Climate Change

The North Sea is one of Britain’s “greatest industrial assets” — but an increasingly polarised fight over its future is driving investment abroad, experts have warned. [some emphasis, links added]

It means the sector is suffering a brain drain of expertise, even though the very same skills are needed to drive the renewables market, as Labour pledges to ban any new licences for oil and gas drilling to alleviate “the worsening climate crisis”.

Research revealed more than nine in ten companies believe the North Sea has a viable long-term future, but only if Whitehall “introduces the right fiscal and regulatory frameworks”.

However, after the Energy Independence Bill was announced in the King’s Speech earlier this month, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband stated:

“After the second fossil fuel crisis in half a decade, our clean power mission is the only way to bring down bills for good and take back control of our energy.”

Drilling at Rosebank, the UK’s largest untapped oil field, and Jackdaw, a giant gas field, has been stalled due to legal objections on climate grounds. Both are licenced fields, but the final decision falls to Mr Miliband.

His Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has repeatedly insisted that more North Sea drilling will not bring down bills because the price of oil and gas is set by the global market.

Meanwhile, North Sea operators continue to face a “windfall tax” introduced by the Conservatives after the war in Ukraine, meaning they pay out 78 percent of profits.

In its Energy Transition Report, Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce (AGCC) warned the country was in danger of “accelerating the decline of the North Sea unnecessarily”.

Opponents of North Sea drilling have argued that there is simply not enough oil left to justify further exploration; the offshore sector believes there could be 7.5 billion barrels still recoverable – almost double the Government’s estimates.

The Energy Transition report found 93 percent of businesses either agree or strongly agree that there is still a future for oil and gas activity in the North Sea with the right frameworks in place.

This finding alone “directly challenges the growing political narrative that the future of the basin is already decided”, says the AGCC.

Russell Borthwick, Chief Executive of the AGCC, said:

“For several years now, the dominant political narrative has increasingly suggested that the future of the North Sea is already decided. This report tells a very different story.”

The report’s foreword warns:

“It’s clear that energy security needs to be at the centre of national economic policy. Simultaneously, increasingly polarised debate surrounding the future of the North Sea continues to create uncertainty across investors, operators, and the wider supply chain.”

The report, launched this morning in Aberdeen, reflected the views of 121 organizations linked to the sector, including seven North Sea operators.

Respondents predicted that, in less than five years, domestic revenues will be overtaken by overseas markets, such as Norway, as the main source of income.

Fewer than one in ten believed that the UK would have “sufficient skills to deliver its energy transition ambitions” if current trends continued.

Nearly nine in ten said new licences should be granted “where operators can demonstrate lower emissions than imported alternatives and deliver greater UK economic value”.

Top: Oil rig off the coast of Norway, Europe’s new center for energy production. AI image.

Read rest at GB News

Ocean “acidification” is a somewhat unique branch of the overarching climate scare. It differs from other branches of the big scare in that it does not depend on atmospheric heating as the driver of the supposed scary consequences. [some emphasis, links added]

Instead, with ocean “acidification,” the idea is that increased CO2 in the atmosphere (from the burning of fossil fuels) leads to increased CO2 dissolved in the oceans, which leads to lower pH of ocean water, which then becomes the driver of the alleged scary consequences.

Thus, ocean “acidification” can theoretically work as a scare even if the atmosphere fails to heat with increasing CO2 content to the extent predicted by advocates’ climate models.

But the ocean “acidification” claim has its own frailties. For advocates of apocalypse, it is a problem that the ocean is (somewhat) alkaline, rather than acidic, and that the change in ocean pH from even large increases in CO2 in the atmosphere is small. Some might even call the change in ocean pH “slight.”

And the pH change, even in worst-case scenarios, is not nearly enough to bring it down to the level of neutrality, let alone acidity. The last point is the reason that I have been putting the term “acidification” in quotes.

So, how can advocates make ocean “acidification” into something sufficiently scary to motivate lots of people to hate or fear fossil fuels?

Well, perhaps they could manufacture a claim that a somewhat lower pH would kill all the tropical fish. OK, but the claim could not be that a slightly lower pH will directly kill the fish — nobody would ever buy that. There would have to be a different mechanism.

Several years ago (May 2021), I had a post covering the work of a pair of researchers in Australia who had come up with a claim fitting just this description. The researchers in question were Philip Munday and Danielle Dixson of James Cook University in Queensland.

