Campaigners call Graham Stuart’s comments ‘laughable’ and say Conservatives are weaponising climate action
Oil and gas are “not the problem” for the climate, but the carbon emissions arising from them are, the UK’s net zero minister has told MPs.
In words that suggested the UK could place yet more emphasis on technologies to capture and store carbon, Graham Stuart said fossil fuel production was not driving climate change, but demand for fossil fuels, in a bullish defence of the government’s much-criticised stance.
I don’t believe that the title is an accurate summary of the person’s quote. Based on the body text, he said that he wanted to constrain demand rather than supply. He did not say that oil and gas did not matter.
I don’t know what global consensus is on constraining demand rather than supply, but just going off what targets I’ve seen, I believe that his statement is probably in-line with what is being done around the world. I don’t see people talking about constraining extraction, like a country targeting N bcm of extraction of natural gas by year Y. Rather, they talk about constraining consumption, like not emitting more than N amount of carbon dioxide (the emissions being when combustion occurs) or limiting the number of internal combustion engine cars being sold by year Y.
And you want the world to choose either consumption or production to be the constraint, since if some do some and some the other, you won’t have any constraint – just a bunch of permissive suppliers sending to permissive consumers.
I believe the article makes the position of the conservative government quite clear.
Carbon capture isn’t a real thing. It’s a unicorn technology that is used, over and over, to justify the continued development of fossil fuel resources. It’s a “don’t worry, we will figure out a solution before it’s a real problem.” It’s literally the same argument we hear from the CEOs of Exxon and BP. So how are we going about that? Are we strongly capping production until the tech is validated and ready to be deployed at scale? Are we taxing fossil fuel companies at 100% of profits to accelerate development of the technologies?
This is just a step above Trump announcing that his clean coal initiative would allow the US to keep up coal production as long as it gets washed first.
The suckiest part is, it NEEDS to be a real thing. We’re already fucked with what we’ve dumped in to the atmosphere, and these fucking ghouls want to step on the gas pedal while the car’s already teetering on the edge of a cliff…
Checks publication … makes sense.
That said, the conservative minister should be a bit more savvy and champion increased use of renewables and shout louder about their use rather than the reverse and promoting fossil fuels.
Why there hasn’t been a national campaign for home insulation is beyond me. Some forward thinking ten years ago might have seen us in a very different position today which would have, as the minister wants, reduced demand.
Fucking tools.