Will drilling for more gas on our own doorstep actually cut your energy bill? Protesters outside Parliament this weekend say absolutely not — and they’ve got a Scottish court ruling to back them up.

Well, it was all kicking off outside the Houses of Parliament on Saturday.

As reported by cbinews.tv, climate campaigners gathered with some pretty blunt banners — 'No new fossil fuels', 'Climate emergency' and our personal favourite, 'Jackdaw is climate arson' — to demand the government finally bin the controversial Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea.

If you’ve not been following it, here’s the backstory. Jackdaw isn’t new. It was actually discovered way back in 2005, about 150 miles east of Aberdeen. It’s what the industry calls an ultra-high pressure, high temperature field — tricky to develop — and it’s thought to hold between 120 and 250 million barrels of oil equivalent. Shell, who operate it, reckon at peak it could supply around 6.5% of Britain’s gas — enough to heat about 1.4 million homes. They’ve already sunk over £1 billion into it.

It was first rejected on environmental grounds in 2021, then approved by the last Conservative government in June 2022. But then came the plot twist. In January 2025, the Court of Session in Edinburgh sided with Greenpeace and Uplift and ruled the approvals for both Jackdaw and the even bigger Rosebank oil field were unlawful. Why? Because the government hadn’t considered the downstream, or Scope 3, emissions — the climate impact of actually *burning* the oil and gas, not just extracting it.

That quashing means Shell has had to reapply, and a fresh decision is expected this month. Which is why activists were out in force on Saturday.

The mood was raw, and very personal. One protester, Versha, put it in the context of a brutal year:

"We've just had a summer like no other in the UK, farmers have had the worst crop failures ever. We've had this glacier melt in Nepal where hundreds of people have lost their lives. Thousands are still missing. The answers are really simple. We do not need new oil and gas."

And that old chestnut about domestic gas lowering bills? The crowd wasn’t buying it.

Demonstrator John summed it up brilliantly: "The fact that it's on our doorstep doesn't make it any cheaper for us, because gas prices, oil prices are set internationally. We have no control over that."

He’s got a point. As anyone who’s looked at their direct debit since 2022 knows, UK wholesale gas prices track the international market, regardless of where the molecules come from.

Ed Gemmell, leader of the Climate Party, was even more direct, as captured by cbinews.tv:

"It is never, ever gonna save us any money. All of that gas, the only way it's gonna save money for Britain, is if Shell, its directors, and its shareholders agree to sell it at an undervalue."

His alternative? Go big on net zero first.

"We invest. We innovate our way to net zero prior to any of the other major economies of the world. If Britain was the only major economy to have innovated, and invested its way there by that time, it would grow our economy by 20 to 30 percent."

But perhaps the most powerful line of the day came from activist Rainbow, who called the whole project a moral line in the sand:

"It's a betrayal to all of us. It's a betrayal to future generations; it's a betrayal to the people of Great Britain and people around the world. There can be no new oil and gas drilling for a liveable future."

So, what happens now? With the field said to be 99% complete and ready to produce as early as this winter if approved, the Labour government is stuck between its growth agenda and its climate commitments. For the protesters at Westminster, though, the message is simple — you can’t drill your way out of a climate crisis.

Source: cbinews.tv

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