Reform Party leader Nigel Farage celebrates his party candidate Sarah Pochin winning the Runcorn and Helsby byelection by six votes Photograph: Anthony Devlin/Getty Images
The head of the UK’s biggest union has urged staff at Reform UK-controlled councils to sign up after Nigel Farage warned workers to seek “alternative careers”.
Farage said during a speech on Friday that he would advise council staff working on diversity or climate change initiatives to seek “alternative careers very, very quickly” after Reform UK took control of Durham county council.
The Clacton MP’s party made major gains in Thursday’s local elections, picking up 10 councils and more than 600 seats. The party also won two mayoral races and secured a fifth MP in Runcorn and Helsby with Sarah Pochin.
Responding to Farage’s comments, Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said: “Unions are there to ensure no one can play fast and loose with the law.
“Any staff working for councils now controlled by Reform, and who aren’t yet members, should sign up so they can be protected too.”
Farage has said he wants a British equivalent of Doge – referring to the Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, which is slashing government spending in the US, in every council.
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UK newspapers have already launched more editorials attacking Ed Miliband in the first four months of 2025 than they did during the whole of 2024, Carbon Brief analysis reveals.
In the year to date, predominantly right-leaning publications have published 65 editorials – articles seen as the newspaper’s formal “voice” – criticising the UK energy secretary, compared with only 61 across the full year of 2024.
Nearly four sucheditorials have been published every week so far in 2025, roughly three times the rate of the previous year.
This is a significant escalation from a period that had already seen an unprecedented torrent of attacks levelled at the energy secretary.
The articles, which primarily appear in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, frequently seek to label Miliband as a “net-zero zealot” with a “messianic” devotion to climate action.
They have also tried to blame him for the potential closure of the UK’s remaining steel plant and – most recently – misrepresented the words of former prime minister Sir Tony Blair to falsely present them as a personal rebuke to Miliband.
Many of the articles urge prime minister Keir Starmer to “sack” Miliband due to his supposedly “radical” policy ideas, referring to him as a “liability” for the Labour government.
Despite this near-obsessive stream of criticism and constantspeculation about the energy secretary’s job security, the prime minister has said unequivocally that the net-zero agenda is “in my government’s DNA” and that Miliband is “doing a great job”.
Record criticism
The UK’s Labour government won an election last summer, with a large majority, on the back of a manifesto that focused heavily on climate action.
As laid out at the time, one of the government’s “five missions” was to:
“Make Britain a clean-energy superpower to cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030.”
Miliband, the energy security and net-zero secretary, is the minister overseeing this brief and the public face of much of the government’s net-zero strategy.
This position has resulted in a relentless stream of criticism and personal attacks from right-leaning commentators and media organisations, against a backdrop of rising political and press opposition to net-zero.
Carbon Brief analysis in January revealed the scale of the personal attacks levelled at Miliband in newspaper editorials during 2024, both in the lead up to the general election and in the months that followed.
However, the new analysis shows that the 61 critical editorials published last year have already been eclipsed in 2025 after barely four months of intense focus on Miliband.
As of 2 May, predominantly right-leaning newspapers have already published 65 editorials taking aim at the energy secretary this year. The chart below, which shows the cumulative number of such editorials, highlights this rapid escalation.
Cumulative number of UK newspaper editorials criticising energy secretary Ed Miliband in 2024 (blue) and 2025 so far (red). Source: Carbon Brief analysis.
Specific events, often only vaguely related to the energy secretary, have inflated the criticism of Miliband in the media.
One example was the imminent closure of the UK’s last remaining steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, in early April. Right-leaning newspapers blamed Miliband, among other things, for “banning new coal mines” in the UK, which they argued could have provided coking coal to the facility.
(The Scunthorpe site’s owners prior to government control, British Steel, had said that the coal from a planned mine in Cumbria would not have been suitable for their needs.)
More recently, right-leaning newspapers have used the furore around a report published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) as a further opportunity to criticise Miliband.
Many publications misleadingly interpreted comments by Blair as a criticism of the Starmer government’s net-zero policies and, by association, Miliband himself. They described the energy secretary as an “eco-loon” compared to the “uncontroversial” advice from Blair.
Miliband the ‘fanatic’
The majority of the criticism of Miliband in newspaper editorials in 2025 has come from the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph.
