A spoof ad of Sunak shaking oil-soaked handPhoto: Fossil Free London
PARODY adverts mocking Rishi Sunak for giving public money to oil giants have appeared across London’s bus stops.
The Prime Minister is shown shaking an oil-soaked hand next to a Conservative logo with the words: “A helping hand for those in need: £3.75 billion public money to oil company Equinor if Rosebank oil field goes ahead.”
The spoof ads have been spotted in Hackney, Southwark and Tower Hamlets so far, and come after Fossil Free London campaigners last week delivered giant gifts to the Norwegian embassy to represent the £3.75bn tax breaks developers of the North Sea’s Rosebank field could receive.
Norway’s state-backed oil and gas giant Equinor would be among the firms set to profit while the taxpayer picks up almost all the costs of the development.
Earlier this month Mr Sunak claimed a planned expansion of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea was “entirely consistent” with the government’s goal to reach net zero by 2050.
If we have not been warned of the dangers of climate change this summer, we never will be. Extreme heat, forest fires and floods have been all over news reports. Yet the oil and gas industry remains largely in denial.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) says steep cuts in oil and gas production are necessary to reach the Paris (COP 21) goal of keeping global warming at 1.5℃. However, only a tiny fraction of the industry, accounting for less than 5% of oil and gas output, has targets aligned with the IEA’s “net zero” requirements.
The current secretary general of production cartel Opec, Haitham al-Ghais, expects global oil demand to rise by about 10% to 110 million barrels a day by 2045, a volume incompatible with the Paris goals. The UK government has just offered a helping hand, granting around 100 new North Sea licences. What are we to make of this mismatch?
The new denialism
Typical of the new breed of climate denialism is a recent report by the Energy Policy Research Foundation (ERPF), a body funded by the US government and various undisclosed corporate interests and foundations. It sees the IEA’s requirements as a “seal of approval … to block investment in oil and gas production by western companies”. The report views meeting the targets as too costly, too harsh on poor countries and too bad for the energy security of the west.
In fact, it is wrong on each account. Many eminent economists and scientists use the concept of the social cost of carbon (SCC), which is defined as the cost to society of releasing an additional tonne of CO₂. Expert estimates from 2019 put this at between US$171 and US$310 (£133 to £241). If we go with, say, US$240 per tonne, the social cost of continued carbon equivalent emissions comes out at almost US$8.5 trillion every year.
A recent study has factored into the calculation climate feedback loops. This is where one problem caused by global warming leads to others, such as melting permafrost unleashing stores of methane.
When the study estimated the economic damage that this could cause, it produced an SCC in excess of US$5,000. That implies annual costs of more like US$170 trillion a year, which makes the US$4 trillion investment into clean energy that the IEA thinks necessary to meet the Paris climate goals look like a drop in the ocean.
It may help to break this down to one barrel of oil. A special IEA report for COP28 estimates that on average, each barrel of oil emits 0.53 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in greenhouse gas across its life cycle, 20% of which comes from production.
Going back to our average SSC per tonne of US$240, that points to a social cost of US$126 per barrel. With oil currently at US$85 per barrel, the societal damage from producing, transporting, refining and consuming it is far greater – and that’s before including climate feedbacks.
Meanwhile, the arguments by the EPRF and like-minded supporters about energy security are laughable. The history of the oil and gas industry is a history of wars and geopolitical tensions. Transitioning to cleaner fuels can only increase our energy security and reduce the need to police remote autocracies.
The argument that poor countries need to continue burning carbon for development reasons is no better. In its latest report from 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said climate change would probably see an increase in “losses and damages, strongly concentrated among the poorest vulnerable populations”.
Equally, the World Health Organization estimates that: “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.”
How to respond
The denialists offer no alternatives to cutting carbon emissions, and often simply ignore climate change altogether. The recent ERPF report mentions climate change only four times. It is as if heatwaves, forest fires, flooding, rising sea levels and the demise of natural habitat caused by climate inaction were happening on another planet.
