DOMINIC LAWSON: Why cannot our leaders be as hypocritical as Brazil, which is internet hosting the Cop local weather summit – whereas it drills for much more gasoline and oil?

Almost certainly, no nation will be jetting out its plenipotentiaries in greater numbers than the United Kingdom has this week to Brazil.

That vast country is hosting the 30th UN Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (Cop 30). Along with Sir Keir Starmer, Ed Miliband and hundreds of officials from his Department of Energy and Climate Change, Prince William is also heading out. He is to deliver a speech on behalf of his father, the King – the planet’s most persistent prophet of carbon-fuelled doom.

These campaigners against the alleged threat of human extinction from fossil fuel use are not just heading off to Rio de Janeiro in their jets: their ultimate destination is the city of Belem, where Cop 30 is being held.

To enable the speediest possible transfer of the 50,000 or so delegates, Brazil’s president Lula has commissioned a four-lane highway, cutting through tens of thousands of acres of ‘protected’ Amazon rainforest.

While the state government declared this a ‘sustainable highway’ (whatever that means), the BBC sent a reporter to the locality and reported back: ‘Locals and conservationists are outraged. The Amazon plays a vital role in absorbing carbon for the world… many say this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit.’

The hypocrisy seems off the scale, but it is just Cop business as usual. The previous shindig was held in Baku, in hydrocarbon-rich Azerbaijan. The host, president Ilham Aliyev, proclaimed his country’s oil and gas reserves to be ‘a gift of God’.

Brazil’s Lula is a man of the Left, like our own Ed Miliband. And like Eco Ed, he proclaimed his country would be ‘a leader in tackling the climate crisis’. But that is where the similarity ends.

While our own Government deliberately destroys our oil and gas industry, Lula is doing the opposite.

Brazil is hosting the 30th UN Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (Cop 30)

While our own Government deliberately destroys our oil and gas industry, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, pictured,  is doing the opposite, writes Dominic Lawson

Activists hold a protest to demand COP30 negotiators protect Amazon forests

Of Brazil’s untapped hydrocarbon reserves, he declared: ‘We can’t have knowledge of this wealth underneath and not exploit it. Why can the US and Saudi Arabia continue being oil suppliers and not Brazil?’ Good question, and Lula added that his objective was for Brazil to be the world’s fourth-largest hydrocarbon supplier.

But what of the UK’s own remaining reserves? Industry experts estimate that the British sector of the North Sea still contains up to 24bn barrels of undeveloped oil or oil equivalent (gas).

Yet the Government is doing its utmost to deter such development through an intensely punitive tax regime – and has banned exploration for new finds. This, as I pointed out in the Daily Mail last year, has led to the astonishing debacle of us increasing our imports of gas from the Norwegian sector of the North Sea on the grounds that, unlike British-produced oil and gas, these supplies would not count against our own sacred ‘carbon budget’.

So, while Norway – with almost identical geological formations on its side of the North Sea median line – is carrying out extensive drilling, a survey of offshore operations by consultancy Westwood Global Energy revealed that in 2025, for the first time since 1964, no new oil or gas wells were drilled in the British sector of the North Sea.

The only things being drilled are the nails in the coffin of what was once our most profitable industry – and it is a British Secretary of State for Energy wielding the hammer.

Poignantly, in these circumstances, yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Forties oilfield in the North Sea – our largest in terms of developed and prospective reserves. On November 3, 1975, it was inaugurated by the late Queen by pressing a gold-plated button in BP’s control centre in Aberdeen.

The event was the subject of what, at the time, had been Scotland’s largest-recorded security operation: there were concerns the ceremony would be disrupted, or even that the pipeline would be bombed.

Who then would have guessed it would be another Labour government (Harold Wilson had joined the Queen at that opening ceremony) to do to this industry what in 1975 had been thought a risk only from violent disruptors?

Chairman of Ineos Andrew Gardner, the British firm which owns the Grangemouth refinery and the Forties pipeline, last week said that while it was ‘wonderful to celebrate its 50 years, current government policy is squandering that legacy’.

He added: ‘The public need to be aware of the harm the Energy Profits Levy is inflicting on the North Sea and its impact on jobs in Scotland and elsewhere. There are 200,000 jobs in the UK associated with oil and gas, and they are all at risk unless the Government changes course.’

One of the many oil rigs that are operated by Brazilian oil company Petrobras

He was in-part referring to the windfall tax brought in after the outbreak of Putin’s war on Ukraine had sent oil prices soaring to $130 a barrel. But it remains in place, even though crude oil prices are now half that. The result is that North Sea oil companies are still paying a punitive tax rate of 78 per cent.

The Financial Times last week reported that the Chancellor was considering a Budget announcement to scrap the levy – from 2029. This had not mollified the chairman of the Association of British Independent Exploration Companies (BRINDEX), Robin Allan.

He told me: ‘Labour’s policies have intentionally driven UK offshore oil and gas activity to record lows. Tweaking the policy is not going to make the North Sea investable. Thousands of well-paid jobs have already been lost. These are real people in real jobs, not the imaginary 400,000 future green job workers promised by Labour.

‘It is completely ludicrous that the UK imports oil and gas when we have it in abundance in our own country.’

A similar point was yesterday made by Britain’s leading energy economist, Sir Dieter Helm, on Radio 4’s Today programme. He was introduced, somewhat nervously, as ‘a sceptic’.

Addressing Labour’s persistent boast of demonstrating ‘climate change leadership’ by its unique decision to close down the country’s oil and gas exploration, and impose massive ‘renewable energy obligation’ costs, Sir Dieter devastatingly observed: ‘Do you think any developing country looks to Britain and says: “You know what, you’ve got the highest energy prices in the world, you have de-industrialised your economy, and there’s no energy intensive industry coming to your country.” Do you think anyone else wants to follow that path?’

It’s not something one would normally say, but if only we had more hypocritical leaders such as the Brazilian host of Cop 30, or other countries who preach the anti-oil and gas gospel but still look after their own.

Ed Miliband’s messianic sincerity, supported by our current and future King, will only make the people of the United Kingdom poorer and colder.