Over the course of multiple years and some 22 peer-reviewed papers, those two (and coauthors) had put forth a claim that lower ocean pH would drive tropical fish crazy, or at least cause the fish to experience “profound behavioral and sensory impairments” that would imperil their survival.

As should be obvious, this claim gave extraordinary support to the anti-fossil fuel narrative, independent of any claim of global warming, and as a result gave the papers a very high profile and brought the authors great acclaim.

There are >20 papers by the same authors with these massive effect sizes and tiny variability. Has anybody ever conducted a single study where they’ve achieved effects and variability like this? Ever? Let alone in animal behaviour research… #FlumeGate https://t.co/XghvgSWvFp

— Timothy Clark (@Timothy_D_Clark) August 9, 2022

But it was too good to be true. The occasion for my May 2021 post was a paper that had appeared in Nature in 2020, by authors Timothy Clark, et al., reporting on the results of efforts to reproduce the Munday/Dixson results.

Excerpt from the abstract:

“Here, we comprehensively and transparently show that—in contrast to previous studies—end-of-century ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes, such as the avoidance of chemical cues from predators, fish activity levels and behavioural lateralization (left–right turning preference). Using data simulations, we additionally show that the large effect sizes and small within-group variances that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable. Together, our findings indicate that the reported effects of ocean acidification on the behaviour of coral reef fishes are not reproducible, suggesting that behavioural perturbations will not be a major consequence for coral reef fishes in high CO2 oceans.”

The abstract does not contain the word “fraud,” but the article contains strong suggestions of data manipulation. This was a very unusual piece for Nature to publish, given the harm it caused to a significant underpinning of the anti-fossil fuel narrative.

Here we are now, five years on. Does anything remain of the “ocean acidification” narrative as a reason to hate fossil fuels?

The past few months have seen pieces laying out the cases both for and against believing that “ocean acidification” is a significant environmental concern.

On the side of “ocean acidification is really bad and scary,” I will highlight a piece by Dana Nuccitelli that appeared in something called The Invading Sea in March, titled “Fossil fuel pollution’s effect on oceans comes with huge costs.”

On the side of “ocean acidification is way overblown,” I will highlight a May 13, 2026, paper by van Wijngaarden, Ridd, Cornell, and Happer, titled “Acidification of Water by CO2.”

Nuccitelli is a frequent writer at Yale Climate Connections (yet another black eye for Yale). In Nuccitelli’s piece, he appears to have given up on trying to claim that changing pH is killing off the tropical fish.

So instead, here, he emphasizes the effect on coral. He claims that “acidification” is killing off coral, but can’t attribute dying coral just to pH, so he throws in warming as well:

“Florida’s barrier reef is in trouble – and it’s costing us. The reef has been experiencing a severe outbreak of stony coral tissue loss disease over the past decade. The likely cause: stress from the warming climate and acidifying waters, both the result of burning fossil fuels. … Human burning of fossil fuels affects Earth’s oceans via the one-two punch of warming and acidifying waters, which occurs as carbon dioxide is absorbed into the ocean.”

No quantitative information is provided for the amount of coral loss, if any. The “likely cause” of the disease is said to be a combination of “warming” and “acidifying waters.”

How does he know that? How much from each? Is there any actual proof? If so, Nuccitelli does not choose to cite it. I guess it’s just obvious to his readership.

After asserting the “likely cause,” Nuccitelli moves on to calculating the cost, not of the portion of the coral that may be lost, but of the entire tourism industry related to all the coral:

“The financial stake of losing the reef is high. Florida’s coral reefs are estimated to draw in over $1 billion in tourism revenue each year, provide $650 million in flood protection benefits and support over 70,000 jobs. What’s more, coral reefs protect people and property by dissipating up to 97% of wave energy, lessening storm surges.”

And then Nuccitelli goes on to rely on a recent paper from Nature Climate Change (from January 2026) that purports to calculate a new measure of “social cost of carbon” on the assumption that global warming will significantly decrease the productivity of the oceans, not just for coral, but all other life. The NCC paper does not appear to deal with the acidification issue at all.

Here’s my favorite chart from Nuccitelli’s article on the subject of “acidification”:

It looks like the ocean pH is dropping like a stone! Do you notice anything odd? The entire vertical scale of the chart goes from pH of 8.03 to 8.11 — less than 0.1 of a pH unit. The full pH scale goes from 0 to 14.

