Scotland’s only petrol refinery, based on the Firth of Forth at Grangemouth, is scheduled to close in 2025. The closure is not a cause for celebration by climate campaigners, it will be replaced by a new refinery in Antwerp and 500 workers at the Grangemouth site will lose their jobs. The closure is in no sense part of a transition away from Fossil Fuels and even less is it part of a just transition.
The march assembling outside the Grangemouth stadium – image Pete Cannell CC0
The huge 1700 acre Grangemouth site is owned by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS. They bought the Grangemouth petrochemical plant and the refinery from BP in 2005. Then in 2014 the company raided the pension fund originally established by BP and in turn de-recognised the plant unions. The refinery part of the site is now run by Petroineos, a joint venture between INEOS and the Chinese state-owned oil and gas company PetroChina.
Unite, the main union at the refinery is leading a campaign to ‘Keep Grangemouth Working’. The union is calling for action to ‘Extend, Invest and Transition’. On 3August, they organised a march and rally starting from the Grangemouth stadium on the edge of the INEOS site. Around 600, including refinery workers and their families, and trade unionists from around Scotland and further afield marched to a rally held in a local park. There were a handful of climate activists.
At the rally Unite Scottish Regional Secretary Derek Thomson talked about how the union was campaigning locally to raise awareness of the impact that closure would have on jobs and the local economy. Unite believes that the new Labour Government may be able to persuade Ratcliffe to extend the life of the refinery. The Tories pledged to provide 700 million Euros in credit to support the development of the new Petroineos refinery in Antwerp and they think that if Labour were to question this it would provide leverage.
Grangemouth is a critical campaign for the climate movement. There are moments when decisions are made and actions taken, or not made and not taken, that then resonate through the movement and shape its future trajectory. If the Grangemouth refinery is closed it will be such a moment. In Scotland another such time was the failure to take the BiFab fabrication yards into public ownership in the autumn of 2017. The loss of 1400 jobs at BiFab offshore renewables technology yards discredited the idea that action over climate offers opportunities for employment. The closure of Grangemouth would be not just a blow to the workers, their families and the local economy, it would also send political shockwaves through the climate and workers movements.
On the march – image Pete Cannell CC0
At the rally on 3 August the speaker from Friends of the Earth Scotland received a great response from the Unite members in the crowd. It is important that the union and the Grangemouth workers see transition to a sustainable future as a positive goal. However, there is a real weakness in the current campaign. Unite’s strategy seems to be based on pressurising INEOS into extending the lifetime of the refinery. But there’s no evidence that Ratcliffe is interested in doing this or interested in planning for a sustainable transition. And it’s not that Grangemouth is unprofitable – simply that Antwerp would be more profitable. None of the speakers at the rally criticised INEOS. Implicitly or explicitly the focus was on partnership with the company.
At a time when all the indicators suggest that global heating is increasing faster than the most pessimistic predictions, companies like INEOS and BP are doubling down on investment in fossil fuels. They aim to make mega-profits while they can. In these circumstances, when action to decarbonise is overdue, working in partnership with big oil, while talking about the need for transition and social justice is simply greenwashing. It won’t save jobs, and it sets back progress towards transition.
So, what’s the alternative? Public ownership, and democratic planning that involves energy workers is essential. To build the mass campaign that could make this possible the unions and the climate movement need go beyond slogans.
The private sector is simply not capable of the kind of planning and coordination that is needed to save jobs and manage a just transition.
Convincing energy workers, winning hearts and minds and building the mass support for public ownership requires brutal clarity about what the oil and gas companies are doing. The profits they’ve made and continue to make, the huge subsidies they continue to attract and the way they expect us to clean up their mess. Grangemouth has been a site for petrochemicals for a hundred years. Without an enormously expensive cleanup the site is only suitable for industrial use.
Image Pete Cannell CC0
Partnership with INEOS is a dead end. The company has no loyalty or regard for the workers or the local population. There’s no guarantee if the refinery closes in 2025 that the rest of the operations on the site will continue much longer, and with it, the loss of over 2,500 jobs. Ratcliffe expects us to pay the huge cost of cleaning up the site. And the residents of Grangemouth having lived with the stink and pollution of the plant for decades will remain with a toxic legacy.
But to win hearts and minds and build the campaign there also needs to be a plan for change. The vast site at Grangemouth could become a hub for a wide range of renewable technologies. There’s room to establish new facilities, there’s good communications by land and via the Firth of Forth and there is an established workforce and a cluster of further and higher education institutions in the region that could support the development of a new low carbon economy.
