Burnham approves Jackdaw – and Labour’s unity on climate action is imperilled with the stroke of a pen | Zoe Williams

When the news broke that the UK government had approved the Jackdaw gasfield, I was at a Guardian climate event at the Royal Geographical Society. Appropriately, the theme suggested by readers was what can the public actually do in the face of what feels like paralysing climate doom?

There is so much going on that is hopeful: biodiversity tracking, river protection, rewilding. Shruti Suresh, from the independent watchdog Global Witness, told those in attendance that if they wanted to effect change, they should protest against Jackdaw and the Rosebank oilfield project. The message was so well understood that it didn’t need labouring. The mood in the room when the news came in was one of audible dismay. People had just watched the minister for climate transition declare that she could see the challenges ahead and was ready for them. The Jackdaw announcement will face immediate protest and legal challenge, but it sends a very clear signal from the government: we don’t mean what we say about ending emissions.

It turns out you can take all imaginable personal responsibility to arrest the climate crisis, make lifestyle adjustments that even five years ago you wouldn’t have dreamed of, miraculously summon the energy to take collective action from what is often private despair, but it will be insufficient as long as corporations – assisted by the government – are working against you, in effect with impunity. At some point, you need to get the people you elected to do what we all know – and they acknowledge – is necessary.

The Jackdaw decision had been quietly parked during the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, when the threat of the Greens seemed greater to Labour than it turned out to be. But while Labour successfully buried the issue during the campaign, the underlying issues surrounding Jackdaw – and Rosebank, which is yet to be decided upon – persist.

Since the 2015 Paris agreement, we have been committed to try to limit temperature rises to 1.5C, and we’ve known for at least five years that means the vast majority of fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. As of 2024, there’s been scientific consensus that the target of 1.5C is “deader than a doornail”, while this week’s emissions-gap report could not be clearer: the threshold will be breached and it will cause unimaginable damage, yet with urgent emissions reduction, there is a way back from the abyss. There is no workable argument that runs: “Everyone has to leave their fossil fuels in the ground, as a matter of the utmost urgency, except for us; everyone has to prioritise the long-term survival of a livable planet over energy bills, except for us; we all need to reach carbon neutrality and worry about high-skilled jobs later, except for us.” The Jackdaw field isn’t huge, will peak in a short time and won’t on its own reduce energy bills, which are determined by global markets. So it’s tempting to shuffle it off as a side-order issue, but it matters: it destroys our moral authority as a nation and it extinguishes hope.

The climate debate operates on two tracks that don’t meet. On the one hand, we talk about non-linear irreversible tipping points whose effects would be so seismic that the question of mitigation is too vast and, frankly, too painful to consider. The only bearable discussion of the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) – a system of currents within the Atlantic Ocean – is how to avoid it, and the contested matter of whether that is even possible. We talk about heat deaths across 854 European cities over the past summer, and we talk about areas in the UK of environmental deprivation, flood risks and poorly insulated housing. We also talk about food security both in the short term, with potato crops destroyed by the weather, and in the long term, with supply chains subject to the incomprehensible devastation of every country going through its own particular climate crisis simultaneously. We look at the social unrest across Europe – which is the fastest-warming continent – and ask to what extent the deprivation created by an unstable climate is being weaponised by a far right hell-bent on choking off climate action.

Then we gate off all that knowledge, all that anxiety, all that will to action, and turn our attention to the UK’s immediate energy compromises. The arguments here run that since we’re going to import gas from somewhere anyway, because any transition will take time, we may as well get it at home. Even though it’s well known that household energy prices won’t be reduced, the government can use the tax take to reduce VAT. Some categories of emission are lower from UK gas than they would be from energy imported from the Gulf.

We need to bring these conversations together, because what they describe is one shared reality. Alongside the carbon that Jackdaw and Rosebank would release, they’ve “sucked all the oxygen out of the debate around what to do about climate change”, Chris Stark, the former CEO of the Climate Change Committee, has said. A warm homes initiative would create vastly more jobs, research recently found, and by reducing bills would also bring far more prosperity, with the additional advantage of not undermining the climate goals we claim to hold.

Thinking of agriculture alone, the headroom, investment and planning we’re ploughing into carbon extraction could make an immeasurable difference to building resilience for an already uncertain future. The most meaningful way to reduce household bills is to reduce reliance on increasingly turbulent world markets, by separating the renewable price from the fossil fuel price, which would immediately boost the already flourishing wind and solar sectors.

Gas and oil proponents beg us to be pragmatic, while their own arguments are floridly impractical: conducted as though the outside world doesn’t exist; as though carbon emissions are tomorrow’s problem; as though there aren’t better solutions for high prices and insecurity everywhere you look; as though we have time to quickly exhaust all our bad answers before we move on to good ones.

One depressing aspect of the Jackdaw announcement – although by no means the most depressing – is that it’s all about the optics. Even its most trenchant supporters would admit that it’s not a long-term solution to energy security. Rather, it’s a flag to the fossil-fuel industry that the government isn’t an enemy. It’s a toxic smoke signal to the US that the UK might not be with it, but definitely isn’t against it. It’s a feeble attempt at domestic politicking by Labour, trying to deflate the Conservatives’ anti-net zero bubble. It’s a statement of intent to make no trouble, when the trouble is already upon us.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist