Kemi Badenoch has committed the Tories to breaking Britain’s net zero commitments in order to extract as much oil and gas as possible from the North Sea.
The Tory leader has said that Britain “cannot afford not to be doing everything to get hydrocarbons out the ground” as she pledged her party would make “maximising extraction” a goal if it wins power.
Mrs Badenoch will use a speech in Aberdeen in the coming days to set out her plans to overhaul the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which oversees the issuing of licences, dropping the word transition and replacing its current 12-page mandate with a simple order to extract the maximum possible amount of fossil fuels, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
She said: “We are in the absurd situation where our country is leaving vital resources untapped while neighbours such as Norway extract them from the same seabed.
“Britain has already decarbonised more than every other major economy since 1990, yet we face some of the highest energy prices in the developed world,” she added. “This is not sustainable and it cannot continue. That is why I am calling time on this unilateral act of economic disarmament and Labour’s impossible ideology of net zero by 2050.”
Mrs Badenoch said it was time “common sense, economic growth and our national interest came first, and only the Conservatives will deliver that.
“We are going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea.”
This would shift away from the Government’s commitment to reach Net Zero by 2050, which involves plans to shift the North Sea industry away from fossil fuels, in favour of US president Donald Trump’s “drill baby drill” ethos where his administration aims to extract more oil and gas from American soil.
President Trump called the North Sea reserves a “treasure chest” in a July visit to the UK.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said that while “oil and gas are incredibly important for the UK and our energy security”, renewable and non-renewable energy sources were not an “either/or”.
“At the same time, we’re investing in clean homegrown energy, including at Berwick Bank in Scotland, which will create thousands of new jobs and power millions of homes,” she said.
“And that’s what we need to do to make sure that our economy has this energy security that we need, that we bring down bills and bring more good jobs to Scotland.”
Climate experts and environmentalists have already warned that the UK needs to do more in order to reach Net Zero goals.
Campaigners from Stop Rosebank, calling for for an end to the oil and gas field west of Shetland approved by the Tory government, have warned it could produce more carbon monoxide than the 28 poorest countries do in a year.
A report from UCL in June also warned that opening new oil and gas fields would make it harder for the UK to achieve its Paris Agreement goals to limit global warming to well below 2C, preferably to 1.5C.
“The UK has some of the world’s most expensive oil and gas to extract,” the Climate Implications of New Oil and Gas Fields in the UK report read. “Opening new fields would make the path to achieving the Paris goals economically inefficient.”
