The Last Stand of the Oil Barons

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  – R. Buckminster Fuller

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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The oil and gas sector advocacy group Offshore Energies UK has claimed that if the gets more political and financial support than the sector already gets then the UK could produce half of the 15 billion barrels of oil we’ll need before 2050 with the rest being imported from increasingly unstable and unreliable countries like the USA.

However, rather than feeding even more monetary and political capital into the insatiable maw of the companies that caused the climate emergency, it would be a far better idea would be to aggressively drive down that demand by investing instead in a Green New Deal that would reduce the heat we need in our homes, remove the need for that heat to be produced by oil and would retire fuel-hungry modes of transport like internal combustion cars in favour of active travel and electrified public transport.

It’s not clear from the report how much they think it’ll cost to develop the new fields they want to open up but a rough estimate from global data suggests that to extract the two to three billion extra barrels of oil they want to get to would cost something in the region of about £35 billion for the up front capital investment and something like the same again for the eventual decommissioning costs. This does not include the cost of damage to the environment and our global societies from burning that oil which, according to recently updated research on the social cost of carbon by Adrien Bilal and Diego R. Känzig for the USA’s National Bureau of Economic Research in November 2024, now stands at over $1,300 per ton of carbon, or about £123 per barrel (that’s £370 billion of climate and social damage for 3 billion barrels of oil burned).

On that social cost of carbon, the report contains one very revealing line missed by other media sources that must be highlighted and pushed back against. While the authors accept recent court rulings that the oil sector must be held accountable for their “Scope 3” polluting emissions (i.e. the emissions caused when someone else burns the oil they extracted), they are calling for a “pragmatic” approach to this accounting. This should be seen as yet another attempt by the industry to dodge their responsibility to clean up the climate emergency that they caused and any attempt to water down vital anti-pollution legislation should be resisted.

It might be worth asking, what Scotland would look like instead with even that lower amount of let’s say £70 billion for capital and decommissioning if we invested in not needing it in the first place? The portion that we don’t redirect as public subsidy towards the oil sector we can take from them in wealth and extraction taxes.

Common Weal’s Green New Deal Plan published in 2019 had a total cost of about £170 billion (about £235bn in 2025 money) so we might not be able to do the whole thing, but if we focused on the largest part of the plan – home heating – we could more or less complete that. Imagine every single house in Scotland hooked up to district heat networks or otherwise improved with zero carbon heating as well as fitted with improved insulation. The result being that instead of some multinational extracting oil, selling it to us and making off with the profits as we shivered through the winter – we could all have warm homes with the revenue from the little heat we do need being recycled back to us through the Scottish Public Energy Company.

Alternatively we could look at transport. Imagine, instead of coughing your way through the fumes of a traffic jam, you could get most of your services just a few minutes walk or cycle away because of 15 minute neighbourhood policies, a community-owned cycle hire would be enough to get your shopping, and a bus or train ride could get you elsewhere. Imagine, if you really must still drive a car, you don’t have to endure that traffic jam because so many other people have the option of getting out of theirs (rumours are that the Scottish Government are about to cancel their target of reducing car use – having done absolutely nothing to meet it).

Or we could follow the suggestion of the oil and gas sector. Give them too much more public money and give them the cuts to regulations they want. Let them extra more oil and profits. And then likely have to give them even more public money when they walk away from those investments (and, as we’ve seen with Grangemouth, away from their workers too) either when the oil runs dry or before then when they realise that once we’ve decarbonised our lives, they’ve lost their customer base. What this report actually says is that no matter what future we want to get to – a Green New Deal or just more of the same – it’ll probably costs us all more or less the same to reach, so isn’t it more sensible to make sure we end up in the one where all of our lives end up better instead of the one that makes us poorer and enriches only a few already rich oil barons?