The nature of the plan matters. At the Grangemouth rally – ex-MP and deputy leader of the Alba Party, Kenny MacAskill argued that Grangemouth could prosper through the development of green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. But these are the solutions that are promoted by Offshore Energy UK, the organisation that represents the interests of the UK oil and gas sector. Both technologies may have some use in the future but the industry focus on them right now is aimed at maintaining oil and gas production, and the infrastructure and systems that support it, for as long as possible. Opportunities for rapid progress lie in Wind, Solar, Wave and Tidal technologies together with energy storage and a new smart distribution grid. Ending partnership between unions and big oil also requires a new and critical view of what technologies support jobs and employment and support rapid decarbonisation and a break from the fake self-serving solutions that are advanced by the oil and gas industry. Which technologies are prioritised is not simply a technical choice but also highly political.
There will be a protest outside the SSE AGM in opposition to the company’s disastrous plans for a new gas burning power station in Peterhead.
SSE already owns the existing power station in Peterhead, which is Scotland’s biggest polluter. A new plant will lock people in Scotland into reliance on expensive and polluting gas for decades – well past the Scottish Government’s 2045 net zero target.
SSE’s Annual General Meeting is for the company to celebrate their huge profits and their expansion plans.
We want to make sure that their bosses and shareholders know that people are not happy about their plans for new fossil fuel infrastructure, so we will be holding a demonstration outside the Concert Hall venue. It will be a family friendly protest, and everyone is welcome!
Here are some train times that will get you in by train if you’re coming from: Aberdeen – 9.44 train gets into Perth at 11.15am Glasgow – 10.07 train gets into Perth at 11.11am Edinburgh – 9.39 train gets into Perth at 11.06am Dundee – 10.55 train gets into Perth at 11.15am
Thanks to Friends of the Earth Scotland for this information
We’re pleased to be able repost this from South Lakes Against Climate Change. The campaign against the West Cumbria coal mine had been fighting for the last decade. The case for the mine has been in tatters for a long time.
Protest at the site of the proposed mine – image by Pete Cannell CC0
The Secretary of State (SoS) of Levelling Up Housing and Communities (LUHC) has accepted that there was an “error in Law” in the previous decision to grant planning permission for the mine. The Government will therefore not be defending the decision, made in December 2022, to grant planning permission for the new mine, and will argue that it should be quashed.
In a reasoned and careful “Statement of Reasons” the SoS explains that the re-assessment is the result of the Supreme Court’s recent judgement on the “Finch v Surrey County Council” case. It is now clear that the combustion emissions, i.e. from the use of the Cumbrian coal, should have been assessed as an indirect effect of the new extraction in the Environmental Impact Assessment.
If that is agreed by the Court, the planning application goes back to the SoS to make a fresh decision.
This is HUGE news. We don’t know what West Cumbria Mining will do, but we are pretty sure that the Hearing of our legal challenges will open on the 16th July as scheduled. Only the Court can quash the planning consent, and that is what we are hoping for.
On 4 July, the climate-trashing Tory government will be replaced, as good as certainly by Keir Starmer’s “changed” Labour party.
For all its talk of “green prosperity”, Labour plans to work closely with the corporations that profit from North Sea oil and gas and from generating electricity – and who intend to produce, and use, fossil fuels for as long as they can.
A protest at government offices against the Rosebank oil field project, January 2023. Photo by Steve Eason
Labour’s plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from homes and cars are hopelessly timid, because of its conviction that private business does it best.
Under Labour, we will in my view make progress against social injustice and climate change only insofar as social movements and the labour movement:
(i) confront and confound the government, and
(ii) show that action on climate change, far from costing ordinary people money as the extreme right claim, is 100% compatible with combating social inequalities.
In this article I try to identify the likely battlegrounds between our movements and a Starmer-led Labour government:
Fossil fuel production and the path away from it (part 1); electricity generation at national (part 2) and local (part 3) levels; avoiding false technofixes (part 4); and changing the way energy is used in homes and transport (part 5). Part 6 is about bringing these separate, but connected, issues together.
1. Transition away from fossil fuel production on the North Sea
The election-time slanging match about the North Sea’s future has featured politicians’ and union leaders’ cynicism at its worst. In opposition to this, our movement needs serious conversation about how to fight for working people’s livelihoods and run down oil and gas production simultaneously.
The political war of words has focused on Labour’s commitment not to issue new licences to explore for oil and gas in the North Sea.
