Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research
It has been unsettling to watch Scottish politicians line up behind Unite the Union’s “no ban without a plan” campaign to keep Scottish oilfields flowing.
I understand Unite’s position on this. They don’t want to see their workers harmed during the largest economic transition Scotland needs to undertake since the oil fields opened. They’ve been promised a “just transition” for those workers. And it hasn’t been delivered.
The politicians signing up to the “no ban” pledge are the very people who should have come up with “the plan”. They not only didn’t, many have spent their time actively pushing against those who have tried to instead even as news breaks that many of those workers at Grangemouth will be losing their jobs anyway – casualties of being pointed at for headlines but never being heard.
To watch both the Scottish and UK governments roll back on their pledges for no new oil developments has been extremely concerning, especially as they try to do the very political thing of twisting words to their limit to reduce their actions to the Minimum Promised Deliverable – the least they can do and still claim to have “kept” their promise. The UK Government is trying to claim that because the Rosebank and Jackdaw oilfields were initially proposed before they came to power then it won’t count as “new” if they issue a licence. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government’s “official” position is that it won’t endorse a “new” field unless it meets “environmental criteria”, without ever stating what those criteria should be or what an oilfield would have to look like in order to pass them.
The major problem with this is that the courts have already stepped in and made clear that companies that produce polluting products are just as liable for the mess they make as companies who produce pollution directly. You might have heard about the different ways pollution is measured. There are three “Scopes” to it.
“Scope One” emissions are the emissions your company produces directly (the gas emitted by the flare stack of an oil rig is Scope One as are the emissions caused by transporting people and material to and from the rig). “Scope Two” are emissions caused indirectly but as a result of the operation of your company (if your oil rig gets its electricity from a coal power plant, the emissions from the plant are counted as your Scope Two emissions). “Scope Three” emissions are those caused by the use of the products your company produces. That is, the emissions caused by someone burning the oil you extracted and sold to them.
Until recently, highly polluting companies (from airports to oil companies) pledged that they were on the path to becoming net zero, but only as a result of reducing (or “offsetting”) their Scope One and Scope Two emissions (the Scottish Government’s INTOG project is all about powering oil rigs with wind turbines for this purpose) but they declared that their Scope Three emissions were, in the words of Douglas Adams, “Somebody Else’s Problem” and therefore didn’t really exist.
The UK courts have been challenging this idea, making it clear that Scope Three emissions actually are the oil extractor’s problem. Add to this the 2019 Sea Change report from Friends of the Earth Scotland that stated the simple maths – the UK cannot meet its climate obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement unless it pledges to not open any oilfields currently not open and pledges to actively close down existing oilfields well before they reach the point of maximum “economic” extraction. It might be supporting current workers to ask for a plan before the oil ban but there also can be no plan for the oil sector that does not include a ban.
Anything less is a climate-denying fairytale and time is rapidly running out to enact it. Indeed, given that 2024 was likely the first year we breached the +1.5C limit mandated by the Paris Agreement, the politicians who signed it have already failed – everything from here out is damage control but the IPCC has been clear that the damage CAN be controlled but only if we accept that every fraction of a degree of additional warming matters and makes the job harder.
There are no more excuses and there is no more time for trying to wriggle out of previous pro-oil commitments. Every politician in Scotland and the UK has to face up to their own obligations and start implementing the rapid phase out of oil from our economy (both domestic and as an export) or make way for someone who will.
Do it fairly and with regard to the workers involved, but do not let that obligation be an excuse to miss climate targets or to extend oil extraction indefinitely into the future. Do it with and for the workers, but do not let that obligation be an excuse to capitulate to the oil barons who were never and will never be our friends in the climate emergency. If there can be no ban without a plan then my question to the politicians is simple: “Where is the plan?”
