The Weather Outside Is Frightful. So Is Labour’s Climate Forecast

If you only had to nail down your wheelie bin to stop it blowing across the street this weekend, you were lucky. 

Three days of back-to-back storms – Austen on Friday, followed immediately by Boelo – caused flooding, power cuts for almost 83,000 households and travel chaos across swathes of the UK. Winds of over 80mph were recorded, roads were blocked and flood waters surged in apocalyptic scenes. Two men were killed by falling trees. 

After a summer of extreme temperatures, drought and a food production crisis, with more than 2,800 excess deaths due to consecutive heatwaves in May and June alone, you’d think the government might be taking a more muscular approach to the climate emergency.

But just days before the UK was plunged into killer-storm territory, Andy Burnham’s government approved new North Sea drilling in the form of the Jackdaw gas field. 

Climate experts are clear: no new oil and gas fields are compatible with keeping global heating around the 1.5°C mark. Jackdaw and the as-yet-unapproved Rosebank oil field, the two new North Sea projects previously halted in the courts over their climate impact, are not an exception. 

Perhaps more immediately painful as the weather turns (and I sit cradling a hot water bottle like my firstborn child) is the knowledge that gas from Jackdaw will do sweet FA to bring down energy bills at home, according to most analysts. However, it is a big win for owner and operator Adura, a joint venture between fossil fuel giant Shell and Norwegian firm Equinox, so I guess we can all be pleased for their shareholders. 

And congratulations might be in order for the climate-wreckers once again, with Whitehall ‘sources’ briefing on Saturday night that Burnham and chancellor John Healey are set to “defy eco-zealot Ed Miliband” and approve Rosebank, despite energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh insisting she’s the only one who can make the final decision. 

Rosebank is far bigger and will be significantly more damaging than Jackdaw, with predicted lifetime emissions of over 200 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to nearly 70% of the UK’s total emissions last year). 

If approved, Rosebank’s oil will be sold on the international market for the benefit of its owners, which include a 20% stake for Ithaca Energy (and Ithaca’s majority shareholder, the illegal West Bank settlement-facilitating Israeli oil and gas firm Delek). If the UK government goes ahead with Rosebank, it could be in breach of the Geneva Conventions – something that should give major pause to an administration banning trade with illegal Israeli settlements. 

But there’s more incoherence from Burnham’s lot at play here. On one hand, the government is urging us to stockpile tins and buy windup radios, citing severe weather, and then on the other, ignoring the science in favour of “taking a pragmatic approach to the North Sea”, which seems to mean little more than capitulating to fossil fuel giants with delusory benefits for the British public. 

While the government waited until after its Holborn and St Pancras byelection win against Zack Polanski to announce Jackdaw’s approval, Labour may now be feeling diminishing pressure from the embattled party to its left. The Greens, for which climate should be a slam-dunk issue, are sinking into a polling black hole while Labour rides high with 32% and an eight-point lead, according to Ipsos. Labour peer Harriet Harman certainly felt unembarrassed to tout the “green argument for Rosebank” on Friday – an equivalent to the turkey’s argument to play a central role in Christmas dinner. 

Jackdaw was the smaller fish, and approving it might’ve been a compromise to soothe the more vociferously climate-denying elements of our political and media class, allowing Rosebank to be rejected as a ‘climate red line’ with less pushback. But what’s the point in speculating? Too much of Westminster analysis is a glorified game of ‘guess what’s in teacher’s head’. Burnham’s first budget is looming on Wednesday, and we can soon judge the government by what it does to tackle the most existential and interconnected issue of our lifetimes (and our children’s and grandchildren’s lifetimes), rather than what imaginary trade-offs we suspect it might make. 

From food prices and energy bills to migration, strain on the NHS and the planet-poisoning consequences of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, climate touches everything. Without a survivable climate, the rest is immaterial. New Goalhanger podcast, anyone?