Judges on the Supreme Court appear to have joined Just Stop Oil. In a landmark ruling, with profound implications for the UK energy industry, they’ve said that Surrey County Council cannot give permission to drill new wells on an existing extraction site, Horse Hill, which already has a couple of them. This is because the oil might be burnt – which admittedly tends to happen with hydrocarbon fuels. Net Zero campaigners who brought the original action against the ‘Gatwick Gusher’ as they called it back in 2019 are ‘over the moon’. The Scottish government, however, is not quite so sanguine.
The Supreme Court’s ruling is illogical
Could the ruling mean the end of oil and gas fields, such as Rosebank off Shetland and Jackdaw off Aberdeen? The SNP has only recently revised Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘presumption against exploration’ and her opposition to lucrative oil fields like Cambo.
Last week, the new deputy first minister, Kate Forbes, coolly announced that the SNP had never opposed new drilling in the North Sea. The very idea. All those Sturgeon selfies with Greta Thunberg at Cop26 were really just holiday snaps. The SNP’s coalition with the Scottish Green party, whose slogan is ‘Keep it in the Ground’, was just a passing phase. Indeed, it was. The Greens were cast out of the governing coalition in April when the Scottish government scrapped its annual CO2 emissions reduction targets after perennially missing them.
Since the 1970s, the SNP has claimed that ‘Scotland’s Oil’ can help fund not only the transition to renewable energy but fill in the gaps in the independence prospectus. It was worth nearly £11 billion last year in oil revenues alone, not far short of the SNP’s notional independence budget deficit. The overall value of the fossil fuel industry to Scotland is three times that figure in well-paid jobs and economic multipliers.
In this election, First Minister John Swinney has repeatedly promised to protect the 100,000 jobs that Aberdeenshire Chambers of Commerce and the GMB union say are at risk because of Keir Starmer’s ban on new new drilling and his increased windfall taxes on the energy companies. The SNP now accept that oil and gas have to play a major role in what they call the ‘just transition’ to renewables. Whisper it, but Starmer does too now he’s dropped the £28 billion green investment plan.
The Supreme Court’s ruling is, of course, illogical. Nearly 80 per cent of the energy currently used in the UK is derived from fossil fuels, mostly gas. That isn’t going to change any time soon. Giving up on the North Sea means importing ever more of our hydrocarbons from abroad, from countries like Russia and Qatar where judges don’t get to make the rules.
We are already importing Liquified Natural Gas from America that has been produced by fracking – an extraction process that is banned in the UK. Shipping in this stuff is massively worse for the environment than using our own. But the judges don’t need to take logic into account in their rulings. They just interpret the law, they don’t make it.
It is not at all clear that Cambo, Rosebank and Jackdaw are now dead ducks. They have already been subjected to environmental impact assessments and the UK government has given them the go ahead. However, environmentalists will now redouble their efforts to ban oil extraction via the courts. There are currently actions by Greenpeace in the Scottish courts against all three fields, which had been stalled pending the UK Supreme Court ruling on Surrey.
Worse, there will now be every reason for activists to step up their campaigns of civil disobedience, like spray painting Stonehenge and defacing old masters in the National Gallery. Now the judges would appear to be on their sides can we expect to see bewigged boomers hurling orange powder all over the red benches in the Lords, or the Inns of Court? Who knows.
Conservative ministers are furious at this ‘judicial over-reach’ and are saying the judges are replacing the democratic government. Though they’d better watch out with that argument because it could catch on, given the Tories’ recent shambolic performance in office. But judges only interpret the law, they don’t make it; governments do. The Supreme Court was not responsible for legislation like the 2019 Climate Change Act, which was billed as ‘a legally binding commitment to end the UK’s contribution to climate change’. You can’t place these pronouncements in the Statute Book and then expect courts to ignore them.
The Conservatives have been almost as bad at passing virtue signalling laws as Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP. This is blowback for a thousand environmental speeches by Tory ministers currying favour on social media. The only consolation for the Tories is that Keir Starmer, when he takes over, is also going to suffer death by a thousand legal cuts. His dash for growth will inevitably involve greater burning of fossil fuels. Just wait till Just Stop Oil take that to the Supreme Court.
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