Buried in the infrastructure bill is an astonishing contradiction on the UK’s approach to oil and climate change
Sometimes there’s nothing to do but sit there and laugh. That’s what happened last week while I was reading the Lords debate on the infrastructure bill, and stumbled across something so amazing that I had to go back over it three times to ensure I’d read it right.
The bill, as several peers complained, is an odd one: published before half the measures it will contain have been inserted. This is how democracy works these days: our unelected legislators are asked to debate something they have not yet been allowed to see. So the bombshell I came across isn’t in it yet. But Baroness Kramer, who introduced the legislation, casually dropped it into her preamble.
"to introduce measures in the bill to put the principle of maximising economic recovery of petroleum in the UK into statute."