Climate Emergency

Cherie Blair’s Charity Received £3.6 million from ExxonMobil

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Article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.

UK barrister Cherie Blair. Credit: The Swift Hour / YouTube

The oil major has provided a significant chunk of the foundation’s income.

A charity set up by Cherie Blair has received more than £3.6 million from U.S. fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil, DeSmog can reveal.

The eponymous Cherie Blair Foundation for Women was founded in 2008 – providing training and resources, including mobile apps, for “women entrepreneurs” in low-income countries to start small businesses, according to its website.

The group has received at least $4.8 million (around £3.6 million) from ExxonMobil’s charitable arm, the ExxonMobil Foundation, since 2015.

The majority of this ($2.8 million, around £2.1 million) was received between 2020 and the ExxonMobil Foundation’s most recent filing in 2024.

The oil and gas giant provided roughly a-fifth of the Cherie Blair Foundation’s total income from 2020 to 2024, according to an analysis of the latter’s accounts.

Blair is a barrister and the wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who last month called for the UK to abandon its climate targets and ramp-up North Sea fossil fuel exploration. There is no suggestion that Exxon funded the Cherie Blair Foundation to influence Tony Blair’s work, nor that his views have been swayed by the money provided.

The ExxonMobil Foundation is the primary philanthropic arm of ExxonMobil, the largest U.S.-based oil and gas company.

Internal company reports have revealed that Exxon knew in the 1980s that unrestrained carbon emissions have the potential to cause “great irreversible harm to our planet,” and that it predicted the exact amount of global warming the world is now experiencing. However, instead of warning the public, Exxon internally decided to publicly “emphasize the uncertainty” of climate science.

The Cherie Blair Foundation said that it is “focused on supporting women entrepreneurs in low- and middle-income countries.”

It added: “We receive funding from a range of donors to deliver programmes aligned with our mission. One of these donors is the ExxonMobil Foundation, with whom we have worked since 2015. This support has enabled us to expand access to business skills training for women entrepreneurs in Nigeria and Guyana.”

Africa is disproportionately vulnerable to climate change, with eight of the 10 countries most at risk globally located in central, west, and southern Africa.

The ExxonMobil Foundation’s available tax returns show that it gave the Cherie Blair Foundation $1 million in 2015 and 2016, $600,000 in 2024, 2023, and 2022, and $500,000 in 2021 and 2020. 

Exxon’s tax returns for 2017 to 2019 do not list any donation recipients, although the Cherie Blair Foundation’s annual accounts for those years still list Exxon as a donor.

The ExxonMobil Foundation is also listed on the Cherie Blair Foundation’s “donors and partners” list for 2011 to 2014, but details of any money provided are not available in the charity’s reports or the ExxonMobil Foundation’s tax returns.

Cherie Blair is still involved in the foundation, having given an interview to The Standard about its work in March.

The foundation added: “We are not connected to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change or to Tony Blair’s personal or professional activities, and we operate independently in our governance, strategy and operations. Information relating to funding received is publicly available in our annual report and accounts.”

ExxonMobil was approached for comment.

Tony Blair and Net Zero

In a major intervention in May, Tony Blair called on the Labour government to “use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources” and sideline the UK’s net zero emissions targets. 

He also said new oil and gas was essential to power the data centres needed for the mass deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), which Blair has championed.

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has caused an energy crisis and a spike in the price of oil. Labour has argued the UK needs to deploy clean energy at a faster pace, while the Conservatives and Reform have been calling for the UK’s ban on new North Sea exploration licences to be lifted.

The Cherie Blair Foundation’s ExxonMobil donations are the latest example of fossil fuel interests backing Blair family initiatives.

TBI has been paid to advise the governments of several authoritarian petrostates, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Azerbaijan, all of which are heavily reliant on oil and gas exports.

The institute has also championed the deployment of artificial intelligence by the government and in the economy, and has supported the use of gas to power AI data centres.

TBI received $130 million (around £96.5 million) between 2021 and 2023 from billionaire tech entrepreneur Larry Ellison, founder of data software company Oracle and an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump. In total, Ellison has donated or pledged at least £257 million to TBI.

“Neither Tony nor Cherie Blair can be taken seriously when it comes to climate change, energy policy or human rights when their organisations have taken so much money from oil companies and oil dictators,” a spokesperson for the Green Party said.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Credit: Kmu.gov.ua (CC BY-4.0)

In a 5,000-word essay published on the TBI website in May, Blair listed “the net-zero acceleration and phasing out of the British oil and gas industry” among Labour’s 2024 manifesto commitments which he considers a mistake.

