Jack McGovern

.@KemiBadenoch displays her total lack of understanding of the energy sector. She argues for more drilling in the North Sea to protect us from this energy crisis - seemingly oblivious to two very important facts. The first is we don't set the price of our north sea oil and gas - we let global markets do that. So in a crisis where global prices sky rocket, how can the answer can be to produce more globally priced oil here - it’s (energy market) illiterate to say so. The answer is to take control of our own energy pricing, starting with our own North Sea, as we have already with retail energy bills. Impose a price and profit cap. If we do this as part of an entire sector move - capping all wholesale prices, then we can combat this crisis and those that are coming next. The second very important fact Kemi seems unaware of is that it will take up to five years to produce anything new from our North Sea. So even if that could help us, it can’t help us with anything soon. And it won’t help us for long because our North Sea is all but empty, there’s 10% left. Our North Sea has been in decline for 30 years, shedding jobs and production capacity - because it’s running out - this has been going on for far longer than green energy has been a thing - to blame green energy for the decline of the North Sea is ignorant (of the facts). And Global markets have been filling the gap between what we make and what we use for decades now - Kemi seems not to know this either. As for energy bills, Badenoch seems unaware that the ‘green taxes’ we have on our energy bills were added by previous Tory governments. She seems also unaware that we spend vast sums subsiding fossils fuels - £17 billion a year at the last count. She operates in a fantasy environment, or would have us do - where green taxes have ruined the country and our oil and gas industry and all we need to do is drill more - it’s delusional. It’s straight out of the mouth of Trump.