ED Miliband halting new oil and gas licences is a very welcome change of direction for UK politics and effectively brings the UK Government into line with what was the Scottish Government’s policy on new oil and gas in January last year.
As it stands now, though, the Scottish Government has backtracked on its opposition to new oil and has been extremely vague about the conditions under which it would support a ban. To be clear, it is one thing to state that you’d only support a licence if environmental checkpoints are met but if you don’t state what those checkpoints are or what a properly compliant oil licence would look like, then all you are doing is deferring responsibility for the decision either way.
The Supreme Court’s ruling last month that oil extraction must fully account for all oil emissions is significant here. Until then, a case was being built that a “net zero” oil rig would be one that transported workers to and from it without burning fossil fuels (Scope 1 emissions) and was powered by renewable energy instead of a fossil-fuel power plant (Scope 2 emissions) but that basically washed its hands of whatever happened to the oil it extracted (Scope 3 emissions). If you bought some of their oil and burned it, that wasn’t their problem.
This can no longer be the case and so brings into question the very possibility of a compliant oil rig. The Scottish Government should outright admit that either its support for oil must be ditched, or its remaining climate policies must.
As welcome as Miliband’s stance is, it likely doesn’t go far enough. He’s equally stated that he won’t revoke licences already granted but not yet being exploited nor will he shut down oil wells that are still economically producing oil.
Half a decade ago in 2019, Friends of the Earth’s Sea Change report found that if the world is to meet its collective climate targets, then not only must new licences be blocked and unexploited licences revoked, but at least 20% of the economic oil in wells that are currently open must stay in the ground.
A just transition for workers is vital and I sympathise with Unite’s “no ban without a plan” slogan, but I fear that the politicians will stick to the easy option of “no ban” rather than what they should do, which is to bring those workers into the room immediately and help them design the plan that grants them the just transition they want and deserve before another political deferral forces a chaotic collapse of the oil industry and sees oil workers dumped just like their predecessors in the coal industry were.
