substack.com
Another Angry Voice (@anotherangryvoice)
Kemi Badenoch and the Tories; Nigel Farage and his bunch of lunatics; and now The Mail on Sunday. They're all going on about drilling for more North Sea oil, as if it would be some kind of magical solution to the energy price rises caused by Trump and Netanyahu's war-mongering in Iran (war-mongering that they all vehemently supported by the way). The idea that Britain can be saved by "our oil" is stupid on multiple levels. The oil is not "ours". Energy privatisation means that if more North Sea oil and gas fields are opened up, the beneficiaries would be the private multinational energy companies that extract it, not Britain or the British people. The North Sea oil and gas bonanza was a one-off economic boom, and there's not much left to extract in comparison to what's already been taken. The tragedy is that Britain didn't invest these massive one-off profits in a Sovereign Wealth Fund like Norway did with theirs. Norway, with a population of 5.5 million has the biggest Sovereign Wealth Fund in the world, while the UK squandered the economic benefits on a load of right-wing ideological nonsense (monetarism, deregulation, tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich, de-industrialisation ...). Who delivered this policy of wasting away the North Sea economic benefits? The Tories. Who cheered on this wanton ideologically driven waste? Nigel Farage and right-wing propaganda outlets like the Daily Mail. Drilling for more oil and gas isn't an immediate short-term solution to anything. What's left in the North Sea are the smaller fields, and the ones that are most difficult to access. It's not like you can just turn on the oil and gas taps and expect prices to immediately fall. It just doesn't work like that. It would take years for any new licences to actually deliver oil and gas, and even when they would start producing, it wouldn't bring prices down anyway, because the oil and gas would be sold at international market rates, which are subject to the whims of a demented old man, as we've all just seen. A better long-term solution would be to invest more in renewable energy, and wean the UK off its fossil fuel addiction. Global fossil fuel resources are finite, and dwindling. It's a criminal waste to burn them up for energy that can be be easily, cheaply, and cleanly extracted from the wind and sun, especially when the benefits of burning what's left of North Sea oil and gas would simply accrue to private energy profiteers, not Britain or the British people. It's utterly mad to argue that the deranged behaviour of Donald Trump is a reason for the UK to continue its reliance on fossil fuels, when the economic instability he's caused with his Iran war-mongering demonstrates the case for the exact opposite. These people are either economically illiterate, or they're deliberately arguing for policies that would benefit multinational private energy companies in the hope of kickbacks. And anyone repeating their propaganda as if it's their own opinion is making a fool of themselves, and demonstrating their profound ignorance of UK energy privatisation; economics; geopolitics; Britain's current energy generation mix; and the scale of remaining North Sea oil reserves. One simple rule of thumb is that if Kemi Badenoch; Nigel Farage; and the Daily Mail are blaring it, it's almost certainly a load of absolute bollocks, so it's time to adopt scepticism, rather than mindlessly absorbing it, and adopting it as your own opinion.
