Former oilman backs Extinction Rebellion campaign

“I’m looking at the world through their eyes,” he says. “I’m petrified at what they’ll be seeing at my age. Will they be looking at their grandchildren and wondering if they’re looking at the last generation on Earth?

“I look at my two-year-old granddaughter and her eyes are so bright. She’s just so up for life and I’m wondering, if I’m feeling like this, what is she going to be feeling like?”

Mr Rothnie believes his connection to the oil industry gives him a particular role to play in fighting the climate crisis.

“My role is to make sure people see the elephant in the room – the oil and gas industry,” he says. “Ninety per cent of the UK’s emissions come from it, but the UK industry have wheeled out the smoke and mirrors and their position is ‘it’s business as usual’. They’re going to extract every single drop.”

A former trade union activist, Mr Rothnie, from Glasgow, has a history of fighting the oil industry – not over climate change, but the way it treats its workers.

“My finest hour prior to now” he says, “was when I was the editor and founder of Blow Out magazine, which opened the door on the North Sea during the big strikes in 1989. But really my finest hour starts on Wednesday, in London, for me.” 

His knowledge of the industry and its processes informs his attitude to it.
“It helps when you’ve been to the Gulf of Mexico or to the Norwegian and European continental oil fields,” he says. “It helps if you know what a barrel of oil looks like. I’ve been there and it’s a real thing. I’ve fought the industry all my life. They don’t scare me. But it’s not going to be a pushover.” 

Mr Rothnie’s career began when he first went offshore in 1973 and ended in 2015, when he retired from the industry in Norway.
He admits he was long “in denial” of climate change as an issue, before Extinction Rebellion changed his outlook.

“Every time I saw an article with another polar bear stranded on a floating ice floe, I knew it wasn’t good,” he says. “I would hurriedly rush to the next page because it was disturbing reading. But it really wasn’t until Extinction Rebellion came on the scene that it hit home.”

Mr Rothnie recalls that, during his time in the industry, there was not much talk about the fate of the planet among his co-workers.

“People weren’t going, ‘We can’t keep producing this stuff, it’s killing the Earth’. There was none of that.” 

He also recalls the excitement of his early days in the industry.

“You can imagine as a young man in Aberdeen, 1973, I felt like a pioneer,”
he says. “I was going into this stunning industry and it got more stunning.
“Even now, I find it difficult to hold back the tears when I try to explain to people what it looks like if you take a helicopter flight through Statfjord, or Gullfaks or the Ekofisk field. It’s like science fiction.

“I always felt as if I was doing something important. Energy is important.”

But how does Mr Rothnie reconcile the fact it’s only now, after a lifetime of drawing a healthy wage from the industry, he is confronting its impact?

“Do you think I’m not slightly embarrassed to turn round now and say, ‘Listen guys, I got my pension, a lifetime of good wages, got my pension, but I’m afraid it’s time to pull the plug on this?’
“You can imagine the response I’m likely to get from many of today’s oil workers.”

Mr Rothnie also recalls his time organising to defend the coal mines.

He says: “What was the progressive position with regards to the miners? 
Just to let them get slaughtered and the communities destroyed? No, it was to defend coal mining.

“Did we know we were defending what would ultimately destroy the planet? No, we did not.”

He considers that one of the groups XR needs to get on board are the oil workers.

“They know they will get shafted when, eventually, the oil industry is forced to deal with this one,” he says. “The oil industry, without huge pressure, is not going to take any role in planning a fair transition to green energy.”