Tory Lord’s Firm Awarded New North Sea Oil and Gas Licences
Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.
Michael Spencer, who has donated millions to the Conservative Party, is the largest shareholder in North Sea exploration firm Deltic Energy.
A company whose largest shareholder is a former Conservative treasurer and major party donor has been awarded two new North Sea exploration licences, DeSmog can reveal.
It was announced on Wednesday (31 January) that Deltic Energy had been awarded the new licences in the latest North Sea oil and gas licensing round.
Conservative peer Michael Spencer currently holds an 18.8 percent (£4.5 million) stake in the firm.
Spencer has donated over £6 million to the Conservative Party since 2005 and was appointed to the Lords by Boris Johnon in September 2020. The billionaire financier is a former party treasurer and raised an estimated £70 million for the Tories between 2006 and 2010. He currently serves as a director of the Conservative Party Foundation – the party’s multi-million pound endowment fund, created under his watch in 2009 to manage “legacy funds to support the long-term finance” of the party.
The Guardian and the Good Law Project also revealed today that EnQuest Heather, a subsidiary of EnQuest,` had been awarded a new oil and gas licence. EnQuest Chief Executive Officer Amjad Bseisu has donated nearly £500,000 to the Conservative Party in the last decade and has lobbied to maximise oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
DeSmog revealed in May 2023 that EnQuest had been awarded licences to explore carbon dioxide storage under the North Sea.
Jolyon Maugham, executive director of the Good Law Project told DeSmog that: “The Electoral Commission records these contributions as donations to the Conservative Party. But, given the extraordinary correlation between donations to the Tories and valuable awards from the government, I wonder whether it would be more accurate to brand them as investments?”
Both personally and through his family office IPGL, Spencer has donated more than £100,000 to the Conservative Party and its candidates since Rishi Sunak became prime minister in October 2022.
Sunak has been advocating forcefully for North Sea oil and gas exploration in recent months, saying that the UK plans to “max out” the UK’s reserves. In addition to its two new licences, Deltic currently has interests in five licences covering nine North Sea areas, known as blocks. New licences were also awarded this week to fossil fuel giants Shell and Equinor.
“Rishi Sunak’s obsession with doling out new North Sea licences now starts to make some sense,” Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, told DeSmog. “It’s clear there is no public benefit from the policy… But new fields could make a tidy little profit for a handful of oil and gas executives and their shareholders, including Conservative Party donors.”
Through the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill, passed by MPs last week, the government is attempting to bind future administrations to annual North Sea oil and gas licensing rounds.
This is despite the International Energy Agency stating that new fossil fuel exploration is “incompatible” with the Paris Agreement target of limiting global heating to 1.5C.
This week, the Climate Change Committee – the independent body that advises the government on its net zero policies – warned that mixed messages, including new fossil fuel projects, have damaged the UK’s international climate standing.
Spencer told DeSmog that: “I believe it is totally in the best interest of the UK to replace imported oil and gas by energy extracted from our own North Sea.”
North Sea gas carries higher emissions than imports from Norway, while there is no guarantee that oil and gas extracted under the new licences will be used to supply the UK, given that it is mined by private companies that sell it on the open international market.
Khan added that: “new drilling won’t make any difference to our bills, which ministers have admitted; it won’t boost energy security in that the UK has burned most of its gas; and it won’t provide a secure future for the workforce, which has halved in the past decade despite hundreds of licences being issued.
“The prime minister now needs to come clean with the public on any discussions he’s had with Spencer, or any of his party’s other oil and gas donors,” Khan said. “Sunak cannot continue to privilege the short term interests of a few, rich oil execs over the needs of millions of ordinary people who are struggling to afford to heat their homes.”
North Sea licences are awarded by the North Sea Transition Authority, a non-departmental public body owned and funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. There is no evidence that Deltic or Spencer used political contacts to secure the licences.
