It’s hot as hell out here on the block, with the UK sweating through its second massive heatwave of the year, and you already know the politicians are using the weather to play their usual mind games. Green party boss Zack Polanski is out here trying to put the squeeze on Andy Burnham—the man everyone says is sliding into the Prime Minister's seat next. Polanski is talking loud, warning Burnham that if he backs down on these green climate promises, the Labour party is going to end up in complete obscurity. He basically told Burnham that playing half-way with the climate is a straight-up moral and political failure that’s going to leave the whole country broke.

But let's keep it 100: while these politicians are arguing in their air-conditioned offices, there’s a massive civil war kicking off in the labor unions about who actually gets to eat. On one side, you got Unison, the biggest union in the game, saying "no more drilling" in the North Sea. They want a total stop to the oil and gas extraction, acting like the transition to green energy is going to be smooth for the working class.

But Sharon Graham, the boss over at Unite representing the actual oil and gas workers, ain't buying the hype. She stepped up and said Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s net-zero obsession is a straight-up "noose around the neck" of job creation. She’s backing new drilling, and she’s got Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, in her corner demanding they greenlight the massive Rosebank oilfield. Even the corporate suits at the British Chambers of Commerce are sweating, telling Burnham he’s got to drain whatever fossil fuels are left in that dwindling North Sea basin if he wants to stop thousands of people from getting laid off.

Now, the critics are throwing stats around, saying the game is already rigged. They point out that even though the government handed out hundreds of new drilling licenses over the last ten years, the number of jobs in the industry still got cut in half—dropping from 441,000 down to 214,000. On top of that, the numbers show that 90% to 93% of all the viable oil and gas in that basin has already been sucked dry. So the workers are getting squeezed no matter what.

This whole fight has turned into a massive chess game over who gets to be Burnham’s Chancellor and run the money. The right wing of the party is pushing hard for Streeting, trying to block Miliband from getting his hands on the bag.

The drama is getting messy behind closed doors, too. A senior union source leaked that a lot of people in the labor movement are stressing out over Sharon Graham’s pro-drilling stance. They’re claiming her attacks on Ed Miliband are playing right into the hands of the Labour right and giving a major boost to Nigel Farage and his crypto-backing friends. This anonymous insider is calling Graham’s moves "not strategic at all," warning that putting Streeting in charge of the Treasury is going to end up hurting the very working-class people Graham represents.