The Sun remains the most consistent critic of Miliband, with 26 editorials published in 2025 so far. There have only been 18 weeks in 2025 to date. As the chart below shows, this spate of 26 editorials from the Sun is already approaching last year’s record of 29.
UK newspaper editorials criticising Ed Miliband, broken down by publication, in 2024 and 2025. Source: Carbon Brief analysis.
The attacks levelled at Miliband by right-leaning newspapers are often both highly personal and somewhat melodramatic.
They frequently imply that his focus on net-zero policies is a sign of mental instability or quasi-religious devotion, rather than being part of his job title – or acknowledging that reaching net-zero emissions is the only way scientists say climate change can be prevented from getting worse.
The Sun has referred to Miliband’s “uncontrolled fanaticism”. The Sun on Sunday has described the “madness of Ed Miliband’s green crusade” and called him the “fanatical prophet of net-zero”.
Another editorial from the Sun stated that “Miliband is so blinded by eco-ideology that he’s lost touch with reality”, referring to his “eco insanity”.
In an editorial lamenting the state of the UK’s oil-and-gas industry, which shed 10s of 1,000s of jobs under the previous Conservative government, the Daily Mail mentioned:
“Energy secretary Ed Miliband’s messianic desire to sacrifice a multi-billion pound industry on the altar of net-zero.”
The newspapers also suggest that Miliband is unwilling to listen to any criticism. “Miliband has shown himself unprepared to countenance any suggestion that his efforts to decarbonise the grid within five years might be reckless,” the Daily Telegraph claimed.
There have also been frequent calls from newspaper editorials for Starmer to sack the energy secretary. In an article titled “Miliband’s madness”, published at the end of April, the Daily Mail asked:
“Isn’t it time Sir Keir Starmer accepted his colleague’s ideological net-zero fervour is damaging the government – and sacked him?”
Beyond the editorial pages, there has also been a constant stream of comment pieces, many by climate sceptics, which often go even further in their attacks on the energy secretary. “Miliband belongs in a padded cell,” Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote at the start of May.
This has come amid much media speculation from commentators on both the left and right that Starmer is considering firing Miliband.
However, Starmer has not given any indication of doing this.
On the contrary, at the recent energy security conference the UK government hosted in London, Starmer stated that he was fully committed to his government’s net-zero ambitions. “That is in the DNA of my government,” he stated in a widely covered speech.
dizzy: Miliband has been vilified by the same right-wing climate science deniers in a similar way to Just Stop Oil and others labelled zealots. I object to his and thereby the current Labour government’s policy of supporting Carbon Capture and Nuclear for different reasons. Both are false solutions needing huge government subsidies, carbon capture and storage is an unproved, false solution proposed by the fossil fuel industry to enable them to continue destroying the planet, nuclear supports producing nuclear weapons and [ed: is] hugely capital intensive producing radioactive waste that needs to be managed for thousands to millions of years. A far better response is rapid decarbonisation including conversion to renewables and to travel far less, prevent the rich from causing so much damage.
Expected greenhouse gas emissions from US oil and gas fields has jumped under Trump, after previously dropping under Biden, forecasts show. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Tariff chaos hampers Trump’s pledge to ‘drill, baby, drill’, but analysis still shows surge in planet-heating emissions
Donald Trump’s ambitions for the US to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels have ironically been hampered by the economic chaos unleashed by his own tariffs, but the US is still on track to increase oil and gas extraction, causing a surge in planet-heating emissions, a new analysis shows.
The US was already the world’s leading oil and gas power, producing more of the fossil fuels than any country in history during Joe Biden’s administration. But Trump has sought to escalate this further, declaring an “energy emergency” to open up more land and ocean for drilling and launching an unprecedented assault on environmental regulations in his first 100 days back in the White House.
This new political climate means that the expected amount of greenhouse gas emissions from active and planned projects in US oil and gas fields has jumped under Trump, after previously dropping under Biden, forecasts shared with the Guardian show.
Despite awarding more drilling leases than Trump in his first 100 days, Biden also pursued policies to combat the climate crisis that saw oil and gas companies revise down their production estimates. That situation has now reversed, threatening a pulse of new pollution that will further add to the fever of a planet already suffering from heatwaves, floods, droughts and other disasters accelerated by global heating.