He wrote that Labour should “remove those parts of the net-zero agenda which prioritise clean energy over cheaper energy”.

Blair, who was prime minister from 1997 to 2007, concluded: “We must prioritise cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources. This is essential for our competitiveness and for taking advantage of AI.”

Renewable energy from wind and solar power are consistently the cheapest form of energy. High energy bills are caused by the price of oil and gas, while new North Sea exploration will do little to cut energy bills.

Data centres are currently using six percent of electricity in the UK and U.S., according to a report earlier this month by the International Data Center Authority, an industry body. The average data centre uses enough energy to power roughly 5,000 UK homes, and between 11 million and 19 million litres of water per day, the same as a town of between 30,000 and 50,000 people.

Up to 100 data centres in the UK are reportedly looking to use gas power to meet this demand, threatening emissions reduction targets. The Labour government has yet to state whether it will prevent gas-powered data centres from being built in the UK.

Last month, the government admitted that it had under-estimated the potential carbon emissions of data centres by a factor of more than 100.

Last year, Keir Starmer’s administration – which has close ties to Blair and TBI – signed a ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’ with the U.S. government through which big tech companies pledged to heavily invest in AI development in the UK. While Trump paused the deal in December, it’s unclear to what extent these investments are also on pause.

Article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingCherie Blair’s Charity Received £3.6 million from ExxonMobil

We are all going to die, you f*cking idiots

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https://rogerhallam.com/our-grandchildren-will-starve

Good News: Our Grandchildren Will Starve, Not Our Children

The most extreme climate scenarios are off, according to scientists in the conservative IPCC. However, the Godfather of Climate Science says otherwise.

Good news from The Times: our grandchildren will starve to death rather than our children. The new worst case is just 3.5C. Phew.

Adam Vaughan, Most Apocalyptic Climate Scenario Thrown Out by Experts, The Times, 11 May 2026.

Firstly, let’s remember what a 3.5C world actually means.

  1. Mass food system collapse, particularly in the Global South.
  2. Vast areas of Africa, South and West Asia will become uninhabitable within the lifetimes of people already born. Translation: billions will die from impending poverty and disaster.

That is what this headline is supposedly reassuring us of.

Secondly, this report is not telling the truth about the science because it is based on outdated models. Even Trump jumped on it to advance his end-times fascist agenda.

To understand why both Trump and the Times are deeply wrong about where we are heading, let’s turn to the godfather of climate science, James Hansen, and look at one of his latest papers on climate sensitivity.

In May 2025, Hansen published a paper on Earth’s albedo (the reflectivity of solar radiation bounced back into space). Over the past 25 years of precise satellite data, Earth’s albedo has declined by 0.5%, leading to an increase of 1.7 watts per square metre of absorbed solar energy. Hansen describes this as a BFD (Big Fucking Deal), and he is right. That single number, in forcing terms, is equivalent to an additional 138 parts per million of CO2.

Clouds reflect sunlight back into space. Fewer clouds, or thinner clouds, means more solar energy reaches the surface and stays there. As the planet warms, evidence now shows that cloud cover is decreasing and, crucially, that this decrease is itself a response to warming. In other words, warming reduces clouds, which in turn cause more warming, which further reduces clouds. This is what climate scientists mean by a feedback loop, and this one is a fucking big one.

And a big cloud feedback means the planet is far more sensitive to CO2 than the IPCC’s standard figures suggest. The IPCC’s best estimate for climate sensitivity — the amount of warming you get from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 — is 3°C. Hansen’s three independent lines of evidence (of which the albedo data is one), all point to 4.5°C. The difference between 3°C and 4.5°C is the difference between devastation and extinction.

The corporate media has barely engaged with this work, and when it has, it has often cast doubt on its truth. At the end of the climate sensitivity paper, Hansen notes:

“Criticisms of the Acceleration paper in the media did not address the physics in our three assessments of climate sensitivity. Instead, criticisms were largely ad hoc opinions, even ad hominem attacks. How can science reporting have descended to this level? Climate science is now so complex, with many sub-disciplines, that the media must rely on opinions of climate experts. Although there are thousands of capable scientists in these disciplines, the media have come to depend on a handful of scientists, a clique of climate scientists who are willing, or even eager, to be the voice of the climate science community. But are they representative of the total community, of capable scientists who focus on climate science?”

The Problem of Fragmented Science

A key problem of scientific understanding is that it requires slicing reality into manageable chunks. Take “the doubling of CO2.” The slice aids understanding but paradoxically kills it too. Attending to the part deflects attention from the whole. Space. Time. The full arc of what’s coming.

