by Until last week, few people had heard of Horse Hill, near Horley in Surrey, much less existed.
By ruling against Surrey County Council’s decision to extend permits for oil drilling on the site, the British Supreme Court put this backwater of semi-rural, southern England on the map.
In the process, it also put the kibosh not only on any prospect of oil production from this tiddler of prospects, but on all future hydrocarbon development in the UK, including very likely the planned Whitehaven coal mine in Cumbria and the Rosebank. North Sea oil field.
The Supreme Court ruling is a death blow to an industry long treated as a pariah, but which is worth £60bn a year in exports, employs more than 30,000 people directly and indirectly, and last year saw around Plus £5.2bn of tax revenue. .
In any rational world, you would be seen in any rational world to destroy a useful source of economic benefit as something you do not believe.
Runoff from the current capacity will of course take several years to take effect, but apart from maintenance and decommissioning expenditure, the judgment effectively means that there will be no new investment to speak of from now on.
It’s completely mad, but it doesn’t matter; the pursuit of net zero must come first. It also doesn’t matter that the decision will make no real difference to emissions. It’s not just that the amounts expected to flow from Horse Hill are too trivial to be significant. It is also the case that oil and gas not produced in the UK will be produced elsewhere instead.
The rule of their lords merely displaces production from one place to another.
More than 70pc of Britain’s energy needs are still fossil fuels; on any realistic assessment, this is likely to remain the case for years or years to come, let alone any attempt to move away from them.
The effect of shutting down domestic production is therefore to further increase Britain’s economic dependence on imports.
There is already a substantial trade deficit in energy. According to the latest Office for National Statistics “Pink Book”, we imported £117bn of fuels in 2022 and exported £60.2bn. With the North Sea rapidly declining, that deficit will increase, putting further pressure on the balance of payments. The UK already has the second worst and most persistent current account deficit in the G7.
It could be argued, I think, that this is not the case if renewables fill the hole left by oil and gas. But there is little sign of it so far. Yes, renewable forms of energy are on the rise in the UK and around the world, but they have yet to displace demand for fossil fuels.
On the contrary, greenhouse emissions are continuing to hit new records around the world. Here in Britain, we’re just getting rid of a lot of them.
“Clean energy is still not meeting the full growth in demand,” says Nick Wayth, chief executive of the Energy Institute in London. “Arguably, the energy transition hasn’t even begun.”
There is little point in Britain self-destructively bending the knee to the climate change bandwagon if everyone else is ignoring it. Biden’s America may have caught the green energy bug, but he’s still investing billions in oil and gas. It is only in London and Brussels that the two are thought to be incompatible.
There is some repetition of the background to the Supreme Court’s judgment. Britain may have left the European Union, but the long arm of its diktat is deeply affecting our affairs.
Ruling against Surrey County Council, the Supreme Court was given guidance by EU Directive 92/11 implemented by the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017. These require an environmental impact study to be carried out on full scale on most forms. Development.
The UK had already voted to leave the EU by the time the directive came into force, but had not yet formally done so, so it was still legally bound to implement European laws and obligations.
There was a chance to achieve these with the Retained EU Law (Repeal and Reform) Act, known as the “Brexit Freedom Act” last year. As originally planned, it would have repealed almost all EU laws.
But this year the zero approach was seen as too hasty and too radical, and the Bill was under a lot of pressure under the then Business Secretary in charge, Kemi Badenoch.
In any case, the EU’s requirement for an environmental impact assessment remains on the statute book, even if the scope and position of any such assessment is highly open to interpretation.
When Horse Hill was found to be responsible not only for the emissions produced by the site itself, but also for the emissions resulting from the eventual burning of the oil, the Supreme Court took a very tough approach.
The Court has also taken issue with the government’s policy of “maximizing” the nation’s conventional oil and gas reserves. Once again, he is accused of judicial overreach. The courts are just as frustrated with the Government’s efforts to stop the boats, most famously encouraging parliament to leave the European Union.
Reductio ad absurdum, the European Court of Human Rights – which is not an EU institution and therefore still under British control – opened the floodgates to all kinds of climate change litigation by upholding a complaint by a group of women elderly of Switzerland. that their rights to family life were violated by the government’s failure to take adequate action to protect them from global warming.
Across the board, the courts are taking on powers that rightfully belong to elected politicians. Is it any wonder that Europe’s economies are such a mess? There seems to be almost no development that cannot be legally challenged.
What was seen as a bulwark against the abuse of executive power risks instead becoming an instrument of economic paralysis. Like the fog in Dickens’s Bleak House, it has fallen over almost everything.
Good luck with Labor’s growth-enhancing planning reform, which promises to be quickly mowed down in the legal system. As well as boosting Britain’s shamefully poor levels of business investment, where the risk of litigation is now a powerful deterrent.
As for the North Sea, it may not matter what the Supreme Court says, as Labor has confirmed there will be no new licenses anyway.
Not that he has to be so clear in his plans. An effective marginal tax rate of 75pc on North Sea profits killed the industry anyway.
And just in case anyone is foolish enough to invest at these tax levels, Labor plans to tax the sector even more to help fund its plans for Great British Energy , a publicly owned clean energy company to “harness Britain’s sun, wind and energy. wave” power.
Will the last roughneck to leave the country please turn off the lights.
