Abandoning net zero and drilling for more oil and gas in the North Sea would be a massive setback for the UK and would not help the economy, leading experts have said in response to claims by the former prime minister Tony Blair.
“This is a bizarre intervention to make during the worst May heatwave on record and when the Iran crisis is providing yet more evidence of the enormous costs of oil and gas,” said Ed Matthew, the UK programme director at the E3G thinktank. “Clean energy is cheaper energy – it protects our bills from prices skyrocketing, its running costs are virtually zero, and it doesn’t cause climate change which threatens economic collapse … The government should ignore Blair’s ideological nonsense and focus on what works.”
In an essay published on Wednesday, Blair argued that the UK should exploit its remaining oil and gas reserves and abandon its long-set target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Blair, who has links to petrostates and whose institute takes money from technology companies that want a large build-out of AI data centres, has made these arguments for fossil fuels and against net zero many times in the past two years.
His intervention came as the UK broke records for solar energy generation as well as for temperatures, which scientists said were the result of the climate crisis and reliance on fossil fuels. Doctors said older people and the very young could be at risk from the heatwave, and farmers struggled with heat stresses on livestock and crops that are likely to cost the economy well over £200m this year.
James Sutton, the co-executive director of the Zero Hour campaign, said: “Blair’s interventions on energy policy would lock Brits into more instability and price shocks that, unsurprisingly, line the pockets of his billionaire funders, not everyday people. This myth that it’s either clean power or cheap power may have been his policy in 2007, but the world has moved on, Britain can no longer afford to outsource its energy security to Blair’s friends.”
Calls to maximise production from the UK’s rapidly dwindling North Sea reserves have also been made by the Conservative and Reform parties.
The head of the International Energy Agency, and one of the world’s most respected energy economists, Fatih Birol, said last month that opening new fields would have little impact, and more drilling by the UK would not bring down the price of oil and gas for British consumers.
Tessa Khan, the director of Uplift, which researches and campaigns on the North Sea, said: “The idea that the North Sea can be an engine for economic growth, that it would be able to help the underlying structural challenges of the UK economy, is for the birds.”
The net zero target is not a political target, but was set according to scientific advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of the world’s leading climate scientists, which has said that reaching net zero around mid-century is the only way to limit global heating within relatively safe thresholds.
Last week, the UK’s Climate Change Committee warned that the impacts of global heating of 2C by 2050 were likely to wipe billions from the UK’s economy, in the form of damage from heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms, but that acting to reach net zero would bring economic benefits.
A Labour source told the Guardian: “Blair has made these interventions many times before and they have not shifted the dial inside the government one bit. The government’s commitment to net zero and the North Sea position has been rock solid, and this is not going to change.”
Jess Ralston, the head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, said renewable energy would bring down energy bills, while pursuing oil and gas would simply leave the UK exposed to more shocks.
Pointing to the record amounts of solar energy generated this week, she said: “The British public are clearly seeing net zero technologies like solar as a way to take back control of their energy independence, and demand shows no signs of slowing down with energy bills rising in just a few months[’ time] . Saving families hundreds a year; reducing our imports of foreign gas as the North Sea continues its inevitable decline; and boosting the economy as more people invest in installing these technologies – people are voting with their feet on the way to overcome the latest energy crisis.”
The lessons were also clear from other countries, she said. “Look at Spain, where higher levels of renewables are already helping to shield households from volatile gas prices,” she said. “Electrification is emerging as the obvious route to stabilised bills and more British energy.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “The government is implementing the manifesto commitment to deliver a fair and balanced transition in the North Sea – managing existing fields for the entirety of their lifespan, and not granting new exploration licences because they will not support our energy security and will not take a penny off bills.”
The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said: “As we face a second fossil fuel crisis in five years, Britain is taking back control of their energy by generating more clean power than ever before. Record-breaking solar growth means greater energy security, lower exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets which we can’t control. This is what our clean power mission looks like: backing homegrown energy, giving people more control over their bills, and building a stronger, more resilient energy system for the future.”
