Employment, Energy and Environment

The Climate Contradictions of Gary Smith

Paul Atkin replies to an interview with the GMB union’s General Secretary Gary Smith in the Spectator.

In agreeing to be interviewed by the Spectator under the title “the folly of Net Zero” GMB General Secretary Gary Smith lets his members down; not least because remarks like these from a leading trade unionist help give Rishi Sunak encouragement to accelerate his retreat from the government’s already inadequate climate targets.

The phrase “the folly of Net Zero” makes as much sense as “the folly of getting into the lifeboats when the ship is sinking”.

Difficulties in making a transition to sustainability does not mean that making it isn’t essential, and the faster we move the less damage is done. We can see that damage all around us even now.

Gary doesn’t seem to get this, any more than Rishi Sunak does, and he latches on to some of the same lines as the PM does, albeit with a more pungent turn of phrase. To go through these point by point, quotes are either directly from Gary Smith or the Spectator.

Auctions for offshore wind power

“Now there will be no bids for the next round of licences because the wind industry can’t afford to put up the projects”

The article starts with an odd bit of misdirection, that echoes the entire right-wing press, on the results of the latest round Contracts for Difference auction for new electricity generation. This focusses on the absence of offshore wind bids at the strike price of £44 per Megawatt hour. The way the Spectator puts it is “The government and the renewables lobby hoped that a successful auction would show that wind power could compete with fossil fuels”. The fact is that it already does. There were no bids from fossil fuel sources at this price either; and the successful bids were all from renewable sources.

24 onshore wind projects
1 Remote Island wind project
56 Solar projects
3 Geothermal projects
11 Tidal stream projects.

These are slated to produce 3.7GW of power. So, renewables 95: Fossil Fuels 0. It’s quite clear which source is heading for the relegation zone. And the International Energy Agency has just reported that electricity generation from fossil fuel sources declined by 7.4% in the whole OECD in the year to September, so this is happening in every developed country.

Starmer’s 2030 net-zero carbon electricity deadline

“Starmer’s 2030 deadline is impossible, I don’t even worry about it”

With 5GW of potential offshore wind projects not coming online, due to rising raw material and interest rate charges increasing costs beyond the auction price, you have to wonder if the government set this up to fail. With the current wholesale electricity price set at over £80 per Kilowatt hour, there was a lot of room to set a price (perhaps around £60 per KWH as suggested by the industry) that could have brought this on stream, and still cut the cost of electricity for customers. This will have a knock-on effect on bills and supply chain jobs – which have been projected on the basis of a tripling of UK offshore wind by 2030 – and choke them off unless the momentum is restored at the next auction. Anyone concerned about jobs in the supply chain will be campaigning between now and then to make sure this is the case.

The stop-go market driven model embodied in the CfD system makes a consistent plan for energy transition vulnerable and chaotic. To take this process by the scruff of the neck and drive it through at the scale and pace that we need requires, as UNITE successfully argued at the TUC, public ownership of energy.

Undersea cables

“The National Grid can’t get undersea cables, There are 4 suppliers of cables in the globe, they’re all booked out to 2030”

If you are concerned with cutting carbon emissions and growing jobs, this is an argument for campaigning for more investment in cable laying and the jobs that go with them, not accepting current limited capacity as an insuperable obstacle. A very good use for some of that £28 billion Labour is pledged to ramp up to.

North Sea drilling

“There will be more drilling in the North Sea”

Senior figures in the unions can’t afford to ignore the scientific reports on this matter. They are not ambiguous. NO new oil and gas exploration is compatible with Net Zero. 60% of existing reserves have to be kept in the ground to avoid catastrophic consequences. Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels requires unions to fight for a just transition as rapidly as possible for their members in the oil and gas sector. Spinning a delusion that everything can carry on as it is, will speed us to a point at which sustaining jobs will be the least of our problems.

Renewables lobby

“The renewables lobby is very wealthy and powerful. I think people on the left, for good intentions, have got hoodwinked into a lot of this”

This is a breathtaking inversion of reality. How “wealthy and powerful” is the “renewables lobby” compared to the fossil fuel companies? Octopus compared to Shell? Vesta compared to BP, or Aramco, or Exxon? According to the IMF, last year total fossil fuel subsidies were $7 Trillion. 7.1% of global GDP. That’s power. That’s wealth. We should note that this is $3 Trillion more than the total that would be needed globally to get us on track for sustainable development. Shell is now casually projecting that Net Zero will only be possible sometime in the 22nd century if they have their way, with no accounting at all for the social, economic and political consequences of that. Gary sees these companies as “people who we can work with” without reflecting that, since they have known about climate change for fifty years and tried to cover it up, with no “good intentions” at all, that hoodwinking is a large part of what they do.

UK net zero targets

“We’ve cut carbon emissions by decimating working class communities

Who does he mean by “we”? A better word would be “they”. The succession of Tory governments, in all their various guises, since 2010 have been bad for climate breakdown and the working class. They have put business imperatives (profit) above sustainability, and dumped costs of transition downwards onto those least able to afford it. Two examples. Insulation and solar energy installation fell off a cliff when the Tories “cut the green crap”, leading to thousands of lost jobs and higher bills as a result.

