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Donald Trump has criticised the UK’s plan to shift away from North Sea oil and gas production, in the latest salvo against Sir Keir Starmer’s government from the incoming US administration.
The president-elect said the UK was “making a very big mistake”, adding it should “open up the North Sea” and “Get Rid of Windmills”, in a post on his Truth Social social media site.
It was unclear what prompted the post, which included a link to an article from November in which APA Corporation, which owns US oil producer Apache, said it would wind up its North Sea operations by 2029 warning high taxes and environmental regulations made them “uneconomic”.
Apache itself halted drilling in the North Sea in June 2023, before Starmer’s government took office in July last year.
Trump’s digital intervention puts him directly at odds with one of the cornerstone policies of the Labour government, to shift the UK away from fossil fuels in the coming years.
The post indicates a willingness by the incoming US president to weigh in on domestic policies of other nations that was a feature of his first term in office, something that could further hamper relations with the UK.
His intervention also follows multiple criticisms of Starmer’s government by Elon Musk, the Tesla head and technology billionaire appointed by Trump to co-lead a new waste-cutting department.
The posts from both men are likely to fuel concern within the UK about potentially rocky US-UK relations when Trump is inaugurated as president for the second this month.
Starmer has appointed former Labour minister Lord Peter Mandelson as the new ambassador to Washington, while the prime minister and David Lammy, foreign secretary, have worked to try and forge ties with Trump and his allies.
The political consensus in the UK around tackling climate change has fractured, with the Conservative party — which introduced binding 2050 Net Zero goals under Theresa May — aligning itself more closely with Trump’s pro-fossil fuel stance.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who describes herself a “net zero sceptic”, recently met vice president-elect JD Vance, while Musk has urged people to vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which has said it would scrap the UK’s net zero emissions targets.
Trump wants to boost oil and gas drilling in the US, and has said he would halt President Joe Biden’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act package of subsidies for green energy.
His campaign has also said he plans to withdraw from the 2015 international Paris agreement on tackling climate change. He did so at the end of his first term in office in 2020, although the US rejoined months later under Biden.
Starmer’s government has made moving away from oil and gas a major part of its agenda, citing the damaging impact of burning fossil fuels on the climate.
It plans to stop issuing North Sea licences for new oil and gas exploration and has increased the tax rate on oil and gas producers.
Starmer’s administration is instead making a big push on renewable energy such as wind turbines and solar farms. It wants to decarbonise the electricity system by 2030, as one step towards the UK’s wider, legally binding goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions across the economy to net zero by 2050.
However some critics have questioned the wisdom of throttling domestic production of oil and gas when both will still be needed for the next 25 years, albeit in declining volumes, even as the UK moves towards the 2050 target.
Downing Street declined to comment on Friday, but government officials highlighted Labour’s long-standing position and arguments for its energy policies.
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