The environmental movement has been looking at fossil fuels all wrong. According to the head of a major energy conglomerate, extracting millions of barrels of crude poses “no contradiction” to our net zero goals, and who are we to argue with the experts?
I will confess that when I first sat down for Dover sole with EDF Energy head Simone Rossi at a private dining club in Mayfair, I was prepared to be combative. I had my little notepad. I had my little statistics about atmospheric warming and ocean acidification. I was fully prepared to ask him how a string of corporate renewables leaders could possibly advocate for new North Sea oil and gas projects with a straight face. But within five minutes of listening to Rossi speak, I realized how childish my understanding of the environment truly was.
Rossi leaned over his sparkling water and explained, with the exhausted patience of a visionary forced to speak to a toddler, that new oil and gas projects are a “no-brainer.” He assured me they pose absolutely “no contradiction” to the net zero agenda. And sitting there, surrounded by the quiet hum of immense corporate wealth and attentive waitstaff, the scales fell from my eyes. Of course drilling for more fossil fuels doesn't contradict net zero. You just have to fundamentally change your definition of the word “zero,” the word “net,” and the basic concept of causality itself.
For years, the environmental movement has been chained to the simplistic, frankly anti-business notion that removing prehistoric carbon from the ground and lighting it on fire makes the planet hotter. We are out of time, but go off. If the working-class activists who block traffic on their days off understood the sheer complexity of corporate forecasting, they would realize that leaving that oil beneath the seabed is actually a profound risk to our sustainability targets.
Think about the economics of the transition. If we do not pump the remaining oil out of the North Sea, someone else won't pump it either, which means EDF won't make the billions of pounds necessary to eventually, someday, perhaps fund a feasibility study for a wind turbine. We must accelerate our carbon emissions to fund the hypothetical future cessation of our carbon emissions. It is a beautiful, elegant loop of logic that you can only truly appreciate if your annual bonus depends on it.
I brought this up to the experts, fully expecting pushback, but the consensus among those who matter is absolute.
Our modeling clearly indicates that the safest place for prehistoric hydrocarbons is directly in the upper atmosphere, where we can keep a close eye on them while booking the revenue.
Exactly. And yet, the public continues to complain. They point to the wildfires and the floods, entirely missing the fact that EDF has already addressed these phenomena in a recently published ESG report. I read the executive summary myself on the train ride home. The company has boldly committed to using slightly thinner paper for their internal lobbying memos by 2038. This is what real climate action looks like—quiet, administrative, and completely decoupled from the physical reality of the Earth’s biosphere.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government are currently preparing to decide on two major new North Sea extraction projects. The pressure from the unwashed masses to reject these proposals is immense. But Starmer must hold the line. He must look the terrified youth of this country in the eye and explain that their future can only be secured by maximizing shareholder value for an energy conglomerate operating in British waters.
It is so easy to sit in a drafty apartment, wearing a sweater because you cannot afford your heating bill, and criticize the titans of industry. It is much harder to put on a bespoke suit, order a £90 fish, and carry the heavy burden of explaining why your company must extract every last drop of profitable sludge from the earth's crust.
The next time you feel the urge to criticize energy executives for treating the atmosphere like an open sewer, I urge you to look at your own carbon footprint. Did you exhale today? Did you take a warm shower this week? You are just as complicit. Let us leave the big decisions to the adults in the room, who understand that the only way out of this hole is to dig with absolute, unapologetic fury.