Green levies

“Green levies are a modern-day poll tax”

It’s also the case that, because it was the Tories, the schemes they had were skewed to subsiding the sort of consumers who could afford the upfront investment; while dumping the costs on everyone else’s bills. Hence Gary’s complaint that this was ‘disproportionately paid for by the poorest’. Quite so, but the answer to that is not to scrap insulation and solar panel installation altogether, but to approach it as a social mission to upgrade the “leaky, freezing council house(s)” that need it most first, and do it through Direct Labour run by Local Authorities; thereby creating jobs, cutting fuel poverty and improving health, as well as cutting energy demand and therefore emissions. Win, win, win.

Green Jobs

“It’s usually a man in a rowing boat sweeping up the dead birds”

Given that there were 19,600 jobs directly in offshore wind in 2022, and another 11,500 in the supply chain, that’s quite a lot of rowing boats. 30% of these are in Scotland. 15% in Yorkshire and Humber. If considering bird fatalities, Gary might note that in this study from the US, “for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants killed 2,118 “. If we go for nuclear and stick with fossil fuels, we’re going to need a bigger boat.

According to Prof Sir Jim McDonald, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, 30,000 new skilled workers would be required to retrofit buildings, while 60,000 technicians would have to be on hand to go one step further and install energy efficient heating systems in homes, offices and factories, with intensive training required. This is an extremely conservative estimate given that it can take four skilled workers six months to do a thorough retrofit on a house. In their latest Climate Jobs Report the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group argues that two million jobs will be required to deal with all 27 million homes and public buildings that need retrofitting if it were to be addressed seriously with the level of investment that’s needed.

That’s an awful lot of new jobs. Were the GMB to campaign for this, positively and proactively, some of these new workers might join.

Nuclear energy

“Smith is broadly positive about the future of green energy and sees Hinckley Point as a success story”

The argument that new nuclear is the core of future “green energy” is not consistent with any concern for impact on energy bills. The strike price for electricity generated by Hinckley Point is £93.50 per KWh. More than double the price at the last CFD auction and a third more than Offshore wind companies were pitching. This will go onto electricity bills and hit the poorest hardest. Small Modular Reactors are projected to be even more costly. So, whatever the green merits or otherwise of nuclear, it is not compatible with the concern for costs to customers that is foregrounded in his argument against “green levies”.

Hydrogen

Gary also argues for hydrogen, in general terms in this article. Elsewhere the GMB has pushed hard for hydrogen to be used as a mass replacement for natural gas for domestic cooking and heating. This is a complete non-starter on grounds of cost, emissions and safety. Unless the hydrogen is produced by renewable energy, the carbon emissions produced in making it are greater than if you just use natural gas in the first place. To produce sufficient hydrogen for mass domestic use using renewable energy would need far more wind farms than Gary is prepared to contemplate as a realistic possibility. Hydrogen has a role in some hard to decarbonise industrial sectors, so any green hydrogen we produce should be kept for that. It will be an expensive and precious resource that we should use accordingly. You have to add to that the concerns about how flammable the stuff is in a domestic context. As hydrogen is much lighter and more flammable than natural gas, the possibility of leaks and fires is much greater, so the existing infrastructure would need significant upgrading. A recent government report concluded that hydrogen in the home would be four times more dangerous than natural gas. A job creation scheme for the Fire Brigade perhaps, but probably one they’d rather not have. That’s why people selected to trial it as a cooking and heating tool in Ellesmere Port rebelled against the prospect of a domestic Hindenburg disaster* in their kitchen, leading to the pilot project having to be scrapped. Many gas fitters are less than happy at the prospect of working with hydrogen for domestic heating or cooking for the same reason.

China and supply chains

“We’ve become increasingly dependent on China because we can’t secure our energy future”

Gary’s position on trade and supply chains is contradictory. The GMB has argued for a “Great British Supply Chain”, with an almost autarkic vision of everything from widgets to jackets to turbines being built here, and for the CFD auctions to be stopped until one is established. At the same time, he quite rightly says he is “not a protectionist”, because workers lose out. But also, that the UK can’t do what the US is doing with the Inflation Reduction Act because it does not have a major reserve currency; which does not quite add up. He objects to the Tory approach for its “ideological bent” to neo liberal globalisation and buying the goods from the cheapest source, but also objects to imports from China as a “non-market economy” that “distorts the world economy”.

Gary seems to accept that China’s “non market economy” is more efficient at producing the necessary goods than the UK neo liberal economy is. In the case of energy, this is probably because they are investing more than twice as much in renewable energy generation than the EU and USA combined, and the UK lags behind both of these. Whether you agree with China’s definition of itself as “Socialist with Chinese characteristics”, or argue that it is a form of “state capitalism”, there’s no doubt that their state directed investment and coordination of state companies, academia and the private sector is beginning to produce the necessary goods at the necessary speed and scale. Just as well, because getting their dependence on coal down fast is crucial for all of us and, again according to the International Energy Agency, both possible and happening.

And that brings us to the paradox of Gary’s position. To develop a comparable supply chain here would require investment on that scale. But he claims that investment even on the smaller scale being carried out in the US is beyond the UK’s capacity. To deploy the £28 billion that Labour projects that it will ramp up to (which will be comparable to the US and EU, so therefore about half the Chinese level) would either require direct state investment through newly created nationalised industries, or you have to bribe a multinational, which at the moment is “free money” that comes with no government stake or even a say for the workforce or affected communities. Tata is doing rather well out of this at the moment, with half a billion for an electric arc steel furnace in Port Talbot and another 600 million for their EV plant in Swindon. Gary’s complaint that the redundancies that come with this deal at Port Talbot shows that Just Transition is “fantasy land” undercuts the position that his members would expect him to take alongside the other affected unions – for a say in the transition, for investment in a wider range of viable technologies to sustain volume steel making and the jobs that go with it. If this is a “fantasy” then so is any prospect of defending those jobs.

