The Scottish Greens are the only party “prepared to tell the truth” about the need to end new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, Gillian Mackay has said.
The party co-leader said her opponents had to be “honest” with voters that further fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea would “do nothing to lower bills”.
The Greens have called for the windfall tax on oil companies to be “tightened to remove the loopholes” following “eye-watering profits”.
Last week, BP announced that its profits in the first three months of the year more than doubled to £2.4 billion after a surge in oil prices triggered by the war in Iran.
Mackay’s Call for Honesty
Ms Mackay said: “New oil and gas fields will do nothing to lower bills and will only fast-track the climate crisis. We all need to be honest about that, but the Scottish Greens are the only party prepared to tell the truth.”
“The SNP and Labour are pretending that new drilling is compatible with climate action, while the Tories and Reform are actively wanting to scrap Scotland’s climate laws.”
Ms Mackay said the “huge price fluctuations” caused by “Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran show exactly why we need to shift away from fossil fuels and on to renewables both to cut the cost of living and to protect our national security”.
She accused other political parties of knowingly “misleading people” by claiming that the opening of the Rosebank oil field could lower bills.
Renewable Energy as the Solution
“Clean, green and locally produced energy is the safest, cheapest and best energy available,” she said. “Scotland’s future should be about fast-tracking the just transition our workers, planet and households need and deserve.”
“A renewable energy sector, based at home, is where long-term jobs can and must be created. Oil and gas jobs managed by multinational corporations are in long-term decline and that will only continue, no matter how much of our North Sea we give up for them to exploit.”
“If we don’t tax their profits to invest in a clean energy future, they will just keep leaving their workers on the economic scrapheap as we have seen in Grangemouth and Mossmorran.”
“We cannot drill our way out of the climate crisis, and ignoring the devastating consequences will only make things worse.”
Criticism of Tax Cuts for Oil Giants
She said it was “indefensible” that politicians, including First Minister John Swinney, were calling for “massive tax cuts for oil giants” despite recording “grotesque” profits.
She accused oil companies of “failing” to support “any kind of transition” for workers to move into green energy.
“It is the last thing we should be doing at a time when millions of households are struggling with the soaring cost of bills and the weekly shop. Instead of ending the windfall tax, we should be closing the loopholes and making it stronger to support people in fuel poverty and fund our transition to a cleaner, greener future.”
Industry and Opposition Responses
Offshore Energies UK, the sector industry body, urged parties to come together and back an “all-energy” approach, including oil and gas, while “building out Scotland’s world-class renewables”. It warned politicians against dividing energy workers between “clean” and “dirty” industries.
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said: “The final boss of the 21st century will be climate change, but we can’t escape the reality that we still need oil and gas. That is a failure of successive governments, in London and Edinburgh, to drive down demand.”
“As long as we still need oil and gas, Scottish Liberal Democrats would make an assessment about whether it makes more environmental sense to take it from our own waters than to import it with the additional carbon from overseas. The hesitancy and prevarication shown by the SNP, Labour and the Conservatives means that jobs are getting lost, when they could be being saved.”
Scottish Conservative energy spokesman Douglas Lumsden said: “Scots already know the Greens would destroy every last job in oil and gas today, if they could. They’d turn the North Sea taps off and then blame the economic shockwave on Westminster, like they did with Grangemouth.”
“The Scottish Conservatives are the only party in the Scottish Parliament to stand fully behind tens of thousands of Scots working in the North Sea. The only ones to back Rosebank when it was demonised by Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf. Anas Sarwar was frozen into inaction by Ed Miliband’s eco-zealotry and won’t defend this critical sector. And John Swinney has tried to pretend he’s softened the SNP’s presumption against oil and gas — but he’s fooling no-one, because that reckless policy remains in place.”
