The Supreme Court has put the future of fossil fuel projects in jeopardy

‘Britain is evolving from a democracy towards a kritarchy – the rule of lawyers,’ wrote Ross Clark in today’s Spectator magazine. His gloomy prediction has been proved correct almost immediately. A 3-2 majority in the Supreme Court today put the emergency brakes on long-standing plans to extract oil at Horse Hill in Surrey when it struck down the council’s necessary grant of planning permission. As with most legal decisions, the reasoning was convoluted. But in essence it was this: the court ruled that the environmental impact of emissions from burning fossil fuels must be considered in planning applications for new extraction projects, not just the impacts of the emissions produced in extracting them. Not having done this, it followed that its decision was flawed and had to be quashed.

Whoops of delight predictably came from the environmental lobby. For the rest of us, however, this morning’s decision should be a big cause for concern.