The reality is that “British” manufacturing is, for the most part, owned by multinationals and might be better understood as “production in Britain”. It also shows that companies like these and the Fossil Fuel majors in the North Sea about whom Gary argues “we’ve got to stop seeing them as the enemy and we’ve got to start seeing them as people who we can work with”, do not return the favour, and shut the unions out whenever they can.

More positively, it should be noted that high quality locally produced goods are not solely dependent on the national market and can also be exported, and companies based here, whoever owns them, do that too. In 2017, according to the Renewables UK Export Nation Report this included “an extraordinarily wide variety of goods and services, including supplying, installing and maintaining onshore wind turbines and components, designing gearboxes, manufacturing offshore wind turbine blades and steelwork, supplying and laying underwater power cables, installing, inspecting and maintaining offshore wind farms, providing helicopters, crew and vessels, developing wave and tidal energy projects and providing components for the marine energy industry, as well as designing software, conducting geological surveys, monitoring wildlife, and providing financial and legal services”. With properly targeted and coordinated R&D producing patents as part of a proper industrial strategy, there is a lot of room for growth in all of this, which matters for the sector because most of the growth in it will be “in Asia”.

“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” Benjamin Franklin

Transition and jobs growth will only happen if there is investment at scale and speed. Seeking to “moderate” Labour’s policy so that the investment doesn’t happen, means there will be no growth in jobs either. Without plans, and without union engagement in making them, we will stagnate at best. That is what we should be concentrating on now, so that mobilising people for transitions in their communities and workplaces that will cut their bills, boost jobs and cut our carbon emissions fast becomes part of the election campaign to drive the Tories out of office and cement Labour in government into actions that drive that forward.

*I was once told at a SERA meeting by a representative of the Hydrogen industry that the reason the Hindenburg burned so fiercely was not because of the highly flammable gas that it was filled with, but because of the lacquer that was painted on the outside of the dirigible. He did this with a straight face.

By Paul Atkin

A message from Get Glasgow Moving

The next year is crucial in our long-running fight to take our buses back into public control. So we’re joining forces with trade unions, community councils, environmental groups, students and pensioners associations and more, to launch a new region-wide Better Buses for Strathclyde campaign. Our aim is to build support for taking back public control of our bus network across the 12 Strathclyde local authorities and we would like to invite you to be part of it.
The campaign will launch publicly with a rally outside SPT Head office, 131 St Vincent St, Glasgow G2 5JF on
FRIDAY 29 SEPTEMBER 2023, 9:30AM

as part of the Better Buses National Week of Action and Scotland’s Climate Week.

Better Buses for Strathclyde is inspired by the success of the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign, which pushed their transport authority, TfGM, into bringing their region’s buses back into public control in order to deliver a fully-integrated, accessible and affordable public transport network called the Bee Network.

By bringing together bus users and employees from across Strathclyde’s 12 council areas, Better Buses for Strathclyde will put pressure on our regional transport authority, SPT, to utilise the new powers in the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 to deliver a similar fully-integrated, accessible and affordable system for us – and on the Scottish Government to provide the funding required.

THE NEXT YEAR IS CRUCIAL

From September 2023 – March 2024, SPT is developing the new ‘Strathclyde Regional Bus Strategy’ which will set the direction of bus policy in our region for the next 15 years (until 2038).

This offers us a once-in-generation opportunity to end the chaos caused by bus deregulation (introduced by Thatcher in 1986), which has seen millions of miles of routes cut and fares hiked well above inflation.

We want to make sure that SPT’s strategy sets out ambitious plans to:

re-regulate the all private bus companies in our region (through ‘franchising’) so that it can plan routes to serve communities’ needs and connect seamlessly with trains, ferries and Glasgow’s Subway, with one simple, affordable ticket across all modes.
And to set-up a new publicly-owned bus company for Strathclyde (like Edinburgh’s Lothian Buses) which can start taking over routes and reinvesting profits back into expanding and improving our network.

Calling on Ironside Farrar to cut ties with the Aberdeen ETZ

Yesterday (9th August) campaigners from Climate Camp, This is Rigged and Scot.E3 were outside the office of Environmental Consultants Ironside Farrar in Edinburgh. Ironside Farrar have been commissioned to produce a masterplan as part of the rezoning of St Fitticks Park in Torry into an industrial Energy Transition Zone (ETZ). The protest is part of an ongoing campaign to persuade the workers at Ironside Farrar to direct their skills towards projects that contribute to a socially just transition. Mike Downham spoke at the protest. There will be another protest at the Ironside Farrar office next Wednesday 16th August from 8.30am.

St Fitticks campaigners at the Scottish Parliament earlier this year

SPEECH OUTSIDE IRONSIDE FARRAR OFFICE 9^TH AUGUST 2023

Welcome – and thanks for joining us this morning.I thought I would tell you why we’re here. This is the head office of Environmental Consultants Ironside Farrar – though the door doesn’t say that. We’re here to call on the employees of Ironside Farrar to boycott all further work for ETZ, the company oil tycoon Ian Wood set up to industrialise a large part of St. Fittick’s Park in Torry as an “Energy Transition Zone”. He then commissioned Ironside Farrar to get Planning Permission.

