Streeting backs ‘progressive capitalism,’ drilling and the bond market
Wes Streeting speaking about so-called ‘progressive capitalism’ at No1 Tower Place West, in central London, June 16, 2026LABOUR leadership pretender Wes Streeting came out fighting today for carbon fuel, the bond market and “progressive capitalism.”
The former health secretary reaffirmed that he will contest any leadership election triggered by Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s expected victory in the Makerfield by-election this week.
Mr Streeting, the Blairite candidate in any election, backed plans to drill for oil and gas in the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields in the North Sea.
He said he aimed to “protect the workers in oil and gas, who’ve seen words like ‘just transition’ translate into jobs for someone else, somewhere else. We should be working with the unions on this – not least on making sure that we’re building our clean power future here in Britain, not simply importing it from China.”
He denied that this would forfeit Britain’s “moral leadership” on climate change.
“The best example we can set is to show the world that net zero is compatible with a pro-growth agenda. The worst example would be losing support for the net zero agenda, handing the country to Nigel Farage, and allowing Reform to destroy the renewables industry,” Mr Streeting said.
Green Party deputy leader Rachel Millward said his “call to open up new drilling in the North Sea is environmentally reckless and economically illiterate.
“Rosebank alone contains enough fossil fuel to produce over 200 million tonnes of CO2 if burned – more than the combined annual emissions of 28 low-income countries.”
Uplift director Tess Khan said: “Politicians need to learn the lesson of the last five years – the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels is making a handful of oil and gas companies obscenely rich and the rest of us poorer, while driving inflation, harming the economy and altering our climate.
“Streeting would do better to listen to the millions who are sick of the energy giants loading costs onto the rest of us, and pay less attention to this profiteering industry and its proxies, like Tony Blair and Donald Trump.”
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We are all going to die, you f*cking idiots
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.
Firstly, let’s remember what a 3.5C world actually means.
- Mass food system collapse, particularly in the Global South.
- 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.
- 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.
- Time doesn’t stop at 2060. At those temperatures, natural feedbacks (clouds, ice, permafrost) accelerate. There is no equilibrium, only continuation.
- Above 5°C, effective human extinction is locked in. We are on that path.
- 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.
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See the full original article at https://rogerhallam.com/our-grandchildren-will-starve
Blair’s fossil fuel ideas ‘bizarre’ in face of energy and climate crises, experts say
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.
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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.
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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
Spain registers record high sea temperatures for May
June 2 (Reuters) – Spain registered record sea temperatures for the month of May along much of its coastline, the country’s port authority said on Tuesday, as the UN forecast a moderate or possibly strong El Nino, which could drive up global temperatures in coming months.
Twelve out of 15 deep-water buoys recorded their highest-ever temperatures for the month of May, as well as six out of 14 buoys along the coast, according to the Spanish port authority.
Human-caused climate change was behind the phenomenon, said Ruben del Campo, spokesperson for Spanish weather agency AEMET.
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Continues at https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/spain-registers-record-high-sea-temperatures-may-2026-06-02
