Ed Miliband seems to have gone missing since Rachel Reeves announced her ambition for a third runway at Heathrow yesterday. Just before he disappeared, he mumbled that ‘of course’ he wouldn’t be resigning over the issue – in spite of threatening to do just that when he was climate secretary in Gordon Brown’s government.
But then who needs Ed Miliband to thwart government growth plans when we have the courts to do it for him? This morning, Lord Ericht in the Scottish Court of Session hammered another great brass nail into the coffin of the North Sea. He ruled that licences granted to extract oil and gas from the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields had been granted unlawfully by Rishi Sunak’s government because they failed to take into account future carbon emissions from the fossil fuels that would be extracted.
Even Miliband accepts that gas will play an important role in the UK’s electricity system
It is not quite the end for the projects. The companies involved – Equinor and Ithaca in the Rosebank field and Shell in the Jackdaw field – may resubmit applications to the North Sea Transitional Authority to reconsider, this time taking carbon emissions from the burning of extracted fuels into account. But how much longer will any oil and gas companies want to put up with this? Already, £2 billion of investment has been sunk into Rosebank and £800 million into Jackdaw – which may turn out to be all for nothing. On the other hand, oil and gas companies have a US president who is enthusiastically welcoming them. What company in its right mind is going to want to explore further possibilities in the North Sea knowing they are likely to blocked, endlessly delayed by legal process and finally taxed to death?
The Court of Session judgement depresses the UK economy in several ways. For one thing, it means that we will have to import yet more gas, much of it likely to come in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipped in from the US. Even Miliband accepts that gas will play an important role in the UK’s electricity system, even in the unlikely event that he meets his target for achieving 95 per cent low-carbon electricity by 2030; gas is his proposed back up.
We are also a long, long way from ending the role of gas in heating our homes; the government accepts that gas boilers are not suddenly going to disappear and has indeed watered down a proposed ban on new gas boilers after 2035. The government will also lose revenue – there will can be no ‘windfall’ taxes if there is no extraction. There is the possibility, too, of huge legal claims laid against the government by the three companies who started developing these fields in good faith but who now find themselves thwarted.
There is no logic to hastening the end of the North Sea. Yet this morning’s ruling is a reminder that so long as Britain’s legally-binding commitment to reach net zero by 2050 remains in place, campaigners and judges – not Miliband or any other government minister – will be in charge of UK energy and industrial policy. Activists have not only won this battle, they will undoubtedly win over the Heathrow runway and just about any other infrastructure project because no government can prove that any of them will be compatible with the 2050 target. The Supreme Court has already ruled that Britain is off the trajectory needed to reach net zero emissions by 2050, so how can anything that increases emissions be compatible with its legal obligations?
If the government wants to grow the economy it is going to have go back and rewrite the Climate Change Act and either remove the net zero target, or reduce it to a non-binding aspiration. Sadly, we seem to have few in government, and few MPs, who are ready to do that.
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