Incredible Rishi Sunak is the only leader NOT planning to rely on oil and gas imported from nasty...
The debate over energy, like so much else in our impatient, Twitterised age, is falsely polarised. Either you fear the imminent incineration of the planet, and want every other policy subordinated to the goal of eliminating CO2 production; or you are a cigar-chomping science denier who refuses to recognise any problem at all. In reality, most of us are in neither category. If opinion polls are to be believed, voters see as one among many problems. They want it tackled, but they want it tackled sensibly and affordably. They want cleaner technologies to replace older ones, but at a pace that will not bankrupt them. They want Britain to lead the effort to slow planetary heating, but they don't want to make futile gestures while other countries expand their use of coal. They are, in short, exactly where Rishi Sunak is. Yesterday, the PM announced a 'proportionate and pragmatic' approach to energy policy, licensing new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea while expanding carbon capture schemes. Immediately, voices from the two fringes were raised in protest. On one side, sceptical scientists pointed out that carbon capture was inefficient, which is why no one will invest in it without huge subsidies. On the other and much more loudly eco-zealots raged against the very idea of allowing more fossil fuels to be extracted. What bothers them, rather oddly, is not using oil and gas, but using British oil and gas. It is here that they reveal themselves as less interested in climate change than in attacking the market economy. Over time, fossil fuels will become rarer and more expensive to extract, while renewables and other alternative technologies become cheaper. Even without state intervention, the day will come when fossil fuels are naturally phased out. There is a legitimate debate about how much governments should spend to bring that day forward. But that is not the position of Greenpeace, Just Stop Oil, Greta Thunberg, Insulate Britain and the other doomsday cultists. They don't want greener energy. They want less energy, correctly perceiving that cheaper energy is the motor of economic growth. Greenies don't like growth. To them, it means human beings spreading like a virus across the planet, plundering Gaia, wrecking some imagined primal Eden. Hence their opposition, down the decades, to nuclear energy a clean and renewable source of power. It cannot be repeated too often that, if the rest of us had followed France 50 years ago, and built safe and dependable nuclear power stations, there would be a far less urgent debate about reducing carbon emissions. What the eco-warriors call our climate emergency is an emergency of their own making. Sunak has no intention of repeating that mistake. He wants pragmatic improvements in our energy sector, not pointless virtue-signalling. He is, so to speak, a techie green rather than a hairshirt green. Virtue-signalling doesn't get more pointless than the idea that we should halt the extraction of oil and gas here, even if that means importing it from overseas at higher environmental cost. As the PM calmly told a sneering interviewer on Scottish television yesterday: 'Even when we reach net zero in 2050, a quarter of our energy needs will still come from oil and gas, and domestic gas production has about a quarter or a third of the carbon footprint of imported gas. 'So not only is it better for our energy security not to rely on foreign dictators for that energy, not only is it good for jobs (particularly Scottish jobs), it is actually better for the environment. Because there is no point in importing stuff from halfway around the world with two to three times the carbon footprint of what we have got at home.' It is hard to argue with any of that. We will need oil and gas, not just to manage the transition, but beyond. And we have enough beneath our own waters to keep going for at least another 30 years. It is worth stressing that intermittent sources of energy need gas as a back-up. If you quadruple the amount of energy you get from wind and solar, you don't reduce your reliance on gas you roughly have to quadruple it, too, to keep up supplies on the days when the wind does not blow and the sun doesn't shine. Technology might solve this problem over time. But, in the meantime, we still need gas. It is true that we will sell energy at world prices, so domestic production will not mean lower prices at home. So what? If the price of something is rising, that strikes me as a pretty good argument for making more of it. And why wouldn't we export a profitable product? What of the other side of the announcement, the vast subsidies announced for carbon capture and storage? Is this an expensive piety, needed to balance the sensible stuff? Or might we be on to something? The blunt fact is that there is no way of phasing out all carbon emissions. The only way to come close to our reduction targets is thus through better and cheaper carbon capture. And Britain is geologically the best-placed country in Europe to pursue this technology, thanks to our abundance of permeable rocks. Now it may be that carbon capture will never become affordable. Certainly the idea that the Government should 'create jobs' through subsidies is nonsense, since the cost per job is vastly higher than the benefit per employee, and many more jobs are lost elsewhere. Still, it is at least possible that Britain will end up with a global advantage in a technology that others come to accept as necessary. In this new announcement, we see the essence of what we might call Sunakism. Practical, low-key, pro-market, balanced and honest about trade-offs. We see the same thing with his support for nuclear power which, partly because of the excessive regulatory burdens imposed by headline-driven past governments, is five-and-a-half times as expensive here as in South Korea. We see it, too, in his refusal to wage war on cars. Yes, phasing out petrol and diesel engines has an environmental benefit. But cars are essential for all sorts of people families taking children to school, women who don't like hanging about on lonely station platforms after sunset and, not least, small businesses. We should work with the grain of human nature, allowing people to buy cleaner cars when they would be replacing their vehicles anyway. All basic common sense, you might think. And yet, incredibly, the Conservatives are now the only major party that does not propose to rely on imported oil and gas, much of it produced in nasty dictatorships, and all of it brought in with higher carbon emissions especially the gas, which needs to be liquefied, shipped in tankers, and then returned to gaseous form. 'This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish,' said Labour's Aneurin Bevan in 1945. 'Only an organising genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.' These days, we are surrounded by oil and gas. Yet the organising geniuses of Labour, the SNP and the Lib Dems all mean to ban the stuff. When will we ever learn?