... on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing - A UK Socialist's blog

… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Ben Webster: The UK government is hiding crucial climate data – so I’m taking it to court
Article by Ben Webster republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
This government and the last have failed to publish key climate information. Sean Gallup / Pool / AFP via Getty Images
The British government is short-changing the public on our right to access information on the climate crisis, wildlife destruction and river pollution. That’s why I am taking it to court.
This Thursday, 15 October, my lawyers will tell London’s High Court that ministers in this government and the last have breached their legal duty by failing to publish vital environmental information under the 1998 Aarhus Convention, which aims to protect everyone’s right to live in an environment suitable for their health and wellbeing.
The UK was one of 38 initial signatories to the Aarhus Convention, described in 2000 by then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan as “the most ambitious venture in the area of environmental democracy so far undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations”.
The treaty gives all of us a legal right to access environmental information and participate in environmental decisions – and to take the government to court if it breaches those rights, which is exactly what I am now attempting to do.
The origins of the case lie in my award-winning openDemocracy investigation into how the gas industry promotes technologies such as “hydrogen-ready boilers” and “blue hydrogen”, which perpetuate the use of gas.
British Gas advisers caught making false promises about ‘green’ boilers
Exclusive: Staff wrongly tell our reporter hydrogen will replace gas and that new boilers can burn it.
I had been tipped off that on an expected strategic policy decision on the future of heating homes, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) was leaning towards the gas industry’s preferred solution of hydrogen boilers, despite an overwhelming majority of independent scientists believing they are a false solution.
I’m seeking a judicial review over ministers’ failure to release information on the climate crisis and river pollution
To find out if this was true, I asked BEIS for any reports on the potential future availability and cost of hydrogen for home heating. My request was submitted under the Environmental Information Regulations, which is underpinned by the Aarhus Convention.
The department admitted it held four reports but refused to release them to me, even after it was ordered to do so by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the watchdog that polices information laws. BEIS, and then its replacement, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), fought for two years to keep these reports secret.
In June last year, on the eve of an information tribunal hearing into the case, DESNZ released three of the four reports without explanation for its change of mind on publication.
It is still refusing to release the fourth report, which is potentially the most significant because it drew conclusions based on analysis in the other three.
The department claims the fourth report is “material in the course of completion” because ministers have yet to make up their minds what role hydrogen will play in home heating.
The absence of a strategic policy decision on hydrogen for home heating is helping the gas industry sell 1.5 million new gas boilers a year, keeping homes locked into burning gas and paying for gas pipelines for decades to come.
My frustrating experience with DESNZ made me wonder what other reports on key environmental issues are being kept hidden by public bodies. A quick search revealed that government departments and agencies frequently ignore their proactive publication duty under the Aarhus Convention.
For example, a report for the Environment Agency revealed that “forever chemicals”, known as PFAS, are contaminating up to 10,000 sites in England and cleaning them up could cost as much as £121bn. The government had no effective plan for dealing with this problem, so it sat on the report for 14 months – publishing it only after an Environmental Information Regulations request by the ENDS report, an environmental magazine.
The government also tried to hide a national security assessment on ecosystem collapse.
I sent Defra and DESNZ a series of requests to find out what they were doing to comply with their proactive publication duty.
Amazingly, neither department could produce any evidence that any official had even discussed the duty in the past two years. Neither had any policy on how it should comply with the duty.
Government lawyers responded to a pre-action letter admitting that more “awareness” of the duty was needed across government. However, they adopted a very narrow interpretation of that duty in order to claim compliance.
My legal team and I think their interpretation is wrong and are seeking permission to bring a claim for judicial review to force the government to adopt an active publication policy on vital environmental issues.
The ICO has joined the case because it believes it could establish legal clarity as the first case to reach court concerning the proper interpretation of the government’s proactive publication duty.
If we succeed, the government will be forced to be more open with what it knows about the interlinked environmental crises we face and how to solve them. Armed with that information, the public could then put more pressure on ministers to act – the whole reason that the framers of the Aarhus Convention gave us these rights to access environmental information nearly 30 years ago.
Ben Webster would be grateful for any donations to his crowdfunder to help pay the legal fees to fight this case. Help pay Ben’s legal fees
Ben Webster
Ben Webster was named Environment Journalist of the Year at the 2024 UK Press Awards for his investigations published by openDemocracy which exposed greenwashing by the gas industry.

