For a safe climate and affordable energy, we must stop Rosebank and all new oil and gas now.
Lauren MacDonald is the lead campaigner for Stop Rosebank at Uplift.
Uplift and Greenpeace UK filed a legal challenge against the previous Tory government’s decision to grant planning permission for Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in Autumn 2023. On 30 January, the Scottish supreme court ruled that the approvals were unlawful and overturned them.
If Storm Éowyn’s battering of Scotland and Ireland last month has taught us anything, it is that climate change is already severely impacting people’s lives here in the UK.
Extreme weather is not just devastating other countries but finding its own unique ways to affect communities closer to home.
We can now access frightening footage of climate impacts, like the brutal Californian wildfires, at the click of a button. A dystopian ability to watch our climate changing in real time.
This reality is one of the many reasons why last month’s legal victory against the Rosebank oil field was so significant.
Rosebank is the UK’s largest untapped oil field, situated 80 miles off the coast of Shetland. Burning its reserves would emit more CO2 than the 700 million people living in the world’s lowest income countries do in a year.
Allowing it to be developed – at a time when experts have warned that opening up new oil and gas fields will push us beyond safe climate limits – would be reckless in the extreme.
The field was waved through by the Conservatives in 2023 – and legally challenged by Uplift and Greenpeace in the Scottish Courts.
The ruling, which overturns Rosebank’s approval, wasn’t just a victory for common sense. If its owners still want to develop the project, they will now need to resubmit an application to the UK government that, finally, accounts for the enormous climate harm caused by burning Rosebank’s oil.
That is because the rules for new oil and gas projects are changing, thanks to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June last year.
The new rules mean that Rosebank’s enormous climate harm should now be subject to proper assessment and public scrutiny, with the oil and gas companies that own the field being forced to come clean about the massive emissions that will be caused by burning its reserves.
Rosebank is not just a bad deal for our climate, though. It’s a bad deal for the UK too. Rosebank’s reserves are 90% oil, the vast majority of which will be sold for export on the international market, doing nothing to lower our bills or provide energy security in the UK.
At the same time, the UK public would carry almost all the costs of developing Rosebank in the form of billions in tax breaks for the field’s owners. The Norwegian state-backed oil giant, Equinor, which owns 80% of the field and which made £24 billion in profit last year, would take most of the profit from Rosebank.
As for jobs in the UK, Rosebank’s drilling ship has been built in Dubai and the project has yet to provide a single construction or design job in the UK. Unions have rightly called this a betrayal of the UK workforce, which has seen the number of jobs supported by the oil and gas industry more than halve in the past decade as the North Sea declines, despite new fields being approved.
There is a long road ahead if we want to keep Rosebank’s oil in the ground. Any application to develop it would need to pass through multiple regulatory stages before being considered by the Energy Secretary. To be clear, the UK government cannot pre-empt this decision.
Now, though, the government needs to know that, when the time comes, we expect them to make the right call and stop Rosebank for good. Our elected representatives need to hear our concerns about what approving Rosebank would mean for our climate, as well as the harm it would do to the UK’s clean energy ambitions. Approving a huge new oil field, and the signal this would send to investors, would put a handbrake on this country’s shift from expensive oil and gas to homegrown renewable energy.
Over the next month, people right across the country are meeting with their MPs and MSPs to make their views known: that for a safe climate and affordable energy, we must stop Rosebank and all new oil and gas now.
In ruling Rosebank unlawful, the Hon. Lord Ericht said: “the private interests of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interests of the developers”.
Join us in making sure our voices are louder than theirs: https://www.stopcambo.org.uk/mp-msp-action-week
Left Foot Forward doesn't have the backing of big business or billionaires. We rely on the kind and generous support of ordinary people like you.
You can support hard-hitting journalism that holds the right to account, provides a forum for debate among progressives, and covers the stories the rest of the media ignore. Donate today.
