For Miatta Fahnbulleh, the tough decision is still to come.
When, during my interview with the Secretary of State for Energy Security in Aberdeen, I asked if Jackdaw signalled a more pragmatic shift toward North Sea licensing, she insisted nothing had changed.
Labour's 2024 manifesto pledge to ban new exploration licences remains intact, she maintained.
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The defence is largely a technicality. Jackdaw already had its licence, and the courts only threw out its consent because the original assessment ignored the climate impact of burning the gas once it was produced.
So, to the government, this is a technical re-approval within legal boundaries, not a policy retreat.
It is not, you will agree, a hugely convincing argument,
Labour under Andy Burnham has shifted, undoubtedly and undeniably, and the question now is what next?
First up is Rosebank. It's the UK's last major undeveloped oilfield, holding 300-500 million barrels, and it is majority-owned by the Shell/Equinor venture Adura. It would emit about seven times the carbon of Jackdaw.
I asked the minister when we could expect a decision. "We're moving as quickly as we can," she said. She added that the process had to be done properly because "the last government didn't do the process properly".
According to the Guardian, officials say she is minded to refuse it. She told the paper the case for Jackdaw does not apply, because that is a gasfield for the domestic market while Rosebank is an oilfield mainly for export.
Professor Paul De Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Robert Gordon University, thinks Jackdaw has shown the government how it could approve Rosebank, whatever the differences between the two.
He told me that ministers now have a process they can reuse. The legal fight forced them to count the emissions from burning the fuel, and Jackdaw has been the first test of that.
He says the same approach can be applied to anything else in the queue, which he thinks makes this a significant moment for how the UK takes these decisions.
He also sees the new £2 billion energy wealth fund as the other half of the package. His idea is fields plus a fund, with some of the revenue from the North Sea used to speed up the transition.
That is roughly what Norway does. It sells most of its oil and gas abroad, uses the money to build and green its economy, and puts the rest into its sovereign wealth fund. In his view, that gives ministers a way to package harder decisions to come.
On the export argument, De Leeuw thinks it is more complicated than it sounds. The UK once had 17 refineries, he says, and now has four.
Criticising Rosebank crude for being unrefinable domestically ignores that the country dismantled its own refining base. It's akin, he says, to taking someone's car away and asking why they can't drive to Dundee.
The result is that the UK relies heavily on imported fuel. He says it now imports more diesel than it produces.
Rosebank crude might need to be refined elsewhere, but he says having production in this part of the world still matters. He frames it as regional resilience. Only two countries in Europe, the UK and Norway, produce significant amounts of oil.
De Leeuw is most animated about the workforce. His institute has published two reports with the numbers, one for the UK and one for the North East. His reading is that oil and gas jobs are disappearing far faster than renewable ones are being created.
He says skills only transfer so far. Offshore workers can move into offshore wind, carbon capture or hydrogen, where the work is similar. But the government's 2030 target of 50 gigawatts of wind is, he says, nowhere close. So the supply chain and workforce have nowhere to go in the UK, and they will go where the contracts are, which is abroad.
"If you look at successful transitions, you build your transition on your existing capabilities."
His fear is that once that industrial capacity is gone, it won't come back.
He praises the government for the process but says the aim should be an integrated plan. If more renewables can keep the jobs here, he is happy. If not, he argues for a fallback.
"If we can't, let's make sure we keep the option out there to bridge it."
Jackdaw has so far been relatively politically easy. Labour whips are said to be pleased with how it has gone down.
Beyond a small group of backbenchers, there was little public disquiet.
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Unions and Scottish Labour MPs welcomed it. The Greens, the New Economics Foundation (Fahnbulleh's old thinktank) and climate campaigners did not.
Donald Trump hailed it as great news for Aberdeen and told the UK to go "FULL BLAST", which is probably the kind of endorsement ministers could do without.
Just think how pleased he'll be if ministers approve Rosebank.
In giving Jackdaw the green light, the Secretary of State has plucked the lowest-hanging fruit. The lowest hanging fruit wasn't, to be fair, that low, but now comes the real challenge.
Fahnbulleh told me she doesn’t “have the luxury of sitting on the fence”. With Rosebank, she's about to find out just how uncomfortable it is being on either side of it.