After months of vacillation, the UK government has finally announced that drilling will go ahead at the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has described the move as “a pragmatic approach”, saying “we’ll still require oil and gas as part of our energy needs for decades to come”.
The thing is, the climate of our rapidly heating planet doesn’t recognise pragmatism. The only thing it acknowledges and responds to is how much carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, and it doesn’t care where it comes from.
A study published two weeks ago reveals that the rate of global heating doubled over the period 2011 to 2025, compared with 1971 to 2025, so that the planet’s temperature is now rising at a rate of 0.4°C a decade. The corollary of this is that the 1.5°C limit is set to be permanently breached as soon as 2028 – a full decade sooner than previous projections. Furthermore, the speed of heating means that even the projected rise of 2.8°C by 2100 is now unrealistic, and points towards a much hotter world arriving far more quickly.
Nonetheless, a report published today by the UN Environmental Programme claims that, while the 1.5°C threshold is now dead in the water, it may still be possible to limit the global average temperature rise to just a few tenths of a degree above this.
According to the report, to have a “good” chance of staying this side of 1.7°C to 1.8°C, greenhouse gas emissions would need to fall 18 per cent by the end of this decade, 45 per cent by 2035 and a whisker under 70 per cent by 2040. That “good” is doing some seriously heavy lifting, but what’s more, the idea that emissions, in the real world, will drop by more than two-thirds in less than 15 years is pure fantasy. Especially at a time when fossil fuel corporations are planning for expansion, aided and abetted by the governments of the UK, the US and others.
Instead, as pointed out by Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the implementation of current national commitments would mean global emissions reaching close to 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure of the global warming potential of all greenhouse gases) by 2035. And that’s assuming that such commitments are adhered to, which is by no means certain as governments, including that of the UK, row back on green measures.
Today’s decision to go ahead with Jackdaw, and to allow drilling in adjacent areas, is entirely the wrong one. A separate decision about the far more carbon-intensive Rosebank oil field is expected by the end of the year. Going ahead with either project guarantees that the UK is now complicit in pushing up global greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing the chances of limiting the global average temperature rise to something more manageable.
At the same time, the decision marks a conscious commitment to retain fossil fuel infrastructure and lock in hydrocarbons to the country’s energy mix for decades to come. Not only will this endanger national carbon reduction goals, but it will hand other nations an excuse to green-light their own new fossil fuel projects.
Every tonne of CO2 we don’t emit makes our future that little bit less grim, and every tonne we pump out takes fully 400,000 years to remove from the atmosphere completely.
There is nothing pragmatic, then, about opening the North Sea to more drilling. The decision will go unrewarded in terms of cheaper energy and more jobs, but the resulting higher temperatures will ensure that the country is rewarded in the form of more drought, floods and wildfires.