By Mike Small, writing in Bella Caledonia, 29th August 2024. Featured image credit Anoop VS on Pexels.com
Following the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in June in Sarah Finch’s case against an oil field in Surrey (see article in the Voice for Arran here) the UK Government has just this week, conceded that approving licences for the Rosebank oil field and Jackdaw gas field without looking at their full climate impacts was unlawful. Uplift and Greenpeace brought a legal challenge against them, which the Government has decided not to defend.
Back in December 2023 Greenpeace and Uplift launched two separate legal challenges to UK government plans to open Rosebank, a massive new oilfield in the North Sea. Greenpeace and the campaign group Uplift argued that the decision to press ahead with the Rosebank development – the UK’s biggest untapped oilfield – was incompatible with the UK’s legally binding climate commitments, and say ministers’ original analysis ignored the devastating impact of burning oil from the site. Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, said at the time: “If Rosebank goes ahead, the UK will blow its own plans to stay within safe climate limits. It’s that simple. If the government disagrees, it needs to provide evidence and prove it in court.”
Today they (and we) won. Greenpeace said: “The UK government WILL NOT defend the legal cases against the Rosebank and Jackdaw oilfields! This is amazing news and a BIG WIN for the climate. The government must now properly support affected workers and prioritise investment in green jobs.”
Tessa Kahn, founder of Uplift:
“The UK gov’t has rightly recognised that approving the Rosebank oil field without taking into account the full extent of its climate impacts was unlawful. It has conceded that argument in our & Greenpeace’s legal challenge against the field. So what does that mean?”
“First, it means the govt accepts that the Supreme Court ruling in Sarah Finch’s case against an oil field in Surrey also applies to offshore fields. In Finch, the Court held that the GHG emissions from burning oil & gas must be considered in the environmental assessment…and not just the emissions from extracting that oil/gas. To put it mildly, this is common sense and it is astonishing that the biggest environmental impact of oil & gas projects had been overlooked by decision-makers until the Supreme Court weighed in.”
“The immediate consequence of the UK govt conceding this argument in the Rosebank legal challenge is that the Scottish Court of Session is very likely to quash the decision approving Rosebank, although we’re likely to have to wait a while before that’s confirmed.”
“To be clear, this is not the same as the government revoking a licence. It’s the outcome of a legal process, triggered by the Supreme Court’s decision in Finch, that has confirmed that the original decision to award the development consent for Rosebank was unlawful.
“If Equinor & Ithaca Energy decide they still want to press ahead with developing the field, then the next step will be for them to submit a new environmental statement to the govt & regulator (the NSTA) that includes the scope 3 emissions from the field.”
“If you need reminding, those emissions are massive: the same as 56 coal-fired power plants running for a year or the annual emissions of the world’s 28 poorest countries. Wondering how we square that with a safe climate?”
“Any serious engagement with carbon budgets for staying within 1.5C puts it beyond doubt that there is no room for any new oil and gas projects. This conclusion is rigorously established in a recent paper in Science, among others: No new fossil fuel projects: The norm we need | Science.”
The UK Govt issued a statement saying:
This is now a winnable battle.