Former Tory Cabinet minister Alok Sharma tore apart the Government’s new oil and gas bill before it passed through the Commons, as he stressed that the UK’s promise to phase out fossil fuels will be broken.
On Monday evening, the Government’s Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill passed through its second reading in the House of Commons despite widespread condemnation from climate campaigners.
The legislation seeks to maximise North Sea oil and gas production, requiring the industry regulator to run regular rounds for new oil and gas licences, pushing fossil fuel production.
Alok Sharma, who was the Cop26 president, abstained from voting, as he spoke out in Parliament against a law which will merely “reinforce the unfortunate perception about the UK rowing back from climate action”.
“We have seen the impacts of the changing climate around us daily, 2023 was the hottest year on record globally, in recent weeks many people have faced flooding again in our country including in my own constituency, we really shouldn’t need anymore wakeup calls to put aside the distractions and act with the urgency the situation demands,” Sharma said.
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Reacting to the vote last night, Greenpeace UK’s political campaigner, Ami McCarthy, slammed the result as a win for the government, but a loss for the planet and everyone on it.
“Literally no-one benefits from this nonsensical, climate-wrecking Bill except the oil and gas industry and its shareholders,” said McCarthy.
“The government has failed to act in the national interest tonight and those MPs who chose not to rebel have placed themselves on the wrong side of history.
Dithering on renewable energy and insulation will leave people in Britain ‘colder and poorer’, campaigners warn
Rishi Sunak is facing further attacks on his plans to expand oil and gas exploration in the North Sea this week. The Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill – to be debated in the Commons on Monday – has already triggered widespread protests, including the resignation of Chris Skidmore, a former Conservative energy minister.
The bill aims to boost fossil fuel extraction by establishing a new system under which licences for North Sea oil and gas projects will be awarded annually.
Green groups and analysts are lining up to criticise it. UpLift, which campaigns for green energy, pointed out that the bill, which the government says will “max out” the UK’s reserves, will actually result in only a 2% rise in North Sea gas output. “The remaining 98% of gas demand will come from existing North Sea fields,” its analysis finds.
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“Sunak, like his predecessor Liz Truss, is obsessing over oil and gas, but dithering on renewables and insulation which will boost UK energy security and lower bills,” said Tessa Khan, executive director of UpLift. “And it’s making people in this country colder and poorer.”
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
“Whether you are drilling for oil yourself, or have paid for the drill, in both cases you are contributing to and bear responsibility for the climate crisis we are currently experiencing,” one campaigner said of the suit against the Dutch banking giant.
Friends of the Earth Netherlands, which won a historic climate case against Shell in 2021, announced a new lawsuit on Friday against ING, the country’s largest bank.
The environmental group, known as Milieudefensie in Dutch, is demanding that the bank bring its climate policy in line with the Paris agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, slash its carbon dioxide emissions by 48% of 2019 levels by 2030 and its carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions by 43%, take measures to ensure its clients are not destroying the Earth, and begin a dialogue with Milieudefensie about meeting these demands.
“The bank finances oil and gas companies, deforestation, and heavy industry, all of which add to the climate crisis,” Milieudefensie director Donald Pols said in a statement. “Whether you are drilling for oil yourself, or have paid for the drill, in both cases you are contributing to and bear responsibility for the climate crisis we are currently experiencing.”
📣 We are bringing #ING to court in a new climate lawsuit. @ING_news funds companies that are making the climate crisis worse with tens of billions of euros. In fact, the bank puts more money in polluting companies than any other Dutch bank. Read more 👉 https://t.co/eBi6pOHO8hpic.twitter.com/G0kfxQk6pR
In 2022, ING emitted at least 61 megatons of climate pollution, more than Ghana, Switzerland, or Sweden. Almost all of ING’s emissions come through the companies it invests in and does business with, and it emits more than any other bank in the Netherlands.
“He who pays the piper calls the tune. Due to ING’s financing of, e.g., oil and gas companies, ING is the banker of the climate crisis,” Pols said.
In a letter to ING, Milieudefensie outlined several steps the bank should take to reduce the climate footprint of its investments. These included requiring all clients to develop a Paris-compliant climate plan and refusing large clients that don’t develop one within a year, requiring all fossil fuel clients to stop expanding fossil fuels and develop a plan to phase them out entirely, and cutting ties with clients who refuse after one year.
“Large polluters like ING and Shell have to seriously get to work.”
In the letter, Miliedefensie said that ING had eight weeks from Friday to respond to its demands.
“If ING does not present a positive answer to Milieudefensie’s claims within the requested period of time, Milieudefensie will assume that ING is unwilling to comply with this request,” the group wrote in the letter. “Milieudefensie will in such case see no other option than to issue summons against ING with the goal of obtaining a court order instructing ING to take the aforementioned measures.”