If you plotted this line with a vertical scale going all the way from 0 to 14, the line would be indistinguishable from horizontal.

If you are interested in the question of whether ocean corals are increasing or decreasing around the world, I can recommend several pieces to you from Peter Ridd. Ridd is a guy who actually goes out and studies the corals (he was formerly at James Cook University, like Munday and Dixson, until he got thrown out for heresy).

He is also the same Ridd who is a coauthor on the van Wijngaarden et al. paper, further discussed below. Here is a piece Ridd wrote in 2023 for the Global Warming Policy Foundation called “Coral in a Warming World, Causes for Optimism,” and here is one from August 2025 from the Institute of Public Affairs, titled “Science groupthink flounders on state of Great Barrier Reef.”

The bottom line is that there is plenty of evidence that coral reefs worldwide are thriving (not every one, and not every year, but on an aggregate basis), and no evidence at all of aggregate decline.

In light of that evidence, what is the proof that “acidification” is harming corals? The answer is zero.

In contrast to Nuccitelli’s evidence-free advocacy piece, the van Wijngaarden et al. paper is a serious piece of scientific work. I note that it appears on the website of the CO2 Coalition, rather than in one of the “prestige” scientific journals. I infer that these authors, who actually are the best scientists to address this topic, have given up on the enforced groupthink of these “prestige” magazines.

The paper is long (55 pages), and much of it is technical. But the bottom line is that it is preposterous to believe that the slight decline in ocean pH caused by increased atmospheric CO2 can cause any significant problem for ocean life. In this blog post, I will only provide a summary quote.

From the Abstract:

“Fundamental inorganic chemistry shows that increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 will have no harmful effect on organisms that live in the natural waters of the Earth [1], and may well benefit them. Alkalinity and dissolved CO2 give high buffering capacity to most natural waters and minimize the change of pH from external influences.

“For example, doubling the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from 430 ppm to 860 ppm would reduce the pH of representative seawater at a temperature of 25 C from pH = 8.18 to pH = 7.93. This change is comparable to diurnal pH changes in biologically productive surface waters, due to photosynthetic fixation of dissolved inorganic carbon during the day and respiration at night. The change is also less than the variations of pH with latitude, longitude and depth in the oceans.”

A key point is that the pH of the ocean is not a fixed number for the whole world at a given point in time. Rather, pH varies within small ranges based on latitude, longitude, depth, and even time of day.

The result is that ocean life already has to deal with these ranges.

A big part of the paper deals with the chemistry of how much the pH of the ocean might be affected by an increase in the atmospheric level of CO2 from the current 430 ppm up to even a doubling of the same to 860 pm. Some mathematics is involved, but I think it is basic and well-known chemistry.

The conclusion, as stated in the abstract, is that the average pH could go down all the way to 7.93 — still well into the alkaline range (neutral is 7, alkaline above 7, and acid below 7).

If anyone is aware of research establishing that pH variation in the ranges indicated is some kind of grave threat to ocean life, I would be eager to be made aware of it.

Until I see that, my conclusion is that the whole “ocean acidification” thing is no more than an effort to play on the idea that people will find the word “acid” scary.

Read more at Manhattan Contrarian

Climate Central claims in “Summer Warming (1970–2025) Driven By Climate Change” that summers have warmed in 97 percent of 243 U.S. cities and that human-caused climate change is the leading driver in 91 percent of them. [some emphasis, links added]

This is misleading at best. The analysis relies on biased average temperature trends and model-based attribution while downplaying one of the most important and well-documented drivers of urban warming: the urban heat island (UHI) effect.

Climate Central claims:

Summers have warmed since 1970 in 97% of 243 U.S. cities analyzed. A new Climate Central analysis shows that human-caused climate change is the leading driver of summer warming trends in 221 (91%) of these cities.

Digging deeper, we find that Climate Central’s findings are based on changes in average summer temperature, calculated from daily high and low temperatures. That matters. Because when you look at how UHI typically manifests, the strongest signal is not in daytime highs, but in nighttime minimum temperatures.

The UHI is not a fringe concept. It is a well-documented physical process that has been observed and mapped worldwide.

Even the often-biased website Wikipedia gets it, saying,

“[T]he urban heat island (UHI) effect is a meteorological and climatological phenomenon in which urban areas experience significantly warmer temperatures than surrounding rural areas. The temperature difference is usually larger at night than during the day.”

