If Chris Packham is anti it, it’s probably a good idea

If the broadcaster and eco-warrior Chris Packham describes something as ‘an act of war against life on Earth’, sensible people might suspect that it’s probably, on balance, a good thing. Such is the case with the Rosebank field – the UK’s largest remaining undeveloped reserve of oil and gas, in deep waters west of Shetland, which was green-lighted by the government last week.

Leading this £3 billion project will be the Norwegian energy giant Equinor. Rosebank’s 69,000 barrels of oil per day will be shipped to Norway or elsewhere to be refined and sold into world markets. But its 44 million cubic feet of gas per day will be piped to the UK mainland, as a substitute for liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipped from global hot-spots, at least for as long as we still need gas for heating – a time horizon recently extended by Rishi Sunak’s backpedalling on the switch to electric heat pumps.