“The uptick in embodied emissions from forecast US oil and gas production is worrying,” said Olivier Bois von Kursk, policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which tracks emissions projections from the lifetime of projects, based on data from research consultancy Rystad Energy. “The world can’t afford more climate chaos.”
…
The International Energy Agency, which has forecast that global oil and gas demand will peak by 2030, has said that no new major fossil fuel projects can occur if the world is to stay within agreed temperature limits and avoid catastrophic climate impacts. Last year was the hottest, worldwide, ever recorded and governments are collectively failing to meet targets to avert escalating disasters.
…
Tariffs on solar panels from Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia have been ratcheted up to as much as 3,521%. “We don’t want windmills in this country,” the president said shortly after his inauguration in January. “We don’t want windmills. You know what else people don’t like? Those massive solar fields.”
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What’s not to like about an all-female celebrity crew riding a rocket into space? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Katy Perry and her companions were initially portrayed in the media as breaking down gender barriers. On their return to Earth, the team enthused about protecting the planet and blazing a trail for others. Perry even sang What a Wonderful World during the flight, and kissed the ground on exiting the spacecraft.
But the backlash was swift. Fellow celebrities piled in to highlight the “hypocrisy” of such an energy-intensive endeavour from a former Unicef climate champion. Evidence was quickly presented to dispute the pollution-free claims of the Blue Origin rocket, which is fuelled by oxygen and hydrogen. (In fact, the water vapour and nitrogen oxide emissions it creates add to global heating, on top of the emissions from the programme as a whole.)
But it’s the negative social effects of this kind of display from celebrities (of any gender) that our research sheds light on. I’m part of a team of social scientists researching the powerful effects of politicians, business leaders and celebrities who lead by example on climate change – or don’t.
Social kickback
Space tourism, and other energy-intensive activities by people in the public eye, such as using helicopters and private jets, have a much wider knock-on effect than the direct damage to the climate caused by the activity itself.
We carried out focus groups with members of the public to understand their reactions to the high-carbon behaviour of leaders in politics, culture and business. We also conducted experiments and surveys to test the effects of leaders “walking the talk” on climate change. We found that observing unnecessary high-carbon behaviour demotivates people and reduces the sense of collective effort that is essential for a successful societal response to climate change.
Solving climate change and other environmental crises requires fundamental changes to economies, societies and lifestyles according to climate science. Using much less energy, not just different kinds of energy, can play a big part in halting the damage. And it is the wealthiest people in the richest countries who use the most energy and set the standards and aspirations for the rest of society. That’s why the Blue Origin dream (of space exploration for the unfathomably wealthy) is a nightmare for the climate because it perpetuates an unsustainable culture.
Our findings reveal that when people see public figures behaving like this, they are less willing to make changes to their own lives. “Why should I do my bit for the climate when these celebrities are doing the opposite?” is the question people repeatedly asked in our research.
Many of the changes to behaviour necessary to tackle climate change will require people to accept trade-offs and embrace alternative ways of living. This includes using heat pumps instead of gas boilers, trading in large, fossil-fuelled vehicles (or even avoiding cars altogether) and forgoing flights – because there is no way to decarbonise long-distance flights in time.
When celebrities (or politicians and business leaders, for that matter) ignore the environmental damage of their choices, it sends a powerful signal that they are not really serious about addressing climate change.
Not only does this undermine people’s motivation to make changes, it reduces the credibility of leaders. That in turn makes coordinated climate action less likely, because shifting to a low-carbon society will require public trust in leadership and a sense of collective effort.
Individual choices matter
The widespread aversion to Perry’s space flight contradicts the popular argument that tackling the climate crisis “is not about individual behaviour”.
On the contrary, the response shows that these actions from celebrities and other leaders have much greater symbolic meaning than is captured by the idea of an “individual choice”. People are highly attuned to the behaviour of others because it signals and reinforces the values, morals and norms of our society. As such, few if any choices are truly “individual”.
This message of collective responsibility is one our current economic and political system works hard to suppress by championing unlimited freedom to consume, while ignoring the loss of freedom that such behaviour causes: freedom to live in a stable climate, freedom from pollution, freedom from extreme weather, freedom for future generations.
