By Mathew Carr*

I’m surprised the world is forgetting what was agreed in 2015.

That rich countries would not exceed their fair share of the global carbon budget.

The two offshore fields being considered for expansion at the absolute center of the UK’s energy and climate debate are Equinor and Ithaca Energy’s Rosebank and Shell’s Jackdaw.

I’m hoping this is a live climate negotiation stance rather than a real expansion push.

A “straw man” proposal that’s never really meant to see light of day. Like Labour’s fake plan to eradicate many jury trials.

The plan all along was to make Burnham look better than Starmer.

*With Gemini — partly unchecked— warning :

Leaving it in the Ground: Why New UK Drilling Defies the Paris Climate Agreement

The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement committed nearly 200 nations to a binding global goal: limiting the rise in global temperatures to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial levels, while actively striving to cap warming at 1.5°C.

Behind these temperature thresholds lies a strict mathematical reality known as the global carbon budget.

This represents the finite, absolute quantity of carbon dioxide (CO2) humanity can still emit before locking in irreversible climate tipping points

When viewed through the lens of this planetary budget, the United Kingdom’s consideration of new domestic oil and gas licenses in the North Sea shifts from a localized political debate into a direct scientific contradiction of international law.

The Arithmetic of Over-Allocation

A carbon budget operates exactly like a physical bank account: once the allocation is spent, the temperature limit is breached. The fundamental argument against expanding UK oil and gas extraction rests on a jarring surplus: the world has already discovered far more fossil fuels than it can safely burn.

According to comprehensive atmospheric modeling and research from institutions like University College London (UCL), the “committed emissions”—the CO_2 that will be released just by operating currently active and already approved global fossil fuel projects—amount to roughly 469 gigatonnes. This volume is already approximately three times greater than the remaining carbon budget required to maintain a 50% chance of staying under the 1.5°C threshold.

Because the global atmospheric budget is already deeply over-allocated, approving new extraction sites like the North Sea’s Rosebank or Jackdaw fields actively worsens this excess. To stay within safe climate boundaries, the math dictates that some existing fields must be shut down ahead of schedule; building entirely new ones moves the global trajectory in the exact opposite direction.

The Structural Redundancy of New Supply

Proponents of domestic drilling frequently argue that new exploration is required to bridge the energy transition and maintain security. However, energy market modeling by the International Energy Agency (IEA) disproves this premise.

In any scenario aligned with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target, global demand for oil and gas must contract sharply—declining by roughly 3% to 4% every year.

Crucially, this rate of demand reduction almost perfectly mirrors the natural depletion and decline rates of existing, operating wells.

The IEA Consensus: In a world successfully transitioning to limit warming to 1.5°C, no new long-lead conventional upstream oil and gas projects need to be approved for development.

Because it takes an average of nearly 20 years for a new UK exploration license to move from initial approval to actual commercial production, any new infrastructure licensed today would come online long after the point when clean alternatives must dominate the grid.

New projects do not fill a gap; they instead threaten to become “stranded assets”—massive economic investments that fail to achieve commercial returns as the global market shifts away from fossil fuels.

The Fallacy of “Clean” Domestic Extraction

A common defense for continued UK drilling is that North Sea gas has a lower production carbon footprint than importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) via tankers. While domestic extraction may slightly reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions (the energy used to pull the fuel out of the ground), this perspective entirely ignores the true driver of climate change: Scope 3 emissions.

Over 80% of the total lifecycle emissions of oil and gas are generated at the point of consumption—when the fuel is ultimately burned in cars, factories, and gas boilers. A molecule of carbon dioxide heating the atmosphere carries the same warming penalty regardless of whether it was drilled off the coast of Scotland or imported from abroad. By approving new fields, the UK expands the total aggregate global supply of fossil fuels. Basic economics indicates that increasing supply exerts downward pressure on global prices, artificially prolonging the economic competitiveness of fossil fuels and delaying the commercial viability of renewable alternatives.

A Crisis of Diplomatic Leadership

Finally, the Paris Agreement relies heavily on international equity and peer pressure rather than centralized enforcement. It operates on the principle that wealthy, economically diversified nations must lead the transition, leaving developing economies the fiscal breathing room to adapt.

As the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and a nation possessing deep capital markets and immense offshore wind potential, the UK’s domestic policy decisions carry immense geopolitical weight. When a wealthy nation with a robust safety net chooses to exploit new fossil fuel reserves, it destroys its own diplomatic leverage. It signals to the rest of the world that short-term economic convenience takes precedence over long-term planetary boundaries, providing political cover for other nations to continue expanding their own extraction industries.

Conclusion

Drilling for more oil and natural gas in the UK cannot be reconciled with the Paris Agreement. The global carbon budget is not a flexible policy target; it is a rigid boundary set by the laws of chemistry and physics. Because existing reserves are already more than sufficient to exhaust our remaining atmospheric capacity, any expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure directly breaks the climate budget, compromises international equity, and undermines the global collective effort to secure a liveable future.

….

Context

The two offshore fields at the absolute center of the UK’s energy and climate debate are Rosebank and Jackdaw.

While they were initially greenlit by the government in recent years, a series of historic legal challenges and an evolving political landscape have pushed them into the headlines.

The Fields and the Players Behind Them

1. The Rosebank Oil Field

• The Core Players: Operated by Equinor (the Norwegian state-owned energy giant) in partnership with Ithaca Energy (an Aberdeen-based independent explorer).
• What it is: Located about 80 miles west of the Shetland Islands, Rosebank is the UK’s largest undeveloped oil field, estimated to hold around 300 to 500 million barrels of oil.

2. The Jackdaw Gas Field

• The Core Player: Owned and operated entirely by Shell.
• What it is: Located in the Central North Sea, Jackdaw is a major natural gas field projected to provide up to 10% of the UK’s domestic gas production at its peak.

Why These Two Are Under Intense Discussion Right Now

Rosebank and Jackdaw are dominating current policy debates for three critical reasons:

1. The Fallout of a Landmark Legal Defeat

In January 2025, the Scottish Court of Session delivered a massive blow to the energy industry by ruling that the original government approvals for both Rosebank and Jackdaw were unlawful.

The court agreed with environmental groups (Greenpeace and Uplift) that the government had failed to assess Scope 3 emissions—the actual carbon footprint generated when consumers eventually burn the oil and gas, rather than just the minor emissions created while drilling it. This ruling effectively stripped the fields of their immediate permits and forced the entire environmental approval process to restart from scratch.

2. Ongoing Public Consultations

Because of that court defeat, the developers had to draw up brand-new Environmental Statements that explicitly account for those massive downstream emissions. Right now, those new assessments are undergoing a highly contested public consultation process. Industry leaders are aggressively lobbying for “timely consent” to unlock billions in economic activity and slow the decline of North Sea jobs. Meanwhile, climate scientists and activists argue that approving them anyway makes a mockery of the legal system and the climate budget.

3. A Massive Political Crossroads

The timing of these consultations has collided with a major shift in Downing Street. With a transition in national leadership underway, the incoming administration faces immense cross-pressures:

• The Industry Push: Trade unions and energy groups are heavily pressing the government to pivot toward a “Norway-style” pragmatic approach, allowing development to protect energy security and regional economies.
• The Climate Push: Green politicians and civil groups point out that because most of Rosebank’s reserves are oil meant for export, it won’t actually lower domestic energy bills. They are demanding a permanent ban on progressing these fields.

Because these two specific projects were already “in the system” before recent blanket bans on entirely new exploration licenses were implemented, they represent the absolute final frontier of mega-scale fossil fuel expansion in the UK.