Judge Blocks Major North Sea Oil and Gas Projects Over Climate Change
A judge has blocked Britain’s two biggest offshore oil and gas developments from producing any fossil fuels by quashing their production permits over climate change concerns. The Telegraph has more.
The judge, Lord Ericht, banned production at the Jackdaw gas and Rosebank oil projects in the North Sea, operated by Shell and Equinor respectively, after ruling that “the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers”.
The decision in the Scottish Court of Session marks a victory for environmental groups Greenpeace UK and Uplift, which are campaigning against any further development of North Sea oil and gas.
However, it is a major blow for Shell, whose Jackdaw gas field was set to produce 6-7% of the UK’s gas needs, and Equinor, whose Rosebank project would generate nearly £7 billion of investment and hundreds of millions of pounds in taxes.
The judicial review into Jackdaw and Rosebank followed a Supreme Court ruling in a separate case brought by the activist Sarah Finch, who said that the emissions generated by burning fossil fuels should always be considered when approving new drilling sites.
Equinor and Shell have both vowed to continue development work on the two projects, while also submitting applications for new permits that take account of future emissions by their customers.
However these would ultimately have to be approved by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, who has made clear his opposition to new oil and gas projects.
The last Government issued permits for Jackdaw and Rosebank without considering future emissions.
Shell and Equinor both conceded these permits are unlawful in light of the Supreme Court decision, but argued that having started work in good faith and having spent £800 million on Jackdaw and £2 billion on Rosebank, they should be allowed to continue.
Judge Ericht’s ruling gives them part of what they wanted. It means they can carry on developing the two projects. However, they are banned from producing any oil or gas unless the Government approves a new application.
Separately, Mr Miliband has held a consultation on the impact of the Finch ruling and plans to issue new guidance for oil and gas firms seeking new permits to “deliver economic growth, and meet the Government’s climate obligations”.
Worth reading in full.
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Emissions which might be generated by burning oil or gas once it was extracted cannot be considered in such an application because they might not actually happen. Further, emissions caused by burning stuff are the legal responsibility of the people who burn the stuff and nobody’s planning to change that.
The practice that so-called UK judges are free to find that water will eventually run uphill, ie, base their judgements on demonstrably wrong speculations about the future and willful ignorance of existing laws must urgently come to an end and the people who abused their positions to further their private political pet causes in this way ought to be brought to justice themselves.
Hence the LHR runway announcement.
Trying to bury the real story.
At least until nest Tuesday.
The fuels will be purchased, from abroad, with higher Carbon (Dioxide) footprints, higher costs, worsening balance of trade, and more inconvenience overall.
The most worrying part of that news is that everyone involved is operating on the assumption that man is changing the climate in a way that causes significant harm, more harm than these climate policies, in fact.
That is not one but a whole set of unproven assumptions. And they are now somehow law.
A society that makes major decisions based on fantasy and delusion is not going to go well for long.
Unproven assumption 1: CO2 emitted by human activity significantly changes the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere. (It might not. CO2 levels changed before humans existed.)
Unproven assumption 2: Changes in CO2 proportions in the atmosphere will change the climate.(It might not. There seems to be evidence of a saturation point)
Unproven assumption 3: Climate change will be bad for us. (It might not. It be great. Why is our current climate optimal?l)
Unproven assumption 4: We can reduce climate emissions while maintaining our standard of living, more or less, with new energy producing technologies.
Unproven assumption 5: If we reduce out CO2 emissions other countries will.
Unproven assumption 6: If we stop extracting gas, we won’t just consume hydrocarbons produced elsewhere, thereby making no difference whatsoever to the CO2 emitted in the planet as a whole.
It’s a total blitz of unproven assumptions making it very difficult to argue against these people.
Almost as many assumptions as an Imperial College prostitute’s Number 9 knickers…
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/disease-areas/covid-19/report-9-impact-of-npis-on-covid-19/
…Last time I counted, over 40 uses of “assume” or derivative thereof.
Almost as many assumptions as an Imperial College prostitute’s Number 9 knickers…
Or an Imperial College Wuhan Flu model?
“Why is our current climate optimal?”
I think that’s the killer one, for me.
A “climate change fanatic” might argue that it’s optimal because it’s the one to which we have adapted, but that seems like a weak argument to me.
If so, why do people go on holiday to much warmer regions of the world? Shouldn’t the be rather miserable there if they were irrevocably adapted to a colder climate? Irrevocably adapted (the assumption behind this ‘argument’) is also an oxymoron. Adapted means something changed from a state A to a state B. But if it could change once, why can’t it change twice?
