Don’t Look Down! The Reality of Boris Johnson’s Climate Politics

Rhetoric from reality

When it comes to Boris Johnson’s climate policies, it is important to separate rhetoric from reality. In October 2021, the UK government set out a ‘landmark strategy’ committing to delivering net zero emissions by 2050. But barely six months later, in April 2022, it commissioned a new scientific review of shale gas. All signs are that it is using this review to restart onshore fracking in the UK. (Famously in 2012, Johnson had described fracking as a ‘miracle’.)

Even the windfall tax on oil and gas companies belatedly introduced by Johnson’s then Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, came with a major loophole: a 91 per cent rebate on the value of projects developing oil and gas North Sea. It is thought that this sweetener, designed to accelerate development of the North Sea, may actually be worth more to Big Oil than the value lost to the windfall tax.

The links between the oil and gas industry and British politics – particularly the Conservatives – are deep. Numerous Tory MPs have close connections with the lobby that aims to dilute climate change policies. At the same time, key oil and gas corporations, and their representatives, are given free rein to set the agenda in parliamentary groups on energy and climate policy.

In early June, the development of the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields in the North Sea were given the green light. Both are estimated to be bigger than Cambo field, the North Sea project that was ditched by Shell to great fanfare in the wake of the Glasgow COP. Since then, the North Sea has truly been turbo-injected with a combination of tax incentives and new government licences.

This is some legacy for a Prime Minister whose commitment to dealing with climate change represented his redemptive, Damascene qualities: his ability to sense the big issue of the day and act on it. After all, Johnson was, like his friend Donald Trump, a confirmed climate sceptic until relatively recently. As Mayor of London, he denounced scientific assessments of nitrogen dioxide pollution in the city as ‘bollocks’ and ‘a ludicrous urban myth’. In 2015, he openly ridiculed the idea of climate change in his Daily Telegraph column. Four years later, in his general election victory speech at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London, he pledged ‘to make this country the cleanest, greenest on Earth, with the most far-reaching environmental programme’.

Fast-forward to Glasgow COP26 in 2021 and another typical headline-grabbing flourish from Johnson: ‘It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now.’ In in his role as COP26 President, Cabinet Secretary Alok Sharma had been given free rein to suggest that the UK government might end North Sea development. The government seemed to accept that the North Sea was on its last legs. As late as January 2022, while tensions rose in Ukraine, Sharma stated clearly that ‘extracting more gas from the North Sea is not a “realistic” strategy’.

Oil and gas interests

The realpolitik has been very different. Just weeks after Alok Sharma was calling for urgent action at COP in Glasgow, the UK government released a remarkable consultation exercise on the future of oil and gas production in the UK. Designing a climate compatibility checkpoint for future oil and gas licensing in the UK Continental Shelf sought to reshape decisions on how fossil fuel production will be permitted in future. The consultation notes that it is predominantly concerned with responses from ‘the UK oil and gas industry, the investment community and non-governmental organisations’. In other words, the consultation sought to mimic the lobbying process in which those organisations compete for access, effectively incorporating the lobbyists into the machinery of government. Both Johnson and Sharma had diplomatically omitted to mention their plan to the earnestly assembled governments of the world in Glasgow.

Indeed, the ongoing consultation on the future of oil and gas production in the UK is replete with assertions that oil and gas companies must be ‘incentivised’ to ‘invest in energy transition technologies and support their development’. In effect, the government is inviting oil and gas companies to frame the conditions of future oil and gas production, and to make suggestions about the best way to subsidise their role in the transition. The basic idea is that the easiest, most pain free route to transition is to ensure the Shells and BPs of this world continue to grow and to expand their market share.

In early January 2022, less than a month after the consultation’s publication, the government reported that a total of 29 new North Sea projects were under consideration (including four projects forecast to yield more than Cambo (Equinor’s Rosebank, BP’s Clair South, Enquest’s Bentley, and CNOOC’s Glengorm). On 19 January, a licence was issued for the relatively small Abigail field and by early February, a series of government leaks set out its intention to fast-track a number of major oil and gas projects.

