The Conservatives are in favour of granting licences for new oil and gas extraction; Labour is against it. But what does it matter what either party have put in their manifestos when the Supreme Court has just asserted the right to decide Britain’s energy policy for us? In a judgment this morning the Supreme Court decided that Surrey County Council was wrong to determine a planning application for a small oilfield near Gatwick Airport without considering the carbon emissions which would be released in burning the product.
Environmentalists will cheer today’s judgment but they shouldn’t really, because it is fundamentally undemocratic
Council planners had taken into account emissions from the drilling itself, but not the carbon dioxide which would be released when the oil is taken elsewhere and used to power cars, buses or whatever. Planning permission has effectively been rescinded for this small project. But the judgment has wide implications for the whole of Britain’s oil and gas industry. If it is deemed unlawful to drill for oil in Surrey on the grounds that the oil will be responsible for carbon emissions then the same is presumably going to be true of oil and gas extracted anywhere in Britain or off our shores.
Today’s judgment is yet one example of how political power is draining away from elected politicians to the courts, a process which, as I write in this week’s magazine, is bound to accelerate under a Starmer government. But in this case the politicians quite openly disempowered themselves by nodding through the Commons, in the dying days of Theresa May’s premiership, a legally-binding target for Britain to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It should have been obvious that the result of the target would be to make it ever more difficult to carry out any kind of infrastructure project.
Environmentalists will cheer today’s judgment but they shouldn’t really, because it is fundamentally undemocratic. In a well-functioning democracy we would develop a national policy on oil and gas extraction which would weigh-up the effect on the environment with the need for fuel and power. It would balance the desirable objective of lower carbon emissions with the need for energy security. Once all those things had been considered and we had established that national policy, local planners would only need to consider the local issues.
But the net zero target throws a spanner in the works. Firstly, the net zero target only refers to territorial emissions. If a decision to refuse oil and gas extraction in the UK results in us having to import oil and gas instead – with consequent higher emissions – that is not something the Supreme Court is going to be bothered with. Neither is it going to be concerned with energy security because Parliament hasn’t set a legally-binding target for that. The only thing that matters to the court is UK carbon emissions.
Surrey County Council could now go back to the drawing board and consider the planning application a second time, this time taking into account the effect of the project on Britain’s carbon emissions. But what is the likelihood of this oil well ever being developed? Very slim. The pockets of oil and gas companies – even the big ones – are only so deep, and consequently they can only go on fighting for so long. Like fracking before it, the courts have been used effectively to squash an activity which could have added to our national wealth and energy security. This is not how democracy should work.
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