So when Hansen and colleagues write that climate sensitivity for doubled CO2 is 4.5°C, and that sensitivity as low as 3°C is excluded with greater than 99 percent confidence — they stop there. Slice completed. No return to the whole. No wonder the media shrugs. So what.

Here’s the whole.

  1. Doubling CO2 means going from 280ppm to 560ppm. We’re at 420ppm now. At current trajectory — roughly 40ppm additional per decade — we hit 560ppm around 2055. That’s 4.5°C by roughly 2060. Not 2100. 2060. Hansen also shows Earth’s albedo has already darkened by 0.5%, an extra 1.7 W/m² of absorbed solar energy. The system is already running hotter than the models admit.
  2. Time doesn’t stop at 2060. At those temperatures, natural feedbacks (clouds, ice, permafrost) accelerate. There is no equilibrium, only continuation.
  3. Above 5°C, effective human extinction is locked in. We are on that path.
  4. Facts alone don’t move humans. Emotion does. We are human, after all. So the headline that would actually communicate the whole truth? “We are all going to die, you fucking idiots.”

In my recent paper with the 4 Billion Dead team, we examine what an All Systems Approach could look like to counter this fragmented thinking.

…

See the full original article at https://rogerhallam.com/our-grandchildren-will-starve

Continue ReadingWe are all going to die, you f*cking idiots

As the Climate Crisis Heats Our Ocean, Trump Is Tossing the Thermometer

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Article by Erika Spanger

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data collecting buoy is moored in the Indian Ocean. (Photo by David Zimmerman/ NOAA)

At a time when ocean heat, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots.

It’s easy for us land dwellers to forget that we live on a water planet, more than 70% of it covered by a vast ocean. But we are entering an age—or more accurately, have created an age—when that fact will be impossible to ignore. With global climate change, the seas are rising, yes, but they are also warming, slowly but steadily, and that warmth is now reaching levels that can drive profound changes here on land. Many of those changes have begun, many are on display this year, and some will have seismic consequences going forward.

…

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A more representative, less terra-centric view of our 70% water planet. (Photo by NOAA/NASA GOES via Smithsonian)

…

Most recently, the administration ordered the “descoping” of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observing Infrastructure Project, a system of sensing and data gathering infrastructure distributed in the North Atlantic and Pacific. Information is still sparse about this dismantling; the process is not transparent. What’s clear is that, at a time when ocean heat, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots. Sending taxpayer-funded ships on taxpayer-funded missions to essentially unplug functional taxpayer-funded ocean monitoring systems is baffling. Given the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the Trump agenda, it could look like a massive attempted cover up, except that the crime—warming the planet—is ongoing, and there’s really no covering up the changing climate, because we live here.

The ocean has become easy for the wealthier people of the world to ignore: a place to extract resources and dump waste. But this titan is now rumbling into a new kind of activation, more central character than backdrop. It’s hard to think of a more monumental failure than overheating an ocean planet and handing it off to younger generations. History won’t look kindly on the leaders of this time who ignore the science and the obvious signals. May it reflect that they were forced by their people, in time frames that made a difference, to phase out fossil fuels and invest in a safe and just climate future for all on this rare water planet. invest in a safe and just climate future for all on this rare water planet.

Article by Erika Spanger

Edited since this article is not published under a CC licence

Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says disinhibition and swearing are typical and common symptoms
Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says disinhibition and swearing are typical and common symptoms

Continue ReadingAs the Climate Crisis Heats Our Ocean, Trump Is Tossing the Thermometer

To Crush Global Inequality and Secure Livable Future, Scholars Call for 90% Tax on Mega-Rich

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Article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Demonstrators call for higher taxes on the rich during a protest in Davos, Switzerland on January 19, 2025. (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

“The current international order is plutocratic,” said French economist Thomas Piketty. “It is essential to move away from this plutocratic system to a new democratic order.”

A sprawling report released Thursday argues that averting the “bleak techno-authoritarian futures now being sold to us” and laying the groundwork for a just, livable future requires restructuring the world’s economic order to widely redistribute wealth that has been hoarded at the very top for decades.

The report, compiled by hundreds of researchers from around the world and published by the World Inequality Lab (WIL), is billed as the first comprehensive attempt to lay out a plan to “reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all.” Achieving that aim will be impossible, the authors argue, “without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth, and power.”

