The future of Britain’s oil and gas industry has been thrown into doubt after a landmark decision by the Supreme Court that found emissions from burning fossil fuels must be considered when approving new drilling sites. The Telegraph has more.
The court ruled on Thursday that emissions from burning fossil fuels must be considered when approving new drilling sites.
It is the latest development in the case brought by Sarah Finch, a Surrey resident who challenged the local council’s decision to allow the expansion of an oil site at Horse Hill in 2019.
Ms. Finch, acting on behalf of Weald Action Group, argued that the environmental impact assessment had only considered emissions from the extraction of oil – and wrongly ignored those produced when the oil was burned.
The Supreme Court has sided with her, handing down a decision that has huge implications for the entire U.K. oil and gas industry.
Legal experts say the decision could influence the way in which new fossil fuel projects are assessed in the U.K., forcing planning officials and energy companies to justify emissions generated by oil and gas.
Ms. Finch triumphed at the Supreme Court after her case was dismissed by the High Court and the Court of Appeal.
Surrey County Council had sought to challenge her case on the basis that the law did not require it to consider “downstream” emissions as part of the assessment.
In its decision on Thursday, Supreme Court justices ruled three-to-two in favour of allowing her appeal. In doing so, they also overturned the decision to grant planning permission for the Horse Hill drilling site.
In his judgment, Lord Leggatt said “it seems to me plain” that emissions created by burning oil extracted at the site “are effects of the project”, and as a result “it follows that the council’s decision was unlawful”.
Leftist lawfare strikes again – thanks to idiotic legislation that gives activist judges a free hand.
Worth reading in full.
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It has to get worse before it gets better. How much worse is my worry..
A lot, lot worse. Most people still believe that Farage will save us all, and do so under the current ‘democratic’ electoral machinery. He won’t. The first step to something meaningful is for people to understand that the current system can only survive because of the buy-in to the ‘democratic’ elections, which are simply pure theatre. Whilst everyone continues to buy their tickets, the system remains intact as a democratically approved way of governance. But the entire system is broken beyond repair and rotten to the core, so tweaking this and fiddling with that will change absolutely nothing.
In one of the most cynical/sceptical sites on the internet about 90% (rough estimation) of people commenting here seem to have been propagansied into believing they MUST vote, and do so for all the reasons they tell you you must vote. That gives you a clue about how much worse it’s got to get.
I think we think we should rather than must vote, and we try to change things in other ways too, by not complying, protesting, persuading others of our views, changing our behaviour, making decisions a certain way where we have influence. What else would you suggest?
We have 3/4 tools, voting, non compliance, converting the asleep and ultimately violence though it’s preferable to avoid the last one, though the government will surely quickly resort to it.
Just because someone votes for X in a GE does not mean they approve of the whole lot. It’s general, not specific on any single matter. Low turnouts if lots of voters do not like any of the candidates does not seem to result in better councils, e.g. No shortage of Trade Unions that actually fund the Labour Party, but will call a strike at the drop of a hat if they don’t agree with a certain action. Look what Unite are doing re. Port Talbot works at present.
I agree they don’t care about the turn out. If 1 person voted they’d still claim democracy.
Well, that’s all very well and I certainly recognise the deficiencies in the present electoral system.
But the only alternatives seem to be to put up with it, to emigrate ( to where?), or armed insurrection.
I cannot imagine that, having put up with even the last four years, significant numbers of people are up for insurrection, other than the hordes of RoP invaders that are likely here for precisely that and who likely will win.
What do you suggest as a realistic alternative to recording your opposition to the Uniparty?
I just want to play my part in destroying the Tory Party and then the Labour Party after that. Throwing some spanners in the works may not rectify the corruption at the heart of the British establishment but it can do no harm. Doing nothing is not an option.
My prediction. Venezuela will look like a shining beacon of low tax enterprise compared with us in five years time.
Another result for the Bliar project.
Another example of judges not implementing the law but rewriting it to fit their own narratives.
“Lord Leggatt said “it seems to me plain” that emissions created by burning oil extracted at the site “are effects of the project”, and as a result “it follows that the council’s decision was unlawful”.”
