Letters to our MPs

I understand that Parliament ran out of time to debate the Oil and Gas Licensing Bill earlier this week, but that it will be coming back to the Commons in the near future.

When it does, will you please add your voice to Alok Sharma’s and others’ in opposing it?  This week we had confirmation that 2023 was the hottest year on record, by no small margin, and here in Britain we have been seeing the effects of climate change with yet more flooding.  We know that addressing the threat can only and has to be addressed by moving away from the use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.  This must mean, as the UN and other authorities have said, that no new oil and gas fields are exploited.  So legislating to do just that is perverse.  Moreover it strengthens the argument, increasingly being made both here in the UK and abroad, that the Government is just not serious about addressing climate change.

The argument that North Sea gas is ‘cleaner’ than gas from other sources is specious, since it ignores the fact that by far the largest contribution to environmental destruction is made when it is burnt, not in its extraction and distribution.  Unless existing sources of oil and gas elsewhere are closed off unused as new ones are opened (which they won’t be), bringing more facilities on stream is only making matters much worse.

We know that here in the Hope Valley, as elsewhere in the UK, most people want more to be done to address the climate emergency, and don’t want to see Government making matters worse.  There is nothing conservative about allowing the ecosystems on which we all depend to be destroyed.

Please oppose the bill.

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