09.04.2026

No time to waste

Far-right politicians and media outlets are peddling a delusional and reckless North Sea fantasy. Britain pays global prices for both gas and oil. Meanwhile, the planet continues to heat up and targets are being routinely missed, writes Eddie Ford

Rarely has a political campaign, and slogan, been so vacuous as Kemi Badenoch’s ‘Get Britain drilling!’ This, of course, is inspired by Donald Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” and general MAGA philosophy - fundamental to which is climate-change denialism.

Hence the Tory leader launched the campaign on March 30 on an oil rig off the North Sea near Aberdeen.¹ As part of her supposed three-point plan to ‘max out’ production, she proposed ending the moratorium on new oil and gas licences, scrapping the windfall tax on energy profits, and providing more financial support for the fossil fuel industry. In this way, we are invited to accept, households can be protected from rising energy bills - which saw drastic price rises across the globe with the US-Israeli war against Iran.

According to Badenoch, who initially called for UK forces to actively join the bombing campaign, Labour’s ban on new oil and gas drilling licences was “stupid” and “completely crazy”, as drilling for “our own” oil and gas is about energy and national security. After all, a “strong economy” relies on “cheap, abundant energy”, which Labour is holding back due to its net-zero commitment. She even claimed that the “real reason” Labour is refusing new licences is that Ed Miliband “is now running the government” - so absurd a statement that it is impossible to imagine she believes it herself.

Naturally, Badenoch’s sentiments are echoed by Nigel Farage, who called on Sir Keir to “open up the licences, and become self-sufficient in natural gas”. Warming to that theme during PMQs, he urged the Labour leader to “follow Norway”, on the basis that over the last year “our North Sea neighbours” have opened 49 drill sites for gas and oil.² Yet on “on our side” of the North Sea, said the Reform leader, the number is none, thanks to Labour’s net-zero push, which has left Britain “vulnerable.”

In fact, Farage wants to make climate change a new populist dividing line in British politics - telling The Sun that “this could be the next Brexit”, where parliament is “so hopelessly out of touch with the country”. In this way he hopes to present net-zero as an obsession of the ‘elites’ rather than a matter of general human interest.³ Politics is moving so far to the right, both in the UK and globally - with the White House directly sponsoring the far right - that Farage could be latching onto something, unfortunately.

Vapid

Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and the far right generally, are peddling a deluded fantasy, of course.⁴ Indeed, as described by Tessa Khan, executive director of the renewable energy campaign group, Uplift, it is a “vapid, political game playing at the expense of ordinary people”. She points out that more drilling will do absolutely nothing to lower energy bills - a “fact” that Badenoch knows and “members of her [shadow] cabinet have admitted”. She cites Tory MP Claire Coutinho, when serving as energy secretary in 2023, admitting that new licences “wouldn’t necessarily bring energy bills down”, but argued they would improve the “security” of supply - which is also nonsense, of course. Coutinho now has the energy brief in Badenoch’s shadow cabinet.

Yet in reality more North Sea drilling would obviously put the UK at further risk from volatile fossil fuel markets, not less. Just because Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy security and net zero, says something does not necessarily mean it is untrue. He told a Parliamentary Labour Party meeting that “one overriding lesson of the crisis” is that Britain remains dependent on fossil fuel markets, when rather there needs to be “further and faster driving for clean power”. Included in that ‘clean’ mix is, of course, building yet more nuclear plants - which given the inherent dangers, not least revealed by the Ukrainian and Iranian wars, we need like a hole in the head.

Acting as a corrective to Badenoch and Farage, research by Uplift and the energy consultancy, Voar, shows that the hundreds of new North Sea licences granted by the Conservatives between 2010 and 2024 have so far produced just 36 days of gas.⁵ As the study further details, these licensing rounds will actually lead to just 20 new and re-licensed fields, and over their lifetime they will meet less than six months of UK gas demand and less than eight months of oil. Furthermore, they have produced to date just over two months of oil, but, of course, around 80% of UK oil is exported. Separately, official data shows that new drilling will have little impact on the UK’s dependency on imported gas, due to the drastic decline of the North Sea. Therefore, after 50 years of drilling, we have already burned most of the gas and most of what is left is now oil - there is no ‘abundant’ energy from fossil fuels waiting for the UK.

