply not fit for purpose in the heat. Nor are they built to withstand the wet, stormy, flood-prone autumn and winter that is on its way. We’re not equipped to deal with the rapidly extremifying climate or the weather whiplash it brings. Simply put: our infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists.
If we are to survive the coming decades, we need to build preparedness and climate resilience into our society. Extreme events are already exposing our vulnerabilities, and if we thought 2026 was bad, count my words: we ain’t seen nothing yet.
In the wake of our hottest summer on record, it’s abundantly clear that we need to slash emissions to save lives, and at the same time prepare for the changes that are now committed.
The geoengineers are right about one thing: It’s not an either/or. We have to reduce emissions to net zero and remove carbon from the atmosphere and adapt to what’s in store. There’s no other safe option.
Dr. Ella Gilbert is a climate scientist and multi-award-winning presenter with a PhD in Antarctic climate change.
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SUN VALLEY, IDAHO – JULY 10: Private jets parked at the Friedman Memorial Airport during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 10, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Every year, some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful figures from the media, finance, technology, and political spheres converge at the Sun Valley Resort for the exclusive week-long conference hosted by boutique investment bank Allen & Co. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
“While working families struggle to afford groceries, housing, and gas,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the Trump administration “focuses on tax breaks for billionaires—including tax breaks for private jets.”
A group of Democratic Caucus members in the US Senate on Thursday denounced the US Treasury Department under President Donald Trump over its refusal to close a gaping loophole in the federal tax code that allows some of the wealthiest people in the country to reap tax benefits from their ownership and use of private jets—even as working people and the middle class families struggle to make ends meet in Trump’s economy.
In response to a previous request made in July by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to close a rule that allows the wealthy “to substantially undervalue the taxable cost of personal travel on a corporate private jet,” a letter from a top Treasury official on Thursday said such an effort would be too “burdensome,” including for the uber-rich taxpayers subject to it.
Known as the Standard Industry Fare Level (SIFL) loophole, the lawmakers have argued that it has been exploited by the extremely wealthy to lower their tax burden even as they travel the country—and the world—in the least energy efficient and most polluting way possible.
“President Trump’s 2017 tax law and Big, Beautiful-for-Billionaires bill handed billionaires and big corporations massive tax breaks on private jets,” said Sen. Whitehouse in a statement. “The Trump administration now says it would be ‘burdensome’ to close the private jet tax loophole because this is an administration hell-bent on using the powers of government to make the ultra-rich even richer, and they don’t care if middle-class taxpayers get stuck with the tab.”’
Alongside their July letter, the lawmakers shared analyses detailing the loss of the revenue made possible by the SIFL loophole. According to the Whitehouse’s office,
analyses by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation detailing the boom in private jet sales after passage of Republicans’ tax cut for corporate jets and highlighting the extent of the tax revenue lost by the abuse of the SIFL loophole. One analysis responds to an inquiry from the senators on the tax consequences of the SIFL loophole, finding that a wealthy executive would pay roughly between $1,577 and $1,804 less in taxes for a flight from JFK airport in New York City to DCA airport in Washington, D.C. under the SIFL method. The fair market value of that flight could range from $4,500 to $5,112, but under SIFL, that executive would only have to report a value of $235.77.
Van Hollen on Thursday denounced the shamefulness of yet another Trump administration position that rewards the wealthy and powerful at the expense of working people.
“Trump’s priorities revolve around enriching himself and his billionaire friends. While working families struggle to afford groceries, housing, and gas, this Administration focuses on tax breaks for billionaires—including tax breaks for private jets,” said Van Hollen.
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