For nearly half a century, the Scottish National Party based its independence project on ‘Scotland’s Oil’ which it claimed had been stolen by England. Now the SNP seems to be saying it wasn’t Scotland’s oil at all and wasn’t even the UK’s to steal. The SNP and their Green coalition partners have discovered that North Sea oil is owned by foreign capitalists and is anyway unusable in the UK.
‘Most of this oil will be shipped abroad,’ insisted the SNP First Minister, Humza Yousaf, last week ‘and then sold back to us at whatever price makes the oil and gas industry most profit’. New fields like Rosebank off Shetland, he says, won’t therefore help reduce energy bills or replace oil and gas imports.
This has been the thrust of the SNP’s attack on Rishi Sunak’s promise to extract ‘every drop’ of North Sea oil to give the UK greater energy security. ‘It’s the greatest act of environmental vandalism in my lifetime,’ according to Nicola Sturgeon. Yousaf accuses the PM of being a climate change ‘denier’ who is in the pocket of capitalist fossil fuel behemoths by giving the go ahead for the development of the Rosebank, and the Cambo, another oil field off Shetland.
These are all specious arguments designed to cover for the fact that Yousaf has simply lost the argument over Rosebank
Yet these self same capitalist behemoths have been exploring and exploiting North Sea hydrocarbons for the last fifty years. How could the SNP not have noticed until now? The fact that the oil is mostly refined abroad doesn’t make it any less of a strategic energy resource. ‘Heavy’ oil goes to European petrochemical plants because we closed most of ours years ago. Oil is refined and then returns largely as petrol and plastics.
All oil is sold into a market. It is a complex system governed by a global energy price that more or less determines what fields are developed commercially. There is nothing new or sinister about this. And the anticapitalist rhetoric is such a bizarre revision of SNP energy policy that it calls into question the entire independence project.
How are we to have any confidence in the SNP’s current economic prospectus, which is based on forecasts of Scotland’s renewable energy wealth? That too is being exploited by Big Oil: companies like Equinor, Shell, Total and BP. Offshore wind energy is also sold into the energy market for profit. Are the SNP suggesting that Scotland’s wind is owned by corporate capitalism? Will we shortly discover that it is the wrong kind of wind because the turbines that collect it are owned by foreigners and any electricity surplus exported?
These are all specious arguments designed to cover for the fact that Yousaf has simply lost the argument over Rosebank. Most Scottish voters agree with Sunak that it is common sense to use Scotland’s domestic oil and gas rather than importing it from abroad. This is why the red herring of oil exports has been deployed to confuse the argument.
There was a time when the SNP didn’t use such arguments. They said Scotland was the only country to discover oil on its waters and not directly benefit from it. But oil is still immensely valuable for the revenues it delivers (£9 billion last year alone) and because it supports 100,000 jobs in the UK. That wealth can and has been used to lower UK energy bills. Yet under tutelage of the Greens, the SNP now suggests it should be kept in the ground.
Nationalists have always cited Nordic countries as models of environmental virtue. Yet Norway is drilling like mad, not least in the Arctic. It is getting UK consumers to pay for it by buying their gas while we’re supposed to stop using ours.
We still produce around 25 per cent of our natural gas and Rosebank and Cambo will help maintain that. The SNP appears to favour importing yet more Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) from the United States at much greater cost to the environment. US LNG is derived from fracking which is banned here.
SNP rhetoric is shot through with such hypocrisies and half truths. The reality is that Rosebank will not set net zero back by a single day as the regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority has conceded. It won’t stop the UK meeting its legally-binding target of 68 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. Nor will Sunak’s decision, also attacked by the SNP, to delay the banning of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. That just brings UK into line with the EU.
The SNP’s Rosebank alarmism has however undermined the credibility of Yousaf’s own net zero targets. Scottish voters now realise that the First Minister’s climate pronouncements are so much hot air.
Comments