Roy Spencer, Ph.D., a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite, has globally mapped UHI, including the United States, and published a peer-reviewed paper on the subject. Just one look at the North American UHI map produced from that paper is all you need to understand the concept.

You can clearly see the UHI in major cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

As summarized in Climate at a Glance: Urban Heat Islands, built-up city environments absorb solar energy during the day and release it slowly at night, suppressing natural nighttime cooling.

The result is elevated overnight minimum temperatures, especially in cities with extensive pavement, buildings, and infrastructure.

This is precisely the pattern seen in the real-world measurement comparisons done by Climate Central.

In The Heartland Institute’s Global Open Atmospheric Temperature System project in Reno, Nevada, a properly sited reference station was installed only 1.1 miles from the official airport ASOS station. Both stations experienced the same regional weather.

The only meaningful difference was microsite exposure.

The official station sits amid runways and pavement. The GOATS station was placed over natural ground, more than 100 feet from artificial heat sources, consistent with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) guidance.

The results are telling.

Across two full years of side-by-side data, the official Reno station measured warmer than the reference station on the vast majority of days. The biggest difference was not in daytime highs. It was in nighttime lows.

In 2024, the official station averaged nearly 3°F warmer at night than the properly sited reference station. In 2025, the nighttime difference was still more than 2°F.

That is classic UHI behavior.

It is also important to note that UHI effects are most pronounced in summer, precisely when Climate Central is measuring its “summer warming” signal. UHI is fundamentally driven by solar insolation.

Asphalt, concrete, rooftops, and infrastructure absorb the most solar energy during the long, high-sun days of summer. That stored heat is then released slowly after sunset, elevating overnight minimum temperatures and suppressing natural cooling.

The combination of peak solar loading and densely built environments means that summertime is when UHI influence is strongest and most persistent.

Therefore, analyzing summer averages in urban stations without fully isolating UHI amplification risks, attributing a seasonally maximized urban signal to broader atmospheric change.

When Climate Central reports that summers have warmed by 2.6°F on average across 236 cities since 1970, and then attributes at least half of that warming to human-caused climate change in 91 percent of cities, it ignores the UHI entirely.

It would be a safe bet to believe that most of those 236 cities that fall within the cities on Spencer’s UHI map have experienced between 0.2 and 2.0 degrees of UHI-measured warming.

Also undercutting Climate Central’s claim is the fact that it uses a statistical attribution model that compares ERA5-based modeled climate with the built-in assumption that human emissions drive heating with a counterfactual ERA5-based model with no anthropogenic forcing.

In other words, it is model against model with a big dose of UHI thrown in. That’s not science; it’s predetermining a result.

Although the document admits that “secondary drivers” include natural climate variability and the urban heat island effect influence measured temperatures, it treats UHI, the prime factor in measured warming, as residual noise.

Using the daily average temperature as a metric amplifies this problem. Because the average is calculated as the mean of daily high temperature and nighttime low temperature, any systematic upward bias in nighttime lows directly inflates the average.

The Reno case study demonstrates that station placement alone can introduce 1 to 3°F of warming into reported records, particularly via elevated overnight minimum temperatures. That is comparable to the multi-decade summer warming Climate Central is highlighting.

This is not a theoretical quibble; it is a measurement integrity issue.

Climate Central emphasizes that 22 more summer days are now “hotter-than-normal” compared to the early 1970s. But “normal” is defined relative to 1991–2020 baselines, and hotter-than-normal days are again based on average temperature metrics.

Urban growth and densification have intensified around many of these stations over the past half-century; thus, part of what is being counted as the climate signal is localized microsite warming or UHI.

This is especially relevant for airports, which host many official climate measurement stations. Airports are highly built-up environments dominated by concrete, asphalt, jet exhaust, and infrastructure.

The Reno comparison is not an anomaly. It is a case study illustrating the systemic vulnerability in the U.S. surface temperature network as documented in the 2022 nationwide project, Corrupted Climate Stations.

None of this proves that all warming is artificial; the Reno report itself makes that clear. But it does demonstrate that before declaring that 91 percent of urban summer warming is primarily human-caused, one must rigorously quantify and account for station siting bias and UHI amplification of average temperatures.

In fact, 91 percent or some similar number may be human-caused, but caused by the UHI as a result of [urbanization] and poor measuring site placement, not “global” climate change.

