Industry insiders say it will be ‘tricky’ to find suitable candidate who would agree to location and civil service pay
Britain’s state-owned energy company faces a “challenging” task to find a chief executive for its Aberdeen HQ when it begins recruiting this month, senior industry sources have said.
Great British Energy is poised to begin the hunt, but sources claim there are still no obvious frontrunners for the top job almost six months after the £8.3bn publicly owned clean energy company was formed.
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02/09/2025 - 11:00
02/09/2025 - 10:00
Elementary schoolers in the San Francisco Bay Area are embarking on tasting journeys of fruits and vegetables
On a crisp winter morning in San Francisco, a team of six-year-olds declare that their favorite fruits and vegetables are peaches and broccoli – but then again, they have yet to venture out into the farmers’ market where produce they have never tried before awaits them. With handfuls of tokens, they will purchase persimmons, pomegranates, Asian pears, purple potatoes, kale and more from the farmers who grew them – then embark on a tasting journey, featuring new and familiar spices.
The first-graders are visiting the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market – a Bay Area institution that draws more than 100 farmers to San Francisco’s waterfront three days a week – with 22 of their classmates from Lincoln elementary. That morning, the children had ridden the subway from their school in Oakland’s Chinatown into the city with parent chaperones and their teacher, Kitty Chen.
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02/09/2025 - 08:08
Exclusive: Health experts and cancer charities say findings should serve as wake-up call to ministers
More than 1,100 people a year in the UK are developing the most prevalent form of lung cancer as a result of air pollution, the Guardian can reveal.
Exposure to toxic air was attributed to 515 men and 590 women in the UK in 2022 getting adenocarcinoma – now the most dominant of the four main subtypes of lung cancer – an analysis by the World Health Organization’s cancer agency found.
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02/09/2025 - 05:00
There’s no point trying to make plans around the whims of Trump. The PM instead needs to turn to Europe
To Elon Musk, I say this! To perform one Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, might be considered a misfortune. To perform two Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, begins to look like carelessness.
I didn’t write that joke. I have cannibalised it from one by the gay Irish Victorian Oscar Wilde, a typical diversity hire who would have achieved nothing had his work not been promoted by the famously woke 19th-century British establishment. Luckily, Wilde was dead long before he had the opportunity to emigrate to the US and take an air traffic controller job from a more deserving straight white male, where his gayness would have caused planes to crash.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
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02/09/2025 - 04:00
Heading off the environmental crisis and growing the economy are not at odds. They are two sides of a coin – as our politicians should realise
If you care about the world we are handing on to future generations, the news on Thursday morning was dramatic. This January was the warmest on record; temperatures in 18 of the past 19 months have exceeded pre-industrial averages by 1.5C. There can be no comfort that the epoch-changing climate crisis is 20 or even 10 years away. It is already upon us.
Temperatures should have been moderated this winter by cooler air over the Pacific; it did not happen. Scientists are bewildered and scared. James Hansen, doyen of climate crisis research, believes that, unless this pace of deterioration is reversed, warm ocean waters flowing from the southern to the northern hemisphere will be trapped as vast sea currents cease. Sea levels will rise to impose a civilisational threat. It is a global imperative to dial down the rate of carbon emissions.
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02/09/2025 - 02:00
Keir Starmer’s rhetoric against green campaigners appears to have taken a playground turn
Before the last election, in what was billed as his “most personal interview yet”, Keir Starmer said: “I’m not in the habit of bandying insults around”. It was once part of his appeal, or meant to be, that his speech was polite, even to the point of colourless, in contrast to the ugly gibberish streaming out of Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss. When the Tories went low, Starmer went sorrowful headteacher. “I don’t think Boris Johnson is a bad man,” he said in one speech, “I think he is a trivial man.”
His favourite word, these days, is “nimbys”. Starmer uses it so freely he’s personally breathed new life into the original acronym (“not in my back yard”), revealing along the way its largely unexplored potential to create national disharmony. Why restrict such a genius jibe to arguments about ring roads and executive homes? Last week’s headlines about his plan for nuclear power expansion – typically, “Starmer to ‘push past nimbyism’ in pledge to expand nuclear power sites” – are only the latest in which Starmer demonstrates how any opposition to any scheme with environmental consequences can be represented, by a skilled litigator like himself, as nimbyism: purely selfish, irrational and against the common good. Unlike the visionary tech overlords such as Google, Meta and Amazon, which Starmer invited, in the same speech, to profit, with their data centres, from the UK nimbys’ certain defeat. His government’s pro-nuclear press release featured praise from similarly patriotic, non-nimby-infested corporations, such as EDF and Microsoft.
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02/09/2025 - 02:00
Leading climate group warns of damage to green agenda if giant project goes ahead
Keir Starmer will do huge damage to the global fight against climate change if he gives in to political pressure and allows the development of a giant new oilfield in the North Sea, according to an analysis by the country’s leading environmental institute.
Chaired by Nicholas Stern, the Grantham Institute on Climate Change will fire a warning shot to ministers not to give the green light to the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, after suggestions that the Treasury is now in favour of allowing drilling to maximise economic growth.
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02/08/2025 - 21:44
David Crisafulli says infrastructure to be replaced after floods needs ‘greater ability’ to withstand natural disasters
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Queensland’s premier has vowed to rebuild “more resilient” infrastructure after devastating floods in the state’s north, as Queenslanders were warned not to panic-buy while they are cut off.
David Crisafulli said his government was here “for the long haul” of recovery, in an update on the state’s flooding on Sunday.
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02/08/2025 - 18:00
Sometimes a branch grows so low and bushy that it blocks access to my room. I diligently cut it back
More summer essentials
In the late 1970s when my parents built the house I still live in, there was no forest. The property was a disused cow pasture, full of scrappy grass and weeds. My parents began planting trees before they began the house build, and now – in my lifespan, 47 years – it has grown into a forest. When I was a child we called my parent’s plantings “the garden”, implying a place managed by us. Cultivated, civilised. Somewhere along the way we renamed it “the forest”. A self-managed ecosystem we occasionally impinged upon – cutting back, cleaning up debris – but only when it made incursions into our actual house.
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02/08/2025 - 14:00
The party’s agenda is about energy security, lower bills, economic growth and good jobs
Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and secretary of state for energy security and net zero
During four years in opposition and in the seven months since this government came to office, we have been clear: smart climate policy means not only protecting future generations from the biggest existential threat we face, but fighting to make working people better off today, growing our economy and confronting the economic injustices we face.
In a world where climate policy is being questioned, this government’s message to those in the Tory and Reform parties who say that we should go backwards on climate is simple: you are wrong, and this government is going to speed up, not slow down, the clean energy transition, because that is how to grow our economy and fight for working people through our Plan for Change.
Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and secretary of state for energy security and net zero
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