From record-smashing temperatures, wildfires, hosepipe bans and thousands of premature deaths, the climate crisis has left its mark across the summer of 2026. Tackling the root cause – the burning of fossil fuels – and ending the crisis will take years. So will fixing the UK government’s calamitous failure to protect lives and livelihoods against the long-predicted affects of global heating.
But the climate emergency is right here, right now, and here are 10 policies that Andy Burnham’s government should consider announcing urgently. This would be a vital and confidence-boosting sign that the UK is committed to putting a rocket-booster under the clean, green and very fast-growing economy of the 21st century, not the fossil-fuelled one of the last. It would also give diplomatic weight to the UK as it works internationally to cut emissions and end the climate crisis.
The supposed benefits of approving the North Sea oil and gasfields are mostly fantasy. They will have no impact on UK energy prices – oil and gas are commodities whose price is set by international markets. As the UK Energy Research Council says: “Assertions that drilling the North Sea will provide energy resilience and affordability in the face of current fuel price shocks are a delusion.” As for jobs, the licences would support very few – again, unlike the growing green economy.
Some also argue North Sea production is less carbon intensive than imports, but that ignores the far cleaner record of our main gas importer, Norway, as well as the methane emissions from LNG, and in any case the differences are small compared with CO2 savings of using renewable energy and storage instead of gas. When people say money is tight, remember the eight biggest oil companies made a staggering $93bn in the three months to the end of June – almost double their profits from the same period last year. At the same time, carbon emissions from the oil and gas these companies produce are driving the escalating climate crisis, and bills for ordinary consumers continue to rise.
An increased windfall tax on these excess profits could raise huge sums for government coffers and help pay for emergency adaptation measures. The UK is predicted to face a shortfall of 5bn litres of water a day – that’s 2,000 Olympic-sized pools of water – by 2055. Grey water recycling or reuse captures water from sinks, showers, baths, washing machines and other “wash water” sources – not toilets – for use in homes.
Rainwater capture is another way to make homes more water efficient and reduce the demand for drinking water. Grey water is not safe to drink but reusing it for other activities, such as toilet flushing, can reduce an individual’s water consumption by 50%. In some water-stressed areas, developers must demonstrate no net increase in water use.
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