Now, I’m no upstream man—I’ve never claimed to be—but even from my vantage point, it’s hard not to suspect that if Britain actually wanted to, there’d still be ample oil and gas left in the North Sea. Not a trickle, not a symbolic gesture—real volumes. And beyond heating homes and keeping what’s left of British industry from wheezing its last breath, the country is going to need energy for something far more uncomfortable: rebuilding its manufacturing base once people finally grasp that the economy is cooked and you can’t pay for life with imagined money forever.
Cheap, reliable, clean energy would be the perfect backbone for that kind of resurrection. But of course, that would require politicians to read the room, abandon their delusions, and stop sabotaging their own country. And I don’t see even a faint spark of that happening. Politicians only ever do the right thing once they have chewed through every grotesquely stupid option available to them—every last one, scraped clean to the bone.And rest assured, there’s still plenty of room at the bottom. So whatever you do, don’t hold your breath.