But like everything else which might harm his and his government’s reputation, Johnson went to extraordinary lengths to blame his very own political initiative to reopen the North Sea on someone else: Vladimir Putin. Writing in the Daily Telegraph in March 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Johnson argued that ‘Putin’s strength – his vast resource of hydrocarbons – is also his weakness. He has virtually nothing else.’ Two days later, from the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi – where he was discussing new oil deals between the UK and Middle Eastern states – Johnson proclaimed, ‘What Putin is doing in Ukraine is causing global uncertainty and a spike in the price of oil’. Statement after statement, all naming Putin, accumulated throughout March, until the UK government finally announced a new energy policy. In the introduction to his ‘Energy Security Strategy’ in April 2022, Boris Johnson blamed ‘Putin’s invasion of Ukraine’ on the need to give ‘the energy fields of the North Sea a new lease of life.’

But the green light had already been given, back in December. The bureaucratic machinery was in place long place before the invasion of Ukraine, and before fall out from this war could be anticipated. This renewed political appetite for fossil fuels has its origins in a typically opportunistic Johnson government ‘business as usual’ approach to the climate crisis.

‘Business as usual’

The links between the oil and gas industry and British politics – particularly the Conservatives – are deep. Numerous Tory MPs have close connections with the lobby that aims to dilute climate change policies. At the same time, key oil and gas corporations, and their representatives, are given free rein to set the agenda in parliamentary groups on energy and climate policy.

When Shell announced its relocation to London, a matter of days after COP26, few bothered to ask why a company like Shell would relocate to Britain. The answer is obvious: Shell sees Britain as a country that will protect and defend oil and gas industry interests. Both Shell and BP paid zero corporation tax and production levies on their North Sea oil operations in the three years between 2018 and 2020, and at the same time claimed tax reliefs totalling almost £400m. All the major fossil fuel producers are positioning themselves as leading market players in the UK’s energy transition. And they can be confident that the government will support them in this.

The UK’s net zero carbon strategy includes a central role for Big Oil. On the face of things, there appears to be an unresolvable contradiction here. The Johnson government constantly reasserted that it was on track to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and that there was no question of revising this. So how could this be possible while giving new licences in the North Sea?

The answer is that net zero is not zero. It is a market measure of zero: a market concept that proposes a way of reaching ‘zero’ whilst simultaneously burning fossil fuels. It is a kind of balancing act made possible by directly funding other activities that purport to remove carbon from the system at some point in the future (tree planting, speculative new carbon capture technologies), or by purchasing carbon credits generated by renewable energy projects, by restoration of woodlands or peatlands or by the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.

The concept of net zero also facilitates the expansion of highly lucrative markets in geo-engineering, including a fast-growing market in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS). The idea of utilisation is basically that carbon captured from the environment can be used in a secondary form (it can be recycled for use in new forms of fertiliser, new polymers, new synthetic fuels, or construction materials like concrete and asphalt). CCUS is the paradox of net zero in perfect symmetry: it uses CO2 – the by-product of industrial processes – to produce more carbon-based commodities using a new industrial process. The net value of those techniques as a real mitigation for climate change is highly dubious (Buck, 2019). Equally dubious is the process of oil enhanced oil recovery in which pressurised CO2 is injected into existing oil and gas reservoirs. This is something that oil and gas producers do anyway, and have done for decades because it is a process that significantly enhances the rate and efficiency of oil production.

The Energy Security Bill that is being prepared at the time of writing neatly sums up this government’s approach to energy policy. It is entirely concerned with maintaining the energy supply. There are consistent references to maintaining a mixed system of ‘homegrown energy from more diverse sources’ with no targets set out to stem the flow of hydrocarbons. The headline decarbonisation measure is CCUS. Indeed, it is clear from reading the accompanying documentation that ‘the delivery of net zero objectives’ will allow decarbonisation targets to be met whilst we continue to burn up everything we have under the North Sea. Thus ‘in the power sector, gas-fired generation with CCUS can provide flexible, low-carbon capacity to complement high levels of renewables’. So, business as usual, then.

Johnson’s climate legacy

Johnson has left office, a former climate denier now repented. But he has undoubtedly strengthened anti-climate action voices within the Conservative Party. Steve Baker (who regards the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as implausible) and the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of backbench Tory MPs (who want to incentivise Big Oil even further) are now being taken seriously and regularly wheeled out in the national press for their views on the future of the Conservative Party and indeed the country. For Baker and his clique, the problem is not climate change, it is scientific evidence and ‘woke’ environmentalists.

Yet if we are to learn anything from the Johnson era – perhaps the most scandalised period in the modern age of politics – it is that we should be very wary of fixating too long on what is happening in the political sewer. This may have been the most scandalised political leader in living memory, but while gazing downwards at the lies and the frauds and the gutter politics, we shouldn’t forget to look up at the most enduring and world-wrecking scandal of the lot.