Post date 7 Sep 2026 (original LinkedIn date)
Original LinkedIn version· 1,984 words
‘It’s a sin’ by the Pet Shop Boys, released in June 1987 as the lead single from their second album Actually.
Last week I watched the National Emergency Briefing film on climate and nature, a powerful piece intended to set out, in fairly uncompromising terms, what the scientific evidence now implies for the UK. Ultimately it left me with a strong sense of shame - shame for any contribution that I have made towards the mess that we are in. But what stayed with me longest was not any single projection, alarming though several of them were, but the extent to which the briefing was about systems rather than individual hazards. Climate change, nature loss, food, water, health, infrastructure, economic stability and national security are not separate problems that can conveniently be allocated to different departments. They interact, sometimes reinforcing one another, and the consequences of a disturbance in one part of the system can appear somewhere quite different. IPBES highlightd these interaction a couple of years back.
Against that backdrop, the reports a few days later that ministers are preparing to approve the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea felt particularly jarring. Count me mystified! It would be easy to turn that juxtaposition into another argument about whether governments should permit new fossil-fuel development while simultaneously claiming to take climate change and nature loss seriously. There is certainly an argument to be had there, but I’m increasingly unconvinced that it is the most useful one, at least in terms of moving us on.
Simon Sharpe made a related point recently in Prospect, arguing that the political argument over North Sea drilling has bizarrely acquired a significance far greater than its effect on either UK energy prices or global emissions warrants. Additional British production does little to change the international price of oil and gas, while there is a thin argument that constraining British production without changing demand simply risks shifting production somewhere else (if that’s the case, then let’s change demand!). The more consequential question is therefore what happens to demand, and particularly how quickly technologies that rely on fossil fuels are displaced by alternatives that are cheaper, more efficient or less exposed to volatile commodity prices.
That seems right to me, but it also raises a question that sits slightly to one side of the usual climate debate. If developing a new North Sea field makes relatively little difference to the price British households and companies pay for gas, and only a modest difference to our long-term dependence on imports, what exactly are we describing when we call it a contribution to “energy security”? Part of the difficulty may be that supply, security and resilience have gradually become almost interchangeable in political language, when they describe, at least to me, very different things.
There is clearly some ‘security’ value in domestic production. Shell expects Jackdaw, at peak, to account for around 6.5 per cent of UK Continental Shelf gas production, and domestic production can offer advantages over imported LNG in relation to transport, infrastructure utilisation and, depending on the comparison, production emissions. Nor should the employment and industrial capability associated with the North Sea simply be dismissed. A poorly managed transition that destroys skills and supply chains before alternatives can substitute (I strongly believe they already do, but note that I am trying to be balanced!) would itself create vulnerabilities. Other forms of successful transition are available! But none of that tells us very much about the resilience of the UK energy system.
The distinction matters because 6.5 per cent of UK Continental Shelf production is not 6.5 per cent of UK gas consumption. North Sea output is declining, and estimates produced during the Jackdaw consultation suggest that the field would reduce Britain’s overall gas import dependency by only around two percentage points over its life. More importantly, the gas that emerges from a British field is not somehow insulated from the market into which it is sold. British households and industry remain exposed to European and international gas prices regardless of whether a marginal molecule originated beneath British or Norwegian waters. Jackdaw may therefore alter the provenance of part of our gas supply without materially altering our exposure to the thing that caused so much damage in 2022: a sharp increase in the price of gas across an internationally connected market. That distinction between supply and exposure seems to me a useful way of thinking about resilience more generally.
If the risk we are concerned about is the physical interruption of gas imports, then additional domestic production clearly has value. If the risk is another international price shock, the benefit is much less obvious. If the concern is the loss of North Sea jobs and engineering capability, then there may be a perfectly legitimate industrial-policy argument for managing production decline slowly. But that is not quite the same argument as saying that another gasfield materially improves the resilience of British households, manufacturers or the electricity system.
There is nothing particularly radical about asking those questions. It is simply the sort of analysis we would expect an investor to undertake before allocating capital to any other form of risk reduction. What is the risk being reduced, how large is the exposure, how much does the proposed investment change the distribution of possible losses, and are there alternative uses of the same capital that reduce the exposure more effectively? Seen through that lens, the interesting comparison for Jackdaw is not simply another gasfield. It is every other intervention capable of reducing Britain’s sensitivity to gas prices.
A house that permanently requires less energy for heating has a lower exposure to future gas-price shocks. Replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump can reduce that exposure further, particularly as the electricity system itself becomes less dependent on gas. Additional renewable generation does something similar, provided that the grids, storage and flexibility needed to use it are built alongside it (and therein lies a major part of our problem). None of these measures guarantees that an energy shock will not occur. What they do is reduce the amount of the economy whose welfare depends upon the price of the commodity when it does. That, I would argue, is much closer to what resilience actually means.
