Last week reporters Jillian Ambrose and Damian Carrington published a piece which revealed that biggest oil firms made $93bn in profits in three months amid the war in Iran and the climate crisis. They’re online now to to discuss their story and any other questions you might have
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IscoBusquet asks: Why does the ‘energy sovereignty’ argument for expanded North Sea oil drilling keep coming back again and again despite the fact that there is no way the UK can realistically achieve it in that way?
Jill:
I fully empathise with the frustration in this question. Most credible voices in this debate agree that the UK couldn’t be entirely self-sufficient in oil and gas if the government did more to support the declining North Sea basin, or that greater energy security would mean significantly lower energy market prices.
But energy sovereignty matters in the North Sea debate because oil and gas still provided 75% of the UK’s primary energy needs last year. There are still 23m homes which use a gas boiler, and almost half of the gas which we use to cook our meals and heat our homes comes from the UK’s North Sea gas fields.
The short answer is no, and a rising tide of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for their role in the climate crisis means that is unlikely to change anytime soon. The science is ever clearer though. An analysis published last September showed for the first time that carbon emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms were directly linked to fatal spells of hot weather.
The big oil companies were among the first to realise the dangers of global warming half a century ago. But decades of denial then followed. As the reality of climate crisis has become undeniable, the arguments of the fossil fuel industry have shifted. Gas was cleaner than coal, for example, or that carbon credits from new forests could offset emissions. Today, the industry likes to tout carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a solution. But just this week, one of CCS’s loudest cheerleaders, ExxonMobil, has started a process to sue the European Union which wants to make the company actually store a small amount of CO2.
