Scottish ministers have been urged to denounce plans to develop a new oilfield off Shetland with the potential to yield 255 million barrels.
Campaigners at Oxfam Scotland estimate that the 132 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions that could come from the proposed Cambo site would need an area of land 1.5 times the size of Scotland to counteract them.
Jamie Livingstone, the head of Oxfam Scotland, said in the run-up to the Cop26 climate summit in November that Westminster must “intervene in the Cambo case and stop its climate credibility going up in smoke”.
With Cop26 taking place in Glasgow, he said the Scottish government had a “duty” to press UK ministers to reject Cambo. Oxfam has published a report which estimated that for all current net-zero plans to be achieved, an area equal to all the farmland on Earth would need to be converted to forest, putting food production at risk.
The report said that net-zero targets “instead of focusing primarily on the hard work of cutting carbon emissions, for example by rapidly ending the use of coal, oil and gas for electricity and oil for cars, rely instead on using other methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere”.
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The report, Tightening the Net, said: “The problem is this removal of carbon either relies on virtually unproven new technologies or on a level of land use that is completely impossible and would lead to mass hunger and displacement of people across the world.”
Livingstone said: “All of our lives and futures depend on the world’s biggest polluters quickly, drastically and genuinely slashing their emissions, phasing out fossil fuels and investing in clean energy and supply chains.
“Instead, what we’re seeing is too many net-zero strategies being used as smokescreens to mask dirty behaviour: promising unrealistic carbon removal schemes in order to justify the continued plundering of our planet.”
He added: “The proposed Cambo oilfield is a clear climate contradiction. If the UK government is to be a credible broker for a deal that can stop the planet overheating when it hosts the Cop26 climate talks in November, it must intervene.
“The Scottish government has a duty to demand it does just that.”