Saturday, January 6, 2024

Chris Skidmore resigns over oil drilling: 'I can no longer stand by'

Yesterday, January 5, UK Conservative MP and former Secretary of Energy Chris Skidmore resigned from Parliament. The Mirror leads:

"A Tory MP has launched a spectacular attack on Rishi Sunak’s climate record as he announced he was quitting.

Former energy minister Chris Skidmore, who led a Government review of net zero, warned: 'I can no longer stand by.'"

He resigned because, as Bill McKibben explains, "next week that government, led by Rishi Sunak, is going to try and open up the North Sea to a huge new wave of oil and gas drilling. It’s as if a Republican Senator said, I’m not running again because my party has become a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry. That won’t happen, I fear—but it did in Britain, and in the most explicit way."

McKibben goes on:

"Skidmore is straightforwardly setting out the reality the planet faces: there is no way to deal with the climate crisis if we go on expanding fossil fuel production. And yet every fossil fuel nation, as Shannon Osaka pointed out recently in a sagacious Washington Post piece, insists that it should be allowed to go expanding fossil fuel production. 'Every country has their own reason why they should be the last,' Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told her. As a result, 'by 2050...countries expect to produce 2½ times more fossil fuels in 2050 than would align with a target of 2 degrees Celsius.'"

big rig on fire

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