The Supreme Court judgement which says anyone wishing to extract oil and gas in the U.K. or any licensing or planning authority wishing to let them has to consider the CO 2 burning those fuels is a bad call.
The truth is this country is going to need large amounts of gas for home heating and industrial processes for a good many years. It is going to need oil products for vehicles and other purposes. It will take time for people and business to convert that to electricity and time and huge money to put in the grid, renewable generation and storage it would take.
So the decision today is do we import all the oil and gas or do we try to use what local resource we have? It is a no brainier that we should prefer to use our own. The Supreme Court needs to grasp that lowers world CO 2. Imported LNG gas gives off far more CO 2 than piped home gas, given the energy needed to liquefy, gassify and transport.
Home fuel brings many well paid jobs to the U.K. It bring big tax revenues. If we switch to importing we pay the taxes away to foreign governments, and pay the salaries for jobs elsewhere.
It also leaves us dependent on the goodwill of foreign suppliers, which can prove difficult and expensive as we saw over the Ukraine war.
The Supreme Court should not set energy policy.
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