My TL;DR:
Ministers have repeatedly claimed developing the huge oilfield off Shetland will improve UK energy security.
For example, in September, Rishi Sunak said Rosebank would help prevent young people from growing up “dependent on foreign dictators” for energy security.
Furthermore, in the king’s speech: “Legislation will be introduced to strengthen the United Kingdom’s energy security and reduce reliance on volatile international energy markets and hostile foreign regimes".
However, in a written answer to a parliamentary question, the government admits that the private companies extracting the oil will sell the vast majority internationally: “Around 80% of the oil produced in the UK is refined overseas into the products demanded by the UK market".
Alexander Kirk, of the climate justice group Global Witness, says “UK oil and gas is owned by the companies that extract it and sell it on global markets. New oilfields like Rosebank will only line the pockets of rich fossil fuel firms, it won’t help the millions of Brits that are struggling to pay their bills.”
Edit: Making title more clear.
Just want to being particular attention to this quote:
“…around 80% of the oil produced in the UK is refined overseas into the products demanded by the UK market."
It’s quotes like this that convince me more and more that one of the best things we common folk can do to help tackle climate breakdown is just buying less stuff…
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
It comes first for a reason.
And yet we’re still barely doing recycle
You can’t really do much with plastics. It can handle being reprocessed once or twice before it just becomes too brittle.
We can only reduce to fix our worst pollutants. Well, until we get some plastic eating bacteria.
Plastic eating bacteria introduces all sorts of new problems, actually. Plastic is popular because plastic is forever (as long as it’s protected from excessive heat and UV light)
It’s going to be bad when your plastic can rot.
Sorry, my response was to the comment about recycling plastic.
I completely agree that it would cause issues ones it has plastic eating bacteria, but there are many reasons why plastic recycling hasn’t taken off, the biggest being “it doesn’t actually recycle”.
It does recycle, though. You can’t recycle plastic bottles into plastic bottles forever, but they can become lower grade plastics meant for different tasks for their entire life cycle. Highly degraded plastic can be made into building materials and roads, for example.
The real reason it hasn’t taken off is because it’s not profitable.
And we do that already.
But considering you can only do it basically twice, you can’t mash different types of plastics together, and you can’t “recycle” into the types of plastics that are in demand, it’s all rather pointless.
They make low grade building materials, think benches, and flake easily so roads are a really bad idea. There are only so many benches you can make and Walkers have that covered with the green washing of crisp packets.
