It is madness to import ever more quantities of liquefied natural gas from states with dubious human rights records
Published 23rd Oct 2026, 06:00 BST
On Wednesday morning, the United Kingdom’s worst-kept secret was revealed, as the government confirmed that it would grant consent for the Jackdaw gas field to begin drilling east of Aberdeen.
Notwithstanding some righteous fury from the Speaker of the House of Commons – who was understandably unimpressed that every media outlet in the country had been told the news before it was announced in parliament – the general response from most parties was something between cautious approval and impatience.
Consent for Jackdaw is the right call – but the government must now see this as the moment to step up efforts to cut our gas demand for good.
Energy price shocks
In the medium to long-term, we know that we have to move away from oil and gas as energy sources. That is not just a question of climate goals but of stabilising our economy and protecting people from energy price spikes.
In the immediate term, however, approving Jackdaw seems to me to be a straightforwardly pragmatic decision. It is all very well to promise to shut off oil and gas in the North Sea (though it is far easier to do this in the abstract than to say it to the faces of the thousands of workers and their families who are bearing the brunt of that steady shutdown).
If we cut off our energy supplies without reducing our underlying need for that energy source, however, all we are doing is outsourcing our responsibilities – while putting ourselves at greater risk from price shocks of the sort we have seen this year.
That, to my mind, is the great unspoken failure of successive governments as we seek to reach our climate goals. When it has come to the easy parts of shutting down oil and gas (that is, where all that is required is to let industry wither on the vine), we talk a good game.
Over-reliance on dubious regimes
When it comes to the harder work of out-competing oil and gas by fully backing our homegrown renewable industries to take up the mantle – particularly those like wave and tidal which could provide some of the predictability of supply that gas currently offers us – we have been far too half-hearted and short-sighted in our efforts.
Then there is the basic madness that comes from importing ever more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from states like Qatar. The liquefication process is enormously carbon-intensive even before the emissions from shipping it around the world.
And that is without going into the questionable logic in leaving ourselves and our neighbours ever-more reliant on oil and gas supplied by countries with dubious human rights records (such as Qatar or Saudi Arabia), dubious reliability (the United States), or both (Russia and Iran). The upshot is an economy that has half-decarbonised on paper, but is still reliant on gas where it counts.
We have been extraordinarily blessed in this country to have had access to plentiful oil and gas in the past, and to have natural advantages in many of the renewable energy industries of the future. It is on us to use the best of our energy and engineering know-how to fuel a world-leading energy revolution. That, surely, should be no great secret.
Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland