Aerial view of the construction site for the proposed datacentre at Wapseys Wood in Buckinghamshire. Photograph: sdcm40campus
[Guardian] Exclusive: Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire sites predicted to emit 4.5m tonnes a year when fully running
The carbon emissions from just two planned datacentres in England will exceed all of the fossil fuel company ExxonMobil’s UK emissions, analysis has revealed.
Experts have said this demonstrates the “serious threat” datacentres pose to the UK’s legally binding climate goals.
Analysis by the non-profit group Foxglove reveals that when fully operational, the Wapseys Wood datacentre in Buckinghamshire and the Quest Park datacentre in Bedfordshire will use 1.3GW of power and will produce more than 4.5m tonnes of carbon emissions.
ExxonMobil emitted 3.9m tonnes in 2023, according to the global energy thinktank Ember.
AI datacentres use a massive amount of electricity to power servers and cooling equipment, and to run facility systems. There are currently 315 datacentres in the queue to connect to the UK’s electricity grid, representing 73GW of demand. This is almost double the peak winter energy demand for the entire UK.
Because of the long wait to connect to the grid, the Wapseys Wood and Quest Park datacentres are seeking to build their own on-site gas-fired power stations.
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A worker collects engine oil as he works at a degassing station in Zubair oil field near Basra, Iraq
ENERGY firms raked in an excess of £6 billion in Iran war windfall profits this year, it was revealed today as households brace for yet another bill rise at the end of the month.
Campaigners said profits generated in Britain by these companies equate to over £200 for every household in the country, while a further increase in gas prices is expected in the next Ofgem price cap announcement on August 26.
Financial results posted by the world’s top energy firms revealed their British profits are only one part of their global profits, totalling £95bn in 2026.
Analysis from the End Fuel Poverty Coalition (EFPC) revealed the excess profits linked to global energy market disruptions as a result of the US war on Iran, which has increased cost pressures on households in Britain, as well as other countries.
Researchers looked at financial results posted by BP, Centrica, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Iberdrola, Shell and Total.
EFPC co-ordinator Simon Francis said windfall profits must be considered alongside previous findings saying a third of households are “on the brink of, or are in energy debt.”
“These price shock profiteers are doing very well out of the Iran conflict, but they are doing little to solve the underlying problems,” Mr Francis said.
“As people brace for the next price cap announcement on August 26 and a third of households are on the brink of or in energy debt, the energy industry watches the profits climb.”
Article by republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The rubble of a burned out residential home smolders in the Balboa neighborhood of Spokane, Washington, on August 2, 2026. (Photo by Erick Doxey/AFP via Getty Images)
“The fossil fuel industry may not have struck the match, but the climate crisis they drove has loaded our landscapes with tinder,” said an environmental activist.
Over 60,000 people were ordered to evacuate the Spokane area over the weekend as it was devastated by what Democratic Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell called the “top fire” in a nation currently being scorched by climate-fueled blazes.
Illustrating how the climate crisis is already impacting lives and communities across the country and the globe, three raging fires reportedly consumed over 600 structures as of Sunday, including homes and businesses, and reduced entire streets to their foundations.
At a briefing on Sunday afternoon, officials said more than 250,000 acres were burning across Washington, but reported no deaths or injuries.
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown called it “the worst natural disaster our region has faced.”
Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson has requested assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is under the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote on social media that she had spoken with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and that he “made clear the federal government will do everything it can to support response and recovery,” though President Donald Trump has previously intervened to block disaster aid to Democrat-led states.
While the fires moderated over the weekend, on Monday they remained largely uncontained and continued to spread due to dry conditions from recent severe droughts in the region, exacerbated by rising global temperatures.
This is Spokane, Washington. Right now. First weekend of August.
“This is climate change playing out live in real time,” said meteorologist and Climate Central journalist Shel Winkley in a video about the Spokane fires.
Warmer temperatures, he explained, have caused a vicious cycle of “weather whiplash” in which greater winter rainfall facilitates plant growth before harsher summer heat domes suck moisture from these plants, turning them into a tinderbox.
“Northeastern Washington and central Oregon now see at least three more weeks of fire weather days each year than they did just back in the 1970s,” Winkley said. “More fire weather days means more chances for a spark, any spark, to turn into this.”
The blazes are part of a nationwide trend, with wildfires this year more severe on average than in previous years. Over the past decade, the average annual acreage burned in the US was more than double the average of the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.
Last week, an Oxfamanalysis of data published in the journal Nature found that emissions from just five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies—were sufficient to cause around 1 in 4 heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023—“heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.”
Using S&P Capital Trucost data, the group estimated that Big Oil was responsible for more than $60 billion in environmental damage last year.
But as costs fall on the public, oil companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil have reported record profits of $12.1 billion and $14.5 billion over the past quarter, in part due to global oil price spikes driven by Trump’s war with Iran.
“The fossil fuel industry may not have struck the match, but the climate crisis they drove has loaded our landscapes with tinder,” said Clémence Dubois, the campaigns director for the environmental group 350.org. “Chevron and Exxon are profiteering from a model of distraction, leaving ordinary people to pay the price with higher bills and devastating impacts such as these fires. These profits feel almost criminal.”
Jay Inslee, Washington’s former Democratic governor and a longtime advocate for policies to combat the climate crisis, said on Sunday that his friend, a legislator from Spokane, had been forced to flee his home due to the fires.
“Climate change isn’t some faraway threat,” Inslee said. “It’s happening right now, to our neighbors and friends. We have to fight for them.”
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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.
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.
As reported by the New York Times, the court has agreed to hear arguments related to a petition filed by ExxonMobil and Canadian energy firm Suncor related to a 2018 lawsuit by the city of Boulder, Colorado that seeks financial damages from the companies for their role in causing global climate change.
The Times report noted that dozens of similar lawsuits have been filed by states and municipalities over the last decade, and they generally seek money from energy firms to help mitigate or repair damage done by extreme weather exacerbated by the climate crisis.
According to the Associated Press, attorneys for the energy companies are petitioning to have the case moved from state courts to federal courts that have in the past dismissed similar complaints.
“The use of state law to address global climate change represents a serious threat to one of our nation’s most critical sectors,” the attorneys claimed.
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case comes months after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Boulder’s lawsuit could initiate the discovery process and move toward a trial.
In an interview with the Colorado Sun, Boulder County Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann said that the city wasn’t backing down from its efforts make the fossil fuel industry pay for the damage it’s done.
“The oil companies have tried every avenue to delay our climate accountability case or move it to an out-of-state court system,” said Stolzmann. “As everyone continues to face rising costs that put budgets under pressure, we must hold oil companies accountable for the significant harm they’ve caused our communities.”
Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said that the merits of the Boulder lawsuit are clear, regardless of the Supreme Court’s intervention.
“Big Oil’s climate lies are the most consequential and harmful corporate deception campaign in history,” Wiles said, “and the communities paying the price for that deception deserve to put these companies on trial. Exxon’s desperation to escape accountability does not change the evidence of their wrongdoing or the law that lower courts agree is on Boulder’s side.”
Alyssa Johl, vice president of legal and general counsel at the Center for Climate Integrity, said the Supreme Court should simply affirm lower court rulings stating that “communities like Boulder have the right to seek accountability in their state courts when corporations have knowingly caused local harms.”
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A worker collects engine oil as he works at a degassing station in Zubair oil field near Basra, Iraq