Of course it can change, but adaptation is costly.
I would probably like to live a bit further towards the equator, but I like greeness so am not sure I would want to be permanently stationed much further south than maybe Sicily. I like going on holiday to warmer places but it comes at a cost – the warmer it gets, the less stuff grows (unless it’s a monsoony type place and I don’t like humidity). Probably ideal for me would be half the year in England and half in some place in the Southern hemisphere at some latitude south as we are north – Montevideo possible.
And the monsoony type places as you call them have the Malaria carrying mosquitos. Another shout out for Hydroxycloroquine.
Yeah I like the climate in the Canary Islands or Cape Verde – sunny, dry and windy – but not much grows there so decent fresh food is very limited.
Even though, if you go to Tenerife, at least in the West side of the island, the further north you go, the greener it gets.
Maybe I should go there. Always stuck with Lanzarote.
How strange. I was talking with a friend about this very thing today. The north of the island is greener because the prevailing winds hit the hills/mountains and in being pushed up lose all their moisture. The descending air on the south side tends to be dryer and will be hotter as it descends. I once walking along the ridge to the right of the island and cloud was coming up the north slope, which was relatively green and wooded, and rolling over the road and vaporizing on the south facing down slope. I scrambled down a gulley on the south side and the vegetation quickly became that suited to arid.
Rain Shadow
I was there when they had one of their dust storm out there formally known as a Calima, blown across from West Africa. Very hot and humid and leaving your car covered in sand.
Is our climate optimal?
Which climate? Alaska? Singapore? Amazonian Brazil? Mojave desert? Falkland Islands? Kolkata? Chicago?
Mankind has adapted and used its intelligence to survive and thrive in all these climates. We’re well adapted to all of them.
Indeed we are, and we can adapt again but as I said below the adaptations take effort.
But these adaptions are external: We are wearing clothes and live in heated shelters because otherwise, we couldn’t survive in the English climate. We actually keep changing our clothing style throughout the year to adapt to seasonal changes.
Tomorrow, temperatures in Shen Zhen are supposed to be 18⁰C – 22⁰C while temperatures in Reading will be 4⁰C – 8⁰C. I’ve lived in both places at this time of the year and adapted easily to them. I like the weather in Shen Zhen end of January much better because that’s when it starts to get summerly there — in summer, it’s much hotter than here. And I’ve also lived there in summer, somewhat stubbornly refusing to change my shoes to Chinese-style “cheap plastic junk” sandals and cover my head with something. The natives claimed they couldn’t possibly stand their climate otherwise. But I could.
People in Cape Verde don’t have heating but crops need to be irrigated. People in Scotland don’t need irrigation to grow things but they do need heating, good flood defences (but they don’t need air conditioning). It’s also about materials used in construction of buildings and other things, infrastructure generally. We don’t need to worry much about snow, but they do in Finland.
The moment it looks seriously like it’s going to start raining soon, shop employees in Shen Zhen will rush out of the buildings to build (fairly small) rectangular sandbag barriers in front of the entrances to stop the torrent that’s about to be unleashed from entering the shops. And they need them, as the streets will soon be swirling with more than ankle-deep water.
Hong Kong is only about 17miles southward from this place but the climate is altogether different, just the temperatures are comparable. Shen Zhen in summer is hot and dry and usually without any wind save during the regularly occuring torrential rainstorms. Hong Kong is hot and incredibly humid (for our standards) but at least, the air moves instead of just sitting on the countryside like a pressing layer of hot glas people can walk through (it’s a bit difficult to describe this phenomenon).
Some people live in Shen Zhen and work in Hong Kong (and vice-versa). They can all adapt to that.
Yes but they don’t have snowploughs in either place. If the climate in a given area changes significantly, there will be adaptations required.
Indeed. I sleep under a layer of four blankets during the night I wouldn’t want to have above me during the day, not even in winter.
We’re all constantly adapting to different external conditions and sometimes, quite radically changed ones. This obviously comes at a cost but that’s not really an argument because absolutely everything has cost, even not having to adapt. Maintaining a certain state of adaptedness is not free, trivial example is clothes wearing out.
Well the argument would be that the cost of adaptation would be huge and worse than the cost of using “clean, green energy”. Not only a cost in money but in disruption of lives. Not an argument I subscribe to, but I was putting the counter argument to stewart’s point about the “optimal” climate.
