Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, said: “It would be a mistake if the first thing Andy Burnham does as Prime Minister is cave into the demands of the profiteering oil and gas industry.
“These are companies that have made obscene profits, while our energy costs have skyrocketed. New North Sea drilling will not take a penny off our bills, it will just make a handful of executives and their shareholders even richer.
“New fields like Rosebank also won’t stem the decline in oil and gas jobs, which have more than halved in the past decade, despite new fields and hundreds of new licences being issued in that time.
“It would be particularly tone deaf – and out of step with the majority of voters, including Labour supporters – when the UK is right now suffering the impacts of climate change, driven by fossil fuels.
“The recent extreme heat has claimed thousands of lives, strained hospitals, schools and transport, and piled pressure on farmers. Those impacts will only worsen as long as we keep expanding fossil fuel production.
“The science is clear: the world already has far more oil and gas than can be burned safely if we are to maintain a liveable climate for ourselves and our children.
“We are through the looking glass if we’re even considering drilling on the scale of Rosebank when parts of this country are literally on fire.
“Burnham promised voters in Makerfield that he would upend the unfairness built into the current system. You fix that by getting us off oil and gas and shifting to homegrown renewables not by locking us into more of the same – companies extracting wealth at our expense.
“Rosebank is a defining test of the Burnham government. It needs to listen to ordinary people, not the self-interested lobbying of oil giants and fossil fuel cheerleaders like Donald Trump.
“Burnham must choose: protect oil company profits, or protect people from soaring bills and a worsening climate crisis.”
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