The Scottish National Party, which fears losing parliamentary seats to Labour, has lashed out with a claim – shown by BBC Verify to be false – that this would cost “100,000 jobs”. This is “a clear about-face” from the SNP, which last year “committed to a built-in bias against granting new licences”, the Politico web site reported.
“Exaggeration and misinformation helps no-one”, given the urgent need for “a clear-eyed conversation about how to ensure that Scottish workers benefit from the transition away from oil and gas”, Tessa Khan of the climate advocacy group Uplift said.
But exaggeration and misinformation is exactly what leaders of the Unite union, which represents many North Sea workers, contributed. They withheld support for Labour’s manifesto, because of its North Sea policy (as well as for much better reasons, such as its employment policies) and endorsed SNP leader John Swinney’s nonsense.
Unite leader Sharon Graham suggests that a ban on oil and gas licences is the main threat to North Sea jobs. That is not true. It usually takes more than ten years from licence issue for a field to start production, so there is only a very indirect connection. In recent years oil corporations’ decisions to slim down their North Sea operations has posed a far more immediate threat.
If Labour reverses its ban on new licences, the only beneficiaries will be those corporations – while the planetary disaster threatened by climate change would come one step closer, as the heads of the UN and International Energy Agency have pointed out. Indeed there is a powerful case for scrapping the already-granted licence for the giant Rosebank field.
Unite says it wants to “see the money and the plan” for the transition away from oil and gas. But as its leaders well know, plans already exist.
The Sea Change report, published five years ago, showed how the North Sea workforce could expand, with investment in wind power and other renewables. The oil companies and Tory government have other ideas, set out in the North Sea Transition Deal – which proposes spending £15 billion on their pet technofixes, carbon capture and hydrogen. (See also part 4 below.)
The Green New Deal Rising group disrupted an event sponsored by oil industry lobbyists at the Labour party conference in October last year. Photo by Jess Hurd
Unite, along with other unions, accepts these false solutions, and calls for investment in hydrogen and carbon capture, as well as wind power.
Perhaps we should be talking about “rupture, rather than transition”, he said, to make gains for social justice and tackling climate change. This starts with uniting oil workers and Scottish working-class communitiesmore broadly. This is the conversation we urgently need.
At a recent gathering of trade unionists concerned with climate policy, Pete Cannell of the campaign group Scot E3 argued that, given the dominance of this technofix narrative, “it’s legitimate to ask whether ‘just transition’ is any longer the right framing”.
2. Public ownership in the electricity system
Labour will set up a “publicly-owned clean power company”, GB Energy, paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas producers. But GB Energy will own few, if any, electricity generation assets and will focus on partnerships with private capital. Labour also plans to leave the electricity transmission and distribution grids in private hands, and to leave largely unchanged the neoliberal electricity market rules that allowed corporations to reap billions by impoverishing households in the 2022 “energy crisis”.
Labour intends to capitalise GB Energy with £8.3 billion over the next five years: £3.3 billion for a potentially useful Local Power Plan (see part 3 below), and £5 billion to “co-invest in new technologies” including floating offshore wind and hydrogen, and “scale and accelerate mature technologies” including wind, solar and nuclear.
Labour’s loud claim that GB Energy will “lower [electricity] bills because renewables are cheaper than gas” is not credible. This would require, at least, an investment far greater than £5 billion, allied to a root-and-branch overhaul of electricity markets.
More likely, GB Energy will, at best, fund new technologies that financial markets prefer not to risk their own money on – or even follow in the footsteps of Tony Blair’s disastrous Private Finance Initiative, with which corporations milked billions from the NHS. The Guardian, apparently briefed by Keir Starmer’s team, reported that GB Energy will probably start with “investments alongside established private sector companies”, including the chronically over-budget Hinkley Point, Sizewell C and Wylfa nuclear projects.
The Greens and others slammed Starmer, when he finally clarified on 31 May that GB Energy will essentially be an investment vehicle. But a trenchant critique had already been published last year: Unite’s Unplugging Energy Profiteers report, which warned that “unless combined with a public purchasing monopoly, or significant market reform intervention, [GB Energy] will have no impact on distorted pricing in the wholesale market”, and “by concentrating very limited resources on de-risking experimental forms of generation, GB Energy will use public resources to underwrite and further increase future potential profits for the private sector”.
Unite, and the Trades Union Congress, call for public ownership to be extended not only in electricity generation, but also in the supplybusiness and in transmission and distribution networks. Labour madesimilar calls in 2019, but has now ditched them.
