Climate activist and ex-offshore worker Neil Rothnie has written this letter to climate justice activists and organisations in Glasgow. It has already attracted some interesting and positive responses. As ScotE3 we’d like to share the letter across Scotland at the beginning of the new year. The letter raises important issues and we’d welcome your thoughts and responses. You can email ScotE3 directly via the contact form – and if you would like to contact Neil use the form and we’ll pass your message on.
The climate justice movement shares a common enemy with striking workers, and with those in our communities facing cold and hunger this winter due to energy price gouging,
A quick look at BP, Total, Shell and Equinor’s profits for the first 3 quarters of this year certainly suggests that it’s inflation, caused largely by the profiteering of North Sea gas producers, that’s driving the strike wave and the cost of living crisis.
Is this not why the climate justice movement should be on every picket line, offering our moral and practical support to striking workers?
Energy price inflation, caused by North Sea gas profiteering, is also set to drive many thousands of people into having to organise against cold and hunger and debt this winter.
Should then the climate justice movement not be thinking about how to help to organise locally, to ensure that everyone has access to warmth and food as the crisis bites?
We don’t need to be endlessly pushing the climate science. The people being forced into struggle today are not contemplating the end of the world, they’re trying to get to the end of the month, warm and fed and without more debt. If they want to know why the climate justice movement is on their side they’ll ask, and then we can tell them why.
The point is surely not just to understand the role of fossil fuels in climate change, but to end the oil and gas industry’s stranglehold on energy production, their profiteering, and the misery this is causing
What then are the slogans that we should take to the picket lines on our placards, and into the communities on posters, to expose the role of the North Sea gas profiteers?
How can we collaborate to encourage grass roots organisation, and resistance to the cold and hunger that North Sea gas profiteering promises?
Employment, Energy and Environment 
Dear Scote3, I’m super keen to talk to you about solutions to this awful crisis. We need a revolution in retrofit and community-owned energy. I’ll reach out to you soon to discuss. I’m very keen on getting hold of independent academic research and evidence base on the root causes of the energy market failure. You have clearly laid out some of those and my knowledge and experience tells me you are correct. And then it would be good to counter this bad news with the evidence for mass energy efficiency retrofit, coupled with community-owned and cheaper energy generation from renewables and storage – as we have witnessed in the 1900+ energy coops across Europe. We have set up a miniature social enterprise version in my home town of Linlithgow called “Linlith-Go-Solar” and are really keen to scale up but have no access to development resources like so many other communities. The Holy Grail! We are talking to Community Energy Scotland, Local Energy Scotland, SPEN and others about bringing in support. It would be great to hook up.
Neil Barnes
energy@trust-linlithgow.org.uk
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