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

Recent weeks have seen the closure of the Rosebank and Jackdaw consultations, and many have speculated that Andy Burnham may be poised to approve these North Sea oil and gas developments.

When people start to talk about Rosebank and Jackdaw, odd as it may seem, I immediately start to think about oysters. I ponder on how the Firth of Forth used to be home to vast groaning beds of these molluscs, but now contains only a tiny, restored smattering, and how this is often referred to as a tragedy of the commons.

As demand grew and dredging intensified during the nineteenth century, neither informal restraint nor effective regulation prevented exploitation. An 1840 Act protected private oyster beds rather than the ecosystem as a whole. Fishers had their reasons to carry on: they needed an income, catches continued, and they lacked today’s understanding of population collapse.

The result was a tragedy – though, as some have pointed out, less strictly-speaking, a tragedy of the commons than a failure of institutional management.

Oil and gas present a mirror-image problem. It is not depletion of a shared resource, but the collective consequence of burning too much of it: carbon dioxide emissions, climate change, the flurry of heatwaves we have seen this year, and diminished harvests.

But, across the giant shared commons that is the world, most of the countries who have reserves want to extract a bit more. On oil and gas, we in the UK have our justifications: relatively low-carbon production, an industry central to the north-east Scotland economy, and jobs. Offshore Energies UK says Rosebank and Jackdaw could generate £1.4 billion in tax revenues this parliament, rising to £3.8 billion in the next,........

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