A thinktank with close ties to Saudi Arabia and substantial funding from a Donald Trump ally needs to present a particularly robust analysis to earn the right to be listened to on the climate crisis. On that measure, Tony Blair’s latest report fails on almost every point.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) received money from the Saudi government, has advised the United Arab Emirates petrostate, and counts as a main donor Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, friend of Trump and advocate of AI.

The latest TBI report calls for an expansion of oil and gas production in the North Sea, despite the additional greenhouse gas emissions this would generate, and abandoning the UK government’s target to largely decarbonise the electricity sector by 2030, arguing that doing so is necessary to power AI datacentres.

The report claims renewable energy is too expensive. Yet this overlooks the fact that it is significantly cheaper than building the gas-fired power stations that would be needed instead.

New onshore wind has been agreed at a price of £72/MWh and new solar at £65MWh – both less than half the £147/MWh cost of building and operating new gas power stations. New offshore wind, at £91/MWh, is about 40% cheaper than new gas.

According to the analyst firm Aurora Energy Research, offshore wind priced below £94/MWh lowers consumer bills. By contrast, nuclear power – on which the TBI is keen – is likely to cost more than £133/MWh and would take many more years to build.

The report also cavils at the cost of electricity grid upgrades needed to support renewable energy, without acknowledging that grid improvements will be required in any scenario. It also ignores the conclusion of the network system operators, NESO, that a clean power system for the UK by 2030 is achievable “without increasing costs to consumers”.

Draining the last drops of oil and gas from the North Sea lies at the heart of the TBI advice, projecting a £165bn industry as a result. Yet the North Sea is a rapidly declining basin where the remaining reserves are increasingly expensive to extract. Accordingly, says the TBI, oil and gas companies should receive substantial tax cuts.

Since 2020, the energy industry has made £125bn in profits in the UK, with oil and gas companies enjoying windfalls while vulnerable people struggled to heat their homes. Shell made $40bn in 2022 alone, BP $30bn the same year. Although profits have come down from their peaks, persistently high gas prices are keeping fossil fuel companies buoyant.

Simon Francis, a coordinator at the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said: “To call for the windfall tax to be scrapped, while energy giants post extraordinary profits and millions live in cold damp homes is staggering.

“That tax exists because companies benefited from a crisis that devastated household finances. Removing the windfall tax would reward profiteering and shift the burden back on to households that are still paying the price of Britain’s overreliance on gas.”

Numerous analyses have shown that further North Sea production would make little difference to the UK’s energy security and would not reduce energy bills.

Bob Ward, a policy director of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said: “More North Sea production would have no significant impact on the wholesale price of electricity and would not reduce prices for British households and businesses.”

Gas is traded on international markets, which determine the price. Even if the North Sea were drilled to exhaustion, the UK is likely to be reliant on imports for at least two-thirds of its gas within five years, and potentially all of it by 2050.

Mike Childs, the head of science at Friends of the Earth, said: “If we’re to bring down bills for good and protect people from future gas price volatility, then we must accelerate the development of renewable energy.”

The report’s claim that renewable energy will be costly – despite price falls of 50-90% in recent years – also overlooks the fact that wind energy cut wholesale prices of electricity by about a third last year, with further reductions likely as new offshore windfarms come online.

Shaun Spiers, the executive director of the Green Alliance thinktank, said: “We don’t need to rethink a clean power plan that’s working – the UK generated record-breaking amounts of renewable energy last year.”

Consumers have yet to feel the full benefit, largely because the structure of the UK’s privatised energy market means electricity prices remain mostly dependent on the price of gas. The TBI report, Spiers added, “gives few suggestions for how to do this”.

Although TBI maintains that the UK’s target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 should remain, it does not explain how slowing the rollout of renewables is compatible with that goal.

What matters to the climate is not emissions in 2050 but the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Maintaining fossil fuel production, as TBI advocates, might still allow net zero to be reached by mid-century, but would result in higher emissions in the interim, undermining the purpose of the target.

According to Angharad Hopkinson, a political campaigner for Greenpeace UK: “The assertion that abandoning strategies to reduce emissions will somehow reduce emissions, and choosing more expensive energy will somehow reduce costs, is ludicrous.”

Elsewhere in the report, the TBI rehashes the argument that the UK is responsible for just 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, implying that the actions of larger emitters such as China will make more of an impact.

While technically accurate, this fails to acknowledge that roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that each account for about 1% of emissions. If all of them abandoned net zero efforts, global temperatures would rise far beyond the 1.5C limit of safe heating.

More than a dozen food companies have urged the European Commission not to ban the use of words such as “sausage” and “burger” for non-meat products.