In additional research to hammer home the message, Uplift reveals that the Jackdaw field - one of the largest unexploited gasfields in the North Sea - would displace only 2% of current imports of gas, but would leave the UK still almost entirely dependent on supplies from Norway and a few other sources.⁶ Then you have the Rosebank field - also in Scottish waters, but mainly containing oil - which would displace only about 1% of the UK’s gas imports. In other words, to quote Tessa Khan, both Jackdaw and Rosebank would do “vanishingly little” to boost UK gas production - Rosebank being a prime example of “oil for profit, not our security”, given the fact that its reserves are predominantly oil for export and, if burned, would see the UK breach its climate targets. In fact, Britain is already well short when it comes to meeting its 2030 targets with emissions set to be 59% lower than 1990 levels, falling well short of the 68% reduction target, and is off track to achieve net zero emissions in 2050.⁷ Any uptick of homegrown fossil fuel usage through renewed drilling in the North Sea would blow another hole through these shaky ambitions.

Warning

This is something verified by more than 65 leading UK scientists in an open letter against new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.⁸ Challenging both the environmental and economic case for further drilling, they write: “As climate scientists, we urge leaders to look to the cheaper solutions we have already, that we know work”. Signatories include Bill McGuire, who has written numerous popular books on climate science and will shortly be publishing The fate of the world: a history and future of the climate crisis.⁹

In their letter, like Uplift, they argue that about 90% of North Sea reserves have already been extracted and additional production would have little effect on global prices, given the scale of international oil and gas markets. Instead, they go on, further drilling would only add to greenhouse gas emissions and undermine efforts to limit global warming. After all, the last three years have been the hottest on record and extreme weather events are becoming increasingly frequent.

As McGuire told the FT, more drilling “means adding carbon to the atmosphere that wouldn’t otherwise be added” and “is the last thing we need”.¹⁰ As for Ella Gilbert, who coordinated the letter, she makes the simple case that renewables already offer a cheaper alternative. Wind and solar energy were now the lowest-cost sources of electricity, while falling battery storage costs were making intermittency - when renewable sources are offline - easier to manage. This is a trend that will only accelerate, despite Donald Trump and his dystopian dreams.

Climate refuseniks say that the UK sources some 75% of its total energy from oil and gas and thus will continue to need fossil fuels for decades, even under the most optimistic timelines, and have also claimed that North Sea output has significantly lower emissions than imported gas. But this argument is not serious. The independent Climate Change Committee, for example, has found only a small emissions advantage when UK production is compared to the global average - and this, of course, would be offset by increased production adding to fossil fuel use and higher emissions. Fossil fuel enthusiasts also point to the latest offshore wind subsidy auction as evidence that renewable energy is not uniformly cheap - developers were guaranteed £90.91 per megawatt hour, as opposed to the current spot prices of around £96, implying that wind and solar energy supplies would also need to be backed up with gas or battery storage, and extra electricity grid systems provided.

Knee-jerk

Gilbert and others reply that countries which had accelerated their transition away from fossil fuels have fared better: eg, Spain is enjoying lower power prices and greater resilience to energy shocks. James Alexander of the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association warns too that expanding drilling would be a “knee-jerk reaction” to a worsening long-term, systemic issue - policymakers would be better focusing on creating the conditions for green energy to attract more investment, rather than artificially prolonging reliance on fossil fuels.

But we have no time to waste, as we are approaching multiple tipping points, and may indeed be closer than previously thought to a point of no return - after which runaway global heating would be impossible to stop, at least according to recent studies.¹¹ As Bill McGuire further chronicles, this time in The Guardian, the first three months of the year have seen record-breaking heat across much of the US and floods have devastated Hawaii, northern Australia, as well as the Gulf states of Oman and the UAE.¹² Meanwhile, in England and Wales, February this year was the warmest on record, following on from record winter rainfall in many parts.

The “worst possible news”, as McGuire writes, was to be found in a Nature paper, published just a week after the bombing of Iran started. This outlined that the rate of global heating has been supercharged since 2015, and is now almost double what it was in the 1970s. Meaning that at the current rate of near 0.35°C a decade, unless there is severe action on emissions, we will see the 2°C limit shattered as soon as the late 2030s with no end in sight - the 1.5°C ‘ideal’ target of the Paris Agreement having become an impossible dream.