We still have time to limit global warming below 1.5℃. It is true that we will need oil and gas for many years, and that there are currently no alternatives for certain sectors such as air travel, shipping and some industries. Nonetheless, there is still much that can be done now to make a substantial difference.
To incentivise the transition to cleaner energy, governments need to end fossil fuel subsidies, which the IMF estimates amounted to US$5.9 trillion in 2020 alone. We also need to put a proper price on carbon – only 40 countries have attempted this so far, and none has it anywhere near the estimated social cost of emitting carbon.
Countries that resist charging their own polluters should face a carbon border adjustment mechanism, which is a tariff that effectively puts the polluter on the same footing as local players. If all the actors in the fossil fuel supply chain had to face the cost of the damage they cause, the need to phase out long-term investments in fossil fuels would become more obvious.
The IEA requirements for “net zero” are just one of the pathways towards meeting the Paris goal of 1.5℃ warming. Others are explored by some of the more credible actors in the petroleum industry, such as Shell, BP and Norway’s Equinor, but all require a substantial decline in oil demand and production by 2050.
Required production cuts
I left the IEA’s scenario off the graph because it published so few datapoints, but it is broadly in line with the others. Meanwhile, the Opec data is for reference and not a net zero scenario. BP, Shell, Equinor and Opec
Instead of criticising efforts to slow climate change and sponsoring ridiculous reports calling for more fossil fuels, the oil industry should eliminate leakages, venting and flaring of methane, and electrify as many processes as possible using renewable power. It should also employ carbon capture, usage and storage technologies over the next ten years – yes this will increase the price of fossil fuels, but that is exactly what we need to make clean sources of energy competitive across the board and speed up the energy transition.
The sooner the industry starts facing up to the realities of climate change, the more chance it has to survive. The companies and even countries that produce fossil fuels will have to face and pay the cost for the damage they cause. Those costs are already massive and will grow. Those that survive will do so only as a provider of clean and sustainable energy.
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Greenpeace activists have climbed onto the roof of Rishi Sunak’s £2m country mansion in protest at his backing for a major expansion of oil and gas drilling amid a climate crisis
Four Greenpeace activists climbed onto the roof of the Prime Minister’s £2m manor house in Yorkshire earlier this morning in protest at his backing for a major expansion of North Sea oil and gas drilling amidst a summer of escalating climate impacts.
After reaching the top of the building using ladders and climbing ropes, the activists unfolded 200 sq metres of oil-black fabric to cover a whole side of the luxury mansion. At the same time, two activists unfurled a banner emblazoned with the words “Rishi Sunak – Oil Profits or Our Future?” across the grass in front of the manor house.
Sunak’s government has come under heavy criticism for pushing ahead with plans to hand out around 100 new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, and even hinting at additional ones in future. He has also indicated that he will approve drilling at Rosebank – the UK’s largest undeveloped oil field. The controversial move flies in the face of multiple warnings from the government’s own climate advisers, the International Energy Agency and the UN Secretary General that any new fossil fuel projects risk tipping the world into the danger zone above 1.5C of warming.
The move, part of a series of climate policy row-backs following the Uxbridge by-election results, comes amidst a summer of devastating wildfires, floods and heatwaves. July has seen the hottest three-week period ever recorded, the three hottest days on record, and the warmest ocean temperatures ever for this season.
Campaigners are warning that any new oil and gas from the North Sea will do nothing for our energy security or bills despite government rhetoric. The companies that own it will simply export it overseas, and any that is sold back to us will be done so at the international market price.
Commenting on the protest, Philip Evans, Greenpeace UK’s climate campaigner, said:
“We desperately need our prime minister to be a climate leader, not a climate arsonist. Just as wildfires and floods wreck homes and lives around the world, Sunak is committing to a massive expansion of oil and gas drilling. He seems quite happy to hold a blowtorch to the planet if he can score a few political points by sowing division around climate in this country. This is cynical beyond belief.
“Sunak is even willing to peddle the old myth about new oil and gas helping ordinary people struggling with energy bills when he knows full well it’s not true. More North Sea drilling will only benefit oil giants who stand to make even more billions from it, partly thanks to a giant loophole in Sunak’s own windfall tax.
