UK Tories promise to let industry dig up all the North Sea oil and gas they can find

Cromarty Firth, where old North Sea Oil platforms are dragged to rest until the price of oil rises again. | Photo by joiseyshowaa Cromarty Firth Oil Rigs 

By Jo Nova

Finally, the UK conservative Party is offering fossil fuels with no apology

It’s all good, but the UK Opposition left it so late to actually oppose The Blob, that Nigel Farage and Reform UK may wipe them out permanently. The latest polls have Reform romping ahead on  29-35%, leading the Labor government who can only get support from 18-24% of voters. The conservatives (who, let’s remember, were The Government a bit over a year ago) have slumped to 15-20%.

Now that Nigel Farage has made it obvious what voters want, the Tories have finally been dragged into offering it too. But true leaders are the people that do it first. We hope Sussan Ley, Australia’s opposition leader, is paying attention.

In March The Tories dumped the impossible NetZero plan. Now they say that if they are (ever) elected again, they will “maximize extraction” of North Sea oil and gas, which sounds like the British way of saying “Drill Baby Drill”.

Tories pledge to get all oil and gas out of North Sea

BBC

Kemi Badenoch has said her party will remove all net zero requirements on oil and gas companies drilling in the North Sea if elected.

The Conservative leader is to formally announce the plan to focus solely on “maximising extraction” to get “all our oil and gas out of the North Sea” in a speech in Aberdeen on Tuesday,

She will claim that net zero measures mean households end up “paying the price through higher energy bills”.

Only a couple of years ago this would have caused apoplexy writ large:

Kemi Badenoch pledges to make oil and gas ‘cornerstone’ of UK economy

The Independent

A Tory government would make North Sea oil and gas the “cornerstone” of the economy, Kemi Badenoch will pledge, as she hit out at Labour for treating the sector as a “relic of the past”.

The Conservative leader, who said she wants to see as much oil and gas extracted from the UK Continental Shelf as possible, will insist that it is only her party that is “backing Britain’s North Sea industry”.

Her comments came as David Whitehouse, chief executive of the industry body Offshore Energies UK, said there was “an important message that the UK should produce its own oil and gas”. He said that estimates suggest the UK will need between 10 billion and 15 billion barrels of oil and gas between now and 2050 – the target date for the country to reach net zero.

But Mr Whitehouse added the UK was currently on course to produce less than four billion barrels from the North Sea.

Only a month ago, the New Zealand government finally voted to undo Jacinda Arderns rules and resume oil and gas exploration. 

The climate agenda is falling apart all over the world:

““No doubt growing public scepticism is what has fuelled Kemi Badenoch’s plans to ‘drill, baby, drill’. The burden of Net Zero is now impossible to ignore. Households and industries have reached breaking point. A deep well of anger has effectively forced Badenoch’s hand,” says @FraserMyers.  “For years, voters were treated as mere bystanders while stringent Net Zero policies were agreed on above their heads. That is now over. The revolt against the climate consensus is just getting started.””  — @NetZeroWatch