If somebody would tell me that I must buy his stuff now because otherwise, I’ll regret it in future, my answer would be “See you then. Bye.”
Me too!
Common Sales tactic……We have a promotion but there is only a week left to get a special discount!
Snow chains is normality for them, too much hassle for us Brits.
In Madagascar July is their wintertime, it can get hot but often around 20/27 degrees and cool at night. It must be damn unpleasant in their summertime around Christmas.
A colleague of mine lives in Mauritius. He likes swimming in the ocean but spends a fair bit of time in the UK during our summer as he prefers it to the weather there.
To back up what you are saying, here are the 30 odd different climates on Earth.
So make that unproven assumption 7: adapting to changes in the climate is more costly than adapting our energy production to remove CO2 emissions while maintaining our standard of living.
This seems the least likely of all assumptions. There is no evidence that we can replace fossil fuels cheaply enough or otherwise. But even more importantly there is zero, absolutely zero, evidence that we are having to spend any resources whatsoever adapting to the climate, if for no other reason because we don’t really know if the climate is in fact changing and if it is where and if it is changing somewhere, if it’s from human activity. And if by sone miracle you can prove all of that then what’s the evidence of a significant cost? None.
One giant storm of unproven assumptions.
Indeed. Adapting our energy production to remove CO2 emissions while maintaining our standard of living is probably impossible (though perhaps you could build enough nuclear to do it, don’t know enough to be sure).
The best one is….If we don’t control the climate, we will get uncontrolled climate refugees. We are not doing so well controlling the boat people now, but just to up the ante, how about getting HMS Belfast in good order starting with those treble forward facing guns!
While a hit from a 6″ shell will probably sink any boat, actually hitting it with such a shell fired from the corresponding gun will be pretty much impossible. A 0.50″ machine gun would be more useful for this and a smaller caliber would work, too.
BTW, the Belfast is just a (Town-class) light cruiser. Nothing particularly formidable.
Even when taking all of this for granted, the issues are still
This so-called judge is a political appointee of a disgraced former Scottish first minister which happens to have a suitable degree. But what he’s doing is political activism and not jurisprudence. And political activism which flies flat into the face of reality and existing law. This is now law-making from the bench but law-breaking from the bench. Judges are not above the law.
Indeed. I don’t know which law(s) the judge used to reach his ruling – my guess it that they were poorly drafted (or perhaps drafted very well), allowing room for abuse.
Case law, obviously, since the ‘judge’ who invented this to kill that Cumbrian coal mine got away with it.
Quite possibly. I wonder what the judge in the Cumbrian coal mine case used though. Other than basic stuff like murder, theft etc I would think at least the initial case would always go back to the statute.
Maybe some human rights stuff, probably made vague deliberately to allow this kind of nonsense.
Deliberate lying would be my guess.
Possibly.
I still find it astonishing that they got away with Roe v Wade for so long. I can see both sides of the abortion argument but cannot see how anyone thought the constitution protected it as a right. Same with gay marriage.
Colossal act of self-harm based on speculation and junk-science. I wonder whether there’ll be anyone around to say, “I told you so.”
That’s why, as much as I don’t like Xi or Putin, I admire their resilience against a social contagious tide of net zero madness. It seems only the ‘rich’ west that has been fooled and captured (willingly) by the fantasy makers a k a eco terrorists.
Without having read the article yet, I’ll suggest that those people in the picture are a bit uninformed and naïve as to what might actually kill them!
Having now read it, this sets a very dangerous and worrying precedent.
Oil and Gas companies must now give consideration to a fantasy, and in so doing put the entire nations energy security at extreme risk.
I hope all these activists and protestors live in homes with no heating or electricity, living to their principles. They can’t claim renewable energy produces their electricity, because they would be doing what they claim the companies are doing, and not considering the manufacture, transport and construction of the renewable source, and the role “fossil fuels” may have played in those processes.
And going by just that segment of a larger picture, I have to ask yet again: where are all the non-whites when it comes to this particular cult? Looks like the insidious ‘DEI’ aspect of the woke mind virus doesn’t like the eco-loons very much. Contrast these people with the ‘pro-Palestine’ people. Always totally homogenous, and I’ve no idea why…To be honest, you don’t tend to find many Muslims ( or any person of colour, come to that ) banging on about the phony ‘climate crisis’ at all, do you?🤔
With all the intersectionality, you’d expect to see greater diversity in the likes of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.
