No amount of spin can disguise the flawed thinking behind this decision
The Rosebank oilfield is located around 80 miles north-west of the Shetland Islands, 3,600 feet below the surface of the North Sea.
It is into this black abyss that any semblance of a coherent plan to power Britain has slipped after its owners were granted permission to drill for new oil and gas.
The timing of the announcement alone was comically bad. Just 24 hours after the International Energy Agency warned that any new oil and gas infrastructure was incompatible with the Paris Climate Agreements of limiting global warming to 1.5C – an accord of which the UK is a signatory – the North Sea Transition Authority gave the green light to a development that is expected to produce as much as 500m barrels of oil over its lifetime.
A cross-party group of MPs and peers estimate that is equivalent to 200m tonnes of carbon dioxide – “more than the combined annual CO2 emissions of all 28 low-income countries in the world.”