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ROSS CLARK
Middle class campaigners claim gas and coal industries are evil – here’s the actual outcome of shutting them down
TO hear reaction to the Government’s decision to approve oil extraction from the Rosebank field to the west of the Shetlands, you’d think Rishi Sunak had kicked away the crutches of an old lady before stealing her purse, if not pressed the nuclear button in a fit of pique.
According to Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, it is “morally obscene”.
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TV wildlife presenter Chris Packham claims it is an “act of war against life on Earth”.
As for Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf accusing the Government of “climate denial”, this is the leader of the same SNP which less than a decade ago was campaigning for independence on the basis that what came out of the northern North Sea is “Scotland’s oil”.
That is the thanks you get from the green lobby when you try to improve Britain’s energy security and alleviate fuel poverty.
There are many climate campaigners who have convinced themselves that the oil and gas industries are the epitome of evil and must be shut down at once.
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And they are the relatively moderate ones.
In July, Just Stop Oil announced it was to launch a legal action to try to drag oil company executives before the courts and try them for “facilitating genocide”.
It doesn’t occur to these mostly middle-class activists what would happen if the oil and gas industry was to be closed down tomorrow.
While it is in all our interests that we seek to reduce carbon emissions, we are not yet remotely in a position to stop using fossil fuels.
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Were the world to try to do this, it would result in mass poverty — with vastly more death and misery than activists can try to claim has occurred as a result of climate change, even with their exaggerated and hysterical claims about higher global temperatures causing more extreme weather.
In 2022, oil and gas accounted for 76 per cent of all energy consumed in Britain.
In spite of massive investment in wind and solar, those forms of energy produced less than six per cent of our total energy needs.
If you take electricity in isolation, gas accounted for 38.5 per cent of generation in 2022, while wind and solar produces 31.2 per cent of our electricity (the Government claims a higher figure for renewables of 41.5 per cent, but this includes the filthy practice of burning wood pellets in power stations, which on some measures is even more carbon-intensive than coal).
But it will take a massive jump in technology before we can have an electricity grid powered without any fossil fuels.
At the moment we are utterly dependent on gas power stations to make up for gaps when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
On calm winter evenings the share of electricity produced by wind and solar can fall to less than two per cent.
If we are to do without gas, we will have to invest massively in energy storage. Trouble is, that is fantastically expensive.
On current technology it costs around six times as much to store a kilowatt-hour of electricity in a lithium ion battery as it does to generate it in the first place.
One thing Rishi Sunak has done is to announce £20billion of investment in carbon capture and storage — which could allow us to burn fossil fuels without adding significant carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Not that climate extremists approve — they still want oil and gas closed down.
But fossil fuels aren’t just about energy.
They are a staple ingredient in many industries from plastics to fertiliser production, and it is proving very difficult to find non fossil-fuel substitutes.
Earlier this week, Lego announced that it had given up trying to find ways of making its bricks without oil-based plastics.
The company has tried more than 400 alternatives but even the most promising of them proved to be “like trying to make a bike out of wood rather than steel”.
Even if we could get by without Lego, I wouldn’t like to live in a world, for example, without plastic Personal Protective Equipment in hospitals.
We are, then, going to be dependent on fossil fuels for many decades to come, at least.
Given that, isn’t it better we produce our own oil and gas rather than having to import it, much of it from politically unstable parts of the world?
The argument of the green lobby that Rosebank won’t help with Britain’s energy supply because much of it will end up being exported is fallacious.
We could, in extreme circumstances, ban the export of oil. UK-produced oil and gas will always have a price advantage over imported oil and gas because the transport costs will be much lower.
At the moment we are sourcing a lot of our gas from the US and Qatar, who send it to us by ship in the form of liquefied natural gas.
But the process of liquifying gas is so energy-intensive that it consumes around a tenth of the energy that is being transported.
It speaks volumes that, in spite of criticising the Rosebank decision, the Labour Party has admitted that it won’t withdraw the licences if it finds itself in power next year.
Gradually it is dawning on the party that trying to rush towards net zero before we have the necessary technology will cost households and industry dearly.
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Oil — or black gold as it is sometimes called — may be a dirty, carbon-intensive product but we should be glad we are able to produce it in Britain’s waters.
The Rosebank decision has just made our country’s future a little more energy- secure.
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