Someone should sue them for their terrible record in DEI.
😆
I can feel my inner Humza Yousaf coming on…
“Chucking soup on priceless works of art, white!
Gluing yourself to the road, white!
Hammering nails into bank windows and petrol pumps, white!
Spraying Stonehenge with orange paint, white!
Infiltrating cricket matches and other sporting events and throwing orange powder, white!
Sitting in the road/slow marching and blocking all traffic, white!”
*List not exhaustive.
They are to be pitied, because they have been led astray.
They are NOT to be pitied, because they are gullible, attention seeking Narcissist’s with an overblown sense of entitlement.
One can’t help being gullible, and they have been subjected to an insane level of propaganda. Not everyone can see through this. Apart from the outright Marxists, their intentions are good, they are just seriously misguided and have been lied to on an industrial scale…
I’m usually in favour of this. But not for the people pictured above: They know very well that Rosebank will kill us is a lie, they just believe that a political goal they’re trying to achieve is so worthwhile that this end justifies any means, especially, gross exaggerations and playing fast and lose with the truth in general.
People who mount a crusade of lies with the intent to harm their compatriots because they believe some higher goal makes this worthwhile ought to be locked away somewhere until they have their delusions sufficiently under control to have stopped being a danger to the general public.
Middle class luxury beliefs.
Too busy plotting to murder all the non-believers to worry about a trace gas.
The Honourable Judicial Lord of the Realm Ericht…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Stewart,_Lord_Ericht
“…Senator of the College of Justice, appointed by Nicola Sturgeon, May 2016.”
Highly trained lawyer with not the first clue about the Laws of Nature in general, and the Laws of Thermodynamics in particular. Equally clueless on the metrology of meteorology and the climate heist.
Another of The Enemy Within. Someone please summons Lord Chief Justice Guillotine forthwith.
I hope they take Scotland, Green Peace et al to the cleaners.
No one will risk investment now.
This has not been done in my name.
I wonder how Judge Ericht went about gauging “the private interest of members of the public in climate change”? No-one has ever asked me what I think about the topic. It’s never featured in election manifestos, and there’s never been any referendum on the issue.
Operating outside his Jurisdiction possibly!
Politically motivated, pretend judicial decision.
But no court will overrule or vacate.
It would seem that ones claim to be acting in the public interest is all the proof needed to demonstrate a public interest.
Which part of the public is the key question… e.g. is it a very small group of people who like to visit Davos once a year for a few weeks?
To “deliver economic growth, and meet the Government’s climate obligations” are mutually exclusive concepts.
Look on the bright side. When the UK elects a different government the oil and gas will still be there.
If I were on the board of one of these companies I’d be sorely tempted to mothball the projects and turn attention somewhere we could make more money.
They all are…
It’s quite clear that any decision by the UK government is not to be relied upon. They just don’t have the authority.
Just zoom in on the faces in the photo. That’s pretty much all you need to know about them…
A frustrating ruling, but it’s all part of the plan to immiserate us.
are the emissions which result from the mining and subsequent manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels taken into account before the wind farms and solar farms are given approval – if not, why not ?
Because it’s all done in heathen lands afar.
The judge is ruling according to legislation passed by Parliament to do exactly that of which the judge has ruled in favour – to stop exploration and extraction of new fossil fuel resources to save us all from Armageddon.
Solution: repeal the legislation.
Sort of. Industrial projects of any significant size need a permit and the process of getting such a permit involves making some sort of CO₂ emission handling plan to conform to government requirement for that. But someone planning a factory manufacturing sofas wouldn’t responsible for the emission people would cause if they chose to operate a power-plant by burning these sofas. That would be the responsibility of the people planning to run such a power plant.
The legislation is already problematic enough on its own. But here, it’s scope is supposed to extended based on what some people claim to believe will happen in future. But nobody can quantify what other people might do in future. That’s ludicrous requirement which can’t ever be met.
You can’t do that I lived iINorway and worked with the Ecofisk platform and to in any way inhibit North Sea oil production or exploration would be disastrous. And then there is the whole unexploited area close to the Shetland Islands. You simply can’t allow this to happen. It is tantamount to the dropping of a nuclear bomb in the damage it would cause and even more extensive damage if such rulings became a norm. Don’t let them rob you of your resources. That is like letting a pickpocket take all of your belongings and then shove it to you up the backside for good measure
Hence the LHR runway announcement.
Trying to bury the real story.
At least until nest Tuesday.
