Chris Hinchliff

I declare an interest as the chair of the climate and nature crisis caucus. If we measure both sides of the scales, it is obvious that the costs of pollution from Rosebank vastly outweigh any of its benefits. Those costs will fall on millions of people across the UK who are already struggling to make the sums add up at the end of the month. They will be the ones whose living standards will dive as farmers’ yields fall and food prices soar; they will be the ones whose health will suffer as our weather grows more extreme and the temperatures in our schools, hospitals and workplaces become unbearable; and they will be the ones who will pay the price of flooded homes and businesses. Moreover, we know that the carbon pollution already in our atmosphere is disrupting the rhythm of England’s seasons right now, and that the stress of climate change is already killing England’s ancient oaks. On Armistice Day, when we remember those who fought and died for our country, it seems that we might be forgetting what inspired and sustained so many of them through the hell that they faced. We say, “Lest we forget”, but what honour do we pay to the memory of Edward Thomas if we now pursue policies that destroy the “hawthorn-time in Wiltshire” that shaped him into a conscious Englishman? What worth is given to Rupert Brooke’s promise, “That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England” if we exacerbate the climate-induced drought that is reducing the River Granta, which he loved, to a feeble dribble, such that no future generation can join him “as swimmers into cleanness leaping”? What sort of remembrance do we offer Robert Graves if, by extracting the last dregs of fossil fuel profits, we extinguish “the quiet of an English wood”, which he longed for in the trenches of 1915? If those poets were with us now, what would they make of a proposal that threatens to wreck the landscapes, the sights and sounds, and the sense of home that made England so precious to them? That national inheritance is infinitely more valuable than all the revenues Shell and Equinor can promise us.