He was Environment Editor of The Times for 11 years until 2022. His 24-year career at The Times included serving as Media Editor reporting on the Leveson Inquiry; Transport Correspondent and Night News Editor. Prior to joining The Times, he worked on the Scotsman, the Irish News and the Nottingham Evening Post.

Ben now campaigns in a voluntary capacity on sustainable transport issues and, separately, information rights.
All articles
Article by Ben Webster republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
14 October 2026
I work for a major insurer. My industry is fudging the numbers in the face of the climate crisis
Article by Industry insider republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Our refusal to confront reality could prove catastrophic for homes, communities … and the entire economy
This is the first in our Secret Source series, a regular column from industry whistleblowers.
The world is facing greater risk than ever from extreme weather. We are not prepared – and that could have profound consequences for the global financial system.
I work for a major insurer, assessing the risk posed by natural disasters on properties around the world, from family homes to schools, government offices and multibillion-dollar commercial centres.
In the face of ever more dire and unpredictable climate risks, I am coming under pressure to cut my forecasts for the losses that disasters will cause in order to make insurance more affordable – and get my employer more business. In some instances, the questioning of my numbers and models is justified. But too often it is not being done to produce more accurate predictions, but to artificially lower prices. If this is happening at my firm, which is struggling to compete with rivals’ prices, it’s happening elsewhere.
Our sector is carrying more risk than we realise. The warming global climate has caused more high-intensity storms, rising sea levels, flooding, wildfires and drought.
While the immediate impact of these events is plain to see, the long-term effects will be compounded as insurers withdraw from entire regions, leaving the economy in freefall and people’s day-to-day lives in ruins.
For example, if subsidence – which is made worse by drought – damages a number of homes in your area, insurers may exclude this from your policy. If subsidence then damages or destroys your house, you won’t be covered.
When that happens to an entire community, businesses leave, investment dries up and the local economy tanks. Now imagine that happening in towns all around the country, all at the same time. And subsidence is only one such issue, alongside wildfires, coastal erosion, wind and floods. And that’s just the UK.
As a modeller it is my job to look scientifically at the data and calculate an expected loss from a natural disaster, which in turn affects the price of the premium for a given policy. As my analysis shows higher and more volatile risk, the price rises with it and we lose customers.
Our industry says it holds modellers’ numbers as sacrosanct, but in reality we are coming under pressure to reduce our projected losses. In the most basic terms, we are collectively fudging the numbers and taking on more risk than we should for a lower price than the expected loss demands.
Sometimes I will forecast losses that would normally be seen as much too risky for us to insure but we offer the policies anyway.
This will eventually lead to a sector built on “competitively-priced” contracts that underestimate risk, leaving gaping holes in the safety net that insurance is supposed to provide.
I have respect for underwriters who are just doing their jobs, and I know that no single individual is responsible. My concern lies with the attitude of the industry as a whole towards modellers, actuaries and researchers: there is a sense that we are an inconvenience to the deal-making process rather than an essential part of risk management. We are the failsafe that stops our industry from reckless gambling.
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At the largest scale, misquoted insurance can damage insurers, companies, their employees and entire communities. The upshot is that our customers are likely much more exposed to climate-related risks than they realise. People are not budgeting for a major increase in their insurance premiums or planning for their homes becoming uninsurable, but many of them absolutely should be.
If the worst happens, the insurance industry may not have the money to pay every claim when a major disaster hits. That would have profound consequences for the economy as a whole – businesses could go bankrupt, the housing market will seize up. If people can’t pay their mortgages, banks could collapse.
As natural catastrophes continue to become less predictable and more severe, the foundations of our entire economy will only become more fragile. Our customers deserve to know.
Article by Anonymous republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
14 October 2026
‘Malicious Use’ of AI, Nuclear War Pose Extinction Threat to Humanity This Century: Lancet Study
Article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Protesters gather outside an OpenAI developers conference at Fort Mason on September 29, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
