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Jul 6, 2026
The UK’s Labour Party seems afraid to talk about the climate emergency.
“To cover up 1 high level report…looks odd,” remarked Caroline Lucas, the former leader of the UK’s Green Party. “To cover up 2 looks like a pattern.” Lucas was commenting on reporting in The Guardian revealing that the Labour party was again burying an explosive report by UK military and intelligence leaders warning that the global collapse of ecosystems poses grave threats to the UK’s security and food supply within as little as five years.
The UK “has no future” if it cannot “restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air,” said Chris Hinchliff, who is among the members of Parliament pressing the government to release the full report, rather than a shorter, redacted version. Even that version, which was obtained by The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey, “paints a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation,” Harvey wrote.
Meanwhile, massive wildfires in France and Spain have been forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate, and prompting countermeasures from governments. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the fires were the effects of the “climate emergency.” For the second year in a row, the prime minister responded to ferocious wildfires by calling on political parties across the ideological spectrum “to reach an agreement, a State pact, [and] to address the climate emergency.”
As if to validate the UK spy chiefs’ report in real time, food production in Europe is already suffering from the extreme heat of recent weeks, which has been “sucking soils dry.” France’s maize harvest is the lowest in 50 years; across Europe, 9 million tons of grain have been lost. Such losses are of particular concern for the UK, which imports much of its food.
The UK report is notable for highlighting not only climate change but the related problem of biodiversity loss and collapsing ecosystems. For example, scientists have warned that continued logging and high temperatures are pushing the Amazon rainforest toward an irreversible shift into a savannah. That would drive further climate chaos as the Amazon transforms from an absorber into an emitter of carbon.
Aides to former Labour prime minister Keir Starmer twice quashed plans to release the UK report, Harvey reported, allegedly for fear that the climate-denying Reform UK Party would attack Labour for putting climate concerns ahead of the cost of living. Climate denial persists in the UK media as well: Even as wildfires scorched Europe, the front page of the Rupert Murdoch–owned Times of London featured a rant against the net-zero emissions goal that scientists say is essential to preserving a livable planet. And across Europe, most news outlets are not reporting that climate change is driving these fires and heatwaves, even as they illustrate their stories with “fun in the sun” images of people at the beach. “The pictures do not convey the severity of the moment Europe finds itself in,” observed Al Jazeera English.
Andy Burnham, who replaced Starmer as prime minister on July 20, has yet to speak publicly about the buried report or climate change in general. He has said, however, that he remains open to approving increased drilling for oil and gas of Britain’s coast in the North Sea. This, even as the smoke from wildfires in France and Spain—and in Scotland in the UK—is estimated to cause “well over 100,000 excess deaths globally,” according to Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London.
Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project spotlights the reality that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger climate action. In this summer of smoke and fire, the public is waiting for their politicians and their press to respond. “Voters are much more tuned into this than most of our [elected] representatives are,” author George Monbiot said on the UK’s Channel 4. “And indeed than most of the media is.”
As the world gets hotter, playing sports in the heat gets more dangerous. Telemundo is the only publication that got this right.
These destructive behemoths are part of a broader model of total extraction—particularly in rural areas.
Interviews across this crucial swing state offer lessons for Democrats hoping to flip the House.
High cost of living and political turmoil are forcing climate change to the back burner, exposing a massive voter turnout problem for the environmental movement.
Hundreds of outlets across the country have joined the “I am the 89%” campaign.
A historically hot summer is revealing a society massively unprepared for the new climate reality.
A protester holds a placard during a vigil for Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was killed by an ICE agent on July 13, 2026 in Biddeford, Maine. Ryan Murphy/Getty
A suite of new laws restricting cooperation between Maine law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security agents is set to take effect today, less than three weeks after an ICE agent shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. These “ICE Out laws,” as they’re collectively known, will limit collaboration between state and local police and federal agents, and forbid landlords, hospitals, and schools from sharing personal information with ICE.
“What we saw in Biddeford was not an aberration,” said Zach Heiden of the ACLU of Maine at a press conference Tuesday. “It was the result of intentional changes at ICE that have unleashed thousands of masked and menacing agents on communities across the country.”
The new laws, Heiden explained, are meant to reshape the relationship between those agents and local institutions such as elementary schools, libraries and the DMV. “These new laws will affect hundreds of entities, including 253 school districts, 107 police departments, and 17 housing authorities,” Heiden said.
Since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, a dozen states have passed similar laws. These are outgrowths of the “sanctuary city” and “sanctuary state” laws of the first Trump term, which generally limited local police partnerships with ICE. Those policies, according to a landmark Stanford study released in 2020, did effectively reduce deportations—and, contradicting right-wing narratives about immigration, did not lead to an increase in crime rates. But laws like Maine’s go further, extending these non-cooperation agreements beyond police.
“That includes not just police departments and sheriff’s offices, but also state agencies responsible for enforcing labor law, environmental law, housing law, or any other state or local law,” said Michael Kebede of the ACLU of Maine at Tuesday’s press conference. The goal is to “make sure local resources are not used to support the deportation machine.”
Data from the Migration Policy Institute shows that the number of state-level laws relating to immigration surged in the first year of Trump’s second term. A total of 106 immigration-related laws were enacted in 2024—which more than doubled to 213 in 2025. Meanwhile, tracking by the National Immigration Law Center indicates that at least 12 states have passed laws this year restricting ICE’s operations within their borders. But at least eight states have passed laws mandating local agency cooperation with ICE, instead. These states now require participation in 287(g) deputization programs, and some have outlawed local sanctuary policies.
Maine advocates hope that new “ICE Out” policies—signed into law months before Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s death, but only now coming into effect weeks after he was killed—will help prevent further violence.
“Every day, we hear from families who are afraid to participate in ordinary life, workers who are afraid to speak up, parents who are afraid to take their children outside, send them to school, or seek medical care,” said Ruben Torres of the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition.
“We see businesses lose employees, communities lose opportunities, and all of us lose something when fear becomes a part of everyday life.” Because ICE is a federal agency, Maine cannot fully bar it from operating in the state—but there are some things states can do to restrict the agency’s movement. ICE Out laws, Torres said, “offer a different path.”
