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The guidance published last week for a new climate test on new oil and gas fields does not make things look rosy for Rosebank, or indeed Jackdaw. Much applauded by anti-fossil fuel campaigners a new climate test suggests that the bar for consent is much higher than previously.

But does it mean that these two fields are now dead in the water?

It’s a question that involves everything from global emissions to economic factors, and the maths of it is highly sobering.

The new guidance is a response to a Supreme Court ruling last year which meant that, in environmental impact assessments, oil and gas producers also have to account for the emissions from burning the fuels they extract, often called “downstream emissions”, and which was itself triggered by a decision in a landmark previous case, Finch v Surrey County Council.

It marks a significant step in acknowledging the ultimate impact of the fuels, which oil and gas companies make their profits from, on global climate, and also means that the UK has bounced into a leading global position on climate policy and jurisprudence.

The new climate test, according to University College London (UCL) researcher, Dr Fergus Green is “really strong” and requires three important things. “First, most obviously, it requires fossil fuel companies to account not just for the emissions from extracting the oil and gas, which they already had to do, but also from the burning of the oil and gas, which can be up to 20 times higher than the extraction emissions.

That inclusion, he notes, is no big surprise, since it is "what is required as the result of the Supreme Court judgement last year.”

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But the second and third elements are what make the guidance powerful. “The second thing,” Dr Green says, “is that the guidance says that companies shouldn’t just look at the climate impact of those emissions in isolation. Rather they have to look at them cumulatively in the light of historical global emissions and crucially in the light of the........

© Herald Scotland