Luke Murphy

“I beg to move, That this House has considered the UK’s progress towards achieving the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this important debate. I am also grateful to the members of the all-party parliamentary group on climate change—of which I am the chair—whose commitment reflects the strength of feeling on this issue in this House and across our constituencies. I also thank the APPG’s secretariat for their dedication to ensuring we have the evidence and expertise to drive forward meaningful discussion on climate progress. Some still ask why progress on tackling climate change matters at a time when living standards, economic growth and public services are much higher up the list of the public’s priorities. The truth is that action on climate change is inextricably linked to those priorities. Just in the past few weeks, it has been demonstrated that our energy security and living standards are indivisible from our climate ambitions. Many of our constituents are already feeling, or worrying about, the severe instability that the Iran war has caused for prices at the pump, heating oil and future energy bills, as well as its wider indirect impacts on the cost of things like the food they put on the table. That is because this is not an energy crisis; it is an oil and gas crisis, one that comes only a few years after the last oil and gas shock, which was caused by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. That crisis caused household energy bills to soar by 80% and inflation in the economy to increase to 11%, and resulted in a taxpayer bail-out of nearly £60 billion. These crises are not new—history is repeating itself. Since 1970, half of our country’s recessions have been caused by oil and gas price shocks. The truth is that the UK is paying the price for a broken global energy system, upon which every household is dependent. Indeed, research has shown that the cost of cutting UK emissions to net zero is less than the cost of a single fossil fuel price shock. We see the consequences in our communities every day, with rugby and football clubs across the country unable to open daily as their energy bills rise, local pubs struggling to keep the lights on and established industries and start-ups alike struggling to cope with energy costs, yet there are those inside and outside of this House who argue for yet more dependence on this broken system. They call for us to slow down our action on climate change—to slow the sprint to clean energy or, worse, to hit reverse gear. They believe that more oil and gas will solve our problems, ignoring the fact that our reserves are heavily depleted and extracting what remains is far more expensive than it is in other North sea nations. They ignore the fact that even if we increased oil production today, it would take five to seven years before any new oil supplies became available, far too late to help families facing costs right now. Even then, UK-produced oil would still be sold into global oil markets, where international supply and demand set the price. Similarly, increasing gas production would not offer short-term relief. Any additional UK-extracted gas would also take years to come online and would represent only a tiny fraction of the global gas market, leaving gas prices effectively unchanged. Of course, oil and gas will be used in the UK for many years and decades to come, but the idea that expanding oil and gas exploration would cut bills or materially improve our energy security is a fantasy. The impact would be marginal.”