Torry is a suburb of Aberdeen, though it used to be a fishing and boat-building village just across the Dee from Aberdeen City. Then with the discovery of North Sea oil and gas in the 70s most of the village was bulldozed to make space for a Shell oil and gas terminal.

Since then Torry has been dumped time after time with the industrial development that other parts of Aberdeen don’t want – a landfill site, an industrial harbour where the Park used to come down to the beach at Niggs Bay, an incinerator close to the school, and now this threat to the Park which the Torry community cherish as their last green space. The threat to their community is huge. Ian Wood’s money persuaded Aberdeen City Council, who had previously invested much public money in improving the Park, to do a U-turn and re-zone it for industrial development. And Ian Wood’s money persuaded the Scottish Government not to intervene.

Ian Wood says the ETZ will contribute massively to bringing down carbon emissions, but much of the vague talk about what he wants to do is about developing Carbon Capture and Hydrogen technologies both of which are scams. This is in fact an attempt at a land-grab to justify continuing to extract oil and gas from the North Sea and fill the pockets of share-holders and directors in the Oil and Gas Industry.

Torry is about as disadvantaged a community as it gets, with appalling health statistics, appalling air quality and few employment opportunities. Despite this they are rising up and fighting for their lives against this plan to industrialise their Park.

Saving St. Fittick’s Park is exceptionally important, for three reasons:

If it’s industrialised it will represent a huge win for the Oil and Gas Industry and delay phasing out oil and gas extraction from the North Sea
It will destroy the significant biodiversity which has developed in the Park as a result of a lot of hard work and fundraising by the Torry community over the past 20 years.
And it will further sicken and impoverish the people who live in Torry. It’s this last which is arguably the most important of the three. Because if we don’t protect and prioritise the poorer communities up the north east coast of Scotland we’re done for. It’s these communities who can force significant change.

Two big things have happened in the six weeks since we started this campaign, which make Saving St. Fittick’s Park even more important. Climate has broken down across the world at a speed which wasn’t anticipated. Southern Europe and North Africa are on fire, and unprecedented floods in central China have displaced 100,000 people. The second thing is that the Westminster Government has decided to grant at least 100 new drilling licences in the North Sea. That these things can happen at the same time shows just how strong our governments are committed to fossil capital.

I’ll end by quoting a few things from the booklet The Declaration of Torry, a product of The Torry Peoples Assembly in May: on the back of this booklet they commit themselves to six actions:

We will do everything to stop the land grab
We will continue to use our Park and increase its already immeasurable value
We demand the incinerator be decommissioned
We will seek support to set up a Torry Retrofit Project to insulate our homes
We insist on a just and fair energy transition
We will strengthen collaboration within our community and with others in Scotland and beyond

And inside the front cover of the booklet, most powerfully:

THIS IS OUR LAND AND NO ONE ELSE’S

THIS LAND BELONGS TO THOSE WHO CARE FOR IT

Just one thing to leave you with. The people arriving for work this morning are highly trained and have knowledge and skills which will be essential when we’ve made the transition to clean energy. They know about tipping points in global heating, and about the complex relationships which underpin biodiversity. Ever since we started this campaign, we’ve been respectful to these workers, seeing them as part of the solution, not part of the problem.

At the same time they must surely understand the enormity of what Ian Wood is planning in Torry. They have the power between them to Save St. Fittick’s Park, by boycotting further work for ETZ. Even if they aren’t in the team working for ETZ, they can bring Ironside Farrar to a standstill by collectively withdrawing their labour.

Sunak fiddles while Rhodes burns

Pete Cannell and Brian Parkin take a critical look at Sunak’s recent oil and gas announcement.

On Monday Rishi Sunak flew to Aberdeenshire by private jet to announce that at least one hundred new North Sea drilling licenses will be granted in the autumn. A policy described by junior energy minister Alex Bowie as “maxing out our oil and gas reserves”. At the same time Sunak gave the go ahead to the Acorn Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project to be based at St Fergus near Peterhead. Acorn will be one of four CCS projects in the UK – the other three are in England.

St Fergus Gas Terminal © Ken Fitlike CC-BY-SA/2.0

At a time when fires rage across Europe, and North America and floods wreak havoc in China and elsewhere, the new oil and gas licenses have received widespread criticism from climate campaigners, climate scientists, the Scottish Government and even some Tory MPs. Reactions to the CCS announcement are more mixed. SNP politicians have welcomed the announcement. Carbon Capture is prominent in the Scottish Government’s draft energy plans and Sunak argues that CCS will mean that the net zero by 2050 target is still in scope.

In our view both strands of Monday’s announcement represent Sunak paying his dues to the big oil and gas companies. In the rest of this article, we’ll explain why.

For months the Tories have argued that the cost-of-living crisis is the result of a crisis of energy sovereignty caused by the war in Ukraine. In fact, the price of gas had rocketed upwards before the war. There was no shortage of supply, since most of the gas used in the UK is piped from the North Sea. Compared with the rest of Europe the UK is unusually reliant on gas for home heating and cooking. There is a real problem here – the North Sea gas fields are nearing the end of their lifespan. So given there is an overwhelming need to reduce carbon emissions the obvious answer is to start now, planning for the future by electrifying the domestic heating system and insulating homes alongside a planned phase out of the use of gas. The Tories are doing none of this. On paper they still say they want to replace natural gas by hydrogen. But the weight of evidence that this would phenomenally expensive and a hugely inefficient use of electricity to generate the hydrogen means that they are rapidly backtracking.