The UHI effect is a primary factor in urban warming trends, not some footnote as Climate Central treats it.

Before attributing summer warming in 221 cities to human fossil fuel use, Climate Central should first ensure that what they are measuring is a long-term atmospheric temperature trend, not the bias from urban asphalt and artificial heat sources.

Read more at Climate Realism

Every once in a while, an intriguing fact hits my X feed, and it’s worth exploring a bit more. [some emphasis, links added]

For years, European media outlets have painted the U.S. as lawless, chaotic, and uniquely dangerous, all while confidently presenting their own societies as models of enlightened, culturally superior governance.

But reality, as it often does, has a way of complicating tidy narratives.

As Europe heads into another summer season, a less-publicized statistic popped up on my screen: heat-related deaths across the continent exceed the number of gun deaths in the U.S.

Yes, that comparison is as striking as it sounds, and is also notably absent from many of the same outlets eager to criticize American risks.

Let’s look at the numbers.

The United Nations (UN) news service, summarizing World Health Organization (WHO) analyses, reports that approximately 489,000 heat‑related deaths occurred globally each year between 2000 and 2019, and that the WHO European Region accounts for about 36% of this total.

This corresponds to about 175,000 heat‑related deaths per year in Europe over that period.

“A staggering 175,000 people die from heat-related causes every year in Europe and that figure is set to soar in line with our steadily warming planet. That’s the warning from the UN World Health Organization (WHO), which said on Friday that European countries are seeing temperatures rise at around twice the global average.

“…’In the European region, heat stress is the leading cause of climate-related death in the region,’ he said. ‘Temperature extremes such as those we’re experiencing at the moment are really exacerbating chronic conditions, including cardiovascular, respiratory and cerebro-vascular diseases, mental health and diabetes-related conditions. The extreme heat that we’re experiencing is a particular problem for elderly people, especially those living alone. It can also place an additional burden on pregnant women.’ “

In comparison, a little over 44,000 people in the U.S. die each year from gunshot wounds…and most of those are self-inflicted.

“In 2024, the most recent year with complete data, 44,447 people died from gun-related injuries, according to the CDC. That figure includes gun homicides and gun suicides, along with three less common types of gun-related deaths the CDC tracks: those that involved law enforcement, those that were accidental and those with undetermined circumstances.

“The total excludes deaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information from official death certificates, which identify a single cause of death.)

“…Though they tend to get less public attention than gun-related homicides, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2024, 62% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (27,593), while 35% were homicides (15,364). The rest involved law enforcement (636), were accidental (450) or had undetermined circumstances (404); each of these categories accounted for around 1% of all gun deaths, according to CDC data.”

If the Europeans were truly interested in mitigating heat-related deaths, perhaps they should focus on more efficient and less expensive energy sources.

Air conditioning can help reduce the number of heat deaths.

Interestingly, nighttime light-level assessments show a dimming of man-made light in Europe. “Net Zero” inanity and the cost of electricity in the region have more to do with this observation than the use of LED lightbulbs.

“The authors concluded that internationally, nighttime light surged in China and northern India along with urban development, while LEDs and energy conservation measures coincided with reduced light pollution in Paris and throughout France (a 33 percent dimming), the UK (22 percent dimming), and the Netherlands (21 percent dimming). European nights dimmed sharply in 2022 during a regional energy crisis that followed the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”

The takeaway here is not that one risk negates another, or that tragedies should be tallied like scorecards in a geopolitical rivalry. Rather, narratives matter… and so does intellectual honesty.

When European institutions and their media allies fixate on American flaws while downplaying their own policy failures, they invite scrutiny of the kind they so readily direct outward.

Read rest at Legal Insurrection

Here is a question for your long weekend: Why haven’t you ever seen a climate change protest before the Chinese embassy anywhere? Why is it always the US or capitalism messing up the environment? Why don’t they show up at all when China is a bigger threat to clean air than any US city? [some emphasis, links added]

The answer is obvious, but I’ll say it. It was never about the climate but rather capitalism or the US.

Check this out:

“In 2024, climate activists in New York City protested alongside anti-Israel protesters at a rally headlined ‘Climate Justice Means Free Palestine.’

“Last year, climate change celebrity icon Greta Thunberg tried to storm Israel by sea on a flotilla protesting the country’s war in Gaza, yelling “Free! Free! Palestine!” when she was refused entry.