“The experts are clear – we can’t afford any new oil and gas, and the fossil fuel industry certainly doesn’t need another helping hand in destroying the climate. What we need is a clean, affordable energy system fit for the 21st century. It’s time for Sunak to choose between Big Oil’s profits or our future on a habitable planet.”
The Sunak government is also expected to approve Rosebank, the largest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea. And thanks to a loophole in Sunak’s windfall tax, the UK public will foot the bill for 91% of the development costs as the Norwegian oil giant that owns it, Equinor, will be handed £3.75billion of public money to develop the field whilst being able to rake in tens of billions in profits.
There is wide agreement that there should be no new oil and gas exploration or development. Former Tory Net Zero Tsar, Chris Skidmore, has called for Rosebank to be halted, and former COP President and Tory MP, Alok Sharma, has also spoken out against Rosebank, highlighting that it won’t help bring down energy bills.
The UK will extract as much oil and gas from the North Sea as possible, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Monday as he announced more than 100 new drilling licenses. Only a few days earlier, United Nations chief António Guterres declared that record heat and extreme weather signalled a new era of “global boiling” had arrived.
How many new oil and gas fields can the climate sustain? None says David Waltham, a professor of geophysics at Royal Holloway University of London who has spent 36 years training young geologists to work in the fossil fuel industry.
“We cannot safely set fire to all the fuel we’ve already found, so why look for more?” he asks.
This roundup of The Conversation’s coverage of how more oil and gas drilling will affect climate change comes from our weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 20,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.
This assessment is shared by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the UN and the Climate Change Committee (CCC) – the government’s own advisers on climate policy. Instead of expanding how much fossil fuel they extract, experts say countries must urgently reduce and even close down fossil fuel production.
An analysis of the world’s reserves in 2021 revealed how stark this decline must be to prevent catastrophic warming. Daniel Welsby, James Price and Steve Pye, the UCL energy researchers behind the research, said 60% of known oil and gas must remain underground in 2050 to prevent global temperatures exceeding 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average – the point at which damage to the climate is expected to rapidly become irreversible.
“Almost all of the world’s coal – 90% – will need to be spared from factory and power plant furnaces. Our analysis also showed that global oil and gas production must peak immediately and fall by 3% each year until mid-century,” they say.
The prime minister argued that pumping oil and gas in UK waters is at least greener than importing it from dirtier producers abroad. After all, the UK did create a climate compatibility checkpoint in 2021: six tests to assess how new fossil fuel projects might contribute to the emissions driving climate change.
“Only three tests remain,” say Tavis Potts and Daria Shapovalova, energy and development experts at the University of Aberdeen, “and each seems designed to wave through new rounds of oil and gas exploration and production.”
Fortunately, Sunak also promised to share £20 billion (US$25.4 billion) in public funding for carbon capture and storage technology with the Acorn project near Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, north-east Scotland. Historical research by Marc Hudson, a visiting fellow in science policy at the University of Sussex, shows how the future potential of this technology has been used to justify prolonging coal power and building gas power plants several times over the last two decades.
And evidence gathered by Nils Markusson indicates that hyping the promise of carbon capture and storage to offset rising emissions can actually delay necessary cuts to greenhouse gases. Markusson is a lecturer in environmental politics at Lancaster University.
What about energy security? Oil and gas from the North Sea is sold on the international market, so the UK’s licensing bonanza is unlikely to ease household energy bills. And the UK isn’t obliged to keep using oil and gas until 2050 as Sunak suggests. The CCC’s plan shows how the UK could meet all of its energy needs with low-carbon sources by mid-century.
The real cost of carbon
Is Sunak at least right in arguing that drilling for more fuel and doing it closer to home will make the UK safer in an era of growing political instability? Not according to Adi Imsirovic, a fellow in energy economics at the University of Surrey.
“The history of the oil and gas industry is a history of wars and geopolitical tensions,” he says. “Transitioning to cleaner fuels can only increase our energy security.”
Research by Imsirovic and others gives some idea of the consequences of the oil and gas industry’s zeal to pump more fossil fuel.
