“Apart from the desperate attempt to turn the climate crisis into the next battleground of culture wars, it is worth noting that the ones to benefit from this Bill are the profit hungry energy giants.”
By Richard Burgon MP
Just a few weeks after the UN global climate talks concluded with a global push against oil and gas, the Government has brought forward a new Bill that does the exact opposite.
This new Tory Bill mandates the annual licensing of new oil and gas projects. It undermines the fight against climate change and does nothing to lower the energy bills that have driven the cost-of-living crisis.
Nor will the Bill help us achieve energy security. It will actually leave us less energy secure.
And it is a Bill that moves us away from the significant shifts underway in energy markets towards more renewables and the good green jobs they provide.
So why are the Tories doing it? Apart from the desperate attempt to turn the climate crisis into the next battleground of culture wars, it is worth noting that the ones to benefit from this Bill are the profit hungry energy giants.
Those are the same firms that have been raking in obscene amounts while people across the country suffer from horrendously high bills. And they are the same fossil fuel giants that have driven us to the cliff edge of climate disaster.
But to justify their Bill, the Tories have laughably claimed that the legislation will help the transition towards net-zero.
The truth is that if every country copied the Government’s approach of squeezing out every last drop of oil and gas, we would risk extreme global temperature rises of 3°C. That’s double the 1.5C limit that we need to stay within if we are to avoid the very worst of climate catastrophe.
The International Energy Agency, the Government’s own Climate Change Committee and recently 700 leading climate scientists are all saying there should be no new oil and gas. The UN Secretary-General has urged nations to “tear out the poisoned root of the climate crisis – fossil fuels”.
The Government should not be ignoring these leading voices at a critical time in the global fight to reduce emissions.
The Tory claim that granting new licences will improve energy security is also total nonsense.
Energy companies are not obliged to supply the UK with oil and gas extracted from the North Sea. Once oil and gas fields are licensed, the fossil fuels belong to the companies holding the licences. They will sell it to the highest bidder on the global markets, just as they already do.
The reality is that a greater reliance on fossil fuels means a greater reliance on the same dictators, petro-states and private fossil fuel corporations who already control and set fossil fuel prices on the international fossil fuel markets. Ordinary people will remain vulnerable to political shocks that drive up the cost of fossil fuels.
All this goes to show that there is no conflict between tackling the climate crisis and the cost-of-living crisis. We address both by moving away from a reliance on oil and gas and the rip-off profit hungry corporate giants that dominate that market. And we deliver energy security through renewables – not by hooking us on ever more oil and gas production.
Nor will the Tory Bill allow us to create good long-term jobs. Despite hundreds of drilling licences being issued over the last decade, over 200,000 jobs in Britain’s oil and gas industry have been lost. The number of North Sea workers is due to halve again in the coming years, as global fossil fuel demand is set to peak by 2030.
Going down the path of more oil and gas licensing will not reverse this but instead divert key resources away from the transition towards a greener economy that would create hundreds of thousands of secure, green jobs in the energy sector. Those are the kind of jobs that people in regions like mine – deindustrialized by Thatcher – so desperately need.
This Bill is just the latest one that highlights the undue influence of oil and gas giants in our political system. For decades, fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists have used their financial and political influence to delay, weaken and undermine climate action to protect their profit.
That is why I’m bringing a Private Members Bill that would prevent MPs from taking any second jobs or receiving any donations from any company that makes more than 50% of its annual revenue from oil or gas. It is time to break the link between the fossil fuel polluters and the political decision makers.
Time after time this Tory Government has shown it has no real plan to tackle soaring energy bills or the climate crisis. We need to kill off this terrible licensing Bill and then we need to kick out this Tory government.
- Richard Burgon is the MP for Leeds East, the Secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs and a regular contributor to Labour Outlook. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
- Richard Burgon has tabled a Private Members Bill in the House of Commons, seeking to prohibit MPs from receiving any financial or other benefit from oil and gas companies. You can read the Bill here and see parliamentary supporters of the Bill here.
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