Fact-Checking the Guardian’s Claim That New North Sea Drilling Will “Only Supply 3% of UK Gas Needs”

The data on the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields tell a very different story

It is abundantly clear now that the Net Zero democratic deficit has widened to such an extent that the cross-party Westminster consensus on climate policy has broken. The tensions around the policy agenda are no longer defined as between ‘scientists’ and ‘deniers’, nor Left and Right, and are evident even within the Labour fold. Union voices (such as they are) are now joined by Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar, who, fearing job losses turning into seat-losses ahead of the Scottish Parliament elections next month, has reportedly been lobbying Ed Miliband to reverse his objections to North Sea oil and gas development. But spare a thought in this new battle of the climate war for its antagonist, the Green Blob. Despite having spent billions of pounds on lobbying in many forms, it is now losing the long overdue debate. And so it falls to its grantees to produce its talking points – and to the Guardian (also a grantee) to report such lines verbatim – in an attempt to hold the ground against reality. ‘New North Sea drilling would barely reduce UK gas imports at all,’ claims Fiona Harvey in the newspaper this week.

It’s an odd claim, mostly for the vehemence that accompanies it: “The Jackdaw field, one of the largest unexploited gasfields in the North Sea, would displace only 2% of the UK’s current imports of gas,” says Harvey. And worse: “The Rosebank field… would displace only about 1% of the UK’s gas imports.” This, she explains, “would leave the UK still almost entirely dependent on supplies from Norway and a few other sources”. If that’s true, then why the panic about allowing these developments to go ahead? This pitiful 2% won’t cost us anything to allow private investors to develop, and the revenues would boost income for the Treasury. Chill, Fiona.

As is the nature of the Guardian’s brand of environmental ‘journalism’, Harvey’s research consists of quotes from blob-funded organisations. The producer of this claim, the European Climate Foundation-funded campaigning organisation Uplift, sets the scene. This is followed by a Greenpeace spokesman, who claims “the only path to real [energy] security is to leave fossil fuels behind as quickly as possible”, because of “a volatile global market which we cannot control”. Another spokesman, from the End Fuel Poverty Coalition – a misnomer, if there ever was one, it being a “coalition” of Green Blob grantees, including Uplift – claims that the energy market is “not working in the public interest” and is “rewarding the companies whose products are driving up the bills that millions of households cannot afford to pay”.

These green claims are of course manifestly specious and lack any sense of basic arithmetic, let alone economics. Such Blobbers can neither explain how North Sea oil and gas development will harm energy security nor how it could increase market prices, even if their claims are that the developments will only produce negligible benefits over time. The gas will still flow, either from UK territory, Norway or elsewhere. The implication driving the argument, however, seems to be that the developments would represent an either-or: that once the taps to our energy resources are allowed to open wider, then it will be harder to close them again. But no less likely is that having been dealt such a symbolic loss as opening these fields would represent, the Green Blob business plan would also fold. Those ‘civil society organisations’ which lobbied for decades for Labour’s election promise to end domestic fossil fuel production may find themselves starved of resources.