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Tuesday briefing: To drill or not to drill – Burnham’s first big climate test

11 August 2026 at 06:46

In today’s newsletter: As we enter our fifth summer heatwave, Andy Burnham’s government is looking at what the UK should do with its remaining North Sea oil and gas

Good morning. What a difference a new job can make. “To have a shot at staying within 1.5C global warming, we can’t have any new oil or gasfields … It’s irresponsible and shortsighted to be funding new #fossilfuels when we need to be getting to #NetZero.”

This was the 2022 message from Miatta Fahnbulleh, now the secretary of state for energy security and net zero. It’s a testament to her remarkable rise that Fahnbulleh wasn’t even an MP when she posted it four years ago. Today, she is in the cabinet, facing (or is the face of, at least) one of the most challenging, and potentially controversial questions looming for the new government: to drill or not to drill, baby?

Two sites are the focus of fierce debate. Yesterday, a public consultation on whether to greenlight extraction at one of them – Jackdaw – closed. Next Monday, it’ll be the same for the other, Rosebank. Andy Burnham has been silent about the climate crisis since taking office. As we enter yet another heatwave, what his government does next will be a defining signal of intent on the issue.

Colombia | More than 100 people have died after a powerful earthquake struck western Colombia, collapsing and severely damaging scores of buildings in major cities including Cali and Pereira.

UK weather | Almost three-quarters of England is now in drought, with four more regions officially declared, and as much of Europe braces for its fifth climate crisis-driven heatwave this summer.

Crime | Police are investigating whether Joshua Kerry, the man charged with the murder of the former Reform UK and Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe, had any role in an attempted burglary last year at the then London home of Nigel Farage.

China | More than a million people were moved to safety across eastern China by Sunday evening as powerful Typhoon Dolphin made landfall amid fears torrential rain would cause flooding and landslides.

Ukraine | Russia has banned voting against the war in September’s elections, after the supreme court upheld a suit brought by a small pro-Kremlin nationalist party, and stripped voters of their last option on the ballot: Yabloko, the country’s only remaining anti-war party.

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© Photograph: Martin Langer/Alamy

© Photograph: Martin Langer/Alamy

© Photograph: Martin Langer/Alamy

Shell’s profits more than double after jump in oil and gas prices

Environmentalists renew calls for windfall tax to support households after Q2 earnings rise to almost $10bn

Shell has posted its second highest quarterly earnings on record as the energy market surge caused by the Middle East crisis helped to double its net profit to almost $10bn in the three months to June.

Europe’s biggest oil and gas company reported a quarterly profit of $9.8bn (£7.4bn), more than double the figure for the second quarter last year and the highest since its record-high earnings in the months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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© Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

© Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

© Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

Ars Asks: Share your shell and show us your tricked-out terminals!

I spend more time today than ever before interacting with terminal windows, which is something I don't think Past Me would have believed in the early '90s. Back then, poor MS-DOS was the staid whipping boy of the industry, and at least on the consumer side, graphical environments like Windows (and maybe even odder creatures like AmigaOS) seemed poised to stamp the command line into oblivion, leaving text interfaces behind as we all blasted into the ooey-GUI future.

As it turns out, though, the command line is still the best tool for some jobs—many jobs, in fact. I read a wise post some years ago (probably on Slashdot) arguing that a mouse-driven point-and-click interface essentially reduces the user to pointing at something on the screen and grunting, "DO! DO THAT!" at the computer. (The rise of right-click context menus adds the ability for the user to also grunt "MORE THINGS!" but doesn't otherwise add vocabulary.)

The command line, by contrast, gives the user the opportunity to precisely tell the computer what they want done, using words instead of one or two gestalts that the computer must interpret based on context.

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