It seems to me that society itself will now suffer “effects of the project,” in this case the effects of the judges decision which is just as unlawful in its wider repercussions as their rewriting of the law.
It’s funny how this morally superior supreme court has its knickers in a knot over co2, but hasn’t prosecuted Tony Blair over mass murder having started a war over non existent WMD. It’s almost like the court is entirely political in it’s purpose, somehow I suspect lady justice isn’t blind in this court.
They were blind to the Lockdowns. twice!
Twice?
Simon Dolan challenged Lockdowns and was thrown out twice.
Bang on.
The Supreme Court numpties keep saying that things are unlawful, as if we have to have laws saying that we can do things. Our laws (UK) tell us what we can’t do, so if there isn’t a law saying we can’t do it, we can do it. Unlawful is not the same as illegal, which is breaking a law.
They know that full well, which is why they don’t say illegal. Someone needs to push back and question the judges as to what they mean. Do they mean unlawful or illegal? If the former, then just ignore the ruling.
And a Jury of Peers can null most (or all) cases through COMMON LAW. Just Stop Oil as much as I despise them used a jury and won some months ago. They were interviewed on BBC as they pointed to a plaque on the wall that is in honour of Jury by Peers. “we have a right do do this, see that plaque on the wall in this old building”….A broken clock is right twice per day.
They are Domestic Terrorists who belong in prison.
Abolish the UK Supreme Court, which is just a craven imitation of the US Supreme Court, which is notorious for sticking its nose into matters over which it has no jurisdiction.
The judge’s belief doesn’t mean it’s law!!
Exactly
Agreed, but I have to point out that despite all the activist “experts” and their billionaire malevolent backers, CO2 is a trace gas absolutely essential for all life on Earth. The idea that a British CO2 molecule is bad but a Chinese or Indian CO2 molecule is good, is blatantly nonsensical. That is why our King and the Uniparty love it so much and have stuffed the Judiciary with their useful tools.
It seems to me plain that the damage caused by information received over the internet, from advice on how to make a bomb to phishing and fraud, are effects of the internet’s creation. Perhaps we should shut it down.
It might sound ridiculous, but it follows the same logic as Lord Leggatt’s statement.
People can strangle people with their shoelaces : it follows we must ban shoes.
But i suppose Mrs May didn’t push strangling people with shoe laces through Parliament. But it was rushed through so is not legit anyway.
It’s possible to club people to death with wooden cudgels. It follows that people owning forests are guilty of murder whenver this happens.
People sometimes kill other people. In this case, their parents¸ grand-parents and great grand parents, insofar still alive, are to be hanged because without them having had offspring, said offspring could never have committed a crime.
Better example: This is the ‘gun controls’ nuts’ dream verdict. Declare that gun manufacturers are legally responsible for gun crime¹ and shut them down.
¹ The general idea expressed by Drool² Legatt is that sellers of goods are responsible for future actions of buyers involving these goods.
² A much more fitting title.
Exactly.
A stupid judgement, ignoring the likelihood that if it wasn’t extracted from there, the alternative would be to import it from half way round the world. Or is he so insular that it’s OK to pass the alleged problems to somewhere else in the world?
Old biddies freezing to death is collateral damage to these virtue signallers.
It is a judgement that broadcasts Leggatt’s innate stupidity and ignorance or it is unquestionably malicious and intended solely to push a political agenda which will have devastating consequences for the people of this country.
Kneel must be creaming his pants.
Not just that, but evidence of the massive benefit using hydrocarbon fuels and their derivative materials and products brings us is there in plain sight. One example: just look at the trend of the number of climate related deaths over the last century – down by >95% The judge(s) have made a very serious error here.
What can one do when the judges of the Supreme Court overruling the two lower courts go woke. Legatt who gave the main judgement, educated at Eton, son of old school Court of appeal judge, barrister in top commercial chambers, seemed sensible if unexciting when instructed as a junior in a case I was involved with
How does one communicate the error of their judgement to them? Appeal?
By gently touching them on the chin with a fire swatter. This is not an error. It’s an intentional attempt at bullshitting oneself out of undesirable policy choices. Like Rishi’s decision to license new oil and gas projects.
