On Wednesday, the government approved drilling in Jackdaw, a gas field in the North Sea that has been in limbo since campaigners blocked its consent in a judicial review last year. In one sense the news was unsurprising; energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh’s first ministerial trip was to an oil and gas site in Aberdeen, and other senior Labour figures had signalled an interest in rolling back climate commitments. Yet the decision also seems to conflict with Burnham’s progressive repositioning of the party. How should we understand its politics?
Ask someone from the climate movement, and they’ll tell you this is an indefensible decision that contradicts the science and the UK’s climate obligations with little to show for it. Turn to industry or some of the major unions, and they’ll stress its necessity to support jobs and domestic energy security.
Both sides come armed with stats. The oil and gas industry claims that thousands of jobs are at stake. In its press release, the government claimed the Jackdaw field could increase domestic gas production by 6 percent at its peak, while affirming that it sees no conflict between this growth and its climate commitments. It has also foregrounded the need to bring down energy bills.
Adrienne Buller
The climate movement tells a different story. It points out that the ‘thousands of jobs’ figure combines prospective jobs from both Jackdaw and the Rosebank oil field, ignoring the fact that, by the government’s own estimation, just 27 jobs will be created by Jackdaw alone. Uplift, which alongside Greenpeace has led campaigns and court challenges against both Jackdaw and Rosebank, cites analysis by the North Sea Transition Authority showing that Jackdaw would reduce the UK’s annual gas import dependency by just 2 percent. At this scale, the additional production from Jackdaw would barely dent the country’s reliance on imports. Worse still, it would have no material impact on bills, as the price of gas extracted from the field would still be set on international markets.
There are similar tensions surrounding the field’s climate impact. Supporters say Jackdaw’s product will reduce our reliance on imported liquified natural gas (LNG), which they claim is a far dirtier source. Climate groups, meanwhile, point out that the gap is overstated, since these comparisons refer to how dirty the gas was to produce, rather than describing the substantially larger downstream emissions associated with actually burning the stuff. And because LNG constitutes a minority of what we import, it’s just as possible that Jackdaw’s supply simply displaces gas piped in from Norway, whose production is considerably cleaner than the UK’s.
Much of the debate has so far centred on these particularities: job numbers, tax revenues, emissions, import dependency. The effect has been to force climate advocates into splitting hairs over estimates rather than dedicating our full efforts to contesting the politics of the decision.
During his first hundred days, Burnham has repeatedly described the government’s approach to Jackdaw and Rosebank as one of ‘pragmatism’. The word has done some heavy lifting for the prime minister amid conflicting demands from activists, unions and industry. But what does it really mean in an era of deadly heatwaves and record-shattering temperatures? This week’s conspicuously timed UN Emissions Gap report states in no uncertain terms: ‘the opportunity to bridge the 1.5°C emissions gap with “no or limited” overshoot has been lost’. With every extra degree, more potentially irreversible damage is done to the world around us. In these conditions, it is impossible to find a purpose in Burnham’s pragmatism. Instead, it reads more like an attempt to evade any meaningful commitments as the climate crisis accelerates.
Climate Confusion
Fahnbulleh has now indicated that drilling at Rosebank will not be allowed to go ahead; the field would be considerably more environmentally destructive and do little more than pump oil into global markets. Jackdaw seems likely, therefore, to be presented as a reasonable tradeoff; the fact is that it comes with no coherent vision of a different economic model, grounded in a different energy system. Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy, once billed as a major public power champion, is a shadow of what was promised. The UK’s progress on climate adaptation is drastically off track. Minimal effort has been made to stop disasters like wildfires and harvest failures.
Burnham clearly wants to mimic the success of the ‘affordability’ politics that’s sweeping the United States. Tethered to the Jackdaw announcement was an ‘Energy Wealth Fund’ that, starting from a £2 billion government investment, will ostensibly use funds from oil and gas tax receipts to ‘reinvest Britain’s energy wealth in renewable and low carbon energy infrastructure, unlock investment, back the industries of the future and create skilled jobs.’ But here, too, the crucial questions are unanswered. What portion of tax revenues will go to the fund? How will it be run, and in what will it invest? Will it do so directly, or as yet another vehicle for de-risking private investment — socialising risk while privatising gain? Is this £2 billion even new money, or has it been rebadged from existing GB Energy or National Wealth Fund allocations?
Perhaps most fundamentally, there is the problem of how the government intends to fund what has been touted as a transformative investment vehicle from a revenue stream that is by definition in decline. With gas production expected to almost entirely disappear by 2050, the UK’s North Sea Basin circa 2026 is a far cry from Norway in the 1990s, when oil production was booming and the country established its Sovereign Wealth Fund. Oil and gas firms have also been able to claim outsized levels of financial relief either for investments in more oil and gas or for the cost of decommissioning expired rigs. The real meaning of the fund, then, is clear: an attempt to cover for a lack of direction, winning over the climate-minded with gestures toward green investment.
So when Burnham says ‘pragmatism’, read prevarication. If his main aim is to reduce energy bills, then the Jackdaw decision makes little sense. If it is a sop to the climate-denialist right, then it is a total failure. The Tories and Reform will now be emboldened in their project of maximally exploiting what remains of Britain’s fossil resources while jettisoning climate ambitions. Since the decision was announced, the shadow energy secretary Andrew Bowie has condemned Labour for refusing to issue new exploration licences in the North Sea and pushed for the approval of Rosebank. Burnham, he says, is pursuing a ‘deeply confused energy policy’. Is he wrong?
Real Alternatives
We are living through a time when all the major parties of the right are dragging the country towards an outright politics of denial, helped by a media in which, according to research by Persuasion UK, ‘negative opinions about Net Zero [are] triply overrepresented. . . . versus their actual prevalence among the British public’. Only a clear climate strategy — not a politics in which directionlessness is disguised as sober pragmatism — can push back against this destructive trend.
What might this look like? The economist Brett Christophers has written that dealing with the climate crisis requires a ‘double bet’: electrification of demand at the same time as a decarbonisation of electricity supply. I would make this a triple bet: as the ecological and human costs of extraction rise, we must also reduce demand by reorganising our economy — confronting inequality, prioritising collective needs, and resisting the rise of ecologically disastrous projects like hyperscale data centres that offer ‘growth’ like a poison apple.
Practically, you might start with an affordable energy guarantee; a rapid and state-led scheme to replace gas-fired boilers with heat pumps; and insulating homes and workplaces to drive down demand for heating. As a recent report by the think tank E3G noted, the economic benefits of these measures alone would dwarf the meagre rewards of new oil and gas licenses. The work of adaptation, meanwhile, is both urgent and popular, from improved public transit and resilient agricultural systems to more abundant and biodiverse green spaces.
Whatever politicians might say, the data shows that the appeal of climate politics hasn’t shifted for the British public in recent years, even if it is less prioritised. Mike Davis wrote in 1998 that ‘disaster amnesia is a federally subsidised luxury’: in other words, it’s possible to forget even the worst disasters when somebody else is footing the bill. This is clearly the government’s attitude towards the environmental disasters that struck Europe this summer. But as the crisis escalates, this is not a luxury they can enjoy for very long. The only pragmatic climate politics is one that meets the radicalism of the moment.
Originally published by Tribune as "Burnham’s Climate Policy is Dangerously Incoherent".
Adrienne Buller