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Three billion barrels of oil

Imagine the Government announcing a new report showing huge increases on lung cancer from smoking, at the same time as trumpeting the great news that Benson and Hedges were building a whopping new factory in Coventry.

Or imagine having one health minister announcing the colossal risks to our nation’s health and wellbeing from Alzheimer’s disease, on the same day as another one cut all brain research.

Well this happened this month, on climate change.

On the front page of the Government’s website, there was a clear, sober summary of the IPCC’s research into the ever-escalating impacts and risks from climate change, if we don’t act to cut fossil fuel use.

And on the same front page, a triumphant media release announcing the results of the Wood Review, which will see the Government pull out all the stops to get three billion – that’s 3,000,000,000 – extra barrels of oil drilled out of the North Sea, and burned.

It’s hard to grasp numbers like 3,000,000,000. Too many noughts. Here’s some ways of thinking about it:

Imagine a cube of oil barrels, a kilometre square, and a kilometre high.

Imagine the biggest lake in England – Windermere – drained, and filled with oil, and then half filling it again.

Lake WindemereThe Government must know by now that the world can’t burn three-quarters of the world’s existing coal, oil and gas reserves, let alone go drilling for even more. The boss of the Bank of England says it. President Obama says it. Even Shell acknowledge it.

So imagine instead, if the Government thought: “instead of drilling for more, we should focus on trying to use less”.

There’s a big opportunity. Also published last week are the Government’s latest energy projections. They show that the UK plans to make almost no progress on cutting our use of oil. They project UK oil consumption falling at less than 0.5% a year. But make it fall at 2.5% a year, and we don’t need those 3,000,000,000 barrels. A decent climate change strategy would start with massively ramped up plans to save energy of all types, including oil.

Such a plan would have huge economic implications. Positive, if done right.

First, it’s essential that the UK Government puts in place a long-term plan, starting now, for how we exit out of North Sea Oil and Gas, but does so in way which protect jobs, industry and communities. It’s really fortunate that there is – ready-made- the perfect alternative: to build a world-class, enormous offshore wind industry, focussed on the North Sea. We already have half the world’s offshore wind. We are world leaders, we can keep on being leaders – this industry can be bigger than North Sea oil and gas.

A core element of moving off oil will be to switch to electric vehicles (EVs). This can be a perfect complement to renewable electricity from offshore wind – the storage potential of EVs being used to help balance the grid – as Prof Julia King sets out. Electric vehicles manufacture and infrastructure is another huge industrial area where the UK economy could benefit from a switch from oil.

To be sure, there are huge economic changes here. But done right, they’re opportunities: to deliver new and huge economic sectors to the UK economy.  The converse – sticking with oil, is just a slow road to decline. The FT reported this week declining revenues from oil production; last week Carbon Brief calculated that using the Government’s own methodology, the economic cost of extra emissions from new oil exploration will by far outweigh the benefits.

A strategy to use less oil is a far better bet for the UK’s long-term economic health than trying to eke out the last barrels out of the North Sea.

We’ve been oil addicts too long. It’s time to kick the habit.

Blog written by Simon Bullock, Friends of the Earth,  24 November 2014

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