In fact, research reveals that most people understand the interconnectedness of society and the need for a coordinated response to the climate crisis. Climate assemblies, which convene ordinary citizens to discuss and deliberate a course of climate action, have revealed a willingness to curtail some activities in a fair way.
When it comes to preserving a liveable planet and a stable climate, most people know that space tourism and ultra-high-carbon living are off the agenda. Celebrities have a positive role to play in leading by example. It’s not rocket science.
Original article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I have not asked to republish this article, expect that it will be ok.
Shymkent, Kazakhstan. Image by Raban Haaijk.
This month, the world’s elites will throw the first dice on how many millions they will have killed for their greatest of all crimes.
As of 28 April 2025, Asia is being battered by a brutal, life-threatening heatwave. Millions of people – right now – are facing unbearable temperatures. In many places it’s over 40°C. In some areas it’s approaching 46°C. In the Philippines, the heat index – the ‘feels like’ temperature – is hitting 53°C. That’s deadly.
People are collapsing in the streets. Children, the elderly, the poor – they’re the first to go. This isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s lethal. Heatstroke. Organ failure. Death in under six hours if you don’t have air conditioning – and most people don’t.
Crops are failing. Water supplies are drying up. Whole regions are becoming uninhabitable. In China, places like Zhejiang and Jiangsu have already hit record-breaking temperatures. In Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand – vast populations are at risk. In West Asia, where conflict and poverty already devastate lives, the heatwave is tipping people over the edge.
Let’s be absolutely clear: this is just the beginning. And it’s not a natural disaster – it’s a crime scene. A direct result of thirty years of lies, inaction, and wilful destruction by the people at the top – fossil fuel executives, politicians, and the liberal classes who let them get away with it.
This is the first phase of climate genocide. And it’s happening now.
So here we are. We’ve finally arrived.
2025 will be the second year in a row that global temperatures sit above 1.6°C. That’s not a statistic. That’s a death sentence – for millions. From this point on, every month is a roll of the dice. And if it lands on a six? The wet bulb threshold is breached – that deadly combination of heat and humidity where your body can’t cool down. People without air conditioning – the majority of humanity – die in six hours. That’s it. Game over.
Billions of people – in poor city slums, in rural villages, in places no one in power cares about – are now inside a roulette wheel of death. Waiting for their number to come up. That is what the ruling elites have created. That is what the liberal and professional classes have enabled – through cowardice, distraction, and silence. They could have stood up. They could have resisted. They chose not to. They are complicit.
The consequences? Beyond catastrophic. And if you sit back now, shrug your shoulders, and go back to your life – you are handing over the final keys. You are helping to lock in human extinction within the next ten years. If it hasn’t already been sealed.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know what’s coming.
Do the numbers. We’re already at 1.6°C. Another 0.4°C rise is expected over the next decade. Add 0.5°C when air pollution clears and no longer cools the atmosphere. Add 0.3°C from the carbon lag – the delay between what we emit and when it shows up. Then add the collapse of forests, the melting permafrost, the methane, the wildfires.
We’re on track to blow through 3°C before 2050.
What does that mean? Ask the British insurance industry – they’ve already said it: 4 billion people dead. Half the human race. And that’s just the start. Because 3°C triggers feedbacks in the Earth system that take us past 5°C – the point where the human body, the human brain, life itself, no longer functions. That’s extinction. Everyone. Gone. Forever.
And even if there was just a 10% chance of this happening – which there isn’t, it’s now the central scenario – then to take that risk, to sit on your hands, is the greatest crime in history.
And if you still do nothing now, at this moment – then what are you?
Rev21 is hosting an online global convention this May, bringing together leading activists, writers, scientists, and changemakers to confront the realities of social and ecological collapse—and to begin designing the revolution we need. Held via Zoom with multiple talks, workshops, and breakout spaces, it’s a space to learn, connect, and collaborate on what 21st-century revolution can look like: holistic, nonviolent, and rooted in real relationships. For some, it’s a powerful networking moment; for others, it’s a first step into serious action. With solidarity pricing and an open invitation to those ready to shape the future, this isn’t just an event—it’s the beginning of a revolution.
Original article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I have not asked to republish this article, expect that it will be ok.
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