Underinvestment in these networks is a scandal as damaging as the water companies’ rip-off: tens of billions of pounds’ worth of network upgrades are needed to facilitate renewable generation and close the gap on missed climate targets.
The National Grid’s Nechells electricity substation near Birmingham
Already, there are 10+year queues for renewables to be connected to the grid; house-builders are fitting climate-trashing gas boilers because they can not access electricity for heat pumps; battery storage lies unusedbecause companies’ computer systems are out of date … all while distribution networks paid out £3.6 billion in dividends to shareholders in 2017-21.
The system is in such a state that even Rishi Sunak’s dysfunctional government took regulatory powers away from National Grid and put them in the Future System Operator. Nick Winser, the electricity network commissioner, warned the government that unchanged, the system would leave “clean, cheap domestic energy generation standing idle, potentially for years”. “Very few new transmission circuits have been built in the last 30 years”, he said: unless jolted, companies could take up to 14 years to build them.
To make the electricity network fit for the transition away from fossil fuels, wider public ownership is crucial. Our movement needs to work out how to coordinate the fight for it.
3. Community energy and decentralised renewables
Labour promises to spend £3.3 billion on a Local Power Plan, under which GB Energy will “partner with energy companies, local authorities and cooperatives to develop up to 8GW of cheaper, cleaner power by 2030”. Up to 20,000 renewable projects will return “a proportion” of their profits back to communities. But “the detail on these plans is sparse”, the New Statesman reported – and so it is surely up to community organisations and the labour movement to discuss effective ways this money could be spent.
Until now, central government has been a wrecking ball for community energy. In 2015, it changed planning rules, effectively blocking onshore wind projects. In 2019, it scrapped the feed-in tariff paid for electricity supplied to the grid from small-scale renewables. And for years – as decentralised renewables technology leaped forward internationally – it ignored calls to overhaul market rules. Small renewables projects were locked out of the grid by the need for a £1 million + licence, and other obstructions.
The Green New Deal all-party parliamentary group last year called for the regulatory system to be turned upside down, to end its bias in favour of the “big five” generators. It proposed a “European style ‘right of local supply’”; changes to rules on planning and public procurement; mandatory transparency of grid data; and other measures.
Such changes would make it possible to replicate the success of Energy Local in Bethesda, north Wales, which supplies locally-produced hydro power to households at below-grid prices. In April, the Common Wealth think tank proposed a “public-commons partnership” as the institutional form under which local authorities could develop such projects.
All this will take a fight, though. Otherwise, electricity corporates will spread their tentacles into decentralised renewables, as they are doing in the US and Australia.
Furthermore, we need to overcome the official labour movement’s residual reluctance to support community energy projects. The TUC’s recent renewables policy paper, which lists offshore wind, wave, nuclear and “zero carbon hydrogen” (?) as energy technologies – but not decentralised wind and solar – is, unfortunately, indicative.
Decentralised renewables, developed with cooperative, community and local authority forms of ownership and governance, can help to break corporate control of electricity provision, and open the way to democratise and decommodify it.
4. Opposing false technological solutions
False technofixes, including hydrogen and carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) feature prominently in Labour’s election manifesto – the outcome of lobbying by the oil industry, for which they comprise a survival strategy. Nuclear power – expensive, dangerous, and beloved of the military – is there too, grabbing funds from proven, socially useful technologies such as home insulation, public transport and decentralised renewable power.
While the case against nuclear has been made, and the false logic of CCUS exposed, over decades, the drive for hydrogen is more recent: it is the oil companies’ alternative to electricity-centred decarbonisation. Energy systems researchers argue that, while hydrogen may be needed in future e.g. for steelmaking or energy storage, it will never be suitable for home heating, and hardly ever for transport.
Demonstration by HyNot, which opposes hydrogen for home heating, at the Green Expo UK in Cheshire, last week. Photo from HyNot twitter feed
The Tory government has invested heavily in hydrogen, and the 2023 Energy Act provided a framework for its commercial development. But attempts to bribe communities into testing it out for home heating have hit setbacks. A planned test at Whitby, Merseyside, was cancelled last year after vigorous opposition by local residents and the HyNot campaign group. This year a second planned test at Redcar, Yorkshire, and a thirdone in Fife, Scotland, were both postponed.
Catherine Green Watson of HyNot said: “These postponements are great progress for our campaign. But on Merseyside we still have strong local political support for hydrogen in industry, which should not be the priority. Instead, we need to concentrate on upgrading the electricity grid.”