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“The current international order is plutocratic,” said French economist Thomas Piketty, a renowned expert on inequality and co-director of WIL. “It is essential to move away from this plutocratic system to a new democratic order.”

The report outlines a number of proposals that would redress staggering levels of wealth and income inequality. Currently, the top 10% of the global population brings in more income than the remaining 90% combined. Wealth inequality is even more extreme, with the top 10% controlling 75% of global wealth, compared to 2% controlled by the poorest half of humanity.

Specifically, the authors call for a new, progressive global income tax that would peak at 90% for those who earn 5,000 times the average adult disposable income. They also propose taxing the wealth of millionaires and billionaires at a rate up to 20%.

Revenue from the new taxes would flow into a Global Justice Fund, which would distribute dividends to countries to help boost spending on climate, education, and healthcare. The fund would also invest in a World Sovereign Fund, whose returns on “sustainable assets” would be used to finance country dividends.

“The result is not a transfer from many to few but a gain for almost everyone,” Piketty and other report contributors wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian. “Close to 90% of the world’s population would double their income between 2026 and 2100, and once leisure and a habitable planet are counted, more than 99% come out ahead.”

“Technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way, but rather the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical.”

Redressing inequality would not be sufficient to secure a livable future, the report authors emphasize, given that continued fossil fuel use and expansion are pushing the world in the direction of climate catastrophe. What’s required to prevent planetary disaster is a “fundamental transformation of energy systems,” the report argues.

“This means electrifying energy demand wherever feasible (such as transitioning vehicle fleets) and switching to low-carbon fuels (for example, in steel and cement production),” the report states. “Crucially, electricity generation itself must be decarbonized, moving away from fossil fuels toward renewables like hydropower, solar, and wind.”

The report also envisions a move away from overconsumption toward what the authors call a future of “sufficiency,” which would entail shorter work hours for the global labor force, changes to land use, and other reforms.

Such ambitious goals will not become reality, the report stresses, without “a powerful citizen movement and a dense network of broad-based organizations (including labor unions, political parties, civic platforms, and other collective initiatives) which are sufficiently well-organized and effective at promoting broad institutional and policy change.”

“A habitable, equal, and prosperous 21st Century is materially possible,” the authors declare. “Technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way, but rather the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical. What it will take instead is political choice, and the hard work of coalition-building behind it.”

Article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him Up
Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him Up

Continue ReadingTo Crush Global Inequality and Secure Livable Future, Scholars Call for 90% Tax on Mega-Rich

Blair’s fossil fuel ideas ‘bizarre’ in face of energy and climate crises, experts say

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/28/tony-blair-fossil-fuel-advice-bizarre-energy-climate-crises-experts-say

A solar park in Deeside, Wales. The UK broke records for solar energy generation this week. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Energy specialists say abandoning net zero and increasing oil and gas drilling would cause more instability for Britons

Abandoning net zero and drilling for more oil and gas in the North Sea would be a massive setback for the UK and would not help the economy, leading experts have said in response to claims by the former prime minister Tony Blair.

“This is a bizarre intervention to make during the worst May heatwave on record and when the Iran crisis is providing yet more evidence of the enormous costs of oil and gas,” said Ed Matthew, the UK programme director at the E3G thinktank. “Clean energy is cheaper energy – it protects our bills from prices skyrocketing, its running costs are virtually zero, and it doesn’t cause climate change which threatens economic collapse … The government should ignore Blair’s ideological nonsense and focus on what works.”

In an essay published on Wednesday, Blair argued that the UK should exploit its remaining oil and gas reserves and abandon its long-set target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Blair, who has links to petrostates and whose institute takes money from technology companies that want a large build-out of AI data centres, has made these arguments for fossil fuels and against net zero many times in the past two years.

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Calls to maximise production from the UK’s rapidly dwindling North Sea reserves have also been made by the Conservative and Reform parties.

The head of the International Energy Agency, and one of the world’s most respected energy economists, Fatih Birol, said last month that opening new fields would have little impact, and more drilling by the UK would not bring down the price of oil and gas for British consumers.

…

Last week, the UK’s Climate Change Committee warned that the impacts of global heating of 2C by 2050 were likely to wipe billions from the UK’s economy, in the form of damage from heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms, but that acting to reach net zero would bring economic benefits.

…

See the original Guardian article at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/28/tony-blair-fossil-fuel-advice-bizarre-energy-climate-crises-experts-say
dizzy: Blair should not be regarded seriously

Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards

Continue ReadingBlair’s fossil fuel ideas ‘bizarre’ in face of energy and climate crises, experts say