Hello! You may have seen the Wanstead Climate Action leaflet. The blog below is a personal view expanding on why experts agree that issuing new North Sea licences is absolutely the wrong thing to do for people and for nature, why nevertheless politicians are pursuing it, and possibilities of how to stop it. While you’re here, please sign up to our occasional emails so we can keep in touch about important developments, and consider joining related local and national campaigns.
The last few years have been like watching some kind of tragic accident in slow motion, perhaps culminating today, 31 July 2023. The UK has been allocating blocks of North Sea for exploration for oil and gas since about 1970. However, throughout the 2010s it was becoming increasingly clear that the ‘remaining carbon budget‘, the amount of emissions left before we hit temperature targets would not allow any new coal, oil or gas. For example, Carbon Tracker analyses how much of proven reserves owned by each company are ‘unburnable’. In 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA), which had been set up by oil consuming countries to ensure energy security, upgraded one of its detailed scenarios, NZE (Net Zero Emissions) to show that the world could power itself from now on without new fossil fuel infrastructure, if investment was redirected from legacy energy to renewables and new technology. This was summed up in a statement from the IEA’s executive director:
If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.
Dr Fatih Birol, May 2021
This seems clear enough, and has been confirmed multiple times, and applied to the UK in particular multiple times too. However, the global petroleum industry (legislation includes methane gas in ‘petroleum’ so we can use it as another shorthand for oil and gas, O&G) presumably sees this as a threat not only to long-term revenues, but the short-term share price and support for directors. What an obsolescent and damaging industry, even one so powerful, is an honest plan to wind up. Instead, the institutions fall back on public relations strategies to deceive the public, elite media, and political discourse: they had succeeded in delaying action on global warming in the 1990s and 2000s through making climate science appear uncertain, using ‘white coats’ and ‘Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt’ strategies.
Nowadays, only a small minority are fooled by straightforward science denial, partly because some of the nuanced value-free science is being properly reported by the media (still sometimes understated, sometimes sensationalised), and because they can see the effects for themselves. So a change of tack is called for, as described in Prof Michael E Mann’s The New Climate Wars (a WCA book club book) and Climate Discourses of Delay, whereby the reality of global warming is acknowledged, but the public are still disinformed and disempowered by claims that the crisis is not urgent (despite the IPCC using that word frequently), or that oil companies have plans that will help ‘tackle’ climate change, or that the real solutions are either ineffective, too expensive, or necessarily unfair. ‘False solutionism’ is often used.
And the PR efforts really shifted up a gear this May, with major attacks on any politician or civil society organisation that had actually been listening to the experts or who understood the situation for themselves, or was threatening to translate that understanding into actual action. Unfortunately a report by academics or even the top international bodies makes only a small media splash, none in some of the press, and quickly dissipates. On the other hand, the attacks were splashed on the front pages of the Murdoch media and Daily Mail and from there to the BBC and other political correspondents; while confusing and misleading lines, about energy security or carbon intensity, were formulated to be repeated by co-opted groups like the GMB union and CEOs in the financial pages; and MPs were lobbied and wined and dined (or at least breakfasted) by industry bodies. (to be continued here)
Those Conservative parliamentarians who actually seem to care about the future further ahead than next week’s headlines or their next job have been rightly outspoken about the need to stop new oil fields, including Rosebank. When Liz Truss was prime minister, she commissioned Chris Skidmore MP to produce a Net Zero Review, which like all serious analysis before or since concluded that the faster we clean up industry, transport and the rest of society, the better it will be health and the economy. Chris Skidmore quickly reacted to Monday’s media splash, by quite rightly pointing out that anti-environmental policies will lose, not gain votes: “This is the wrong decision at precisely the wrong time, when the rest of the world is experiencing record heatwaves…. It is on the wrong side of modern voters who will vote with their feet at the next general election for parties that protect, and not threaten, our environment. And it is on the wrong side of history. Worryingly, this decision has also been announced when MPs are on recess, unable to hold the Government to account.” Future generations “will not look favourably on the decision taken today”. Too right.
The lies, how to stand up for the truth, and how to act on it
It could be argued that some of the industry claims have a grain of truth, if you squint hard enough. But they give a completely false impression (for example by concentrating on energy overheads of transporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar or the USA, when a sensible energy efficiency policy would have meant we don’t need any LNG, our LNG imports are of very similar to our methane exports to Europe, and hey… how have I been tricked into even mentioning such detail when we know we have to get off burning fossil methane altogether?). This is unsurprising: PR lines are written for ministers, sometimes by industry, sometimes by their own departmental press office, to justify bad policy with an element of ‘plausible deniability’. Correcting the idea that we should be patriotically standing up for lovely, clean ‘British’ Brent crude involves making some complex distinctions.
Carbon Brief has written a good fact check of many of the myths used by ministers. WCA members sadly didn’t have that to hand, when we recently wrote several pages back making similar points in response to a minister’s reply. We corrected their cherry-picking, red herrings and straw men (a ‘straw man’ argument is nor a term of abuse, but when someone doesn’t defent against the real points, but against positions that haven’t been made, such as the idea of stopping production ‘overnight’. They are remarkably short on actual figures about when we should stop fossil fuels.)
But should we have bothered? According to Shaun Spiers of Green Alliance, who spend a lot of time talking to MPs, decision-makers, even Grant Shapps, must have been briefed on the impact of new oil on our international commitments, and know that the arguments they use are misleading. So if appealing direct to politicians with reason and compassion isn’t working, what do we do? Since Monday when we decided we should campaign locally about political backsliding on the environment, other people have come to similar conclusions. Greenpeace draped the prime minister’s mansion in oil-black cloth, asking the pertinent question: ‘OIL PROFITS OR OUR FUTURE?‘ Direct engagement with the government is important, but has so far perhaps only moderated how the disastrous policies are presented. By going public, there is some hope that they might feel some accountability to the poorest and youngest in the world or to nature or even their own voters, instead of following a media climate created to prioritise rewarding ‘inward investment’ in activities that are an unnecessary and essentially irreversible poisoning of the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land. A day later, naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham launched a No New Oil poster campaign, similarly to make it clear that they have to take the climate crisis seriously to get elected. So we feel in good company, of course. When we can stop the damage is the the quesion.
We say carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a ‘fig leaf’ for the oil and gas industry. It may have some role in capturing emissions from cement production, but using it as a free pass for oil giants is just wrong, say Friend of the Earth Scotland.
I my opinion, we have to not just spend all our time cleaning up the rubbish that vested interests are throwing in our path. They kind of expect technical clarifications will turn people off. We have to redouble our efforts on putting the big picture back into the frame – not just to stop new licences, but stop already-licensed carbon bombs like the Rosebank oil field.
All WCA leaflets have been printed on 100% recycled uncoated paper or card – shout out to our excellent printers in Bethnal Green, Newman’s Stationery for helping us react to this week’s news in time. This blog written by Cedric with help from Paul, is not necessarily the view of WCA.
While you’re here, please sign up to our occasional emails so we can keep in touch about important developments, and consider joining related local and national campaigns.
Wanstead Climate Action 