By Henry Allen, Consultant

As someone who has made a good living out of the oil & gas industry, the Cambo dilemma has been testing me in the last couple of weeks. It’s easy to see that blocking the start-up of new hydrocarbon production in the UK will accelerate the demise of its oil & gas exploration & production industry, with detrimental economic and social consequences, but little direct impact on reducing UK greenhouse emissions. It is tempting therefore to dismiss the notion of taking such drastic action and put it down to politics, extremist pressure groups and poor public understanding of the hydrocarbon industry and the dependency that our daily lives have on it.

I wonder if this may be a mistake? Do we really think that the general public are going to take anyone seriously that tells them that we are facing a real emergency but it’s OK to continue to bring on new oil fields? Where is the leadership in that? Don’t we need to be seen to be taking tough decisions which, in the public eye, are impactful?

For all the talk about tackling the climate change threat, global energy use continues to rise, oil & gas production is not peaking and the implementation of renewables is not even meeting the incremental demand to enable this. Not enough is happening to constrain emissions, let alone reduce them. Perhaps, if we really want to change our energy future quickly enough, we are going to have to grit out teeth and force some brutal changes on ourselves? We can’t just go on saying “ …….we know things are bad, but meantime, here’s a bit more to burn …”. If we people, companies and countries are not now prepared to commit to a decline in production, then we are not even half serious.

In 1987 the Montreal Protocol was signed by almost all nations of the world to address a less visible global emergency, the depletion of the ozone layer by CFCs, and it has been demonstrably successful. It’s now past the time to take the same approach with the production of fossil fuels. We need to commit to a global production cap and a planned decline. If OPEC can do it, all the nations of the world can do it, determining quotas that still allow investment in new developments to sustain essential supplies. This would surely send out a powerful message across the world, and start to accelerate the changes that we seek while the likes of Cambo oil field may or may not go ahead at the appropriate time.

Meanwhile it feels like we Fiddle (and argue) while Rome Burns.