“And, last week, activists from CodePink, a far-left feminist activist group that has received funds from an American expatriate, Neville Roy Singham, living in Shanghai, took a break from their rallies supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Cuba Communist Party to circulate a video on Instagram, attacking a Utah data center project backed by investor Kevin O’Leary.”

That’s a busy bunch protesting against the West. Maybe someone should tell them that the clean air in Cuba is due to a collapse of industrial activity. Or we can always remind them of how they treat gays in Palestine or women in general.

As the article points out, these marches were always about hating the West and what we stand for.

So don’t be fooled by the slogans or some well-meaning people showing up to protest. The root of all of this is hatred of the West and our individual freedoms.

Top photo by Ziang Guo on Unsplash.

Read more at American Thinker

This has been very carefully orchestrated from the outset [some emphasis, links added]:

It began with the UKHSA “extraordinary” heat health alerts last week:

There is, of course, nothing “extraordinary” about temperatures of 32°C or 33°C, as were forecasted at the time.

The intention was to put that impression into people’s minds.

The Met Office eventually got the May record it wanted, albeit in the London UHI bubble, which is estimated to add at least 2°C to rural areas.

The previous record of 32.8°C was set in the small market towns of Horsham and Tunbridge Wells, where the UHI effect would have been much less back in 1944.

Significantly, the two Class 1 sites closest to London—Benson and Rothamsted—recorded much lower temperatures: 33.6° and 32°, respectively, casting much doubt on the scientific value of Kew:

Laughably, the clowns at the Met Office boast that Heathrow temperatures track closely with Kew.

They did the analysis to persuade the public that Heathrow was a suitable place to measure temperatures! Instead, they proved that Kew Gardens was just as much a junk site as Heathrow.

Northolt is a junk Class 5, and Teddington, another junk site, is in the middle of a walled garden.

Wales also had a new record. And guess what – Hawarden is another junk Class 4 site, where poor siting can add as much as two degrees to the temperature of the surrounding area.

As the previous record was 30.6 °C, the Met Office cannot legitimately claim a record at Hawarden:

Naturally, the Net Zero lobby was out in force with its misinformation:

As the professor should know, one day’s weather has nothing to do with climate.

Let me be clear – it was exceptionally hot yesterday, and I am not going to argue whether or not it was a record.

Such records mean nothing climatologically; they are merely used by the Met Office to generate headlines.

The real question we need to address is:
“Was yesterday’s weather unprecedented for the time of year?”

As you will see in Part II tomorrow, the answer is no.

But I’ll leave you with this from the BBC:

This tells us that the sun has been especially bright, undoubtedly the dominant factor in this week’s heat.

Read more at Not A Lot Of People Know That

Britain’s top four energy quangos have seen costs balloon and staff numbers surge by up to 380pc amid Ed Miliband’s net zero push, new figures reveal. [some emphasis, links added]

Ofgem, the Climate Change Committee, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), and Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC) have all exploded in size over the past decade as Britain races to cut climate emissions, a study from the Taxpayers Alliance (TA) found.

Among the biggest beneficiaries is the little-known LCCC, which administers the UK’s multibillion-pound annual net-zero subsidies to generators.

It has seen its headcount soar by 382pc from 49 employees to 236 staff while costs have also tripled, TA said on Tuesday.

Those costs are set to more than double by 2029 as more subsidised wind, solar, and other projects commissioned by Mr. Miliband come into operation.

Similarly, regulator Ofgem saw expenditures rise by 237pc from £77m to £260m while its headcount more than doubled from 907 staff to 2,276, making it one of the largest energy regulators in Europe.

Much of the growth in all four bodies is linked to the increasing focus on achieving net-zero targets, the growing complexity of the UK’s energy systems, and especially decarbonizing electricity.

The data covers 2015 to 2025, meaning Mr. Miliband was in charge of energy policy for only a small part of that period. However, the Labour energy secretary has dramatically stepped up the country’s net-zero push since coming to power.

John O’Connell, TA’s chief executive, said:

“Britain has developed a sprawling energy quango state with soaring staffing costs and ballooning headcounts. 

“As ministers continue pursuing net zero through arm’s length bodies, taxpayers are funding an ever-growing bureaucracy operating largely out of public view.

“The Government should rein in this quango empire-building and ensure these bodies face far greater scrutiny, transparency and accountability.”

