By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
So Labour’s promise to allow new North Sea oil projects already approved to continue now appears rather hollow!!
The government will not defend the legal challenges brought against plans to develop the UK’s largest untapped oil and gas field and a second North Sea site.
Rosebank, 80 miles west of Shetland, contains around 300 million barrels of oil and is the UK’s last major undeveloped oil site.
It is twice the size of the controversial Cambo oil field.
Jackdaw, another untapped oil site, is 150 miles east of Aberdeen.
Legal claims against developing the sites for oil had been brought by environmental campaign groups Greenpeace and Uplift.
Policy changing
On Thursday, the government confirmed it would now not contest these legal claims by green groups.
It follows a landmark Supreme Court decision in June which said the environmental impact of emissions from burning fossil fuels must be considered in planning applications for extraction projects – not just the emissions produced in extraction.
Last month the new government admitted the decision to approve a new coal mine in West Cumbria was unlawful, as the carbon emissions from eventually burning the coal should have been taken into account.
The International Energy Agency has said no new fossil fuel project is compatible with the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5C.
What next?
It’s still possible for developers hoping to drill at the sites, energy giants Shell for Jackdaw and Norwegian state-owned Equinor for Rosebank, to continue to defend the claims.
The exploration licences granted for oil and gas extraction at the sites have also not been revoked by the government.
Reaction
"Rosebank is also a bad deal for Britain", Tessa Khan the executive director of Uplift said.
"It’s mostly oil for export and would do nothing to lower bills or boost our energy security yet, because of huge tax breaks for new oil and gas drilling, the UK public would effectively cover a huge chunk of the costs of developing it."
"It is astonishing that the massive emissions from burning oil and gas have been overlooked by decision-makers till now," she added.
In reaction to the announcement Greenpeace’s UK climate team leader Mel Evans said:
"This is absolutely the right decision from the government. These permits should never have been granted without being properly assessed for their impact on the climate, and following the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, conceding these cases is the logical course of action."
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We sometimes focus on BBC bias, but this report by Sly News serves to remind us that they are just as bad.
Virtually the whole article is devoted to the views of anti-fossil fuel activists. There is however not a single mention of the economic and social benefits to the UK, not to mention the tiny matter of energy security.
Most people never get beyond the headlines, and Sky’s could hardly be more one-sided:
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