“Although the likelihood of both dangers remains low, the scale of harm, should they be realized, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity.”
A comprehensive new assessment of worldwide health threats published in The Lancet concludes that nuclear war and “malicious use” of artificial intelligence pose existential risks to humanity over the remainder of the 21st century, a finding that comes amid mounting global concern about the implications of rapid AI advancements.
The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health, comprised of dozens of experts across a range of fields, identifies 17 leading threats to human health and society, from the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency and pandemics to childhood malnutrition, income inequality, conventional war, and air pollution. Two of the threats carry “extinction potential” this century, according to the commission: nuclear conflict and misuse of AI.
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“Although the likelihood of both dangers remains low, the scale of harm, should they be realized, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity,” The Lancet warned in an editorial accompanying the new analysis, which was presented Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany.
The commission notes that AI’s “potential to advance health and wellbeing is enormous,” but “the risk of catastrophic harm is equally profound.” The authors of the analysis point to several ways in which AI could be “used maliciously,” including the design of bioweapons, autonomous nukes, and invasive ransomware targeting global healthcare and financial institutions.
“The final pathway is loss of control through the emergence of agentic, unaligned artificial general intelligence,” the analysis states. “This loss of control includes AI systems creating subgoals that lead to the seeking of human disempowerment or elimination, particularly if such agents autonomously gain access to financial networks, key infrastructure, or physical tools in the real world.”
Regarding the existential threat of nuclear conflict, the study authors note that a famine stemming from atomic warfare “would affect all regions of the world, including those far from the conflict itself, through reduced caloric availability and cascading food-system failures.”
“The devastation that could result from nuclear war cannot be overstated,” the analysis argues. “The risk is not hypothetical: We found that between 1948 and 2010, 22 nuclear weapon accidents and 21 close calls were recorded. Future nuclear conflicts could occur due to multiple distinct mechanisms, including nuclear exchange arising from international crises between nuclear powers, accidental detonation of nuclear warheads, terrorist use of nuclear devices, and AI deployment of nuclear weapons.”
To avert the most catastrophic possible outcomes and mitigate other threats, the commission calls for “collective action between nations and within nations,” emphasizing that risks posed by AI, nuclear war, the climate crisis, and future pandemics “cannot be solved by governments or other actors acting for their own national populations alone.”
Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and co-chair of the new commission, said in a statement that “the striking finding is not only the scale of these threats, but that humanity still has the agency to act.”
“Across all 17 catastrophic threats, the decisions made by leaders today will shape the health and wellbeing of the next generation,” said Murray. “But delaying action will only serve to shift and increase the costs into the future.”
Article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
dizzy: I’m surprised that ongoing climate destruction does not meet the measure of carrying “extinction potential” this century. I certainly believe that it does around 2060.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
14 October 2026
14 October 2026
Revealed: The British man who fought for Israel in Gaza
https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-the-british-man-who-fought-for-israel-in-gaza/
Jonathan Burman stands in front of a burning school in Gaza. (Photo: Obtained by Declassified UK)
[Declassified UK] Exclusive: Jonathan Burman was photographed in front of a burning school which was attacked by Israeli troops
A British man fought for the Israeli army in Gaza when war crimes appear to have been committed, a four-month investigation by Declassified has found.
Jonathan Burman, who is in his mid-20s and from Manchester, posted photographs on his Instagram account showing him fighting in Khan Younis early in the conflict.
Newly discovered images show Burman standing in front of a primary school in Gaza that had been set on fire, as a fellow soldier smiles beside him.
They were posted on his private Instagram account in January 2024, six weeks after the Israeli army violently occupied the school.
The photographs were shared exclusively with Declassified by a source seriously concerned by Burman’s behaviour.
Watch our investigation on YouTube

Article continues at https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-the-british-man-who-fought-for-israel-in-gaza/
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.
Ed Miliband says that he and the Labour Party are full of shit criminalising people holding signs as terrorists despite anything he says.

Andy Burnham stands with Israel
14 October 2026