Surely rather than killing all the lawyers we’d do better to kill the judges?
Asking for a friend.
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
:->
Both would seem a good idea.
These are your resources. Don’t be a gimp are you just going to let them take them from you? Obviously the real question is how you gonna stop em.
A judicial review is to determine whether government – at any level – did not have the authority to take an action or make a decision; or did not follow the correct procedure in making a decision or taking an action. So here the failure was in not ‘considering’ emissions. So moving on they produce a statement saying that having considered the future emissions they are not of concern or if there is some procedure set out in legislation to do this they follow that and come to the same conclusion.
Not really. The standard for such projects up to the Welsh coalmine decision was that CO₂ emissions of the project are those caused directly by its operations and these were considered. As this wasn’t sufficient to prevent such resource extraction projects, organized (and billionaire-backed) activists started pushing for moving the goal posts and found judges willing to comply: Emissions caused by the project has now (in these two decisions) extended to include any emissions which might occur if people buying the extracted raw materials burn them afterwards and this despite the fact that whoever plans an industrial project which includes large-scale burning of coal, oil or gas already must already take legal responsibility for exactly these emissions as directly caused by his project.
You’re all assuming too much (read: any) honesty on part of the active parties here (activist organziations like Greenpeace and politician-appointed judged collaborating with them, be that out of conviction or in exchange for dosh or both). They will resort to any disingenuous argument they believe to be able to get away and they will keep moving the goal posts for as long as such resource extraction project still manage to get government approval somehow.
“the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers”.
This assumes that an interest in climate change is because of its so called damaging effects. One can have an interest in climate change from a scientific renunciation.
What about the interests of, and I’m sure a greater majority, those likely to suffer fuel poverty and it’s mortal threat.
So we can just continue to be held hostage with a higher footprint for our fuels, just because some eejits believe in the “climate crisis” which clearly doesnt exist, is proven to not exist, still they will enjoy living, literally in the dark ages, some people, no forward thinking at all.
I hope the judge is living the dream he seeks to impose on the rest of us, will he confirm he uses no fossil fuels to heat and light his home or life, he does not take any pharma product not manufactured from pure plant based derivatives, that his food is all organic and harvested and processed by hand, that he does not drive a car, motorbike. That he does not use a phone, computer. His clothes are all handmade from organic homespun, and that he does not travel abroad at all or use aircraft. That his toiletries are all plant based. That should be a minimum of how he lives his life as that is what he is imposing on the rest of us, and of course those people who were against the development I hope they are not hypocrites and that they are living the life they want for us all. To do otherwise is frankly just a hate crime against humanity
How Totally ABSURD. —-You really cannot make this stuff up. In the warped minds of silly climate activists importing gas from a far is better for the planet than taking it from nearby or under our feet. It all comes down to the Politics of Climate. Which is the biggest jumble of eco fundamentalist garbage ever. This is all funded by the Central Bankers and involves the decarbonisation of the world economy. —-As Reported in “Transcending the Climate Cange Deception” by Mark Keenan, The Bank For International Settlements (BIS) created the Taskforce on Climate Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) which represents $118 Trillion of assets globally.—-This basically means that the all the financialization of the entire world economy is based on meeting Net Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions. What emerges is total Technocratic Control of the world’s wealth and resources and astronomical profits in the Tillions for the major banks, like Blackrock, The World Bank, Goldman Sachs, The Bank of England etc etc. ——–An Eco Socialist Scam all based on an evidence free climate scare. The biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public who mostly think they are “saving the planet”
Lord Ericht (might be worth looking into his allegiances and bank account) needs to bs the first person in the Country after Caroline ‘eco loon’ Lucas, to live an entirely carbon free lifestyle . They wouldn’t make to lunchtime, but how they are decimating the competitiveness of the UK they should be forced to at gunpoint, just as they are us.
Can I know what evidence he based this judgement on? Oh, there isn’t any!
His honest belief that Rosebank woud cause sea levels to rise until the Scottish Highlands are under water by 2045 and thus, kill all people presently living in Scottland. Further, his honest belief that petrochemical applications beyond burning oil for power generation don’t exist. Lastly, his honest belief that the planet must urgently be saved from people in Scottland burning oil for power generation while it will be entirely resilient to people doing the same in India and Chinas, In short, this judgement is based on the evidence of him being a total crackpot living in an apocalyptical dream universe of his own making¹.
¹ Only evil people would speculate that he could have been paid by the likes of Dale Vince to hurt their economically much more successful competition.