Environmental groups have accused the UK of “torpedoing climate action” and “disregarding science” amid reports six new oil and gas fields are to be approved in the North Sea this year.
Rishi Sunak – who said last week he wanted to encourage more investment in new fossil fuel drilling – is reported to have pressed the business secretary to fast-track applications.
A new oil and gas field in the North Sea has already been given the green light this year – just two months after the UK held the global climate Cop26 summit.
Green groups fiercely criticized the move, accusing the government of hypocrisy and taking action that “only worsens the climate crisis.
It is set to be followed by half a dozen more approvals for fossil fuel drilling this year, according to The Telegraph.
The sites have reportedly already been given a preliminary license by ministers and are expected to be approved by the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA), the UK regulator.
The Telegraph reported there were fears in the Treasury over how the move to net-zero could impact the economy, while a Whitehall source told the newspaper the business secretary was “pushing for more investment in the North Sea” during the transition for “domestic energy security” as well.
Philip Evans, an oil campaigner at Greenpeace UK said: “This would represent a stunning retreat from the pro-climate posturing we saw from the government at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.”
The UK declined to join an international alliance aimed at ending new oil and gas projects at the Cop26 summit in November hosted in Glasgow. …
According to the International Energy Agency, natural gas is the “cleanest burning” fossil fuel – but still emits greenhouse gases.
Read rest at The Independent
“Green groups” have little understanding of the environment they claim to love. Or the energy they claim to hate (and yet to continue to benefit from as much as the rest of us). I’m a farmer with a biology degree. I know that life on earth is made from two foundational molecules – CO2 and H2O. They have no idea that it is energy that allows 3% of us to feed the other 97%. They have no idea that it is fossil fuels that have made us the best fed, longest living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. They have no idea that using coal, oil, and gas, fossil fuels, recycles the two basic molecular ingredients of life on earth – CO2 and H2O. Clearly making fossil fuels, (coal, oil, and gas) (85%of civilization’s energy), OUR ONLY GREEN ENERGY. Time to do your homework if you truly love the environment, “environmental groups”. Because you have no idea you, and every other living thing on earth are made from the stuff you call “pollution”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
All life dies without CO2. It is the foundational molecule of ALL LIFE ON EARTH. And CO2 has been dangerously and inexorably declining (tied up in life itself and carbonate rock) since life’s birth in life luxuriant levels of CO2 more than twenty times today’s levels. DECLINING to within 30ppm of the beginning of the death of all things from a LACK OF LIFE ESSENTIAL CO2. Here is the chemistry of life’s foundational process, photosynthesis. The process that actually paints the environment green through its green pigmented enzyme chlorophyll. Sunlight plus CO2 plus H2O gives all of life’s energy (sugar), all of life’s carbon (from CO2), and all of our atmosphere’s breathable oxygen (life was born in an atmosphere devoid of breathable oxygen. And since life consists entirely of little carbon sacks of water we call cells, coal, oil, and gas are civilization’s ONLY GREEN ENERGY. Because FF energy recycles the dangerously LOW LEVELS OF CO2 back to the biosphere where it makes life greener, stronger, more drought tolerant, and more abundant. So much so that it is actually shrinking deserts!
Greenpeace still fuels its two ships and all those Zodiacs with Fossil Fuels we dont see any sails or solar panels on them