THE oil industry’s desperate attempts to gaslight Britain reached a new low this week. Industry lobbyists are pushing a pressure campaign aimed at the new government, arguing that Labour ’s plans to increase the windfall tax will jeopardise investment and jobs.
The industry’s argument rests on one discredited figure: 200,000. That’s how many jobs they claim are maintained by the oil and gas industry in Britain. It is these jobs, they argue, that will be threatened by higher taxes.
But the real figure, the actual number of direct jobs in oil and gas, is 28,000. And the truth is that figure has been cratering for years.
The oil industry shed 30% of its jobs between 2015 and 2022, despite being handed £20 billion more in subsidies than renewables over the same period, and despite the last government’s licensing blitz, when Rishi Sunak handed out 100 new licenses.
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Even the windfall tax, levied against excess oil and gas profits during the energy crisis, handed companies an estimated £18bn tax break.
The Tories were never serious about making their mates in the oil industry pay up – after all, they met with oil lobbyists every single day last year.
In the same period, renewable jobs jumped by 30% to 27,500, even though the Tory government threw up barriers like the ban on new onshore wind farms.
Why are oil and gas jobs disappearing, despite massive state support?
It’s because the UK’s oil and gas reserves are dwindling in a cycle of ever-shrinking returns. UK oil production dropped 60% between 2004 and 2022.
Worse still, what little oil there is in the North Sea mostly ends up exported for profit, contributing little to the UK’s energy security.
The public know this. Recent polling showed that the clear majority of people in Scotland believe investment in renewable energy is key to greater energy security and affordable bills.
The past few years of soaring energy bills driven by wild gas price spikes showed us how important this transition is for our pockets, as well as the planet. Oil and gas are industries of the past.
That’s why their lobbyists are on the back foot, and why they’re trying to gaslight us into supporting a dirty, dying business model which hurts people and the planet, which provides fewer and fewer jobs but ever-growing profits for a small group of executives and shareholders.
The lobbyists are trying to argue that allowing them to rake in more profits means we save jobs.
But that ignores the sad fact that instead of looking after their workers and properly investing in the energy industries of the future, again and again they have decided to enrich their shareholders.
The lobbyists are also threatening that if Labour do increase taxes, they’ll move operations to Norway. But that’s a hollow threat – Norway taxes oil producers far more than the UK does. Shell, for example, contributed just 22p per UK citizen in 2022 – but paid more than £1000 per citizen to the Norwegian treasury.
Labour’s plans to increase the windfall tax on oil companies from 75% to 78% are a welcome start. But they’re nowhere near enough to repair the damage done.
We’ll need to keep increasing taxes on the oil industry and use that money to accelerate the transition and help those being laid off find jobs in the renewable energy industries of the future.
The oil industry has given us multiple, interconnected crises – millions in energy poverty, a climate spiralling out of control, authoritarian petrostates with massive leverage. We will not solve these crises by giving the industry more money.
It’s time to stop the gaslighting and to take back control from the profiteers.
Louis Wilson is the head of fossil fuel investigations at Global Witness
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