On the one hand clearly anti-democratic that tiny groups of unelected officials (in this case judges) can effectively dictate crucial aspects of UK technological and economic policy.
On the other, in this case they made the right decision re “The court ruled on Thursday that emissions from burning fossil fuels must be considered when approving new drilling sites.”
As C02 is a highly beneficial element in the atmosphere in terms of plant fertility and growth (and is currently down at historically dangerously low levels) this ruling means that all new oil and gas projects should be automatically and swiftly passed by the planning process, permissions for currently moth-balled plus proposed future fracking projects immediately granted etc etc…
Deleted.
And if they had considered the utilisation, including burning, of these hydrocarbon fuels, the evidence is there that it’s massively beneficial for us.
Personally, I’m left with more questions than answers.
What does it mean that emissions from burning fossil fuels have to be considered? Ok, I’ve considered it and I’ve decided I still want to go on the with project. Now what? What the hell does “considered” mean? What does the law say precisely about this?
It may be a problem of activist judges. I’m not saying it’s not because I don’t know. But if our politicians have passed laws that make it virtually illegal to extract fossil fuels, then you can hardly blame judges for applying the law.
We know our politicians have passed laws making Net Zero a legal requirement. So I would start by stringing them up.
…which gets back to what I wrote to my Conservative MP (my only letter ever to him) on Day 1 of his winning the seat from his Labour predecessor: I said “repeal The Climate Change Act, otherwise the Conservatives will be voted out of power at the next election”.
Until this is done the Supreme Court is pretty well bound to make judgments like this, based on the “Will of Parliament”. It’s not really about activist judges, but politicians who are asleep, corrupt or stupid.
The irony is that I am expecting shortly to be writing to my MP’s successor, who will be Labour, with the same lobbying (possibly adding something about the WHO/Pandemic Treaty and the ECHR), pointing out that otherwise Labour will be voted out of power at the next election. He will doubtless reply, copied from some civil servant, that I am an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in the pay of BigOil.
What does it mean that emissions from burning fossil fuels have to be considered? Ok, I’ve considered it and I’ve decided I still want to go on the with project. Now what? What the hell does “considered” mean? What does the law say precisely about this?
It means that the council decision to let this project go forward is declared illegal and thus, void, and that a standard that’s impossibly to meet is set for future such decisions. And that’s the sole point of it: Kill this development project and ensure that no other such projects ever happen again.
But that’s not what it is saying. It is saying that it is unlawful i.e. there is no law saying that it can proceed. If the judge meant illegal i.e. a law has been broken, he should have said illegal and not unlawful.
I may be wrong on that but unlawful looks suspiciously like an English translation of the originally Latin illegal.
I agree from the Latin derivation. There is a distinction though in law. You cannot be sent to prison for unlawful acts, but you can be fined etc. You have to have broken an actual law for it to be deemed illegal and imprisonable. This rather negates some of what I wrote elsewhere, other than the fact that unlawful isn’t breaking an actual law.
To consider something doesn’t mean you can’t do it.
Before climbing a mountain you might be advised to consider all the risks. So you consider them and then decide perhaps to do it anyway. You might decide on some precautions, you might not.
I would like to know what to consider means in this case.
Isn’t this obvious in the given context? Such a development project needs to comply with whatever environmental regulations are applicable to it. There are certainly such regulations regarding CO₂ emissions. The amount of CO₂ emitted by burning an unknown percentage of an unknown number of barrels of crude oil using unknown technology over the course of an unknown number of years can’t be assessed. Because of this, compliance of such project can never be demonstrated and hence, such projects mustn’t be allowed to take place.
Why do you assume (as you apparently do) there’s even the least bit of honesty and integrity involved here on the ‘activist’ side, ie, the sue puppets and the verdict puppets? They’re tasked with killing such projects. And hence, they’re going to make up some BS which will hopefully serve this purpose.
By stepping into an area where they have no business , this Court has given more than enough justification for it eventually to be scrapped . It will not happen until Britain finds itself unable to cheaply supply its population with Electricity . When this happens blame will be apportioned !