Economists estimate the cost to society of emitting an additional tonne of CO₂ between US$171 and US$310 (£133 to £241), he says.
“If we go with, say, US$240 per tonne, the social cost of continued carbon equivalent emissions comes out at almost US$8.5 trillion every year.”
But the effects of climate change aren’t so neat and self-contained. One problem caused by rising temperatures leads to others which ultimately accelerate the rate of warming, such as melting permafrost releasing heat-trapping methane gas. A study which attempted to include these feedback loops in calculations of economic damage put the social cost of releasing another tonne of CO₂ into the atmosphere at more than US$5,000.
“That implies annual costs of more like US$170 trillion a year, which makes the US$4 trillion investment into clean energy that the IEA thinks necessary to meet the Paris climate goals look like a drop in the ocean,” he says.
Would a new production boom in the North Sea at least benefit the UK’s public services through a flood of tax receipts? Because of loopholes in the government’s windfall tax on the North Sea industry, that’s not likely either says İrem Güçeri,
associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Oxford.
“There is a lot of research to show how to design a strong windfall tax that will bring in solid revenues for a government and its citizens,” Güçeri says.
The UK government doesn’t appear to have heeded it though, as it allows firms to reap a huge tax relief by investing profits into new extraction sites. “This is a massive subsidy,” she says.
“This is how some oil majors have avoided paying very much tax on their UK profits in recent quarters, despite massive gains.”
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Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades that this type of event will become more frequent as the world continues to warm. The major culprit behind this is the burning of fossil fuels. So it’s extremely concerning that the UK government has announced its intention to grant hundreds of licences for new North Sea oil and gas extraction.
Although burning fossil fuels to generate power and heat has enabled society to develop and flourish, we are now experiencing the unintended side effects. The carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere is leading to a rise in global temperatures, causing heatwaves to become hotter and downpours more intense. The resulting large-scale disruption and suffering is becoming ever more visible.
This warming will continue, with worsening climatic consequences, until we reduce global carbon dioxide emissions to “net zero”. After that, we will still have to live and suffer in a warmer climate for generations. The collective choices we make now will matter in the future.
The small-scale, but high-profile, disruptions caused by Just Stop Oil protesters in the UK are extremely frustrating for many. But their single demand – for no licenses for new UK coal, oil and gas projects – is consistent with the science underpinning the international agreements that the UK has signed.
Temperatures are rising
Since the 1860s, the scientific community has understood that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would warm the climate. And as long ago as 1938, the burning of fossil fuels was linked to the observed rise in both carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. Fast forward to now and global temperatures are warmer, and increasing faster, than at any point in human civilisation.
In response to the overwhelming scientific evidence, the UK and 193 other nations came together in 2015 to ratify the Paris agreement on climate change. One of the agreed goals is to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and even aim for 1.5℃, compared to the pre-industrial era.
However, the latest synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which all governments explicitly endorsed, paints a stark reality. If we burn all of the fossil fuels that we currently have access to, then global warming will exceed 1.5℃ and may reach 2℃.
To avoid breaching the limits set out by the Paris agreement, some of the coal, oil and gas that we can already extract must remain unburnt. New fossil fuel extraction projects will make it even harder to stop further global warming.
Build up renewable infrastructure
There are other options. The UK government’s official advisers, the Climate Change Committee, have put forward a vision for UK power generation consistent with a net zero future. They say that the UK could provide all of its energy needs by 2050 through a combination of renewables, bioenergy, nuclear, hydrogen, storage and demand management, with some carbon capture and storage for fossil gas-based generation in the meantime.
The UK can achieve energy security without causing additional global warming. Nigel Jarvis/Shutterstock
If the UK followed the example of China and rapidly increased its investments in renewable energy, then it could achieve energy security without causing additional global warming. China emits the most carbon dioxide of any country in the world. But it is installing more renewable energy generation than the rest of the world combined.
Rapidly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and not issuing new licenses to extract oil and gas, is the most effective way of minimising future climate-related disruptions. The sooner those with the power to shape our future recognise this, the better.
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