Scott Baxter 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

A simple truth has been laid bare in the Sunday Times this morning: if you block North Sea production, and ban exploration, you get more imports. And not just any imports, imports of LNG which carry emissions that are three times higher than what we produce in the UK and have no meaningful benefit to jobs, investment and balance of payments. The newspaper has uncovered that the UK Government is considering spending billions on new infrastructure to import more LNG as North Sea production declines... while simultaneously banning new UK exploration and maintaining a crippling 78% headline tax rate on our domestic industry. Climate action should be centred on reducing demand, not choking off supply. Then using the massive boost in revenues from UK production to turbocharge renewables. The reality is an LNG facility may well be required regardless but it is incumbent on those who are opposed to oil and gas projects being developed in the UKCS to tell us why this is economically and environmentally preferable to using more of our own domestic supply. I’ll wait…

Pete, will you lead by action and not just words? Will you confirm you will no longer fly to London for your MP duties and only ever take the train? Moreover, will you use your next constituency newsletter to encourage over 2000 main agricultural holdings and farms across Perth and Kinross not to use fertiliser for crops or diesel for the tractors and combines to harvest them? You may also want to include a missive to the 30,000 households in the same area requesting they turn off their mains gas? The reality is the UK needs oil and gas for 75% of our energy use. Until suitable and cost effective alternatives are readily available at scale, oil and gas is an essential part of our every day lives. I’d rather we got the economic benefit (thousands of jobs and £ billions of investment) of using domestics UKCS supply as opposed to increased overseas imports (worse for emissions which don’t respect borders) so we can lobby government to use increased revenues to turbocharge renewables, grid upgrades and the production of alternative fuels.