World on Fire
2 years, 11 months, 20 days, 20 hours
1 August 2026
How can our leaders not see the seriousness of the situation in the land that is burning in front of our eyes?
‘There is a resource there. When people are struggling, we can’t ignore that.’
So says the UK’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, as he continues to hint at approval of allowing more drilling in the Rosebank oilfield and the Jackdaw gasfield, both in the North Sea, as a ‘pragmatic approach’.
Donald Trump, of course approves: ‘He said he’s going to open up North Sea oil. If he does that, you’re going to be a wealthy country’, said the US President, 2 weeks after blaming Canada for wildfire smoke over the northern US.
That the US President is blind to the causes of the climate change he denies, is no surprise. But for the UK Prime Minister to be seduced by the idea that drilling more oil and gas is a good way to relieve fuel poverty is, sadly, a comparable level of short-termist stupidity.
The idea of approving more drilling is all the more breathtaking for its timing. As temperatures across much of Europe have exceeded 35 degrees, the last two weeks have seen a state of national emergency declared in Spain, as wildfires near Madrid burned 77,000 hectares and led to the evacuation of nearly 70,000 people. In France, at least 200,000 were evacuated from the Cap Ferret peninsula, and the suburbs of Bordeaux. In the UK the National Trust and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are lamenting the loss of one of the UK’s rarest areas of heathland, last week, to fire.
It was 2021 when the International Energy Agency declared that if the world was to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050, there must be no new development of oil and gas fields.
How can our leaders not see the seriousness of the situation in the land that is burning in front of our eyes?
What planet are they on? I wish it was anywhere but our beautiful earth.
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PS, it is more than 4 years since I began writing this series, and this blog is number 100 to be published on Linked-In (out of nearly 200 in total, all of which will eventually be on my website). It is also, coincidentally, the first in the countdown to start ‘2 Years’, which means there is now less than 3 years remaining until the world’s temperature crosses 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
In those 4 years a lot of progress has been made. But nothing like fast enough.