We need a discussion in the labour movement and social movements about the social role of these technologies. We could work towards unity around the principle that they should not receive state funding that could go to quicker, more effective decarbonisation paths.
5. Energy use in our homes and transport
Labour has scaled back its promises to invest in its Warm Homes Plan that will fund grants and low-interest loans for insulating homes and replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. Shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband last year talked about “up to £6 billion a year”; by the time Labour’s manifesto was published last week, this had shrunk to “an additional £6.6 billion over the course of the next parliament” (that is, over five years). Talk of upgrading 19 million homes had stopped; now it’s 5 million.
Labour has stuck with commitments to take railways back into public ownership, and to support municipal ownership and franchising of bus services. But it is also promising to “forge ahead with new roads”, and keep the transport system centred on private cars, at a time when researchers argue that this cuts dangerously across tackling climate change.
If Labour sticks to this course, determined by its neoliberal fiscal rules and by corporate lobbying, then key opportunities to cut UK carbon emissions, while improving people’s lives, will be missed. Researchers have been screaming for years that insulation and heat pumps, and superceding the car-centred transport system with better, cheaper public transport, are desperately needed to decarbonise homes and transport, the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
Battles on effective energy conservation in homes, transport and throughout the economy are part of the war to limit climate change.
Labour’s commitments are too timid to reverse the disasters caused by Tory policies. In the decade from 2012, annual completions of home insulation upgrades fell by nine tenths. The measures announced by government last year would take 190 years to improve the energy efficiency of the UK housing stock and 300 years to hit the government’s own targets for reducing fuel poverty, National Energy Action stated.
As for roads, the government could cancel the £10 billion Lower Thames Crossing scheme, final approval of which has been delayed until October, and apply to all future projects the principle adopted by the Welsh government – that they can only go ahead if compatible with climate policy.
Labour may not only fail to deal with these gigantic sources of carbon emissions, but actually open up new ones. A grim example is Labour’s threat to overrule communities who question tech corporations who want to build fuel-guzzling data centres – which will help trash climate targets, to the benefit of those corporations alone.
6. Bringing the issues together
The stakes are high. Every new assessment by climate scientists underlines the conclusion reached by leading British researchers four years ago: that the UK’s decarbonisation targets are half as stringent as they need to be, to make a fair contribution to tackling global heating. The government’s own climate change committee says non-power sectors of the economy need to decarbonise four times faster than they are doing.
Tackling climate change, while reversing the effects of 14 years of neoliberal austerity policies, will not be easy. Indeed, Labour does not intend to: both decarbonisation and social policy will be subordinated to their fiscal rules.
The labour movement and social movements need to challenge and push back Labour’s pro-fossil-fuel, pro-austerity approach.
We need to unite our forces and find the pressure points – be it saying “no”, to the Lower Thames Crossing project and similar, or finding openings for collective action, e.g. in the Local Power and Warm Homes plans.
To act effectively on climate, we need to keep in mind the necessity of holistic solutions, and reject illusory technofixes and greenwash narratives that claim to reduce emissions with one hand, and pour them into the atmosphere with the other. SP, 18 June 2024.
This article was first published on the People and Nature site. Republished here with thanks.
We were invited to contribute to a workshop on fossil fuels and developing a workers’ plan for just transition held in London on 13 April 2024 by the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group. This is a summary of the contribution made by Pete Cannell – responses to this piece would be very welcome.
Dundee Harbour – image by Pete Cannell CC0
The previous speakers have talked about some of the very important practical issues that are central to enabling a transition to a sustainable zero carbon economy. There’s plenty of evidence to show that phasing out oil and gas combined with serious investment in renewables creates more jobs. The Sea Change report, published in 2019, shows how switching from oil and gas to wind and solar would create a big net increase in jobs and how failing to make this transition would mean that targets to cut carbon emissions would not be met.
Similarly, home insulation, retrofitting and replacing gas with electricity for heating and cooking is essential, but critically dependent on a skilled workforce.
This workshop is framed around developing a workers plan for just transition. I would argue that the main elements of such a plan are in place. That being the case in the rest of this contribution I’d like to talk about why there’s not yet a simple consensus about a plan. Having a plan is clearly necessary, and critical to being credible in the eyes of working people who are not yet convinced.
