Until last week, few would have heard of Horse Hill, near Horley in Surrey, and even fewer would have been there.
By ruling against Surrey County Council’s decision to extend oil drilling permits at the site, the UK Supreme Court has put this corner of semi-rural southern England on the map.
In doing so, it has also put the kibosh not only on any prospect of oil production from this wimp of a prospect, but in fact on all future hydrocarbon developments in Britain, including most likely the planned Whitehaven coal mine in Cumbria and the Rosebank. oil field in the North Sea.
The High Court ruling is a death blow to a sector that has long been treated as a pariah, but is worth £60 billion a year in exports, employs more than 30,000 people directly and indirectly and last year cost around £5.2 billion contributed to tax revenues. .
That you would deliberately choose to destroy such a useful source of economic well-being would be almost unbelievable in any rational world.
It will of course take several years before the existing capacity is exhausted, but apart from expenditure on maintenance and decommissioning, the judgment in fact means that from now on there will be no more new investments.
It’s completely crazy, but it doesn’t matter; the pursuit of net zero must come first. It also doesn’t matter that the decision will actually make no difference to emissions. It’s not just that the amounts expected to flow out of Horse Hill are too trivial to be of any significance. It is also the case that oil and gas not produced in Britain will simply be produced elsewhere.
Their rule merely shifts production from one place to another.
More than 70% of the UK’s energy needs are still met by fossil fuels; by any realistic assessment, this is likely to remain the case for years, if not decades, regardless of any attempts to move away from it.
The effect of eliminating domestic production is therefore to further increase British economic dependence on imports.
There is already a significant energy trade deficit. According to the Office for National Statistics’ latest ‘Pink Book’, we imported £117 billion of fuels and exported £60.2 billion in 2022. Now that the North Sea is in serious decline, this deficit will increase, putting further pressure on the balance of payments. Britain already has the second worst and most persistent current account deficit in the G7.
I suppose one could argue that this won’t matter if renewables fill the gap left by oil and gas. Yet so far there has been little sign of this. Yes, there has been a big increase in renewable forms of energy, both in the UK and globally, but this has not yet displaced the demand for fossil fuels.
In contrast, greenhouse gas emissions continue to reach new records worldwide. Here in Britain we only move a large proportion of that abroad.
“Clean energy still doesn’t even meet the full growth in demand,” said Nick Wayth, CEO of the London-based Energy Institute. “The energy transition has probably not even started yet.”
There is little point in Britain self-destructively bending the knee to the climate change bandwagon if everyone else studiously ignores it. Biden’s America may have caught the green energy virus, but it is still investing billions in oil and gas. Only in London and Brussels are the two considered incompatible.
The background to the Supreme Court’s judgment is worth repeating. Britain may have left the European Union, but the long arm of its dictates continues to penetrate deeply into our affairs.
In ruling against Surrey County Council, the High Court was guided by EU Directive 92/11, as implemented by the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017. These require a full environmental impact study to be carried out into most forms of development.
Britain had already voted to leave the EU when the directive came into effect, but had not yet formally done so and was therefore still legally obliged to implement European laws and obligations.
There was an opportunity to scrap this with last year’s Restrained EU (Repeal and Reform) Bill, commonly known as the “Brexit Freedom Act”. As originally conceived, it would have repealed virtually all EU legislation.
But this year the net-zero approach was seen as too abrupt and radical, and the bill was significantly watered down under the chair of the Minister for Business, Kemi Badenoch.
Be that as it may, the EU requirement for an environmental impact assessment remains on the law, even if the scope and status of such an assessment is highly open to interpretation.
In finding that Horse Hill was responsible not only for the emissions produced by the site itself, but also for the emissions resulting from the final combustion of the oil, the Supreme Court took a particularly harsh approach.
In fact, the Court has also defied the government’s policy of maximizing the country’s conventional oil and gas reserves. Once again the country is accused of judicial overreach. The courts have similarly frustrated attempts by the government to stop the boats, and especially to challenge parliament, on leaving the European Union.
Reductio ad absurdum, the European Court of Human Rights – which is not an EU institution and therefore still has power in Britain – recently opened the floodgates to all kinds of climate change lawsuits through a complaint from a group of elderly Swiss women to accept that their right to a family life had been violated by the government’s failure to take sufficient action to protect them from global warming.
Courts everywhere are seizing powers that rightfully belong to elected politicians. Is it any wonder that Europe’s economies are in such a mess? There seems to be almost no development that is not legally questionable.
What was once seen as a bulwark against abuses of executive power risks becoming instead an instrument of economic paralysis. Like the mist in Dickens’ Bleak House, it has cast a shadow on almost everything.
Good luck Labor with the pro-growth planning reform, which promises to quickly become bogged down in the justice system. The same goes for encouraging Britain’s embarrassingly poor business investment, where the risk of lawsuits has become a powerful deterrent.
On the North Sea, it may not matter what the Supreme Court says, as Labor has stated that there will be no new permits anyway.
Not that it has to be so explicit in its plans. An effective marginal tax rate of 75% on North Sea profits has virtually wiped out the sector anyway.
And just in case anyone is foolish enough to invest at these tax levels, Labor is proposing to tax the sector even more to help fund plans for Great British Energy, a state-owned clean energy company, to “make Britain’s sun, wind and utilize energy”. wave” force.
Will the last roughneck to leave the country please turn off the lights?