The timing matters because the wider distribution of physical risks facing the UK is clearly ramping up before our eyes. Recent research by Gergana Gyuleva, Erich Fischer, Reto Knutti and Sebastian Sippel uses observations of surface temperature and the Earth’s energy imbalance to reassess the transient climate response, producing a range of 1.9°C to 2.6°C and making some of the higher-sensitivity climate models increasingly difficult to exclude. This does not mean that every previous climate projection should suddenly be discarded, but it does suggest that the probability distribution around future warming may be shifting towards less comfortable outcomes. For the avoidance of doubt, that’s not good!
There are also increasingly important questions about how those risks interact. Research reported recently by New Scientist suggests that freshwater from Greenland’s accelerating ice loss may be affecting North Atlantic temperature patterns and atmospheric circulation in ways that intensify European heatwaves. Whether that particular mechanism ultimately proves as significant as the initial results suggest remains to be seen, but the broader lesson is already familiar. Physical risks rarely respect the neat categories in which we model them. And that’s before we get to the super El Nino that’s on the way!
Drought affects agricultural output, river flows and electricity generation. Heat affects health, labour productivity, food production and infrastructure. Flooding affects property, insurance and ultimately mortgage and credit risk. Water scarcity can constrain industrial production. Energy prices feed into almost everything. This was, for me, the strongest message from the National Emergency Briefing. The danger lies not simply in the individual hazards becoming more severe, but in the possibility that disturbances propagate through systems whose components are more interconnected than our institutional arrangements acknowledge. We live and operate in silos, further exacerbated by siloed thinking.
Which is why I find the language around energy security increasingly unsatisfactory. The conventional debate tends to ask whether Britain should produce another unit of gas, while the climate debate asks about the emissions associated with producing and ultimately burning it. Both questions matter, but neither tells us whether the UK economy has become meaningfully more robust. A better national-security question might be to ask how a decision changes Britain’s distribution of future losses.
Does it reduce the exposure of households and businesses to international energy-price volatility? Does it make critical infrastructure less dependent upon a commodity whose price Britain does not control? Does it improve the ability of the electricity system to cope with an external shock? Does it preserve useful engineering capability during the transition? Does it leave the country with more options if physical climate risks turn out to be worse than the central forecasts suggest?
Those questions would not necessarily produce a simple answer on Jackdaw, and that is partly the point. There may be a case for continuing some North Sea production while demand falls (I can’t think of one but am sure that there are sharper minds that could attempt to do so!), especially if doing so helps manage employment, skills and existing infrastructure through the transition. Equally, there is a perfectly reasonable argument that approving new production risks slowing that transition and extending dependence on precisely the commodity whose volatility we are trying to escape. What seems harder to defend is the assumption that domestic production is synonymous with resilience simply because it is domestic.
The same confusion appears elsewhere. We often regard flood defences as resilience because they are visible pieces of infrastructure, while overlooking upstream landscapes capable of reducing peak flows. We talk about food security in terms of domestic production while paying rather less attention to the water, soils, fertiliser and energy on which that production depends. We measure spare generating capacity but give less attention to the concentration of fuel or supply-chain dependencies behind it. In each case the physical asset is easier to see than the system dependency.
Perhaps that is why political systems gravitate towards supply-side answers. A gasfield, reservoir, road or power station can be pointed at, counted and announced. Reducing exposure is harder to photograph. It happens across millions of homes, machines, landscapes and investment decisions, and its value is often most apparent in the event that does not become a crisis. Yet if climate and nature risks are becoming more interconnected, reducing exposure is precisely what we should be trying to buy. So I am less interested in whether Jackdaw is described as a climate failure or an energy-security success than in whether we have begun asking the right question of investments made in the name of resilience.
Not simply: how much more supply does this create? But: how differently does the system behave when the shock arrives? That feels to me like the more useful definition of resilience, whether we are talking about gas, electricity, food, water or the natural systems on which all of them ultimately depend. And if we applied that test consistently, I suspect some of the investments we currently describe as matters of national security would look rather less consequential, while others that barely appear in the security debate at all would move rapidly towards the top of the list.
References
National Emergency Briefing film, National Emergency Briefing on the climate and nature crisis, 2026.
Kiran Stacey, Jackdaw gasfield set to be approved by ministers this month, sources say, The Guardian, 4 September 2026.
Simon Sharpe, What Tony Blair gets wrong about climate and energy, Prospect, 2026.
Gyuleva, G., Fischer, E., Knutti, R. and Sippel, S., Recent Temperature and Energy Imbalance Trends Point to Higher Estimates of Future Warming, 2026.
Alec Luhn, Greenland meltwater is intensifying European heatwaves, New Scientist, August 2026.