So is Sunak’s plan to license more oil and gas fields going to keep people warm. Not at all. First the new fields contain more than 85% oil, not gas (see technical note below). That oil would be exported on the world market. Much of the gas is ‘sour’ – it has a high sulphur content – and is unsuitable for home heating. So, we have the worst of all possible worlds – continuing use of fossil fuels at large scale when the climate science says that the use must stop and the likelihood of very high fuel bills and insecurity of supply. Only big oil and their shareholders come well out of this – the rest of us and future generations pay the price.

A close look at Sunak’s plans for Carbon Capture and Storage is equally disturbing. The technology proposed for CCS is untested at scale. Even if the most optimistic targets for carbon sequestration are met, they represent a tiny fraction of the total carbon emissions from the North Sea. At present the only source of carbon dioxide at St Fergus is the gas stabilising plant. In the long-term Carbon Capture may be able to play a role in helping reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – but right now the priority must be to cut emissions rapidly. The £20 billion allocated by Westminster to the 4 CCS projects could be spent on expanding the production of renewable energy, home insulation and developing the electricity grid.

The parallels with the Cumbria Coalmine project are powerful. There we have the Tories supporting the exploitation of a fossil fuel, coal, which is not wanted by the steel industry. With the new licenses and CCS, we have a plan for energy security and net zero which delivers neither. Quite simply both represent political statements by the Tory Government that affirm their unswerving commitment to fossil capital.

Technical note:

The proposed Acorn (St Fergus) (and other) CCS plants are designed to be emissions source dedicated- i.e. they are intended to sequestrate carbon from say, a power station or chemical plant flue stack- not the ‘general’ atmosphere, and as such they are demonstration installations.

Apart from the Peterhead sour gas power station, the other nearby CO2 source is the St Fergus gas terminal which adds about 3-4% carbon to the overall gas/carbon penalty.

Total North Sea reserve gas content is about 27% (73% oil). The new blocks have a much lower gas composition c.12%.

The carbon contents of the different fuels (compared with coal) is:

Coal 97%

Oil 89%

Gas 35% max inc process penalty

Occupation in support of Torry community

Activists occupy tree outside Edinburgh offices in support of Torry community in Aberdeen. Press statement from This is Rigged

For more about Torry and the proposed Energy Transition Zone that will destroy St Fitticks park just scroll down or type “St Fitticks” in the search box.

Ironside Farrar, Environmental Consultants with offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester were commissioned by Energy Transition Zone Ltd (ETZ Ltd) to produce a ‘Masterplan’ for the industrial development of parts of St. Fittick’s Park, Gregness and Doonies Farm in Aberdeen. They were also tasked with obtaining Planning Permission for this development. Ironside Farrar’s plans were presented to the Aberdeen City Council Management Planning Committee yesterday morning (29^th June). The Council say they will adopt the ‘Masterplan’ as Planning Guidance.

On the same day, supporters of This Is Rigged went to the Edinburgh offices of Ironside Farrar and met with Julian Farrar, Managing Director of the company, to discuss the issues and request that Ironside Farrar withdraw from further work for ETZ Ltd, and that employees boycott all further work for ETZ Ltd for the following reasons:

St Fittick’s park is the last remaining green space in Torry, which is one of the country’s most deprived communities, where residents have a life expectancy ten years lower than people living in wealthier parts of Aberdeen. Commenting on the potential loss of the park, local doctors and nurses fighting to improve the health of the Torry community, say that industrialising any part of St. Fittick’s Park will be devastating for the health of that community.

In addition to its positive contribution to human health, St. Fittick’s Park is an oasis for wildlife, including many species of migrating birds, and Gregness and Doonies Farm support this wildlife as green corridors. In a recent article in the Guardian^[1], journalist Tom wall suggested the park’s wetland is “perhaps Aberdeen’s most unlikely beauty spot. Reeds flap and bend in blasts of salt-edged wind. Grey and blue light catch in watery beds, where ducks dip and preen. Birds shelter in a young woodland of oak, dark green pine and silvery birch trees.”

It therefore makes no sense to destroy this important habitat while Scotland is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. Furthermore, the wetlands and forest created 10 years ago in St. Fittick’s Park are already capturing carbon, and it is increasingly recognised that ecosystems like these even regulate local climate including rainfall.

The main purposes of the proposed Energy Transition Zone will be to develop carbon capture and hydrogen technologies, both of which are considered by leading scientists to be unproven and dangerous excuses for continued oil extraction and habitat destruction.^[2]

In yesterday’s meeting, Julian Farrar was warned that being complicit in destroying the wetlands and woodland, both of which are vitally important green spaces and biodiversity sites that have taken years and a tens of thousands of community man-hours to create, would be seen as an act of immeasurable violence.

Ishbel Shand, member of the Friends of St.Fittick’s Park campaign said,

“The proposed industrial development is simply a land grab by the oil and gas industry to fill the pockets of their shareholders and directors.”

After leaving the meeting with Julian Farrar, This is Rigged activists Mike Downham and Tom Johnson decided to occupy a small tree outside the Ironside Farrar offices, and are there awaiting a response.