In one sense we’ve made serious progress in the last five or so years, it’s now common sense in the climate movement to talk about the role of workers and the need for a just transition. I think in this respect COP26 in Glasgow was a watershed moment. But ironically in practical terms, in terms of action I think we’ve gone backwards in the same period. So, for example, the number of workers in renewables in Scotland is about the same now as it was in 2014. In the eyes of many workers talk of just transition looks like hot air. And in the hands of right-wing populist politicians, it fuels arguments that the climate crisis is not a problem and climate action is a threat. So, there’s a real danger that repetition of just transition, in the absence tangible steps that improve lives and livelihoods, becomes a form of greenwashing.
So, while we need consensus on what to do for me the 64,000-dollar question is
How do we build a mass movement with powerful roots in every workplace and working-class community that has the power to make the necessary changes happen?
I think the climate movement often underestimates the extent to which commitment to the North Sea and to the interests of the big oil and gas companies shapes and directs climate policy. Westminster, Holyrood, the energy sector trade unions and the oil and gas industry work in partnership through what used to be called Oil and Gas UK and has now been rebranded as Offshore Energies UK. They are all signed up to the North Sea Transition Deal and it essentially guides their actions. So, for example it’s hard to find a serious analyst who things hydrogen for domestic heating and cooking makes sense but using hydrogen in this way remains a key plank of policy for both Westminster and Holyrood. And while it does other options are not pursued. Why? Because hydrogen together with Carbon Capture and Storage is the best option for Fossil Capital that wants to maintain existing market dominance, infrastructure and (not least) profits.
For more than fifty years the big oil and gas companies have used their operations in the UK sector of the North Sea to blaze a trail for what we have come to know as neoliberalism; establishing practices that have been copied and taken up internationally. Outsourcing, multiple layers of subcontracting, vicious anti-union policies and the use of blacklists. At the same time the so-called free ‘market’ has been featherbedded by massive state subsidies which have exceeded taxation revenue.
In the old saying – if we had a choice – we wouldn’t start from here. All the evidence is that we are just going past the 1.5degree threshold and the scientific evidence is that change is taking place more rapidly than anticipated. This while the Scottish government which has been strong on rhetoric but feebly reliant on the market for action is judged to be a long way for reaching its targets and Westminster gives the green light for maintaining oil and gas production. And the most important unions remain wedded to a policy of partnership with the energy industry. To answer my earlier question, that partnership, is why we don’t have consensus about a plan. It’s the partnership that pulls in Unite, RMT and GMB behind CCS, Hydrogen and Nuclear.
In this context I think it’s legitimate to ask whether just transition is any longer the right framing for what we want or need.
We need to be clear about what we want to happen and largely that thinking is in place. But to make it happen – perhaps what we should now be talking about is rupture rather than transition. And the power to make that rupture resides within the working class.
North Sea workers are key, but the oil industry has been successful at keeping their organisation fractured and largely ineffective. I think it’s most likely that oil workers will become active participants in the rupture we need only if the mass movement we need is built across all sectors and in working class communities.
And if we are to win that mass participation then there’s no place for partnership with Fossil capital – and that means some very sharp arguments within our movement.
Hilary Horrocks reports from Florence where sacked GKN workers continue to fight to keep their workplace open under public ownership and workers’s control.
Five thousand supporters joined a march in Campi Bisenzio, near Florence, on Saturday evening (6 April 2024), organised by the sacked workers at the huge GKN factory who have been fighting for two-and-a-half years to keep their workplace open under public ownership and workers’ control Their campaign has argued, with the participation of academic researchers, for a just transition towards the production of socially useful items such as cargo bikes and solar panels, vital in the battle to save the climate. The dispute and the occupation of the factory continues, since an Italian labour court ruled against the final attempt to dismiss the 400 GKN employees just before the deadline of 1 January this year, but the workers are not receiving any wages.
Shop stewards from the ex-GKN workers’ collective at Campi Bisenzio, Florence, leading 5,000 marchers in the latest demonstration of support. The large banner bears their slogan, Insorgiamo (Let Us Rise Up)Image by Hilary Horrocks
The demonstration at the weekend was called by the Collective in response to the cutting off of electricity to the plant by management stooges, part of a campaign of intimidation against a Festival of Working Class Literature held outside the factory at the weekend. But the Festival – attended by thousands of predominantly young people, went ahead, with impressive sessions by committed speakers on working-class writing internationally.
The Collective is appealing for financial support and for subscriptions to a co-operative ownership scheme for the factory.
The video is a recording of a Climate Justice Coalition webinar on the GKN worker’s struggle.