Companies including Linda McCarney Foods, Quorn and THIS have signed a joint letter calling on commissioners to “let common sense prevail” ahead of a debate on the proposed ban, which they say would cause “unnecessary confusion” for customers “without helping anyone”.

A ban would mean, for example, bean burgers sold in Europe having to be relabelled as “patties” or “discs”, while the Welsh breakfast staple Glamorgan sausages – made of cheese and leeks – would probably become Glamorgan “tubes”.

The letter, organised by the Vegetarian Society and sent to representatives of the European Commission, the European parliament and the Council of the European Union, follows a similar plea from Paul McCarney and eight MPs in December, in which the musician said labelling vegetarian sausages as such “should be enough for sensible people to understand what they are eating”.

The supermarkets Aldi and Lidl, which are headquartered in Germany, the biggest market for plant-based products in Europe, also oppose the proposed ban.

Paul Garner, the commerce area leader at Suma Wholefoods, one of the longerstanding producers of plant-based foods, said: “We’ve been championing vegetarian and plant-based food since 1977 and we’ve seen so much innovation – and the inevitable pushback that follows.

“Here’s the thing: consumers are smart! They don’t need labels policing words like ‘burger’ or ‘sausage’ to know what they’re buying. Clear ingredient lists and a bit of common sense are enough. Banning familiar terms just makes life harder for shoppers and smaller producers, without helping anyone.”

The chief executive of Quorn Foods, David Flochel, said it was “regrettable that energy continues to be spent revisiting an issue that consumers settled long ago”.

He said: “In 40 years, not once has a customer told us they bought a Quorn product believing it to be meat. While we fully support rules that prevent misleading claims, we are concerned that these new restrictions risk creating unnecessary confusion and regulatory burden for both manufacturers and consumers.

“We call on the European Commission, parliament and council to let common sense prevail and to focus on policies that support innovation and accelerate the shift toward environmentally sustainable diets.”

Jenny Canham, the public affairs lead of the Vegetarian Society, said: “As this ongoing debate draws to a close, businesses are the latest group to send a clear message that banning familiar veggie terms is completely unnecessary. EU decision-makers must recognise the global risks of pursuing a terminology ban to address a problem that simply does not exist. What we truly need is clear labelling, not unnecessary language barriers.”

The measures, initially put forward by the French centre-right MEP Céline Imart, were agreed in a vote in the EU parliament last year. Widely considered a victory for the meat industry in a backlash against the popularity of meat-free foods, the initial vote by MEPs in October passed with 355 in favour to 247 against.

However, the proposals need to be approved by a majority of the EU’s 27 member states to become law, in a vote that takes place on 5 March.

Donald Trump has nominated the hospitality executive Scott Socha – whose company once sued to claim trademark rights to the name “Yosemite National Park” – to lead the National Park Service.

The nomination of an outsider with business ties to the agency he’d oversee comes at a pivotal moment for the service, which lost a quarter of its staff under Doge’s civil sector purge and which has been the subject of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to erase mention of historical events from NPS sites that portray Americans in an unfavorable light, such as slavery.

US national parks have historically been overseen by people with experience in conservation and land stewardship, with nominees over the past three decades typically emerging from within the agency ranks.

Socha, by contrast, spent the last 27 years working at Buffalo-based Delaware North, a food and hotel management company that provides hospitality services in seven national parks and runs lodging operations in five national park gateway communities, according to the company’s website.

Socha has overseen the development of enterprises in and near national parks since 2017. His nomination requires Senate confirmation.

“The private park concessionaire executive [Scott] Socha has zero experience in public service or conservation,” Save our Parks spokesperson Jayson O’Neill wrote in a statement. “Instead, he’s made a career out of extracting maximum profit from our national parks, not protecting them, making it abundantly clear he’ll be doing the bidding of special interests and corporate interests.”

Delaware North is well known in conservationist circles for a trademark lawsuit involving Yosemite national park. After the company lost a $2bn bid to renew its contract to operate Yosemite’s hotels and restaurants to competitor Aramark in 2016, Delaware North sued, arguing that the company held intellectual property rights to various names used at the park worth more than $50m – including the terms “Yosemite National Park”, “Ahwahnee Hotel” and “Curry Village”.

Those landmarks were briefly renamed, until the lawsuit was settled in 2019.

“Senators must approach this nomination with the utmost skepticism given Scott Socha’s history and the current state of our national parks,” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director for the Center for Western Priorities, wrote in a statement.

“Our public lands belong to all Americans, not the concessionaires who try to trademark and cash in on the names of our nation’s crown jewels.”