Mike Downham, a retired paediatrician and children’s DR said,

“There is a high incidence of asthma in children in Torry due to particulate matter air pollution from the nearby incinerator and the South Harbour industrial development. Further industrial development in this community would have a serious negative impact on the health of children in Torry.”

Following the meeting, Tom Johnson, a painter-decorator and This is rigged supporter who knows St. Fittick’s park well said,

“If Ironside Farrar were to pull out of the project at this stage, it would have a huge positive effect on the wellbeing and health of the Torry community – disempowered folk who have lost so much already. I mean, Imagine losing an entire bay – your access to the sea. And now forests they planted 10 years ago are to be ripped up and concreted over with “green” factories.”

“Julian Farrar explained to me that Ironside Farrar have reduced the amount of harm to be done in the park, but if they now come out against any destruction WHATSOEVER of these spaces, that will be a really bold statement of solidarity, and an action that shows their real concern for the environment, and people. We understand it’s difficult for a company to do something like that in current economic and political contexts, but to me Julian did seem to be uncomfortable with what’s going on with the ETZ.”

Climate Jobs – Not Coal or Dole

Solidarity with stop the Cumbrian Coal Mine Campaigners

Keep the carbon in the soil: Scientists across the globe are clear that if we are to prevent catastrophic global warming then we can’t continue to develop new oil fields and dig new coal mines.
Coal energy has the highest carbon footprint of all energy types.

In December 2022 the Westminster government gave the green light for the development of a new coal mine at Whitehaven on the Cumbrian coast. The decision flies in the face of statements made by the Tories took while the UK hosted COP 26 in Glasgow. But post-COP and during an ongoing cost of living crisis their mantra has become ‘energy security’. This apparently justifies opening a new licensing round for North Sea oil and gas, massive investment in nuclear and a U-turn on coal. As we write this it looks likely that the Tories will use their majority in the House of Commons to strike out a Lords amendment that would ban all new coal mining.

The new mine is intended to supply coal that can be processed into coke for use by the UK steel industry. Tory ministers argue that coke is essential for steel production and that domestic production will cut the carbon emissions resulting from the transportation necessary for imported coal. But the focus of the two major UK steel producers is on decarbonising steel production by using green hydrogen, moreover the Cumbrian coal is unsuitable for steel production:

‘The UK steel industry has been clear that the coal from the West Cumbria mine has limited potential due to its high sulphur levels,” said Chris McDonald, chief executive of the Materials Processing Institute, which serves as the UK’s national centre for steel research.’

So, in reality, the government’s arguments are simply a poor attempt at greenwashing. It’s estimated that if the project goes ahead around 83% of the 2.8 million tonnes of coal extracted each year will be exported. They talk about it being a Net Zero coalfield. It’s the same sleight of hand as they use to argue that the North Sea will become a Net Zero oil and gas producing area. You electrify the industrial processed required for extraction, offset other emissions and don’t count the carbon embedded in the coal (or oil) because that’s the responsibility of the end user! All in all It looks like the government’s coalition to go ahead is an entirely political strategy aimed at pushing back genuine action on climate in favour of the big corporate interests that dominate energy production.

Lord Deben, Tory chair of the UK Climate Change Committee stated in June 2022 that:

‘As far as the coal mine in Cumbria is concerned, let’s be absolutely clear, it is absolutely indefensible. First of all, 80% of what it produces will be exported, so it is not something largely for internal consumption. It is not going to contribute anything to our domestic needs in the terms we’re talking about, the cost of energy and the rest.’

The other argument used by ministers, however, is one that we do need to take seriously. Whitehaven is a one-time coal and iron mining town and currently has high levels of deprivation. Proponents of the mine say that it will guarantee 500 jobs for 50 years. Putting the investment required for the mine into almost any other form of local economic activity would produce more jobs and certainly investing in renewables in the Whitehaven area would provide, more and more long-term sustainable jobs. But while local people have no faith in their being such investment the pull of the mine remains attractive.

Two court cases aimed at stopping the mine are due to be heard near the end of October 2023. In the meantime, a coalition of national and local environmental organisations are organising resistance. On Saturday 22nd July there will be a day of action in Whitehaven with a rally, leafletting and door to door conversations with local people.

We want to coordinate solidarity contingents from Scotland. If you are able to join It would be very helpful if you could answer these three questions.

I am interested in joining the delegation to Whitehaven on 22nd July.
I could provide a car and take passengers.
If it’s an option, I would prefer to stay overnight and return on Sunday 23rd.

Please reply to triple.e.scot@gmail.com (you can use the contact form on this site if you wish) and cc edinburghclimatecoalition@gmail.com

Our response to the Scottish Government energy consultation

This is our response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on a draft energy plan. The deadline for the consultation is 9th May 2023.

Response to the energy consultation from Scot.E3

Scot.E3 campaigns for a worker led just transition that would require at least 100,000 new climate jobs in Scotland. In our view the draft plan contains material that is useful and will be necessary as part of the energy transition that is needed. We particularly welcome the draft plan’s suggestion that the Scottish Government should not support any further exploration or development of oil and gas fields – this is vital and needs to be followed through. But overall, the draft plan aims for too little and too slowly, and it fails to provide a coherent strategy to reduce emissions and reshape the Scottish economy.