Climate campaigners from Extinction Rebellion Scotland, Divest Lothian and Global Justice Now Scotland danced (and leafleted) outside the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association Conference at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre on 28th February to highlight the flawed climate risk models used by pension funds and to call on the funds to stop investing in fossil fuels.
Despite increasingly stark warnings from climate scientists, oil majors continue to uinvest far more in fossil fuel expansion than in renewables.
For example, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) is being developed by TotalEnergies to run for 1444km across Uganda and Tanzania. It will transport oil for export to the global north that will release 34 million metric tons of CO2 each year.
Many. UK pension funds including the University Superannuation Scheme, West Midlands Pension Fund and Lothian Pension Fund invest in TotalEnergies. However, the tide is turning. PFZW is the third largest pension fund in Europe. On February 24th it announced that has completed a two-year programme during which, 310 oil and gas companies that do not comply with the Paris Climate Agreement have been sold (including Shell, BP and TotalEnergies). It plans to significantly increase investments in companies focused on the energy transition.
Thanks to Divest Lothian for information and some of the text.
They are due to announce their decision on Friday 15 March. GGM is doing everything they can to ramp up the pressure on SPT Board members before then, including delivering the petition to them on Friday 23 February, 9:30am ahead of their Board meeting.
Pete Cannell from ScotE3 was invited to introduce a discussion on Fossil Fuels and Right-Wing Populism at a recent meeting of Dumfries TUC. This is a slightly edited version of his talk.
This post explores the way in which right wing populist parties use climate denial as a key part of their agenda. In thinking about the topic, I found Andreas Malm’s excellent book ‘White Skin – Black Fuel on the danger of Fossil Fascism’ very helpful. Early on in the book, Malm notes that:
“All European far-right parties of political significance in the early twenty-first century expressed climate denial.”
The book weas written 3 years ago but it’s hard to think of more recent exceptions. So, there’s definitely something to be explained here.
Clearly climate denial didn’t start with the rise of right-wing populism. From the 1970’s onwards the major oil and gas companies, particularly Exxon, were researching the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the environment and at the same time funding organisations like the Global Climate Coalition in the US whose role was to argue that pushing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere was not a problem. Privately they knew from early on that fossil fuel extraction would have a devastating effect on the global climate. In 1995 the GCC in an internal document wrote that
“the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied”
but in public they denied it.
As a strategy outright denial had its limitations. The Kyoto protocol signed in 1997 marked the beginning of a new strategy – a shift from denial to greenwashing.
The three core tenets of Kyoto are:
Postpone the showdown with Fossil Fuels into distant future.
Place no serious limits on fossil fuel extraction.
New opportunities for generating profit.
In the UK, the industry’s plans for the North Sea are a good example of postponing any showdown with fossil fuels. The strategy is based on continuing extraction through to and beyond 2050 and the development of a so-called net zero oil and gas basin. Here net zero depends on heroic assumptions about techno-fixes such as carbon capture and storage combined with creative accountancy that ascribes all responsibility for the carbon in the oil and gas that’s produced to the users. Globally there are virtually no regulatory limits on the production of fossil fuels. It’s assumed that any run down will be as a result of market forces. At the same time trading carbon permits has been highly profitable in financial terms and has allowed the industry to claim that the trade contributes to reducing carbon emissions. There is next to no evidence that carbon trading and offsetting has reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
So as far as big business goes, we are still in the era of greenwashing. Big oil and gas are at pains to argue that they want to protect the planet. And almost all governments around the world are in lockstep with fossil fuel industry in this strategy. Practically, depending on local circumstances the form that greenwashing takes varies, but everywhere it’s about maintaining or enhancing the profitability of fossil capital and preserving the existing infrastructure. So, in the UK for example hydrogen is touted as the answer to domestic cooking and heating. In the short to medium term this would probably mean higher carbon emissions than the existing use of natural gas and if ultimately the hydrogen was all green, i.e. produced by electrolysis it would be fantastically inefficient. Requiring the use of up to seven times as much electricity than would be required to simply electrify cooking and heating. But it’s attractive to the industry because it enables the continuation of existing economic and technical infrastructure.
The result of all this is that investment is skewed away from forms of energy use and production that are sustainable and rapidly achievable – and rather than supporting a just transition for workers and communities existing inequalities are maintained and ramped up. The ongoing cost of living crisis in which poor consumers of gas and electricity contribute to eye watering profits for energy producers and distributors is a case in point.
And it’s this that has provided fertile ground for right wing populist parties.
