My second daughter turns 100 days old this week. For 25 of those days the temperature has exceeded 30°C somewhere in Britain. She has spent a quarter of her life experiencing a heat that, in the past, it would only have been possible to feel if her parents were prepared to negotiate an airport and short-haul flight. In London, where we live, only seven days have been colder than 15°C. This is not normal. Wildfires are raging across our continent: as I write, a fire the size of the Isle of Wight is burning outside Bordeaux and hundreds of thousands of people are being evacuated. Strategic military aircraft are water bombing for the first time in their operational history. The ground is burning in North Wales. This. Is. Not. Normal.
But then again, it is now. “What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly consider as normal,” the lead author of the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate report, Mike Kendon, said on its publication on 14 July. It’s a good time to own a swimming pool or a vineyard in Kent, where the great Champagne houses are quietly buying up all they can. Perhaps it’s also a good time to own a hotel in Cornwall or Suffolk, if our love affair with the Mediterranean begins to wilt in the heat of Europe’s summer furnace. And yet, let’s be serious for a second: none of this is actually good. It’s not a good time to be a farmer or a firefighter or, more to the point, anyone forced to live and work in the blistering temperatures now common across much of the world beyond our shores, many of whom will – increasingly – look for ways to escape to cooler climes.
The world is on fire and I consider that an extreme state of affairs. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, who seems to be one of the few who get it, declared at the end of July: “The entire Iberian Peninsula is suffering the effects of the climate emergency in a very specific way.” And yet, those of us who continue to shout are the ones labelled climate extremists. Personally, I consider anyone who wishes to perpetuate this situation an extremist too.
It’s a conclusion I reached after wondering how best to categorise Reform UK and its party members. Far right? I’m not so sure that label works. My worry is that the misapplication of the language cheapens its meaning and the horrors of 20th-century fascism. I spoke about this taxonomy of the right, among other things, with the conservative Iain Dale on the most recent episode of The Exchange. But how else to describe a policy platform that advocates for the militarised mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from Britain and for more – not less – fossil fuel use, including fracking? What should we call a plan that wants to make everything around us less liveable, if not extreme?
In detail, Reform doesn’t just support ending green subsidies but increasing taxes on renewables, as well as the immediate expansion of North Sea oil and gas extraction, and “scrapping net zero”, the UK’s legally binding target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They believe in the existence of something called “clean coal”. Maybe they know something we don’t, in which case they should really share it with the climate scientists who, according to some journals, have reached a 100 per cent consensus that humans are responsible for global warming. In other news, 67 per cent of donations received by Reform UK, totalling £24m, came from fossil fuel interests, as the climate news outlet DeSmog reported in April.
It’s slop, like so much of the party’s agenda. Yes, the lesson of the Strait of Hormuz’s closure is that we should become more reliant on a finite resource whose global supply is controlled by an alliance of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and a nexus of Middle Eastern autocrats.
I don’t dispute the economic benefit of new North Sea licences in the short term. But extend the time horizon and neither the maths nor the morals make much sense. As Elon Musk pointed out in an interview with the Economist magazine a couple of weeks ago, China today produces more electricity than the US and Europe combined, an ever-growing proportion of which comes from renewable sources it controls. China has made its bet on the future – to lead the world’s “electro-states” in opposition to the old “petro-states” led by Trump and his cronies. Do we really want to side with the US in this coming battle?
Morally, too, maintaining our dependence on fossil fuels seems remarkably short-sighted. Will nominal GDP really count for much in a continent beset by wildfires, water wars and increasing numbers of climate refugees? We are at a turning point. The International Energy Agency has warned that new licences and extraction are incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C. Have we really just given up the fight to stop this climate disaster?
Luckily, different politics are available. In April this year, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas globally for the first time. In 2025, all growth in global electricity demand was met by clean power. A future in which an abundanceof renewables causes a collapse in energy prices is within reach. It’s starting to happen in Spain already. Wouldn’t it be nice for your heating and electricity to cost £10 a month and for Europe not to turn into a furnace every year? It’s an alternate world. I think my daughter would prefer to live there.
[Further reading: The responsibility of scientists]
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This article appears in the 29 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new terror
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Subscribe here to commentThis is hopelessly simplistic.
Yes I’m against more fossil fuel burning. Yes I want it phased out as quickly as possible. Emotionally I’m against more drilling.
But at present we can only smelt the silicon we need to make the stuff that will let us do it by using fossil fuel – for its chemical reaction not just for its energy. Lithium batteries include an electrode made by refining oil. And there’s plenty more if you start going seriously into how our world works and what we need to do to change it.
So it’s not just about the illusion of reducing energy bills: more North Sea drilling won’t. It’s too slow to have any immediate effect even it you nationalised it, and the potential volume is not huge. But there is a question of security of supply, not least for the fossil fuels we need to use to get us off fossil fuels. Surely we can see by now how globalisation enables supplier countries to hold the rest of world to ransom.
I would have to look into the whole picture in detail in order to decide what to do. I hope I would be able to decide to say a clear “no” to more drilling. It may well be that it just wouldn’t make a useful difference. But I’m open to the possibility it might and I would have to do the research before making up my mind.
I’m a new subscriber to the New Statesman, but if this article represents its view on the many problems facing us in Britain today then cancellation of my subscription is nigh. I was hoping that the journal would offer well researched and thoughtful views on serious issues, but that seems not to be the case. For the Digital Editor to make a world crisis out of a temporary problem smacks of seeking circulation not education.
The point is that you also get to hear what the loony left thinks for free, given that you buy it for the rest of the paper… but yes the editors should demand higher standards even for this lot
It’s great that we get to see what the Corbyno-Greens think – but it’s disingenuous to talk of China’s electricity consumption without pointing out that 49.7% of it comes from burning coal (!) and another 3-7% from other fossil fuels.
The case for UK drilling is that we need and will use the oil and gas anyway and it is costly signalling to buy from others what we can produce ourselves (and earn from too via mutliple tax sources).
The limited amount of oil that could be found in the north sea basin will be sold on to the world market at the highest price, UNLESS this Goverment nationalizes the production or pays billions to the production companies to give the oil to the UK at lower than world prices. Yes China still uses masses of coal but it working at massive speed on renewables-far faster than Europe.