Fifty years ago, on this day, March 16, 1973, The Conservation Society released report about North Sea Oil and how the gains could and should be spread around
The Guardian 16 March 1973, page 8
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 330.3ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
There was lots of North Sea oil coming at us. (See also Doctor Who and the Terror of the Zygons.) And the question of how these riches would be invested and distributed and spent was very real.
Reading about that Conservation Society report with the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, and in the context of the Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre effort is freaking hilarious.
And of course, the workers doing the hard graft on off-shore wind are… getting screwed. See this recent report in The Ecologist.
What I think we can learn from this
That there were smart people talking about a “just transition”, and lobbying MPs etc, fifty years ago.
What happened next
North Sea oil revenues were used by Thatcher to cover up the economic catastrophe that she was causing, paying unemployment benefits and sick benefits, rather than creating a sovereign wealth fund, as the Norwegians have done; I’m not saying Norway is perfect by the way. And some people got very very rich indeed.
Thank goodness we’re no longer trying to get the last dregs of hydrocarbons out, during a climate emergency, because that would reveal us to be pathetic hairless apes with opposable thumbs and a two millimetre sheet of neurons that didn’t make us quite as smart as we thought…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..