Lady Rose should have thought about recusing herself as her husband was very senior executive of BP and on retirement chaired the office of renewable energy and has other similar roles in that field. Legatt was also brought up in stock broker belt Surrey, but do not know where he now lives
This is obviously horseshit, because nobody can tell how much of the oil from this site will actually end up being burned instead of, say, being turned into lubricants. This depends on what the people buying it want to do with it and that’s something the site operator cannot ‘consider’ because he has no way to know it beforehand. Further, an obvious implication of this ‘plain’ standpoint is that no one except the company planning to extract and sell the oil needs to consider the environmental impact of putting the oil to whatever use he wants to put it because this was supposedly already done and would otherwise lead to a doubling of this impact. The court has effectively decreed that nothing anyone does with oil causes emissions anyone is responsible for, only extracting it does. And that’s the direct opposite of what’s actually happening because these emissions are caused by burning oil.
In the light of this, it “seems plain” that this Lord Legatt must either be someone who’s unable to understand the consequences of his own decisions or that he’s is disgeniously using a power conferred to further his political pet causes.
Having spent a professional lifetime compiling environmental impact assessments, from even before there were officially such legal things, it seems to me that the Court has only addressed one side of the argument.
Yes, it is mandatory that the downstream effects of developments must be taken into account in a formal EIA, but there are limits to how far this can be extended. If you plan to build a nuclear power station, for example, it is not required, nor even possible, to compile a meaningful analysis of the downstream effects of every probable (or, indeed, remotely possible) use of the electricity generated.
Some uses may be beneficial, while others are decidedly not, and it is up to the professional compiling the project EIA to take advice from a full range of reliable professional experts, and just as importantly, from the public as well – ‘stakeholders’, in the jargon of EIA.
Equally, since many of the uses of derivative ‘secondary’ products are in the main themselves fully regulated in law, often under specifically specified codes of practice. These have spawned the emergence of a whole host of ‘mini EIAs’ that are intended to decide on whether, and if feasible, how and to what extent, the derived products may be used.
So, in the case of oil exploration, there are clear environmental impacts of the actual project itself, from exploration through extraction, operation, and eventually right down to final project decommissioning. These are primary impacts of the project itself.
But also relevant are the ‘downstream’ impacts (and even ‘upstream’ – but another time, perhaps!”) of the activities of the project. Depending on circumstances, but only to a limited extent, these may include the use of the products emerging from the project. The respondents in this specific field of business – the oil sector – have no effective legal control over the entire range of uses to which these products – and of course, the derived secondary products such as industrial and agricultural chemicals, medicines and a host of other products – are put, out in the wide world.
And this is where the judgement seems to me to fall apart. The assertion that burning oil products has an uncontrollable adverse effect on the global climate is an unproven assumption, purely an opinion that is subject to challenge in the field of science, not law. Against this is the incontrovertible evidence that the extraction of oil makes possible a vast range of social and practical benefits enjoyed not merely by those whose opinion differs from the Applicant in this bizarre legal case, but also by the Applicant herself.
If, then, as she reportedly claimed, the EIA included only the environmental effects of the extraction process, but failed to acknowledge and quantify the relative benefits arising from the multiple uses of the same product, oil, and its derivatives, then the Court appears to have failed to properly assess the project EIA which is the subject of this bizarre action. It should surely have ruled that the project EIA should also have provided a balanced assessment between the hypothetical (and unproven) threat to global survivability and the demonstrable and quantifiable beneficial values of the uses made by mankind of all the secondary products arising from the extraction of this resource.
As it stands then, the Court’s decision certainly does have huge implications, but not simply for the UK oil and gas industry. EIA is a mature process that attempts to provide a comprehensive basis of analysis of a wide range of reasonable expectations of what the probable effects of developments are likely to be. But it is equally the responsibility of those who attempt to challenge the findings of science itself merely to gain support for their own unproven assumptions to accept that their arguments must recognize the full scope of the questions they are raising, and do not simply ignore inconvenient evidence that challenges their own beliefs.