According to the NSTA, licensees have to “meet certain financial criteria” and meet the adequate “technical capability”, but there is no published guidance on avoiding conflicts of interest.
The NTSA, Deltic and EnQuest declined to comment on the record. The Department of Energy Security and Net Zero has been approached for comment.
Spencer and Deltic
Spencer has a number of oil and gas interests. His House of Lords register of interests shows that he has a stake in Pantheon Resources, a UK company exploring for oil in Alaska, and Cluff Energy Africa, described as an “early stage oil prospecting company seeking licences in Africa (Angola and Sierra Leone)”.
Until December last year, Spencer also held shares in Petrofac, an oilfield services firm heavily involved in the North Sea, including the controversial Cambo project.
Spencer has publicly advocated for the fossil fuel industry. He told LBC’s Nick Ferrari last September that the UK “sadly has opposed further investment in North Sea oil and gas”. Spencer used the interview to praise then Prime Minister Liz Truss for opposing windfall taxes on the sector, calling them “not Tory policy” and “not pro-business”. He has also expressed support for the controversial policy of fracking for shale gas.
Spencer is the chair of the Centre for Policy Studies, an influential Conservative think tank whose director was the co-author of the 2019 Tory manifesto. A number of fellow board members have financial interests in oil and gas firms.
The Conservatives received £3.5 million from polluters, fossil fuel interests, and climate deniers in 2022, and took over £400,000 from individuals and companies in the fossil fuel industry in 2020 and 2021 as the government weighed up decisions on North Sea oil and gas licences.
Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog. ENDS
‘Dishing out licences to climate criminals’
New UK oil and gas exploration licences approved in the North Sea
Judge throws out case against Greta Thunberg and other London protesters
Court rules not enough evidence provided to prove defendants failed to comply with section 14 order at anti-fossil fuel rally
Greta Thunberg and four others charged with public order offences over a protest in London have been cleared after a judge ruled that they had no case to answer.
Thunberg was charged alongside Christofer Kebbon, Joshua James Unwin, Jeff Rice and Peter Barker with “failing to comply with a condition imposed under section 14 of the Public Order Act”.
They had been taking part in a protest outside the InterContinental hotel in Mayfair, the venue for the Energy Intelligence Forum (EIF), a fossil fuel industry summit attended by corporate executives and government ministers.
All were arrested after the senior officer at the scene enacted the section 14 order to impose conditions on the protest, which had blocked access to and from the hotel for guests and EIF delegates.
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US approves plan to bomb Iraq and Syria
Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
The country approved plans to widen the scope of the regional war originating in Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Following an attack by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq against US foreign outpost “Tower 22”, which killed three US soldiers stationed near the Syria-Jordan border, the United States has approved plans for a multi-day strike against Iraq and Syria.
The death of three US troops, the first casualties among US forces in a widening conflict in West Asia, drew attention to the hundreds of US military bases and outposts spread throughout the world.
In confirming responsibility for the attack, an Islamic Resistance official declared, “If the United States continues to support ‘israel,’ there will be an escalation.” and that “All American interests in the region are legitimate targets.”
The United States is using the strikes as a way to continue to blame Iran for the wider resistance in West Asia. The strikes will purportedly be against “Iranian targets.” Resistance organizations such as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq are frequently accused of being Iranian “proxies” by US officials and in the mainstream press.
Contrary to seeking peace for the hundreds of thousands being slaughtered in Gaza, the United States and the Western world have continually chased escalation. Earlier in January, the US and the UK began an airstrike campaign against Yemen, in retaliation against the nation’s casualty-free blockade of the Red Sea, which Yemeni forces claim to be carrying out in solidarity in Gaza. The only deaths surrounding the blockade have been suffered by Yemenis, and have been as a result of the US and UK’s bombing campaign.
The United States and several Western nations have also directly worsened the plight of Gazans by cutting all their funding to the UNRWA, due to dubious accusations made by Israel that some UNRWA were involved in the October 7 operation.
Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
New Evidence Reveals Fossil Fuel Industry Sponsored Climate Science in 1954
Excerpts from an original article by Rebecca John at DeSmog.
Documents shed light on the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry, adding to growing understanding of Big Oil’s knowledge of climate change.
In 1955 in the wilds of Big Sur, a young Caltech researcher named Charles David Keeling gathered carbon dioxide samples among Northern California’s towering redwoods. Crawling out of his sleeping bag several times a night on research trips conducted over the course of 18 months, from January 1955 to June 1956, Keeling measured background levels of carbon dioxide across the western United States — at Big Sur, but also at desert and high mountain stations, in forests and grassland, above the city of Los Angeles, and over the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Keeling’s findings would lead him to conduct a separate series of experiments from the top of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa resulting in the famous Keeling Curve — a visual depiction of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by the burning of fossil fuels. His work underpins our understanding of manmade climate change.
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By December 1954, the Air Pollution Foundation had approved an allocation of $13,814 (approximately $158,000 in today’s money) to fund Keeling’s earliest CO2 investigations.
These never-before-seen documents from the Caltech Archives and the U.S. National Archives, along with material from the Charles David Keeling papers at the University of California, San Diego, and local Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s, establish the Air Pollution Foundation’s sponsorship of Keeling’s research at Caltech as the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry. It’s possible it was also the first time that the oil industry was directly informed about CO2-induced climate change — five years before physicist Edward Teller warned the API of the disruptive consequences of burning fossil fuels.
Fossil Fuel Fingerprints
Carbon atoms contain a combination of the isotopes carbon-12 (C12), carbon-13 (C13), and carbon-14 (C14). Carbon atoms from fossil fuels, however, contain relatively little C13 and almost no C14, which is radioactive and decays over time.
In the 1940s and early 1950s, a carbon isotope scientific revolution was underway in the United States. Scientists had learned that they could measure the different ratios of carbon isotopes in materials to accurately determine the age of ancient objects: carbon dating. By analyzing the isotopic fingerprint of carbon atoms in tree rings, scientists could also identify whether the carbon dioxide absorbed by trees through photosynthesis had been produced naturally or as a result of burning fossil fuels. And, by measuring the isotopic ratios in tree rings of various ages, researchers could also estimate how far CO2 concentrations had risen since the Industrial Revolution as a result of burning fossil fuels.
In a proposal sent to the Air Pollution Foundation in November 1954, Keeling’s research director Epstein wrote, “It is clear that several factors contribute to the variations in the isotopic composition of carbon in trees.” Among these factors, Epstein explained, were the various ecological conditions under which the tree grew, including the isotopic composition of the carbon in the atmosphere. “Since 1840, the carbon-isotope ratio (C12/C13) has increased in the trees so far investigated,” he continued — an increase which could be explained by a change in the carbon-isotope ratio in atmospheric carbon dioxide “resulting from the burning of the C12-enriched coal and petroleum.”
Epstein’s research proposal for the Air Pollution Foundation left no doubt about the potential significance of this research. Approximately sixty years before the Paris Agreement, he described the “concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere” as a matter “of well recognized importance to our civilization” and explained that the possible consequences of “a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization.”
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Ahead of the Keeling Curve
Confident in the accuracy of his measurements, Keeling communicated his findings to an employee of the U.S. Weather Bureau and, in the summer of 1956, its director of meteorological research, Harry Wexler, invited him to Washington, D.C., to present his data. Impressed, Wexler suggested that the young researcher continue his investigations by measuring CO2 at the newly built observatory on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa. Keeling secured federal sponsorship for this work and measured atmospheric CO2 on Mauna Loa, observing a rising trend of CO2 increasing year on year from approximately 313 ppm in 1957 to 320 ppm in 1967. Caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, the depiction of this trend would come to be known as the Keeling Curve — a key piece of evidence that climate change is human caused.
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Excerpts from an original article by Rebecca John at DeSmog.