Ross Clark Ross Clark

Britain is not ready to give up North Sea oil and gas

Credit: Getty images

Ed Miliband seems to have gone missing since Rachel Reeves announced her ambition for a third runway at Heathrow yesterday. Just before he disappeared, he mumbled that ‘of course’ he wouldn’t be resigning over the issue – in spite of threatening to do just that when he was climate secretary in Gordon Brown’s government.

But then who needs Ed Miliband to thwart government growth plans when we have the courts to do it for him? This morning, Lord Ericht in the Scottish Court of Session hammered another great brass nail into the coffin of the North Sea. He ruled that licences granted to extract oil and gas from the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields had been granted unlawfully by Rishi Sunak’s government because they failed to take into account future carbon emissions from the fossil fuels that would be extracted.

Even Miliband accepts that gas will play an important role in the UK’s electricity system

It is not quite the end for the projects.

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