Opening up oil field threatens wellbeing

OIL giant Equinor, which is majorityowned by the Norwegian government, wants to open up the biggest undeveloped oil field in the UK - Rosebank. This one field alone would produce more CO2 emissions than the poorest 28 countries in the world do in a year.

The UK government recently approved the project and now it’s up to Equinor and the Norwegian government to decide if they want to go ahead with it. Rosebank would blow past UK climate targets and do nothing to improve energy security.

Due to a purposeful loophole in the windfall tax, the UK Government will hand Equinor a £3.75 billion tax break to develop the field. British taxpayers will be footing the bill while Equinor profits. Rosebank has to be stopped.

Citing the latest IPCC report, Alok Sharma MP, former president of COP26, said that the government needed to explain how approving

new oil and gas fields, like Rosebank, is compatible with reaching net zero by 2050 and with its carbon budget trajectories.

Analysis of emissions from Rosebank makes clear that the oil field is incompatible with the UK’s climate obligations by every test, whether that’s the huge volume of emissions from burning Rosebank’s oil or the production emissions created to get the oil out of the ground. Given that the world has breached 1.5C warming threshold for a full year, reversing such madness is essential to the wealth, wellbeing and credibility of the UK.

Labour’s green investment policies being delayed is also tragic - a task made much more difficult by the catastrophic mismanagement of the economy by recent Conservative governments. Labour’s planned £28 billion green investment would have been a welcome alternative to the years of Tory decline and decay. Investing in our future is good governance!

Liz Finlayson