People have different ideas about what "pragmatic and proportionate" means but it seems unlikely that the children of the future will consider that includes tackling an emissions-induced climate crisis by firing ahead with over 100 new oil and gas licenses - whatever the surrounding energy security issues may be.

Only around a week ago, Rishi Sunak was talking about the need for a ‘pragmatic and proportionate approach’ to Net Zero, and yesterday we saw another example of what that looks like. A slew of new oil and gas licences, accompanied by the fig leaf of the much-awaited investment in the Aberdeenshire Acorn carbon capture project.

I don’t have an objection to investment in carbon capture - that's to be celebrated. It’s hard to imagine how we can reach anything like net zero without at least some carbon capture given what a challenge it is to decarbonise certain sectors and industries - though clearly it’s not a technology that’s coming easily.

READ MORE: Rishi Sunak confirms new oil and gas licences for North Sea

My chief concern with it is that too often it seems as if it's being used as little more than a greenwash for continuing to extract and burn fossil fuels. And, paired, as this announcement of investment in Acorn is, with a commitment to so many licences, that’s exactly what it seems.

We need trust in the sincerity of a Net Zero plan - and this latest suite of announcements seems only to undermine that. In fact, it seems so cynical as to surely have only been crafted by someone who wants to sneakily discredit the whole idea of Net Zero altogether.

Of course, some will say these new licenses are exactly what we need - and that the Government is right when it points out that the UK Climate Change Committee has estimated that in Net Zero 2050, a quarter of “energy demand will still be met by oil and gas”. Let's "max out" as Sunak puts it, in the faith that carbon capture can solve it all.

But what is absent from the UK Government’s statement is something else the Climate Change Committee said, which is that, even in spite of that continued reliance, it would recommend no further expansion of North Sea oil and gas fields because of the  "'message it would send out to the world".

Sunak’s recent statement also seems to beg the question, what would a truly pragmatic and proportionate response to something as existentially threatening as climate change, look like? And who we might trust to offer us one?

Could it be the Climate Change Committee, Lord Deben, who said, that he “welcomed” Labour’s pledge to put a stop on new licenses and said that it should be the “common view of all parties”? Or could it, perhaps be the International Energy Agency, who in 2021, said there should be no new oil, gas or coal development if world is to reach net zero by 2050?

Could it even be the conservative MP, Chris Skidmore, who led the independent review into Net Zero and, prompted by Sunak's oil and gas announcement has called for an emergency debate?

Skidmore summed a great deal up when he said: "This is the wrong decision at precisely the wrong time, when the rest of the world is experiencing record heatwaves. It is on the wrong side of a future economy that will be founded on renewable and clean industries, not fossil fuels.".

READ MORE: Carbon capture explained ahead of Rishi Sunak's Scotland visit

READ MORE Carbon capture project will help ensure just transition – Scottish Government

Or, do we trust, instead,  our current UK Prime Minister, who according to a recent report in the Mirror, was helped in his race to number 10 by donors with fossil fuel links helped fund his leadership race – and was given, over the past year, £530,000 in funds “from supporters with interests in oil, gas and aviation”?

We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the emissions that come attached to these licenses are real - even if this latest announcement does come with the seeming ‘get out of jail free’ card of a carbon capture project.

According to one piece of Greenpeace research, licences the UK has approved in the last two years will result in carbon dioxide matching the annual emissions of Denmark - and are equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 14 million cars. That’s before any of the new potential licenses are granted.

We in the UK think we are a special case - or at least some of our leaders seem to think that way. We perhaps feel like we’ve led the way on Net Zero, even hosted COP26, and that now we can sit back and focus on something more near-term, and not worry about what the rest of the world thinks us “selfish” (as Jamie Livingstone, head of Oxfam Scotland called yesterday's announcement).

We even seem to view our own oil and gas as so special that often we exaggerate the degree to which it leads in terms of emissions intensity. On this, some other countries, by the way, do better than us, including Norway, from whom we currently import most gas. 

Let's keep in mind that when the generations of the future look back, none of our excuses are likely to count for that much. What will count in the end is the emissions we cut. Those we capture will count too. But the cutting is the job that we can't afford to excuse ourselves from - and that is about clean energy, not the oil and gas of the past.