UK Supreme Court prices fossil fuels out of the market
Last month, the UK Supreme Court ruled that not only the “carbon cost” of extracting fuel has to be taken into account when approving a new plant, but also the cost of all future emissions from burning that fuel. Net Zero, it seems, is based on figures that can only be estimated, but one thing is certain: its price keeps going up.
Carbon footprints that extend far into the distance
The ruling culminated a long saga of attempts to build a new oil well in Surrey, England. Environmental groups predictably challenged the plans, which had been approved by local authorities who insisted that they had accounted for the emissions involved in extracting the fuel. However, climate activists said that wasn’t good enough. When assessing the carbon footprint of a new scheme, they argued, one had to take into account not only the extraction process, but also the future uses of the fuel extracted.
The by-products of these future uses are called “scope 3” or “downstream emissions.” In the case of a gold mine, there are no significant downstream emissions, given that gold is inert. When it comes to an oil well, however, the downstream emissions are considerable.
Three judges rule out fuel for millions
While lower courts dismissed the claims of the activists, three of the five judges on the Supreme Court agreed with their argument, saying that it was “plain” that downstream emissions should be taken into account.
The whole purpose of extracting fossil fuels is to make hydrocarbons available for combustion. It can therefore be said with virtual certainty that, once oil has been extracted from the ground, the carbon contained within it will sooner or later be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and so will contribute to global warming.
The judges stressed that all they were doing was placing the correct interpretation on a law passed by a previous government, and made it clear that their new insight should be broadly applied to all similar situations.
In principle, all likely significant effects of the project must be assessed, irrespective of where (or when) those effects will be generated or felt. There is no justification for limiting the scope of the assessment to effects which are expected to occur at or near the site of the project.
One small step (back) for man, one giant leap for the climate (industry)
Commenting on the ruling, climate lawyer Tessa Khan said that it was a “huge win in the fight for a livable climate.”
Government can no longer keep repeating that the emissions from burning oil reserves don’t count.
Another activist, retired computer scientist Andrew Boswell, was similarly satisfied with the judges’ decision:
It is an important signal to fossil fuel extractors, polluting industries and road developers that they can no longer get away with underplaying how much they are destabilizing the climate system. If the next government is serious about climate change, it must work on strengthening the law to close all such loopholes.
Boswell has long been filing lawsuits against all kinds of infrastructure projects such as mining and road building, protesting their impact on the climate. He is also involved in an upcoming suit against another two planned power stations in the north of England, determined to prevent them from being built.
When even burying CO2 isn’t good enough
Boswell’s natural ally is the ostensibly impartial BBC which trumpets Boswell’s claims that “over twenty million tons of carbon pollution” will be emitted from the two new gas power stations.
While the BBC admits that building the new stations “could generate up to 860 megawatts of low-carbon electricity, enough to power more than one million homes,” they quote unspecified “evidence submitted to the government” that supposedly shows that the companies’ plans to offset the carbon pollution are unrealistic.
The two companies concerned are energy giants BP and Equinor, which have designed complex pipelines that would capture and funnel away at least 90 percent of the projected emissions via special overground conduits. Those opposing the construction don’t point to any of the potential risks of transporting CO2 over miles of British countryside to be buried beneath the North Sea. Instead, they claim that BP and Equinor would need to import fuel to power the plants, because local supply of gas isn’t sufficient (being locked beneath the waves by “green” government policies).
Lorenzo Sani, an analyst at non-profit Carbon Tracker (funded by various groups such as Bloomberg Philanthropies and the European Climate Foundation) told the BBC that “it was very likely the UK would need to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) to fuel the plant,” and that the import process would result in indirect carbon emissions which the developers were either “ignoring completely or underestimating.”
The process of compressing the gas, putting it in a ship in a tanker, a lot of these processes produce a lot of emissions. What we’re trying to show is that, if they don’t deal with these other emissions, the climate impact [of the plants] won't be positive.
Fake Net Zero
Sani claimed that using imported LNG would increase the plants’ lifetime emissions by 1.7 to 2.6 times. Also condemning the project was the “green industrialist” (to quote The Guardian), Dale Vince, who called the plans of BP and Equinor “fake Net Zero.”
This is a fake net zero project from two of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies. How on earth can polluting the atmosphere with 20m tons be net zero? The project should not have been allowed to go ahead and that’s why we’re supporting the legal challenge against this fossil-fueled deception.
No more fossil-fueled jobs — find them somewhere else
The next development was the election of a Labour government. Ed Miliband, a rabid environmentalist, has been appointed Energy Secretary and he has wasted no time in letting the country know that everything he had been threatening to do while in opposition was now about to happen.
A few days passed, and the new government “admitted” that proposals for a new coal mine in Cumbria had been “unlawfully” approved, because future carbon pollution (downstream emissions) hadn’t been taken into account in the planning decision. The plans had already been under attack by Friends of the Earth and another environmental group, and the previous government had been planning to take the side of West Cumbria Mining in court. Now, the government will no longer be defending the plans.
Jamie Peters, a climate coordinator with Friends of the Earth, told The Guardian,
We’re delighted the government agrees that planning permission for this destructive, polluting and unnecessary coalmine was unlawfully granted and that it should be quashed. We hope the court agrees...
The new government must now ensure that areas like west Cumbria get the jobs and investment they urgently need so that people living there can reap the benefits of building a clean, green and affordable future.
All that oil under the sea? Forget about that, too
Next, 257 separate plans to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea were abruptly dropped by Miliband. Never mind that 76 companies had already invested millions in bidding for the contracts, for fuel that the UK badly needs. The untapped reserves are estimated to hold some 600 million barrels.
Offsetting the carbon pollution from those 600 million barrels is probably an impossible task. This is what’s called the “resource curse,” or perhaps a modern-day version of the thirsty sailors’ agony in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Oil, oil everywhere, nor any drop to burn.”
What’s the solution? Shall Bill Gates ride to the rescue with his tree-burying scheme? It only costs $100 to bury a ton of trees to offset carbon emissions. Perhaps the new British government has something else up its sleeve in order to achieve Net Zero by 2030, as Prime Minister Starmer promised he would in his election campaign.
How (not) to free the UK from Putin
Alternatively, Labour could be planning to adopt Green Party policies, which, according to one of their MPs, would ensure that the UK will be “free ... of Putin’s influence.” But then, the Green Party also believes that a temperature rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius would be “far beyond levels at which humanity can safely survive,” and that wind power can “provide around 70 percent of the UK’s electricity by 2030.”
Wind power production and transportation is already heavily subsidized in the UK, and the Greens say nothing in their manifesto about cutting those subsidies, even though “renewable” energy is supposedly so cheap that one might assume it didn’t need to be subsidized.
And how are those subsidies budgeted for? Why, the Greens would like to “introduce a carbon tax on all fossil fuel imports and domestic extraction, based on greenhouse gas emissions produced when fuel is burned.”
The Green Party got four million votes in the last election, not enough to have a seat at the Cabinet table. But no matter — the courts are already doing their job for them.