Five decades of neo-liberalism has syphoned money and resources from public to private and increased inequality everywhere so that working class people are anxious or scared about climate, cost of living, war, housing, growing old – in a world where the belief that their parents or grandparents had that things would be better for the next generation is dead. Most people don’t trust established politicians – established parties offer variations on the same neo-liberal agenda. Into this vacuum has stepped forms of right-wing populism that purport to offer alternatives to the ‘establishment’.
Right wing populism takes different forms – sometimes taking over long-established parties – Trump and the Republican Party in the US. Or in the UK the continuing rise of right-wing populists as a major, perhaps majority faction within the Tory party. Sometimes emerging from explicitly fascist formations, for example, Le Pen in France or Meloni in Italy. And sometimes completely new organisations, for example the AfD in Germany. None of them are into Greenwashing. They are all about Climate Denial.
In Spain a prominent member of right wing populist party Vox explains climate change as
“any change on the sun, the moon, the rotation of the earth, volcanoes and naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena but absolutely not on CO2 emitted by humans. It would, said Abascal, be ‘very arrogant’ to believe that humans could alter the climate. It would be ‘even more arrogant’ to think that the alteration could be rectified by ‘coercive laws and taxes’.”
The AfD in Germany has increased its influence through organising around climate issues, demonising perhaps the biggest climate movement around the world, foregrounding the cost-of-living crisis and agitating around the farmers protests. Often supported and facilitated in this by the state and the police.
It’s obviously not just climate that is building the new far right. Climate issues intersect with the legacy of neo-liberalism, migration and racism and the failure of the left to provide an alternative that speaks to working people’s insecurity and against individualistic solutions. The far-right populists feed off social media fuelled confusion and conspiracies. Very often angry or frightened people looking for answers find them in apparently anti-establishment and authoritative voices online.
So, what’s to be done. I think we can see the embryo of an alternative in the picket lines and in the huge response to the ongoing horror in Gaza. It’s struck me standing on UCU picket lines last year, and then again in the last few months picketing and leafleting outside the Leonardo arms factory in Edinburgh, how many of the passing drivers beep their horns and wave. Early in the morning many of them are white van drivers, very few of them will be in a union. There’s are real possibility of breaking the rise of the populist right. But if I’m right about why they’ve been able to build on climate I think part of what a revitalised left has to do is set it’s face firmly against partnership with fossil capital and clearly against solutions like CCS for continuing oil and gas production and hydrogen for domestic heating that preserve the power of fossil capital. And that means for example that UNITE, RMT and GMB need to stop supporting the oil and gas industry’s North Sea transition deal.
GKN: Rank and file trade union delegation to Florence, are you interested?
Reel News are planning a rank and file trade union delegation from the UK to visit the GKN factory in Florence; not just to show solidarity to this important struggle, but also to spread the workers’ visionary ideas back here. And with thousands of jobs under threat at Port Talbot steel works (of which more below), and Grangemouth oil refinery due to close in 2025 with the loss of another 400 jobs, we can all learn a lot from what’s happening at GKN.
Many of us have been warning for years that if we don’t start planning a just transition away from fossil fuel production, it’ll be imposed on us – and thousands of workers will be thrown on the scrapheap. Now that’s starting to happen, it’s never been more urgent to fight for the alternative: a green future that would create literally millions of jobs globally as well as saving the ones currently under threat.
We’re still waiting to hear back from the GKN workers when would be a good time to visit, but at the moment we’re thinking maybe mid April, depending on how things develop. We want to time the visit for either a big mobilisation/demonstration, and/or if they actually start production under workers control. So the timing might well change. But for the moment, get in touch at info@reelnews.co.uk if someone from your workplace is interested in coming – and especially if you want to help with organising the trip too.
Obviously we’re looking at taking workers directly involved in fossil fuel industries, but every sector needs to make plans for a just transition (click here for a film detailing ideas that came out of a union workshop on a just transition for the hospitality sector for example), so please get in touch if you’re interested wherever you work.
The bosses have now agreed to delay the sackings until at least June 2024, after a NYE party packed out the factory with 7,000 people; and in the past month they’ve DOUBLED the money raised in popular shares to over 600,000 euros.
So now the workers have extended the share scheme until June – and are now very confident they can raise the full million euros. So if your trade union branch, organisation, or even a group of friends want to support this visionary project, there’s still plenty of time. Share packages start from 500 euros.
You can find details of how to take part here, and see the end of the video for more ways you can help. As the workers say, they can’t create an alternative model to capitalist fossil fuel production in just one factory – but they can create an example of what is possible.
Employment, Energy and Environment 