Ed Davey has declared he has ‘no ceiling’ on Liberal Democrat ambitions. This is technically true if your ambitions involve supporting a gas field while claiming to care about the climate.
The Lib Dem leader has backed the Jackdaw gas field, which the government is expected to approve. Jackdaw will extract liquefied natural gas from the North Sea for the next fifteen years. This is the same party that spent the last decade telling voters they were the only ones who actually believed in net zero.
What does it mean to have no ceiling on ambitions when you’re actively installing new floors in the fossil fuel economy? The answer is: it means you say both things and hope nobody reads past the headline. Davey’s strategy appears to be campaigning on climate while voting for the infrastructure that makes climate targets mathematically impossible.
The Lib Dems have positioned themselves as the party of environmental responsibility since approximately 2010. That brand has now collided with the party’s apparent belief that you can simultaneously oppose carbon emissions and fund new gas extraction. You cannot.
The cognitive dissonance is so complete it loops back around to being almost honest. At least Davey isn’t pretending the Jackdaw field doesn’t exist or that supporting it is somehow compatible with climate policy. He’s just saying it out loud while claiming ambition knows no bounds. The bounds, it turns out, are wherever the gas is.