The plan is flawed in several fundamental ways:

It relies on the private sector to a achieve its ambitions.
It follows the strategy outlined in Offshore UK’s North Sea Transition deal which aims for net zero emissions achieved through the large-scale implementation of carbon capture and storage.
It accepts the hype around hydrogen uncritically.
Mass scale retrofitting and decarbonising domestic heating and cooking is not given enough priority.
There is no clear plan for expanding public transport systems.
There is no strategy for creating a resilient smart energy grid that would integrate local community energy initiatives with large scale wind, tidal, hydro, and solar.
It accepts the concept of net zero when we the climate science tells us we should be aiming for real zero.
It fails to consider how a national energy company (Scottish Climate Service) could drive forward a strategy for zero emissions and harness the skills and creativity of the energy sector’s current workforce or the many thousands of young people who are required to make a sustainable energy sector a reality.

Notes

Points 1 and 8. Public versus private. As a campaign Scot.E3 believes that the oil and gas industry aim to extract the maximum profit from its existing business and to maintain the power and influence which it established through the 20^th century and into the 21^st. The infrastructure and practices of what Andreas Malm calls Fossil Capital are incompatible with a sustainable renewable economy. We understand that not everyone would agree with this analysis. However, the scale and scope of the economic transition that is required is unprecedented. The nearest comparisons – transitions to war economies in the UK and the US between 1939 and 1945, and the US New Deal in the 1930’s, depended on strategic planning, public control and high degrees of regulation over the private sector. The Scottish government’s objectives for a just transition can only be met by a much higher level of public investment, democratic control, and regulation than the energy plan proposes.

Points 2 and 3. Rejecting the false solutions contained in the North Sea Transition Deal. In brief the North Sea transition deal (written by the oil and gas industry and endorsed by Holyrood, Westminster, and the Offshore trade unions) is a plan to maintain oil and gas production from the North Sea for as long as possible, and certainly beyond 2050. Carbon capture and a hydrogen economy are central to the plan. There is place for carbon capture when we’ve ended fossil fuel emissions and can focus on repairing the damage created by global temperature rise. And there is a place for hydrogen as a fuel in a small number of important but specialised applications. However, the energy plan’s proposals for prioritising carbon capture, and for making Scotland a world leader in hydrogen production, direct the focus of the plan away from the necessary investment into decarbonising energy production and use right now, and make it much more difficult to achieve the energy transition that we need. Carbon capture at large scale is an unproven technology, while producing green hydrogen is highly inefficient and requires very large amounts of green electricity. A recent report, The Future of Home Heating by the Imperial College Energy Futures Lab notes that ‘Hydrogen production would be best used strategically and its deployment prioritised in sectors which are hard to electrify or decarbonise such as heavy industry, shipping, aviation and heavy transport.’

Point 4. Retrofitting. Energy for domestic heating and cooking in Scotland is mainly supplied via the natural gas network and currently accounts for more than 20% of emissions. The level of emissions could be significantly reduced through improving standards of insulation. Action on building regulations for new builds is possible straight away and amendments to guidance and regulations for the insulation of the existing housing stock to include the new breathable insulation materials that are now available (for example the hemp based materials produced in the Scottish Borders) could also be made very rapidly. A mass campaign of retrofitting requires coordinated action and investment that involves the development of skilled direct works teams in every council area and the resourcing of Further Education Colleges to provide good quality training. At the same time the transition from gas to electricity needs to be coordinated with the timescale for the rundown of North Sea gas production. Retrofitting creates new jobs and has the potential to enhance the health and well-being of the Scottish population. Action now, with investment designed to ensure that no one is excluded is a critical part of a just transition and can win hearts and minds to the project of transforming the economy.

Point 5. Public Transport. Simply replacing petrol and diesel vehicles by electric vehicles will not remove all emissions, will increase demand for scarce and environmentally damaging resources and perpetuate inequality. A sustainable energy plan requires large-scale improvements in public transport networks.

Point 6. Developing a smart grid. This is a surprising omission from the draft plan. A smart grid that includes large scale wind, solar, hydro and tidal energy sources combined with a network of community-based energy schemes and storage that includes local district heating schemes is technically feasible and would ensure that the system is resilient in the face of varying climatic conditions and demand.

Point 7. Net Zero. In practice net zero has become part of the set of false solutions used by the fossil fuel industries to delay real action on emissions. It is bound up with arguments for carbon capture and carbon offsetting. The latter has done almost nothing to actually reduce emissions (see for example Dyke, Watson and Knorr – ‘Climate Scientists: Net Zero is a dangerous trap) and often creates social problems in the private takeover of land for monoculture forests or other crops. We would argue that an effective energy plan requires a critical position on net zero and setting the objective as absolute zero emissions. The only way to achieve real zero in the context of the climate emergency is to phase out oil and gas quickly, starting now, and to invest heavily in renewable sources of energy.

Update on St Fitticks

Demonstrating outside the Scottish Parliament in January 2023

Campaigners in Torry are still waiting on the Scottish Government announcement that was expected back in January. Each month it has been put back another 28 days and is now due on 6th May. If the government gives the go ahead to the current plans for the ETZ (Energy Transition Zone) it will be a decisive step down a road that panders to the oil and gas industry and has nothing to with social justice. St Fitticks Park, which the plans would take over for industrial use, is the only green space in a working class area that suffered from decades of pollution as a result of the oil and gas industry. Most recently a new Energy from Waste incinerator, built close to a primary school, has led to a further deterioration in living conditions.

This film from REELNews highlights the issues involved and the resistance of the local community. Please share it widely.