The environmental group said that the legal argument behind its victory against Shell would also apply against ING, namely that large corporations must comply with the Paris agreement.
“Since the climate agreements in Paris, it is clear what the world needs to do: reduce the CO2 emissions to limit the warming of the Earth to 1.5°C,” the group’s attorney Roger Cox said in a statement. “This means that large polluters like ING and Shell have to seriously get to work. It is evident that they are not doing enough, and I am therefore confident that we will win this case too.”
While ING has made some progress on its internal climate goals, Mileudefensie believes it is not moving fast enough, as it plans to continue funding oil and gas projects through 2040 and has not set any goals for reducing its total emissions.
“We young people are not in charge, but companies like ING, with their fossil fuel financing, are helping to ruin our world and future,” Winnie Oussoren, a 21-year-old who chairs Young Friends of the Earth Netherlands, said in a statement.
‘The time is over for oily corporations to operate with impunity.’
A group of 27 investors, owning around 5 percent of Shell’s shares, is demanding the multinational improves its environmental targets. The resolution is the biggest such drive to date and was coordinated by the activist group Follow This.
Similar motions have been organised by the group at Shell meetings since 2016. Last year, a resolution put forward by Follow This won the backing of 20 percent of shareholders in what was an eventful AGM where protesters tried to storm the stage.
However, support for the upcoming resolution has drawn the largest number of investment managers, said Mark van Baal, founder of Follow This. It includes Europe’s largest asset manager, Amundi.
The group calls on Shell to align its ‘medium term’ greenhouse gas emission target with the Paris Agreement, to limit global warming. The resolution will be brought to a vote at Shell’s annual general meeting later this year.
The bid to shore up pressure on Shell’s climate commitments comes as its CEO, Wael Sawan, aims to boost the company’s profits, partly by increasing fossil fuel production and slowing down investments in renewables. In October 2023, Shell announced it was to cut at least 15 percent of its low-carbon solutions division workforce and scale back on its hydrogen business.
On the morning of January 17, Argentine President Javier Milei gave his first speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The far-right libertarian was sworn in on December 10, 2023 and since then has launched all-out attacks on the working class through presidential decrees and omnibus laws, all of which have been vehemently opposed on the streets.
Milei began his speech at Davos by telling those present: “I am here to tell you that the West is in danger. All over the world, leaders who must defend the values of capitalism assume a vision that leads to socialism and poverty. “The main leaders of the world have abandoned freedom for so-called collectivism, which is the cause of the problems.”
The strongest argument of his speech was going to be that capitalism is the only tool to end hunger and poverty in the world, although he added: “the leftist thinking attacks capitalism for being, according to them, unjust. They say it is bad because it is individualistic and they fight for social justice. This concept has become fashionable around the world, but social justice is an unfair, violent idea, because taxes are coercively collected. Nobody pays taxes voluntarily. The State is financed through coercion. If a company generates a good product it will do well, if the State punishes the capitalist for being successful it destroys their incentives, and the cake will be smaller. Collectivism ties the entrepreneur’s hands.”
He also spoke of enemies, who for him are those who use the State as a tool: “everyone. There are no substantive differences. Socialists, conservatives, communists, fascists, Nazis, social democrats, centrists. They are all the same.”
In this same sense, Milei attacked two of the most important agendas at the Davos Forum, gender inequality and climate change: “The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between men and women. Libertarianism already establishes equality between the sexes. The founding stone of our creed says that all men are created equal, that we all have the same inalienable rights granted by the creator, among which are life, liberty and property,” he maintained.
He went further and said: “the only thing that became of this agenda of radical feminism is greater intervention by the state to hinder the economic process, giving work to bureaucrats who do not contribute anything to society, be it in the format of women’s ministries or international organizations dedicated to promoting this agenda.”
In the same sense, he denied human responsibility for climate change: “another one of the conflicts that socialists raise is that of man against nature. They maintain that human beings damage the planet and that it must be protected at all costs, even going so far as to advocate for population control mechanisms or the bloody agenda of abortion.”
Finally, the only praise in Javier Milei’s speech was for the businessmen, whom he treated as heroes and also told them: “do not let yourself be intimidated by the political caste that wants to remain in power. You are heroes, you are benefactors, let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral, do not give in to the advance of the State, The state is the problem itself, you are the protagonists of history. Long live fucking freedom!
The president returned to Argentina on Wednesday on a commercial flight, after a couple of meetings and a bold speech that was not very widely accepted in Davos. He will face a massive national strike on January 24, called for by all the major trade unions and confederations in Argentina in opposition to his pro-capitalist, pro-businessman policies.
This article was first published in Spanish on ARG Medios.