Read rest at The Telegraph

The UK experienced a “tropical night” on Monday as the record for highest daily minimum temperature in May was broken for the second consecutive day.

Temperatures did not fall below 21.3C on Monday at Kenley airfield, in south London, after the UK recorded its hottest May day since Met Office data began, the forecaster said.

The country also recorded its provisional all-time hottest meteorological spring temperature when Kew Gardens, in south-west London, hit 34.8C on Monday. The previous all-time May peak stood at 32.8C, reached in 1922 and 1944.

The Met Office said 12 locations broke records on Monday – ranging from Suffolk to Berkshire to Warwickshire – and 97 of its monitoring sites reached or surpassed 30C.

The UK’s previous warmest May night was Sunday, when temperatures did not fall below 19.4C at Kenley airfield.

“We have provisionally broken the UK record for highest daily minimum temperature in May … again,” the forecaster said.

“Temperatures didn’t fall below 21.3C overnight at Kenley airfield, making it a ‘tropical night’ [no lower than 20C],” it added. “Remarkably, the record was also broken yesterday.”

“In the past, heatwaves built and built and built and built over days and days and days, these now just develop so quickly,” the Met Office senior forecaster Greg Dewhurst said on Monday, adding that the climate crisis was boosting the heat.

Amid the bank holiday heat, firefighters worked through Monay night to tackle a grass fire near Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh as temperatures in the city hit 25C.

Clouds of smoke were seen rising from the area around the natural landmark and local residents were advised to keep their windows and doors shut as a precaution.

On Monday, a 13-year-old boy also died after getting into difficulty in a West Yorkshire reservoir.

West Yorkshire police said the teenage boy was pulled from the water and taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

On Tuesday, highs of 35C were expected for large swathes of southern England and Wales, which could reach near 36C, a Met Office meteorologist said. Those forecasts covered the Midlands, as well as south-east and south-west England, East Anglia and south Wales.

Many places across England and Wales would reach the heatwave threshold on Tuesday, with some having experienced it for five days by Wednesday, said the Met Office meteorologist Becky Mitchell. There may be thunderstorms in the afternoon, affecting high temperatures.

Temperatures must meet or surpass a specific threshold for three consecutive days to be classed as a heatwave. For this time of year, the highest heatwave threshold in the UK is 28C, applied to London and north of the capital towards Cambridgeshire.

In eight parts of England, those conditions were already met by Sunday evening, including in Heathrow, Kew Gardens and Northolt, in London, and locations in Oxfordshire, Suffolk and Essex. The figure was anticipated to be higher after the bank holiday weather, however data was not yet available.

With nearly 100 sites having reached 30C on Monday, it “goes to show how many places would have succeeded their heatwave threshold”, said Mitchell.

Temperatures will gradually decline from midweek but will remain in the high 20s, with dry, sunny spells expected.

In Spain and France, more new highs were likely to be set on Tuesday as the heatwave continued across Europe.

The risk of unnaturally hot extremes has risen with average global temperatures, which have been pushed higher by a blanket of carbon pollution smothering Earth.

Gareth Redmond-King, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a thinktank, said: “Scientists are clear that cutting those emissions to net zero is the only way to halt climate change and limit the danger. But we also know we’ve got more extreme heat coming this year if, as expected, El Niño joins forces with climate change to break more heat records.”

He added: “The Climate Change Committee was clear last week that alongside cutting emissions to net zero, adapting to our already warmed climate is far less costly than dealing with its ever more dangerous impacts.”

BHP has continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying diesel trucks in the Pilbara despite internal documents suggesting it would increase emissions and be “misaligned” with its decarbonisation goals.

The mining giant is Australia’s biggest consumer of diesel and trucks are its biggest single source of diesel emissions. Replacing the fleet with battery-electric trucks is considered a critical step in the multinational’s efforts to decarbonise.

The company had planned to begin trialling electric trucks in Western Australia in 2024 and to begin rolling them out in 2027-28.

But an exclusive investigation based on documents leaked to the Guardian and Four Corners can reveal that, far from embracing electric trucks, BHP has continued to buy polluting diesel trucks for its Jimblebar mine. It also plans to use diesel trucks at a proposed new mine.

Public documents for Ministers North, a planned mine roughly 85km north-west of the town of Newman, show the mining giant is planning to use diesel trucks and expects they will account for most of its direct emissions at the site.

