Yesterday’s newspapers were awash with headlines about Ed Miliband planning to close the North Sea. I do not want to make comments on politics as such, but I do want to apply some Popperian rational criticism to the statements that have been made.

What the Government has set out plans to do is to prevent new drilling for oil and gas. Existing platforms will continue to produce oil and gas for as long as it is there to extract, which is more or less for ever if you believe some people and not very long at all if you believe geologists.

The data on fossil fuel reserves in the North Sea are publicly available. I have described them elsewhere. Whether or not you think the Government is right to ban new drilling, the North Sea is still open for business and its resources will continue to be needed until the UK’s transition to being fully powered by renewables is completed.

The economic consequences of this decision are not the ones that the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail are hysterical about. There is very little oil and gas left in the North Sea, and most of the oil produced there is exported, because ever since Margaret Thatcher privatised BP 47 years ago, North Sea oil has been in the hands of private companies. The economic value to the UK of the unexploited reserves in the North Sea is now small – as much as anything because the extraction costs of the remaining reserves are high, meaning they increasingly lookalike poor investments to fossil fuel producers – and because their capacity to meet our energy needs is strictly limited.

However, if we continue to remain addicted to fossil fuels, chasing the last cubic metre of gas around the North Sea like a crackhead hunting for a dime bag in the gutter, we will be ripe for exploitation by the new dealers on the block, the exporters of liquified natural gas, who like Gustavo Fring reck nothing of the death and destruction they will ultimately cause, viewing us as merely a convenient means to increase their wealth.