The debate over North Sea oil and gas has become increasingly contentious and fractious and, with the consultations on Rosebank and Jackdaw now complete, it is only likely to become more intense.

I have watched, like everybody else, as the world has burned this summer. Extreme heat, drought and wildfires are no longer distant warnings about some hypothetical dystopian future. They are increasingly becoming part of our very present.

And just as climate disruption has become more visible, climate scepticism has returned to the political mainstream. The Reform and Conservative attacks on net zero — including the increasingly familiar description of “net stupid zero” — are symptomatic of a political retreat from the climate consensus.

The extraordinary thing is that this renewed scepticism has emerged at almost exactly the moment when the consequences of climate change are becoming all too real. At the same time, the oil and gas lobby has become even more energetic and increasingly aggressive. Now deeply embedded in Scotland’s political and business culture, it is relentless in making the case for further North Sea extraction. But let us get a couple of things out of the way first.

I think even the most persistent drilling enthusiast would concede that producing more oil in the North Sea would not mean that UK households suddenly receive cheaper energy bills. Oil is traded on international markets and the UK is a price-taker, not a price-maker. The Government itself has made the point that the North Sea is now too marginal to make a material difference to international prices and therefore to household bills.

Then there is the argument for energy security. The invasion of Ukraine and the turmoil in international energy markets have demonstrated the vulnerability created by dependence on fossil fuels whose prices can be determined by events thousands of miles away. UK production has fallen dramatically from its peak, and the Government says new exploration licences would make no material difference to security of supply. The answer to that vulnerability cannot be to remain permanently dependent on the fossil fuels that expose us to precisely this instability.

For me, this leads to a straightforward conclusion: Scotland must accelerate its transition to renewable energy and stop looking to new oil and gas extraction as the answer to our energy future. The other inescapable fact is that if we take more carbon from beneath the seabed and eventually burn it, that carbon enters the atmosphere. More atmospheric carbon contributes to more warming, meaning more climate chaos. There is no political argument in the world that can change that basic physical reality. 

The oil and gas industry understandably does not want to concede that new developments will result in additional carbon emissions. Instead, it has developed increasingly elaborate arguments that new North Sea production is somehow better for the environment because it is “domestic”, or because imported oil and gas can have a higher carbon footprint. There is a kernel of truth in the argument that different sources of oil and gas have different production emissions.

But Rosebank’s oil would also have to be transported, and there is no longer any crude-oil refining capacity in Scotland. More importantly, this argument does not answer the bigger question: What happens to the oil once it has been produced? If Rosebank goes ahead, its oil will enter the international oil market. It will not be reserved for UK motorists or Scottish consumers. It will become part of a globally traded commodity market in which production, consumption and prices respond to supply, demand, spare capacity, investment decisions and expectations about future supply.

It is true that not every barrel produced by Rosebank will necessarily represent one additional barrel consumed somewhere in the world. Some production elsewhere may be displaced. But Rosebank will still add to the overall availability of oil in the global market. The argument that “if we don’t produce it, somebody else will” is not a sufficient response to the climate crisis.

If every oil-producing country adopted that logic, no country would ever have to reduce fossil-fuel production. We need to reduce both fossil-fuel demand and fossil-fuel supply. Rosebank’s scale also matters. Its developers estimate production of up to 500 million barrels of oil equivalent over the life of the field. The combustion of that oil could produce up to around 200 million tonnes of CO₂.

And there is a further issue. Rosebank is not simply another oil field. It is a test of whether we are serious about the climate commitments we have made. The UK’s previous approval of Rosebank was quashed after the courts ruled that the environmental assessment had unlawfully failed to account for the emissions produced when the oil and gas were ultimately burned.

Any new decision therefore has to confront those downstream emissions directly. And if Rosebank is approved, there will inevitably be other developments waiting in the wings, expecting their own cases to be treated equally favourably. While we agonise over new drilling, Scotland has some of the greatest renewable resources in Europe. We have won the natural lottery in offshore wind, tidal power and other renewable technologies. We have the skills, engineering expertise, ports and supply chains that can underpin a new industrial economy. The workers who built the oil and gas industry are precisely the people we should want building Scotland’s renewable energy future. 

And it is on this key argument of jobs that the oil and gas lobby has its strongest case. The North East of Scotland’s energy workforce is under enormous pressure. Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University estimates that the region’s offshore-energy workforce fell from around 56,000 in 2016 to 42,200 in 2024 — a reduction of approximately 14,000 jobs.

The jobs in oil and gas are in systemic decline. The industry argues that the Energy Profits Levy and wider Government policies have accelerated this decline, with Offshore Energies UK warning that almost 1,000 jobs a month are being lost. I suppose the good news for the sector is that the EPL is to be replaced by a new revenue-based levy that applies when oil and gas prices are high.

But what we need to do is get the transition up to speed and incentivise the big companies to look beyond drilling for their future. Currently there is the Decarbonisation Investment Allowance, an allowance designed to support investment that decarbonises oil companies’ upstream oil and gas production. What it does not do is provide a comparable incentive to use those profits to build the industries that will ultimately replace oil and gas.

What is required is a powerful incentive to invest in the industries that will replace oil and gas altogether — to use the fiscal regime to encourage investment. We need a new energy bargain: not simply lower taxes on declining oil production, but a fiscal regime that rewards companies for investing their North Sea profits, skills and expertise in the renewable industries that will replace them. Rather than incentivising the continuation of the North Sea oil and gas industry, we would be incentivising the industry to use its capital, expertise and workforce to build its successor. That is the transition we should be fighting for. New drilling will not reduce household energy bills. It will make next to no contribution to UK energy security, and the oil it produces will ultimately add to the stock of carbon emissions driving climate change.

There is a better choice. Let’s properly incentivise the just transition we all say we want to see. Let’s take the extraordinary skills and expertise created by the North Sea and put them to work building its successor. The future of the North Sea should be renewable. And Scotland should be leading the way.