As fossil fuel crisis deepens, nations will have to rethink the morality of industrialised production
On the last day of his visit to the Gulf region, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has warned that the Iran conflict is going to define the UK “for a generation”. During his three-day trip to the Middle East, Sir Keir met leaders in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE and Qatar where he has been seeking damage-limitation diplomacy in the wake of the US president’s recent actions.
During his broadcast interviews he refused to expand further on exactly what might lie ahead for the UK but in a personal article published in The Guardian yesterday he laid out his thoughts in some detail. Referencing more than two decades of crises – including the 2008 financial crash, austerity, Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine war – the prime minister argued that the response from Westminster had consistently been to plaster over the cracks and then desperately try to muddle on until the next calamity hit.
“This time, it will be different,” he promised. “The war in Iran must now become a line in the sand, because how we emerge from this crisis will define all of us for a generation.
“And instead of hoping to return to the world of 2008, we will forge a new path for Britain – one that strengthens our energy, our defence and our economic security in a new age. Because the reality is the world has changed: no longer do we live in the benign conditions found during the early part of this century. The world today is more volatile and dangerous than at any other point in my lifetime. That will test and test again every element of our security. And over the years, that is a test for which Britain has too often been found wanting.”
Of course, papering over the cracks and muddling on may be one tried and tested political survival strategy, but so is drawing a line under the past and triumphantly re-inventing oneself. The Labour Party was founded on 27th February 1900, so unfortunately Sir Keir’s ambitions carry more than a century of political culpability when it comes to the present dire state that Britain is in.
Given that the post-planning around the Iran war is primarily about securing oil and other energy sources, it was no surprise that Sir Keir has been focussed clinically on promises about protecting British supply chains and limiting runaway price increases. Becoming a country “where people are not at the mercy of events abroad” is the new mantra of the moment, and the current government is rattling out both the rhetoric and emboldened promises about reversing decades of outward investment and building economic growth and security from within our own borders – ironically echoing President Trump’s own fixation with homegrown greatness.
It’s welcome news that legislators are now going to do their utmost to repair the damage that has been done previously to the British economy and the morale of the population, but this won’t be an easy – or quick – fix; decades of scandalous mis-investment, poor decision-making, laissez-faire capitalism and abstention from interfering in the workings of the free market has left the UK in a perilous and financially impotent state. Add to this the sustained pursuit of a liberal relativism that has broken down the moral fabric of human society and it’s easy to see that connecting political rhetoric to real societal change will be both challenging and economically tough to achieve.
Although the prime minister’s comments over the past few days have highlighted a wide range of socio-economic aspirations – including rebuilding our defence capabilities, reducing poverty, improving worker’s rights and attracting inward investment – it already seems fairly obvious that all such measures are going to be predicated on energy security. The first warning shot was fired this week when the Labour Party’s much-hyped £13bn AI investment project named Stargate UK collapsed when the company behind the project – OpenAI – pulled out. The intention had been for OpenAI to put the UK at the global centre of the AI industry by building a huge data centre in northeast England and make thousands of cutting-edge chips for AI development. The data centre was expected to be based across a number of sites – including Cobalt Park in North Tyneside – and would be part of the Government’s “AI Growth Zone” in the North East.
The news that the company was shelving the plan and will only reconsider when “the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment” has been a hammer-blow to Labour’s UK regeneration narrative. Frankly, though, you couldn’t blame OpenAI for the U-turn – Britain’s industrial energy prices are currently double those being paid by US manufacturers and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s highly-contested Net Zero agenda was also cited by many as rattling the investor. Julian Jessop, an economics fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, told GBNews that Mr Miliband’s “mad dash to decarbonise” was the “final straw” which resulted in OpenAI pulling its investment.
Balancing a determined drive towards creating a carbon neutral country with a desperately urgent need to reinvigorate industrial and commercial growth is a problem few politicians have had much luck with, but frankly the energy issue is the one problem that now looms urgently above all others – thanks largely to Donald Trump and the Iran war. Much of the recent corridor talk in the Palace of Westminster has been about managing the message that whilst we may talk about the urgent need to reduce our carbon emissions, economic recovery for Britain in particular is likely going to need a substantial re-commitment to highly-damaging fossil fuels.
Despite what rogue denialists like Trump, Bolsonaro or Modi might think, it’s becoming pretty obvious to everyone else that the climate disaster is already upon us and, even if we take drastic measures immediately, there’s probably very little we can do to prevent catastrophic changes happening to our planet within our own lifetimes. It’s said that the latent global temperature has risen by around 1.2C since the pre-industrial era and – in the past century alone – our oceans have been absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second. The implications of this were presented graphically in a report published in the journal Nature as far back as 2021, with experts saying that realistically the only chance of the world avoiding the cataclysmic 1.5C increase would be for all forms of fossil fuels to be left in the ground with immediate effect. by 2050 90% of all the coal would have to remain untouched, 60% of the oil, 60% of the gas, 99% of the unconventional oil. And even that impossible ask might not be enough to slow the warming effect.
At one end of the UK Labour Party strategy Mr Milliband is at least acknowledging the emergency, but elsewhere his party remains committed to ‘maximising economic recovery’ of oil and gas reserves from the North Sea – a strategy that Sir Keir is already hinting may become critical as reliance on overseas energy supplies becomes deeply uncertain and unreliable in the new post-Iran world.
Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), on Monday said that 11 million barrels of oil per day have been lost due to the Middle East war, warning that the current crisis exceeds both 1970s oil shocks combined and that no country “will be immune” to the consequences which it is though could last for some considerable number of years. In the face of this kind of potentially catastrophic circumstances one can only hope that a new narrative emerges about the moral consequences of our undue reliance on fossil fuels, which are both limited – and terminally damaging – resources.
In his landmark 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ Pope Francis was clear that environmental protection has ceased to become a political issue but is now a moral imperative if humanity is to have any future. In a statement delivered at COP28 by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Parolin – Francis was too ill to attend himself – the Pope said the ecological transition to save the world could be done by embracing renewable energy, “the elimination of fossil fuels, and education in lifestyles that are less dependant”. In particular he singled out the biggest carbon emitting countries who “were responsible for a deeply troubling ecological debt”.
In a video link to the COP30 climate talks in Brazil last November Pope Leo XIV continued the calls for a non-fossil fuelled world, arguing that climate change, fuelled by fossil fuels, is causing “unnatural disasters, pumped up on fossil-fuel steroids”.
“The creation is crying out in floods, droughts, storms, and relentless heat,” he said.
“One in three people live in great vulnerability because of these climate changes. To them, climate change is not a distant threat, and to ignore these people is to deny our shared humanity.”
His comments were also echoed just last month by the Catholic Bishops of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (the Global South Bishops) who released a “Manifesto of the Churches of the Global South,” urging governments to adopt a global treaty to end fossil fuel expansion and guide a just transition to renewable energy.
The manifesto said that climate change is “not only an environmental crisis,” but also “a consequence of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and an ‘economy that kills,’” creating a wider crisis that “threatens human dignity and peace.”
The phrase “unsustainable patterns of production” is significant because it echoes a longstanding position – of least for a century and half – of the Catholic Church that the obsessive pursuit of industrialisation and the mechanisation of the human person runs contrary not only to God’s purpose but to the common good of human society and the survival of the planet.
Our continued reliance on fossil fuels vs the utopian pursuit of limitless ‘clean’ energy may be the contrary theologies of the moment, but ultimately it’s the far more destructive obsession of humanity with ever-more intensive productivity and profit that needs to be questioned – and reversed if we are to return to a balanced, healthy planet and a contented social order.
Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and public theologian