DANIEL HANNAN: It does not matter the way you vote. Britain has now elevated Net Zero over democracy
No sooner had the Chancellor declared that economic growth was ‘the number one mission of this government’, than a Scottish judge made a mockery of it.
The Court of Session in Edinburgh, acting on a case brought by eco-campaigners, ruled that the Rosebank oilfield off Shetland – one of the largest in the North Sea – may not be touched.
Too bad for the energy companies that have sunk billions into our oil and gas fields. Too bad for the workers they employ. Too bad for taxpayers who must make up the lost revenue. And too bad for every company in this country that relies on energy – from steel mills to AI firms.
Energy is not just one among many commodities. It is the motor of efficiency, the vector of economic growth, the ultimate poverty-buster. The story of human civilisation is the story of falling fuel prices. As we moved from muscle power to steam power to oil power, we liberated our species from back-breaking toil.
Now we are going in the opposite direction, ripping out our industrialised economy and replacing it with something inferior. And, bizarrely, we are pretending that we can do so without making ourselves poorer. I feel almost sorry for Rachel Reeves. I am sure she is sincere when she talks of ‘growth’ as the way to cut hospital waiting lists, improve the lives of working people and, indeed, meet our climate goals.
But, like every previous Chancellor, she is up against the Blob. Anti-runway campaigners know that, if things get serious, they need only go to court to get a ruling similar to the Rosebank judgment. I say ‘almost’ because Labour cannot just blame the Blob. It chooses to keep the net zero target on the statute book, subordinating other policies to it.
The Government’s split between growth and greenery has never been so pronounced. After all, Labour is choosing to accelerate our immiseration, bringing forward the plan to decarbonise the grid by five years. Labour decided to drop its opposition to the Rosebank protesters, more or less guaranteeing their victory. But – even if it were serious about growth, even if it did want to frack and drill and build nuclear power stations at every opportunity – Labour would still be halted by woke bureaucrats, as in this case, with judges making such landmark decisions based on possible carbon emissions.
‘The age of governments approving new drilling sites by ignoring their climate impacts is over,’ said a spokesman for Greenpeace, one of the organisations that brought the legal challenge.
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Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband
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The Stena Spey oil rig off the coast of the Scottish Highlands
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Climate protesters outside Shell’s headquarters in London
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Climate activists demonstrate against Rosebank oil and gas field in Edinburgh
In other words, never mind how you vote. Some things will be elevated above the field of politics. The USSR elevated communism over democracy. Iran elevates Islam over democracy. Now Britain elevates Net Zero over democracy.
I write as someone who accepts that the world is heating, partly because of human activity. But I have come to realise that the ecologist movement is less interested in cutting greenhouse gases than in dismantling capitalism.
‘Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun,’ wrote Paul Ehrlich, the father of the green movement, in 1975.
Perhaps Energy Secretary Ed Miliband thinks this way. Or perhaps he has convinced himself that the transition will somehow ‘create green jobs’. But this is true only in the sense that banning mechanical diggers would ‘create shovelling jobs’.
Miliband admits that we need fossil fuels during the transition. So why phase them out at home – where they are cleaner and cheaper than those we must now import from dirty (in every sense) dictatorships? What fools they must take us for.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is president of the Institute for Free Trade.