The point is there is no such downstream effect for oil extraction. Someone is probably going to buy it and put it to some use. And this use will have further effects and is certainly already regulated because of this. But this may well be throwing of all of the barrels into the Mariana Trench. The seller doesn’t know this and cannot control it because after he sold it, it’s no longer his property.
That’s the reason why this verdict is absurd.
I’m willing to bet that the protestors, who will potentially throw thousands of people out of work are the same sort who were protesting 40 years ago at the “heartless Tories” shutting down coal mines and throwing thousands out of work.
Perhaps the Judge would like to live a couple of years without using anything at all produced from oil and gas? Taxpayers would save on his pension cost, given that he won’t survive the two years
Spot on ‘H.’
What a total stitch up. ——-One way or another our living standards are to be lowered by a determined Climate Industrial Complex. Pretty soon our cars will be illegal, our gas central heating will be illegal, not having a smart meter will be illegal, eating a fillet steak will be illegal, flying to Tenerife will be illegal, travelling half way across the City, unless by electric bus will be illegal. There will be nothing you can eat or drink that hasn’t been assessed for its effect on climate change. ——–Meanwhile as we in the wealthy west self-flagellate and pretend we are saving the planet, half of the world are burning more coal that we did since the beginning of time to bring their people out of poverty and abject misery. ———WAKE UP PEOPLE. Net Zero is an eco socialist scam, and the entire political class that you vote for are in on it. ———Except REFORM
So, let me get this straight, this bozo of a judge is essentially saying that the entire industrial revolution should never have been allowed to happen.
The law is, indeed, an ass and an extremely large one at that.
I think that’s more of a case of him pulling half-baked shit¹ out of his posterior to shut down a specific development project someone really wants to be shut down. That’s probably a counterreaction to Rishi having decided to hand out licenses for new oil and gas projects. Use lawfare to raise the bar for actually getting such a project off the ground to a level that’s impossible to meet. Problem solved. Rishi can license whatever he wants, but nothing’s ever going to happen because of this.
¹ If it’s really the oil extraction companies who are responsible for all emissions someone else causes by burning that oil, CO₂ taxes for owners of vehicles cannot be legal as the emissions of their cars have been decreed to be someone else’s fault.
Yet another example of “Judicial Overreach” and “Legislating from the Bench”, often because ONE PERSON COMPLAINED.
It’s none of the Supreme Court’s business, but as some in the legal profession like Dr. McGrogan in the Daily Sceptic have pointed out, the judiciary is attempting to interfere with every aspect of our daily lives.
It’s the Globalist Dream of a Global “Kritocracy” = “Rule by Judges”, riding roughshod over the legislative and executive branches of government.
We do not consent.
Activist judges should be on our list ….
Is this the same ‘Supreme Court’ instigated by Tony Bliar?
If people understood the real climate crisis, this court ruling as implications beyond terrifying :https://open.substack.com/pub/electroverse/p/montanas-record-lows-and-snows-global?r=jx6c3&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Do we have to consider the impact of burning all the fossil fuels we import?
This must be challenged, as top atmospheric scientists, i.e. those that actually know what they’re talking about, report that adding extra CO2 and/or ‘achieving net zero’ will make no significant difference to global temperature. There is also ample evidence that the use of hydrocarbon (not fossil!) fuels has provided humanity with an undeniable massive net benefit. The court also failed to understand that only a fraction of the oil is burnt as fuels, with many other products being derived from it, with many making essential contributions to greater human welfare, health and safety. The court has singularly failed to understand the real science, and overstepped its reach.
I wonder how Ms Finch could afford to take her grievance to the Supreme Court? Probably through her house insurance!
Ms Finch’s victory ends a five-year legal battle on behalf of
local residents, in which she was supported byenvironmental campaigners Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.Quote from the BBC article I linked to yesterday, with additional markup in the interest of veracity.
Time to get rid of Blair’s personal court of activists.
The Governmemt, but not the country, deserves this ruling. Unfortunately they will all be out of office and get away with it, as they have with lockdowns and vaccines
It would be worth finding out how Sarah Finch heats her house and whether she travels by air or EV, since her ruling will affect all of us plebs