#StopRosebank.
As my local town breaks into a week of events on climate change, activists up and down the country are demanding the UK does not approve new oil and gas fields.
On the table is a huge site in the North Sea, known as
Rosebank. With the potential to supply almost 500m barrels of oil and gas,
burning Rosebank’s supplies would create more CO2 than the combined
emissions of the world’s 28 lowest-income countries, including Uganda, Ethiopia
and Mozambique.
Yet, if the world is to have any chance of limiting global
temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as agreed by our nation’s
leaders at the Paris Agreement, there can be no new investment in fossil fuels.
Period.
It does seem a little strange. If our government is bound by
its climate pledge to strive for a 1.5°C limit, and claims
to be a climate leader, why are our politicians even considering new fossil
fuels? A lot has changed since 2015, as I’m sure you are all too aware of. I
doubt you could go a day without some word towards the covid-19 pandemic,
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the cost of living crisis, to name just a few. Despite
many describing this as an opportunity for the UK to break free from its
reliance on fossil fuels from Russia, our politicians seem to have merely changed
where they see the source of our fuels, not their substance. Indeed, all these
talking points are now culminating in the Conservative government planning to
scrap the windfall tax on oil and gas giants if prices continue to fall. Essentially,
this will incentivise further fossil fuel developments while allowing oil and
gas giants to scrape even more gargantuan profits from our struggle with the
cost of living.
Deciding whether fossil fuel developments are good or not is
no doubt a political question. However, putting decades of party squabbling and
delayed action to one side, is there any merit in allowing some fossil fuels to
continue, at least for now? We are after all in a cost of living crisis. Could
local reserves help to ease pressures on households just until we get ourselves
onto a more sustainable pathway?
To answer this question, we need to go to the heart of the
matter. We cannot go ahead with proposed ‘solutions’ without identifying the
cause of our cost of living crisis.
At first glance, it is easy to see the pandemic as a
trigger, along with government borrowing, reduced working and, of course, the
war in Ukraine, which catapulted us into the crisis. But we can go further and
ask why we weren’t more prepared. Why was the UK and so much of Europe vulnerable
to the cost of living crisis?
Graphic explaining how Rosebank is the biggest undeveloped oil and gas field in the North Sea.
The #StopRosebank campaign amplifies the voices of activists from across the UK, Norway and beyond, demanding that Rosebank does not get approved.
Image source: StopCambo
The answer points us yet again to our reliance on fossil
fuels. With whole finance industries built on the rocky foundations of fossil
fuel share prices, our economy was already precarious. To add to this, decades
of negligible switching to truly renewable energy sources like wind and solar,
which according to Carbon Tracker have the potential to meet the world’s energy
demand 100 times over if scaled up, mean that the UK remains under the collar
of fossil fuel corporations – and their home countries by proxy.
Meanwhile, the government has been able to disguise it’s
inaction on climate change by offshoring much of its emissions. Notice the
‘Made in China’ label being tweaked and plastered on all manner of items on our
shelves? Now, we ship in so many of our manufactured goods from emerging
economies, thereby making it appear in the books as if our own nation’s
emissions have been shrinking, when in fact we have secretly passed them on to
other countries to deal with.
On top of this, the culture of consumerism has grown rampant
year on year. Predicated on the idea that infinite economic growth will
indefinitely improve our wellbeing, we have become a nation of consumers,
eating away at the resources and labour of other peoples’ goods and services.
With little or no consideration of environmental limits, the welfare of workers
in the far-away destinations of the factories that produce our goods, or the
livelihoods of those who struggle by the rubbish dumps of our offshored waste,
we see that our cost of living crisis is not just an energy crisis. It is part
of a much larger a sustainability crisis, comprising crises of health,
wellbeing and social equity. Crises of pollution, biodiversity and natural
resource exploitation. We are in a structural crisis, to do with the very shape
of our society.
And no, oil and gas fields like Rosebank are going to do
nothing to help us out of this crisis. Indeed, profits from Rosebank are
intended to go straight into the hands of the fossil fuel firm Equinor and the
Norwegian government, providing little benefit to UK households. Thus, if
anything, approving Rosebank will only condemn us further into our
sustainability crises.
We need cleaner, greener, more reliable energy sources.
Solar, wind and other sources are available to us, we just need to scale them
up and make them accessible to people from all different backgrounds, especially
those with low-incomes and minority backgrounds who are the most sharply hit by
the current crisis. We need a more sustainable way of living – a society that
cares about wellbeing, environmental justice and equity. We need to change our
culture of consumerism and take responsibility for each other. We are citizens
of this world. Not slaves. Not CEOs. Not consumers. Equals by right of birth,
alongside all other beings on this Earth.
And, crucially, we need to stop investing in fossil fuels.
We need to #StopRosebank.
Today, all over the UK, people are calling on the government
to step away from oil and gas fields. You too can join the #WaveofResistance. Click
here to find out more about the campaign, so you can also join in the
debate. Share a post, like a tweet or write to your MP using a template letter here
and let’s #EndFossilFuels. For good.
H_M
Bibliography:
#StopCambo. 2023. What is the Rosebank oil field?. [Online]. [Accessed 10 June 2023]. Available from: https://www.stopcambo.org.uk/updates/what-is-the-rosebank-oil-field
British Embassy Berlin. 2019. The United Kingdom – a
leader in climate protection. [Online]. [Accessed 10 June 2023]. Available
from: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-united-kingdom-a-leader-in-climate-protection
Carbon Tracker. 2021. Solar and wind can meet world
energy demand 100 times over. [Online]. [Accessed 10 June 2023]. Available
from: https://carbontracker.org/solar-and-wind-can-meet-world-energy-demand-100-times-over-renewables/#:~:text=LONDON%2FNEW%20YORK%2C%2023%20April%20%E2%80%93%20Huge%20falls%20in%20the,tank%20Carbon%20Tracker%20published%20today.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2023. AR6
Synthesis Report Climate Change 2023. [Online].
[Accessed 10 June 2023]. Available from: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/
Office for National Statistics. 2021. Consumer trends,
UK: April to June 2021. [Online]. [Accessed 10 June 2023]. Available from: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/satelliteaccounts/bulletins/consumertrends/apriltojune2021
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