Just Stop Oil? Just Stop the Net-Zero Madness, I say

The ability of single-issue campaign groups like Just Stop Oil to turn the heads of politicians has grown in tandem with social media

The folly of today’s energy policy, forced upon the British public by the interchangeable mainstream parties without a thought for the real impacts on jobs, families and communities is being laid out before us.

Across the whole country, industrial plants are announcing their end days, making the closure of coal pits by successive Labour and Conservative governments in the 70s and 80s a mere footnote compared to the desolation we are about to experience.

Soon the country that invented the production of steel during the Industrial Revolution will have no virgin steel production at all. The last surviving plant at Scunthorpe, bought by a Chinese company, Jingye Group in 2020, is expected to close this summer following the collapse of talks with the Labour government. Nationalisation is an option – thanks, ironically, to Brexit.

It follows blast furnaces in Redcar, Sheffield and Port Talbot that have gone before it. Port Talbot will re-emerge with a new electric arc facility but it will not make the type of steel we need to make our naval vessels or tanks – putting our national security at greater risk just as we are planning to expand our defence procurement.

Just Stop Oil has finally decided to stop throwing orange powder around (Picture: Ben Stansall) | AFP via Getty Images

We already know the fate of Grangemouth is sealed, joining a list of British plants producing chemicals, cement and fertilisers. Any manufacturing process that requires a large input of energy is at risk and it has all been self-inflicted.

It is not as if we do not have the coal, the oil and the gas – it exists within our geographical jurisdictions in large exploitable quantities – but successive governments have taken a series of decisions that have brought us to the situation where we have halted or are winding down what we currently extract.

Instead we appear content to either export our remaining energy-thirsty industries to countries that have no qualms about using coal, oil and gas – or choose to import the carbon-based energy supplies after they have been extracted in other countries and travelled thousands of miles to reach us, adding to the carbon footprint.

Such is the zealotry of our messianic Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, that he has ordered the pouring of cement down the last two shale gas fracking wells to make them beyond salvation. This will not stop the import of large quantities of shale gas from the United States or liquefied natural gas from Qatar.

The sum total of carbon prevented from being used by the UK thanks to these particular energy policies is not net zero but an increase. All we are doing is seeing carbon that we would have extracted and consumed in the UK being instead extracted and consumed in other countries, often with lower remedial standards of safety and pollution control, or extracted and transported to us in carbon-guzzling tankers that make a mockery of Miliband’s Jesuitical demands for net-zero self-righteousness.

Whatever one thinks of the pursuit of net-zero carbon emissions in various economic sectors by 2030 or 2050, the self-harm of simply offshoring our use or supply of carbon-based energy is a gargantuan folly that will condemn future generations of our people to penury.

The latest attempt to try and encourage our governments to see sense and at least have an achievable plan for transition towards net zero by utilising the resources we possess while we develop alternative energy sources and retrain our skilled employment base is well meant but is possibly a year or two too late. I hope not.

Sponsored by our Chambers of Commerce and led by former senior civil servant, Philip Rycroft, the North Sea Transition Taskforce surely would have been a welcome influence before the last Tory government went down the road of aping Labour’s policy of a so-called windfall tax on oil and gas profits in 2022.

Unfortunately the adoption of a windfall tax by then Chancellor Rishi Sunak only served to ensure the electorate had no choice in opposing such policies as all parties with any expectation of winning constituencies supported the move. It was set at 25 per cent, producing an effective rate of 65 per cent of profits and was meant to end in 2025

Showing a distinct lack of political nous or subtlety, former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt raised the additional levy to 35 per cent making the profits tax 75 percent in total – and the following year extended it until 2029, despite appeals by Conservative MPs at their party’s annual conference held in Aberdeen. Once Labour came to power, it increased the effective rate of the tax from 75 per cent to 78 per cent and extended it until 2030.

Such is the madness that has engulfed energy policy in the UK that the fanatical militants of Just Stop Oil announced last week that they were abandoning their extremist direct action campaign of public disruptions and criminal damage because they had achieved their goals of stopping new oil and gas developments.

It was a shameless example of using a humiliating defeat to lay claim for a victory. Yes, Just Stop Oil captured the soul of the Labour party and gave succour to Ed Miliband’s cause, but its high-profile stunts wrought havoc on the lives of ordinary citizens going about their legitimate business, causing travel chaos, holding up ambulances and ruining holidays for ordinary people.

The reality is that Just Stop Oil has been forced to adjust its militant tactics because many of its activist cadre are now behind bars, including its founder Roger Hallam, who was found guilty of conspiracy to block the M25.

The ability of single-issue campaigns to turn the head of our politicians to adopt policies that harm the general populace has grown in tandem with social media. It provides no excuse however for today’s net-zero madness – let China be front of the queue if it’s that smart a policy.

Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European parliaments and editor of ThinkScotland.org