On Tuesday 12 November, the legal challenges to the Rosebank oil field brought by Greenpeace and Uplift began being heard at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. In tandem, people protested outside the court over the Big Oil, climate-wrecking companies involved in the unlawful project. They had a clear message: Stop Rosebank!
Stop Rosebank
Stop Rosebank campaigners hosted a rally on the streets of Edinburgh from 8am:
The Stop Rosebank demo was outside Scotland’s Court of Session, which will hear legal challenges from campaign groups Uplift and Greenpeace UK seeking to stop the development of the largest untapped North Sea oil field:
Banners summed the situation up well:
There was even a choir to keep people’s spirits up in the cold Scottish weather:
The hearing is taking place over three days, from 12-15 November. As campaigner Lauren MacDonald summed up, if Uplift and Greenpeace win the case it could be massive:
“Today, we are on the precipice of a massive victory for the climate,” says @laurensunfl0wer ahead of @StopCambo’s Edinburgh court case against the Rosebank oilfield. pic.twitter.com/xF934TuLOG
— Skotia (@TheSkotia) November 12, 2024
You can get involved online by watching the court stream here.
Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift which coordinated the Stop Rosebank demo commented:
The previous government should have never approved the huge Rosebank oil field, knowing that this is precisely what is driving the awful changes to our climate we’re seeing around the world. The costs of continuing to drill are now vast and the benefits far too few. This is why we’re in court this week.
The costs of our changing climate are worsening and ordinary people are picking up the tab, whether that’s communities and councils cleaning up after floods, or UK farmers losing income from record rainfall. On its own, the Rosebank oil field, off the Scottish coast, would create more climate pollution than the 700 million people living in the world’s poorest countries do in a whole year.
Rosebank is a terrible deal for Britain. It’s mostly oil for export, which would do nothing to lower fuel costs or boost our energy security yet, because of huge tax breaks for new drilling, the UK public would effectively cover almost all of the costs of developing it while the oil companies walk off with the profits. It won’t provide long term security for oil and gas workers either. Even with new fields being approved, jobs supported by the industry have more than halved in the past decade. Workers need clean energy jobs that have a long-term future.
The UK has a massive opportunity today to shift to clean, homegrown energy. We hope the court rules Rosebank unlawful so that the profiteering of the oil and gas industry ceases to hold us back.
A climate-wrecking project
Rosebank, the largest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea, is 80% owned by Norwegian oil giant, Equinor, with the Israeli owned Ithaca Energy, claiming the rest.
Despite repeated warnings from climate scientists, the Rosebank oil field was approved by the previous government in 2023. Our new government, elected with more progressive climate policies under its belt, has since conceded that its approval was unlawful.
Now on their own, Equinor and Ithaca are continuing to do everything they can to drill Rosebank and lock us into dependency on climate wrecking fossil fuels so they can keep raking in profit.
Uplift and Greenpeace UK have been granted judicial reviews of the decisions made by the Energy Secretary under the previous Conservative government and by the oil and gas regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), to grant consent to the Rosebank project.
Now, the field’s fossil fuel owners – Norway’s state-backed Equinor and Ithaca Energy – have entered the case as interested parties. They will do everything they can to bring the oil field into production.
The court will hear arguments that the development of Rosebank is unlawful and consent should be quashed because:
- It ignores the impact of the emissions from burning Rosebank’s oil and gas.
- It failed to properly assess the marine impacts of the development.
- Because of a failure by the regulator to be transparent in its reasoning.
Stop Rosebank – before it gets any further
Commenting on the Stop Rosebank campaign, Tommy Sheppard, former SNP MP for Edinburgh East said:
When I was a kid, we thought the biggest threat to our survival was that the oil and gas would run out. It’s the case today, in fact, that we can’t afford to burn it. So, unless governments are talking to oil and gas companies about how they stop drilling, they shouldn’t be talking to them at all. The biggest deceit is the way these companies can say with a straight face, ‘we agree with phasing out oil and gas, but in order to get there we need to have more of it and develop the biggest field out there. It defies logic and they need to be called out for it.
Fossil Free London is part of a national coalition of groups and individuals campaigning against the Rosebank oil field and an international coalition of groups campaigning against Equinor’s operations across the globe. Joanna Warrington from the group said:
Rosebank is a desperate, reckless attempt by oil giants to extract profits from a dying industry. It’s time for Equinor and Ithaca to face the facts that recent legal victories for the climate in UK courts make clear – the sun is setting on new oil infrastructure.
Court today is about more than just stopping Rosebank —it’s about breaking our dangerous reliance on fossil fuels and, as Spain still struggles in the aftermath of increasingly common devastation, securing a safer future for all.
Featured image and additional images via Uplift
