There’s no mistaking the message of this summer’s wildfires, said Rebecca McQuillan in The Herald. It’s that we need “to stop procrastinating and cut emissions, fast”. But is Britain ready to accept this fact of life and act on it? We’ll soon get an answer to that question when the government announces whether or not it’s giving the go-ahead to the development of two oil and gas fields in the North Sea.
Both projects – the Jackdaw gas field off Aberdeen and the larger Rosebank oil and gas field west of Shetland – were approved by the previous Tory government. But they had to reapply for development consent after a court ruled that ministers had to consider the lifetime carbon costs of the developments, not just the emissions generated during extraction. Consultations on that issue have now closed, leaving the final decision in the hands of Andy Burnham and his energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh.
Climate ‘hysterics’
Reports suggest that a decision is expected next month, said Kathryn Porter on UnHerd. Climate campaigners have presented it as a choice between exploiting new fossil fuel reserves or stopping using oil and gas, but that’s misleading. Given that the UK is still many years away from being able to rely purely on clean energy, it’s really a choice between developing these North Sea resources during the transition to net zero or just relying on imported oil and gas, which generally involves higher emissions. Burnham can allow new oil and gas production to protect jobs and the UK tax base. “Or he can cave in to the hysterics, harming the economy and the planet in the process.”
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Questionable benefits
The prime minister is pitching himself as a “pragmatist” on this issue, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. He “isn’t swayed by expensive fossil fuel lobbyists”, but he is sensitive to the arguments of oil rig workers, car manufacturers and those like the eco-entrepreneur Dale Vince, who say that if we need oil and gas from somewhere, we might as well get it from our own backyard. But Labour voters are looking for more from Burnham than mere pragmatism. They want him to be the sort of leader who can face up to the challenge posed by climate change and “sell difficult answers”.
If Burnham gives the go-ahead to developing one or both of these North Sea fields, he’ll do a lot of damage to his reputation and lose many of the voters Labour has won back from the Greens, said Hannah Martin on LabourList. And for what? The new fields wouldn’t generate huge amounts of tax, and Jackdaw would “only create 27 direct full-time jobs in total”. The economics of new North Sea drilling is questionable. The politics is even worse.
