The argument on climate change seems to have run its course. There are a few flat-earthers who still maintain that climate change isn’t man-made – or at least man accelerated – but even most of them agree that we ought to respect our planet better.
So, policy steers us towards decarbonisation, net zero, electric cars and all the rest of it. My government’s achievements are good, and leading globally, but some would say we could and should go further.
As we run up to a general election in the next 18 months, opposition parties are coming forward with ever more brazen policies, trying to outgreen each other. Labour’s latest, to ban all new oil and gas licenses in the UK, is perhaps one of the more rash. Indeed, even the Labour supporting GMB Union is saying the policy is nuts. It is.
Around 80% of the UK’s energy consumption is fuelled, one way or another, by fossil fuels. Sure, we are doing very well in wind and solar, but when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind stays still, we rely 100% on oil and gas, toped up with nuclear. If we stop extracting oil and gas from the north sea, we need to secure our energy supply from someone else. Starve our ability to generate tax revenues and corporate profits from UK domestic supply, merely profits other nation’s producers and treasuries.
We are not going to stop using energy overnight. Whilst the aim of Labour’s policy is noble – they want to spur investment into renewables through necessity – they simultaneously want to starve the energy sector of cash needed for that investment by taxing fossil fuel producers of all their profit. We already take 75% of UK profits, but at least give them an allowance for investing into new, green energy sources. Labour would tax more and offer less.
We all want a better, cleaner, safer, more prosperous, and secure planet. But when one of your biggest supporters says you are barking up the wrong tree with energy policies, you really ought to listen.
This country is leading in all sorts of areas, including new, innovative ways of securing net zero and green technological advances. But starving our energy sector of resources and cash will only push us back to the stone age. And as a former Gulf oil minister once said, the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of rocks.