“The largest source of [direct greenhouse gas] emissions is associated with diesel consumed by heavy haulage and ancillary equipment,” the company told the Environmental Protection Authority of Western Australia last year.

The documents suggest BHP expects the mine to be operational until at least 2041.

BHP warned the EPA that technology for battery-electric trucks was not ready and that “these delays will impact the previously projected timelines for deploying battery-electric heavy mobile equipment and locomotives” across its Western Australian iron ore division.

The same approach was taken at Jimblebar, a huge iron ore mine near the town of Newman, where much of the ageing truck fleet required replacement or refurbishment between 2024 and 2027.

Internal documents show that BHP decided in 2022 that it would refurbish its Jimblebar fleet to extend its life by 60,000 hours, or about eight years.

That plan would have neatly lined up with its goals to electrify the entire fleet in the 2030s, allowing it to keep the refurbished diesel trucks going for long enough that it could replace them with battery-electric trucks when the technology was available.

“This approach also established a potential replacement window for [zero-emission material movement trucks] between FY30 and FY35,” the documents say.

The 2022 plan warned that buying a new diesel fleet in the mid-2020s, rather than refurbishing the existing ones, would mean BHP was next due to replace the trucks between 2038 and 2041. This timing would be “misaligned with BHP’s climate change strategy that targets full displacement of diesel by 2040”.

But the plan changed in 2023. Documents show BHP had achieved a “material reduction in cost” for new diesel trucks.

The company then authorised the purchase of 62 diesel haul trucks at Jimblebar at an estimated cost of more than $500m. The internal documents said this would meet a goal of “40% diesel displacement by 2040”.

The documents also said this was in line with its climate goals because it was “minimising capital investment in new diesel trucks” at Jimblebar.

BHP presented its second climate action transition plan to shareholders in 2024. It made repeated references to the planned transition to electric trucks, initially through Western Australian Iron Ore, which “will likely be our first operated asset to progressively roll-out electric haul trucks and excavators towards the end of the 2020s”. The plan was overwhelmingly endorsed at the company’s 2024 annual general meeting.

Just a year later, in its 2025 annual report, BHP flagged a dramatic slowdown in its shift away from diesel trucking, blaming “low technology readiness” among truck manufacturers.

“These delays will impact our previously projected timelines for deploying battery-electric heavy mobile equipment and locomotives at [Western Australian Iron Ore],” the report said.

In a statement to the Guardian, BHP said no Australian miner was now using 240-ton battery-electric haul trucks because “the technology is not advanced enough to scale to an operational fleet”.

“To support the acceleration of this technology, BHP is partnering with equipment producers to run trials of battery-electric equipment including two 240-ton battery electric haul trucks being trialled on a BHP site in the Pilbara, and four battery-electric locomotives which we plan to commence trialling in coming months,” a spokesperson said.

Aaron Morey, the chief executive officer of the industry group the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia, said: “There is currently no mining operation anywhere in the world with the scale, complexity and operating conditions of the Pilbara running a fully electrified haulage fleet, because the technology to do so simply does not exist.”

The company’s claim that the technology is not ready is at odds with the actions of one of its key competitors, Fortescue, which has ordered 360 battery-electric haul trucks from two suppliers – Liebherr and XCMG – and brought forward plans to fully power its mining assets in the Pilbara using wind, solar and battery.

BHP said: “Announced commitments by some companies to acquire new equipment in the future does not mean such equipment currently exists.”

Experts and environmental groups say the attempt to blame equipment manufacturers ignores BHP’s oversized role in driving investment in new technology.

Naomi Hogan, the head of engagement at the Australian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, said BHP’s approach had also left it hostage to the global fuel crisis caused by the Iran war.

“BHP and Rio Tinto can actively accelerate technology advancements through investment, procurement, and how they design and operate their assets to be electrification ready,” she said. “That includes building the renewable power needed to support electrification on remote sites and ensuring new operations are designed to accommodate low-emissions equipment.”

BHP consumed 1.23bn litres of diesel and received $622m in fuel tax credits from the federal government in the 2025 financial year, according to analysis of data from Australia’s tax credit scheme.

Tim Buckley, a director of the thinktank Climate Energy Finance, said BHP had doubled down on diesel trucks while backing a Minerals Council of Australia campaign against a proposal to limit fuel tax credit rebates to $50m a company each year.

“I think BHP is not just ignoring change, they are actively trying to undermine any change,” he said.