On days where the bond markets look like they're about to shut up shop and our credit rating as a country is in the toilet, we really need to exploit our natural resources and all our assets.

We started subsidising wind in 1990.

35 years later, Ed Miliband wants to offer wind farms 20-year subsidies.

Essentially a third of our gas generators could retire,

along with most of our nuclear reactors. We would not be able to manage demand under those

circumstances. We would have to ration. One answer to that is we'll quickly build more gas.

Power stations, unfortunately right now, the lead time to buy a gas turbine is eight years. If we

want to keep the lights on, we might really not have very many options. Hello, I'm Fraser Myers,

Deputy Editor of Spikes. I'm absolutely thrilled to be joined by Catherine Porter. Catherine, welcome.

Hi, good evening.

Catherine is an independent energy consultant and founder of what logic.

Catherine, we're speaking in a week when Kemi Badock, the Conservative leader, has somewhat

broken with the cross-party net zero consensus.

She's saying that we need to basically drill baby drill in the North Sea,

maximise every molecule of oil and gas to be found there. Do you think this is a welcome intervention?

How much damage are our current restrictions on oil and gas doing to the UK?

Oh, she's 100% correct in this and I

couldn't be more supportive. So the current restrictions make no sense, either from an economic

perspective or from a climate perspective. On the economic side, we have historically made a lot of

money from North Sea oil and gas. The treasury receipts from

that have been significant. Now, what's happened with the energy profits levy is not only,

is the effective tax rate on some of these fields now over 100%. Harbour Energy has said,

...