The Conservative party will aim to “maximise extraction” of oil and gas in the North Sea if it wins power, Kemi Badenoch has vowed.
The Tory party leader will use a speech in Aberdeen in the coming days to set out her plans to extract as much oil and gas as possible instead of shifting away from fossil fuels.
She will announce a plan to overhaul the North Sea Transition Authority, which oversees the issuing of licences, dropping the word transition and replacing its 12-page mandate with a simple order to extract the maximum possible amount of fossil fuel.
Badenoch said Britain “cannot afford not to be doing everything to get hydrocarbons out the ground” to boost growth.
She said: “We are in the absurd situation where our country is leaving vital resources untapped while neighbours such as Norway extract them from the same seabed.
“Britain has already decarbonised more than every other major economy since 1990, yet we face some of the highest energy prices in the developed world.
“This is not sustainable and it cannot continue. That is why I am calling time on this unilateral act of economic disarmament and Labour’s impossible ideology of net zero by 2050.
“So, a future Conservative government will scrap all mandates for the North Sea beyond maximising extraction.
“It is time that common sense, economic growth and our national interest came first, and only the Conservatives will deliver that. We are going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea.”
Last month, the energy and net zero secretary, Ed Miliband, accused the Conservatives of being “anti-science” by abandoning a political consensus on net zero.
In the first of what is promised to be an annual “state of the climate” report, the Labour MP set out the findings of a Met Office-led study that detailed how the UK was already hotter and wetter, and faced a greater number of extreme weather events.
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Miliband quoted the former prime minister Theresa May, who put net zero targets into law in 2019 and had argued that the real climate zealots were “populists who offer only easy answers to complex questions”. He added: “I couldn’t put it better myself.”
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “We are already delivering a fair and orderly transition in the North Sea to drive growth and secure skilled jobs for future generations, with the biggest ever investment in offshore wind and three first-of-a-kind carbon capture and storage clusters.
“We are committed to delivering the manifesto commitment to not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis.”
