22/07/2026. London, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Andy Burnham Official Portrait. 10 Downing Street. Picture by Alecsandra Dragoi / No 10 Downing Street

For a man who said he was going to tell it like it is in his first leader’s conference speech yesterday, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham dodged one big issue with a few weasel words, saying “we will be pragmatic in relation to the North Sea as we build a bridge to a clean energy future and face the climate crisis.” I take this to mean “We will approve the Jackdaw gas field once we’ve got past next week’s tricky by-election where the Greens are throwing everything at beating us.”

I have talked about Jackdaw and Rosebank for some time, but I’ve never said whether I think they should go ahead or not. The problem is that it is very difficult to sift through the constant deluge of misinformation and opinion-masquerading-as-fact and get an objective view. I’ve been asking search engines “Are these fields compatible with the UK’s carbon budgets?” and despite all this much hyped AI, there is no clear answer.

There is a good reason for that – it is almost impossible to tell. One of the standard pro-exploitation arguments is that imported oil and gas have a lower carbon footprint than “domestically” produced fuel. This difference is usually exaggerated by only including Scope 1 and 2 emissions – “4 times cleaner!”. These are dwarfed when you actually burn the stuff, but overall domestic seems to be about 15% cleaner.

But the big question is: what happens to the fuel you don’t import? Does it stay in the ground, or does it simply get sold to someone else? If the domestic production completely displaces overseas production then, yes, the footprint will fall by 15%, but if it adds to it with zero displacement, the overall footprint rises by 87%! And the difficulty we have is that no-one knows what would happen in practice – you’d have to do some pretty complex modelling of highly uncertain systems including the inside of Donald Trump’s brain.

One of the few pro-exploitation arguments that makes me stop and think is “The green lobby says these fields are both irrelevant (economically) and catastrophic (environmentally) – how can they be both?” The former is true – Jackdaw, the most likely to be approved, would create only 27 direct jobs in a sector which has lost 200,000 in the last decade. A good measure to bring this into context is economic value vs climate damages and that comes out against exploitation to the tune of roughly 11:1 according to some recent research (I’ve averaged and rounded down their 6-17:1 range). On those grounds the projects shouldn’t proceed, but we have the usual problem that those facing the damage are distributed around the world, while those reaping the benefits have a hotline to the Government.

My main concern however, is that these projects have taken on totemic proportions in the media. Approving both could open the floodgates for other projects under a cry of “drill, baby, drill!”, lead to easing of the push for clean energy and make people think the ‘climate fuss’ is somehow over. Conversely, if the proposals aren’t approved, and if the ‘Net Zero is bankrupting Britain’ meme takes hold in the public consciousness, we could end up with our own domestic Trumpian overlords, which would set us back decades.

I live in hope that we are genuinely hitting clean energy tipping points, as appears to be the case, so global fossil fuel exploitation will start to diminish as demand falls, whatever the noise from vested interests. But there will be plenty of bumps in the road while that plays out. For the UK Government, Jackdaw and Rosebank are two pretty high profile bumps and I’m glad I’m not making the decision.

Over to you, Andy.