One Hundred Licences To Drill For Gas
The Prime Minister of the UK has just issued 100 new licences for exploration and drilling in the North Sea Gas fields.
He said he was issuing them to cut reliance on imported gas. Some critics say the gas, when and if it goes on-stream will be sold on the international markets, so it won’t cut imports at all, just add to Britain’s bottom line. And there is of course the criticism that others level at him – that issuing licences to take more gas out of the ground is the wrong thing to do in a world aiming for net zero carbon emissions.
Rishi Sunak also announced that carbon sinks would be brought on-stream by extracting CO2 at power stations where the gas is burned, and sending that to deep underground storage.
A few months ago President Biden said it was naive to think the U.S. could switch to renewables just like that, because doing so would cripple the economy and cripple the ability to get to net zero. He said that every bit of technology was needed to get to net zero and that killing the economy would mean never getting there.
His comments caused barely a ripple. The consensus was that he had spoken pragmatic and meaningful words. That doesn’t take away from the fact that we are on a collision course with the unknown. And I have my own thoughts about tackling climate change.
Meanwhile, when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says the same thing as President Biden, he is criticised even within his own party and leaves a terrible impression overall. He has a terrible style and cannot connect with people. If he had said something along the lines of ‘get real – we will never get to x without y….’ as President Biden said, then maybe he would have come out of this with more of his reputation intact. As it is, he has precious little reputation to preserve because he has fallen at the ‘can you communicate’ hurdle several times over lesser issues.
All of which goes to show that communication can deliver the same message about the same proposals in vastly different ways and produce vastly different outcomes.
What is my position? Get off burning fossil fuels and get off making things out of plastic that pollute the place. And if the fear of global warming is the fuel that drives that happening – then more power to it.
As for how the planet is behaving – I am not in the yes or the no camp. I am in the ‘we are surely not the masters of Nature and we really should learn not to behave as though we think we are’ camp.
I don’t care about scientific consensus on the Anthropocene age, because we have yet to see how the planet will react. It may rebalance in a way that makes human life very difficult, and maybe not. It seems it already is making life difficult, but basically I stand in awe of how it might deal with the little gnat (us) that is gnawing at it.