This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

So Kemi Badenoch wants to extract all the oil and gas in the North Sea. Fossil fuels will be the “cornerstone of our economy” and her party is the only one “backing Britain’s North Sea industry”.

Curiously, she doesn’t seem to have so much to say about the actual cornerstone of future energy and economy, the roll out of offshore wind.

Yes, we're all concerned about jobs, but talk of maximising, feels like a desperate return to the past.

Her declaration, at the Offshore Europe conference in Aberdeen, also came alongside the publication of a new report by OEUK on reforming the windfall tax. The suggested new approach, it said, could bring an extra £137 billion to the UK economy and support 23,000 jobs.

Maximising economic extraction is back in the political vocabulary. It represents a strong contrast with the current government’s approach.

It’s also worth looking at it in the light of the recent guidance on the climate test for new oil and gas developments introduced following the Supreme Court Decision which judged that emissions produced from burning oil and gas should be considered in any environmental impact assessment, not just those produced in extracting it. .

The climate test now requires that companies don’t just look at the climate impact of those emissions in isolation, but also regard them in the light of historical global emissions and those from existing and planned fossil fuel projects globally.

Look at it that way and it's hard to see how any development could be justified. Researchers have assessed that there are already in the global pipeline 900 billion tonnes of emissions from existing and planned fossil fuel projects and these dwarf the emissions from the global carbon budget required to remain within 1.5 degrees.........

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