By Paul Homewood
How this guy still has a job at the Telegraph is a mystery to me:
The Rosebank oilfield is located around 80 miles north-west of the Shetland Islands, 3,600 feet below the surface of the North Sea.
It is into this black abyss that any semblance of a coherent plan to power Britain has slipped after its owners were granted permission to drill for new oil and gas.
The timing of the announcement alone was comically bad. Just 24 hours after the International Energy Agency warned that any new oil and gas infrastructure was incompatible with the Paris Climate Agreements of limiting global warming to 1.5C – an accord of which the UK is a signatory – the North Sea Transition Authority gave the green light to a development that is expected to produce as much as 500m barrels of oil over its lifetime.
A cross-party group of MPs and peers estimate that is equivalent to 200m tonnes of carbon dioxide – “more than the combined annual CO2 emissions of all 28 low-income countries in the world.”
The truth of Rosebank is that it does none of the things that ministers and its cheerleaders claim. Instead, it underlines how desperately muddled our energy policy has become. It is the price we must pay for decades of failure to invest in, and plan for, an energy system capable of replacing one dominated by fossil fuels.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/09/28/rosebank-price-energy-failures-oilfield-north-sea/
It’s the same load of old tripe we are used to getting from Marlow.
The fact that his main argument against it is the Paris Agreement says it all! Does he not realise that the Paris Agreement actually formalised rapid increases in emissions? Does he not realise that it gave carte blanche to China, India and the rest of the developing world to carry on using as much fossil fuels as they want? Whatever your beliefs about global warming, nobody should pretend that it should be an economic blueprint for the UK, more a straitjacket.
Marlow clearly has not realised that we will still be using huge amounts of oil and gas for many years to come. It’s not me saying that, even the CCC accept this. So why should it make more sense to ship the stuff half way round the world, when we could supply some of it ourselves.
His main complaint seems to be that the amounts involved at Rosebank are small fry, in terms of our overall energy consumption. But so what? The same argument could be made about every economic policy decision.
He goes on to moan about the failure of the offshore wind auction this month. Evidently he is happy for the public to pay even greater subsidies for their electricity. As ever, he offers no solutions to the problems of intermittency.
His final moan is about our failure to build more nuclear, especially since he says there is a risk that Hinkley Point might not be ready till 2036. Maybe he should have been arguing for this 20 years ago, when his favourite Miliband and the rest of the Labour Party banned new nuclear, whilst setting the destruction of our energy security into motion.
The delays show just how short sighted it would have been to put all of our eggs in the nuclear/wind basket, as Marlow suggests.
Is it not time for the Telegraph to employ somebody who actually understands the energy sector, and send Ben Marlow packing to the Guardian, where he should feel more at home (judging by the avalanche of critical comments he gets every time he writes this nonsense!)
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September 28, 2023 at 05:33AM
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