Don't fall for the corporate green wash

Storm Eunice has given us a foretaste of some of the damage climate change is going to do to the UK. 1.2 million households lost their electricity supply. Trains stood idle. Countless trees were uprooted.

In Swindon brick walls fell into the street and in London strips of the Millennium Dome roof streamed in the gale. Three people died.

We know that the longer we keep burning fossil fuels, the worse the extreme weather will get.

Despite this, after a discreet pause for some “blah, blah, blah” at COP26, our government is planning to license more areas of the North Sea to the oil and gas companies.

Mr Johnson’s cabinet thinks this will be a popular move. They will suggest that extracting more oil and gas will bring our energy bills down. It won’t. New fields take years to come on stream, and there is nowhere near enough oil and gas in the North Sea to affect global market prices.

But wait! Before the next licensing round starts, the government is holding a public consultation. Good news? Sadly, not so.

The consultation is on “the design of a new climate compatibility checkpoint . . . carried out before each future oil and gas licensing process to ensure any new licences are only awarded on the basis that they are aligned with the UK’s climate change commitments”.

The consultation is not about whether to grant the licences or not – that’s a done deal – it’s about how to make them look OK.

It’s just greenwash. There is no way in which further exploration can be in line with the UK’s climate change commitments. The International Energy Authority stated last year that no new oil and gas fields must be opened up anywhere.

The truth is, there is so much oil and gas available in currently licensed fields that if we burn more than a small percentage of it, the UK’s climate change commitments will be a dead letter. But the Government wants to extract more. If the UK can rip up its commitments like this, how can we expect any other country to stick to theirs?

This consultation ends next Monday, 28th February. Googling “oil-gas-licensing-checkpoint” will find it. You can be sure that Shell and BP have responded, so it's vital that members of the public do too. Some of the questions seem designed to make you give up, like Please detail your proposed methodology and state sources of data and projections that would be required”.

I’m just going to state that we don’t need a checkpoint because we can’t grant any more licences. The International Energy Authority says so, and they are a trade body, not a pressure group. Please respond to the consultation and get other people to do so too.

Jane Milner-Barry

St Margaret's Road

McKirdy celebration prompts memories of Summerbee

Your report of the Town’s win at Carlisle said that Harry McKirdy , after scoring, produced his ‘trade mark celebration’ in front of Carlisle fans who had been freely booing him all afternoon.

I seem to remember the great Mike Summerbee, when playing for Swindon, was quoted as saying that ‘he knew he was good, because he was booed when he played away’.

Roger Foord

Chorleywood

Herts

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