Set aside emotions and examine the numbers behind Rosebank and Jackdaw - Yorkshire Post Letters

Yorkshire's national newspaper has always taken a practical, unsentimental view of what serves this county's interests, so it is worth setting emotion aside and looking squarely at the numbers behind the government's decision on two new North Sea oil and gas fields, Rosebank and Jackdaw.

Independent analysis from Imperial College London, drawing on the developer's own production figures, puts the expected global climate damage from these fields at between £119bn and £336bn, against a claimed UK benefit of just £28.7bn.

Academics at Exeter and Bath, reviewing the work independently, judge its central conclusion sound.

The further claim that new extraction will ease UK household bills does not withstand scrutiny either, since oil and gas are sold on international markets regardless of where they are produced; energy analysts have called that argument a ‘delusion’.

Yorkshire's farmland already carries real flood risk, and energy security is better served by reducing our exposure to volatile global gas prices than by increasing it. This is not a question of sacrificing British industry for abstract environmental goals; it is a hard-headed judgement that the figures on the table do not support the case for these fields.