In the film it’s noted that it’s not clear what use the new industrial zone will be put to. However, since the film was made campaigners have found evidence that there will be a large hydrogen storage facility – with 80% blue hydrogen and 20% green – that will be used to convert the cooking and heating supply for 20,000 social housing tenants in Aberdeen. If this goes ahead not only will Torry lose it’s green space many of its residents will be locked in to a very expensive energy future.

St Fitticks deserves to be a national campaign. The issues it raises around social justice, the use of hydrogen and carbon capture are national issues and they expose the weaknesses and contradictions in Scottish Government Energy Policy.

Share this post – support the St Fitticks campaigners.

Read more detail and watch video from the campaign here and here.

FREE PUBLIC TRANSPORT ACROSS GREATER GLASGOW – A STEP CLOSER TO REALISATION

Glasgow City Council has decided to invest £75,000 in designing a pilot of free public transport, to include buses, trains and the Subway. This decision was a result of more than five years of campaigning by Get Glasgow Moving, strengthened over the last two years by Free Our City, a coalition of climate activists, trade unions and passenger groups.

Representatives of ScotE3, Glasgow Trades Council, Friends of the Earth Scotland, Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment, and Govan Community Council, all active members of the Free Our City Coalition, met last week with a Council officer and a representative of Stantec, the large transport consultancy company which won the commission to design a free public transport pilot, whose report to the Council is scheduled for June.

Free public transport, now available in many cities across the world, is vital for reducing Glasgow’s carbon emissions and the many inequalities which plague Glasgow. Get Glasgow Moving had already met separately with Stantec.

Free Our City made these main points to Stantec:

The pilot must be universal, including all households in Glasgow. Households often plan journeys with other households not in their locality. Anything less than a universal pilot will not provide a reliable evidence base.
It’s vital that Stantec develop the pilot as paving the way for free public transport for all in the longer term – otherwise the pilot will be pointless.
We suggested that the Council could buy out the private bus companies for the duration of the pilot, agreeing a price based on their current income (trains and the Subway are already publicly owned).
Stantec should identify funding opportunities from the Scottish Government for rolling out free public transport across Greater Glasgow – not just say to Glasgow City Council “this is how much it’ll cost”.
There are no examples of effective public transport under private ownership internationally, but plenty of examples under public ownership. Public ownership should be tightly connected to the understanding of how any full scheme could be delivered, as the cross-subsidy benefits of having a whole system under public ownership may reduce the total cost of a free scheme for which a franchise system may over-estimate the total cost.
We asked to be kept informed as they developed their project and offered to meet again.

Here’s the REEL News film of the Free Our City demonstration at the Glasgow COP

Briefing #17 – Net Zero

Our latest briefing takes a critical look at Net Zero. You can read it here or download the PDF. All our briefings are published under a Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 . Find all our briefings on the resources page.

“Net Zero” was defined at the 2015 Climate Summit in Paris as “a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases”. So, for example, it would be OK to continue burning gas in power stations as long as all the carbon dioxide produced in the process is captured and permanently stored.

Paris COP 2015 – image by Pete Cannell CC0

Net Zero was an attempt to translate the temperature target of “well under a two degree rise above pre-industrial levels” into something countries could be held accountable for.

Since then governments have rushed to announce long-term Net Zero emissions goals. The Climate Change Committee has also fully embraced the Net Zero concept – hardly surprising because the members of the Committee are appointed by the UK and Devolved Governments.

As a result of these goals billions of dollars have been invested in research and development of low-carbon technologies , all of which face massive technological, economic and land use challenges when used at scale.

The Net Zero concept emerged in 2013 in the run-up to the Paris Summit, against the background of the collapse of the talks at Copenhagen in 2009. However well-intentioned the idea was, it’s notable that it arose among a group of 30 lawyers, diplomats, financiers and activists, who met at Glen House, a country estate in the Scottish Borders owned by a ‘green’ investment pioneer.

The current front runner technology, which governments are pinning their hopes on, is “Carbon Capture with Storage” (CCS). This is defined as “a process in which a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from industrial and energy-related sources is separated (captured), conditioned, compressed and transported to a storage location for long-term isolation from the atmosphere”. The companies developing this technology are either the same companies which extract fossil fuels, or closely related to them financially.

CCS is an energy-hungry process and as such is not financially viable at scale for the companies experimenting with it. They are calling for government subsidies. In the US extracted carbon dioxide has been used to facilitate pumping in oil wells – a process known as “Enhanced Oil Recovery” – to close the energy gap, make CCS more financially viable, and enable the big energy companies to continue extracting fossil fuels.

On four related counts CCS is not in the interests of either people or the planet. First it requires too much energy; second it would need subsidising by tax-payers; third it would be controlled by giant corporations who already make obscene profits; and fourth it would be too slow to prevent catastrophic climate change.

In the UK at Drax Power Station – the site recently of vigorous strike action by the inadequately paid workers.

– biomass is being burnt and from time to time some of the emitted carbon is being captured in a process called Bioenergy and Carbon Capture (BECCS). A previous ScotE3 Briefing on BECCS explains why this is a crazy idea – primarily because it would require huge areas of land to be planted up with monoculture forests.

It’s clear then that both Net Zero and the technologies which underpin it are meaningless greenwash, being used to justify continued investment in fossil fuel extraction – an effective distraction from the urgent need to deliver sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.

What’s needed is a Real Zero, not a Net Zero. We have the technology to achieve this – we don’t need new technology. This is what we need to do: