Peter Capaldi says government’s Cambo oilfield plans are ‘unscientific’

Actor and campaigner Peter Capaldi had today said the government’s plans to construct an oilfield in the Shetland Islands is “unscientific and potentially disastrous”.

The Glasgow-born actor, best known for his roles in Doctor Who and The Thick of It, expressed his opposition to the plans in a comment piece for The Guardian newspaper on Monday.

The Cambo oil field sits approximately 75 miles to the west of the Shetland Islands and contains over 800 million barrels of oil, enough to to produce energy for around 25 years.

The field is currently only licensed for exploration, but Siccar Point and Shell are bidding over who will extract at the site.

Ahead of the Cop26 UN climate summit set to take place in Mr Capaldi’s home city next month, he said the government “should be supporting green jobs for fossil fuel workers, not deepening our dependency on oil and gas”.

Earlier today Greenpeace demonstrators chained themselves to an oil-splattered statue of Prime Minister Boris Johnson outside Downing Street in light of plans for the new drilling site.

The pressure group’s bid to get a court to reverse BP’s permit for the site was rejected last week.

Mr Capaldi went on to claim that the project, would “ If approved, Cambo would produce 170m barrels of oil and would deepen the climate crisis for decades to come,” and declined it as “a staggeringly backward move”.

He said “North Sea communities are resilient” and compared the need to transition to renewable industries to the transition from shipbuilding.

He said that oil and gas “addiction” was not a suitable way of levelling up such areas, saying that the government “awards industry contracts overseas, meaning that new jobs go elsewhere,” and thus fail to deliver on using slogans such as “build back better” and “green recovery”.