BiFab – Employment, Energy and Environment

New Hope for BiFab?

It’s excellent news that the BiFab yard in Fife will reopen over the next few months with the prospect of 290 jobs working on the production of eight platforms for the Neart na Gaoithe offshore wind farm project. It’s a time for optimism but also a time for organising to ensure that this is not another false dawn.

Burntisland Fabrications yard at Methil by Bill Kasman CC BY-SA 2.0

Neart na Gaoithe is just 15km off the Fife coast. When complete the windfarm will have 54 turbines generating enough electricity to power 375,000 homes. 54 turbines require 54 platforms, and it makes environmental sense to build these massive structures as close to the site as possible. But BiFab will only be making eight, the others will be produced thousands of miles away.

Announcements from the new private owners are positive about more orders in the pipeline, but we have heard this before – and back in 2017, prior to all production ending in early 2018 there were 1400 workers at BiFab. There have been four wasted years.

We’ve argued on this site that the Methil yard should be a key part of the engineering infrastructure that’s needed to build a new sustainable, zero carbon economy. The Methil, Burntisland and Arnish facilities can form part of the much more extensive network of sites required as we build an integrated, full-scale green energy economy.

We’ve also argued that the transition to the new economy we need so urgently can’t be left to the chaos and instability of the market. The workers at BiFab paid the price for the anarchy of the market in 2017/18. To avoid this happening again, to guarantee jobs and a future for our children and grandchildren, we need public investment, public ownership, long term planning and democratic control.

BiFab goes into administration

Yesterday the Scottish Parliament Voted by 61 Votes to 60 to condemn the government’s failure to save BiFaband calling for specific actions to save the yards. The motion is reproduced below. Today the firm was put into administration.

A joint statement by trade unions GMB Scotland and Unite said BiFab’s administration exposed the “myth of Scotland’s renewables revolution as well as a decade of political hypocrisy and failure, in Scotland and the rest of the UK.”

GMB Scotland secretary Gary Smith and Unite Scotland secretary Pat Rafferty added that the workers and communities dependent on the yards had “fought so hard for a future”.

The Scottish Parliament vote calls on the government to take a number of actions – including that the government produces a report by January that sets out steps to ensure future renewable work comes to Scottish fabrication yards. If BiFab is lost it’s a tragedy for the workforce and for workers in the sector more generally. It’s also a major setback on the path to a sustainable economy. Transition requires skilled workers and infrastructure. BiFab should be part of that.

Scot.E3 has argued consistently that the only effective way to develop a serious plan for transition is through public planning and public control. Taking BiFab into public ownership could be a first step. One thing is clear that to get the Scottish Government to take this seriously and to respond to the motion extra parliamentary pressure is required. A new UN report shows how the big energy companies are doubling down on fossil fuel extraction. It’s time to turn the tide – if not now when!

See recent articles on BiFab here and here.

The motion

That the Parliament believes that Scotland has the potential to lead Europe’s green energy revolution over the coming decades; further believes that, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and job losses, green jobs will be central to creating new employment and training opportunities across Scotland; considers that, with the support of the workforce and their trades unions, the maximum effort has to be made to secure wind farm contracts for Scottish manufacturing companies; notes that, in open competition, BiFab won a £30 million contract to build turbine jackets for the NnG North Sea wind farm, work that could have started in January 2021, but has been prevented from going ahead with this; condemns the Scottish Government’s decision to withdraw the financial guarantee that was needed to enable this work to go ahead, thus risking Scotland’s reputation as a new green investment hub, and further condemns the Scottish Government’s failure to produce any legal opinion to justify its claim that support for BiFab was against the law; calls on it to act now to secure the future of the Burntisland Methil and Arnish yards, and the jobs that depend on them; further calls on it to talk to the workforce’s representatives and to ask for the help of the UK Government through the joint working party to urgently negotiate with EDF and Saipem to find a solution that ensures that the NnG contract for eight wind turbine platforms is carried out in the yards, and, with Glasgow being the venue of the COP26 summit in December 2021, calls for a concrete plan to be published in January by the Scottish Government that ensures that future work on renewables comes to Scottish yards, and further calls on the Scottish Government to ensure that these policy commitments on renewables are part of a coherent industrial strategy for the post-COVID-19 era.

What the BiFab disaster tells us about class rule

In the first of what we hope will be a series of further perspectives on BiFab following the article we posted six days ago David Jamieson argues that capitalists and their institutions are not in a serious conflict over the failing ‘just transition‘ in Scotland. David is editor of the Conter website and his article was first published there.

The tragic saga of the BiFab yards at Burntisland, Methil and Arnish goes on – but for how much longer? The Scottish Trade Union Federation reacted with vehemence to the Scottish Government last week (24 November) “as it sneaked out a joint statement with the UK Government on pulling the plug on Bifab and breaking promises to keep unions informed of developments”. The vaunted ‘Just Transition’ has been flushed.

The first things that we learn on this recognition are obvious: capitalism will generate a chaotic response to climate change and environmental destruction, one that will only feebly mitigate its effects. Further, this transition will be organised to benefit capital, create new transnational production networks (that will damage the environment) and will be borne on the backs of workers, who will variously lose work, be exploited in the new industries, or see their communities pulverised by the collapse of old industries and the extractive qualities of the new.

Perhaps the less commonly understood are the organic links between different nodes and actors in the system. It has been common for politicians, trade unionists and activists to seek out responsibility for the industrial carnage by dividing-out responsibility between the triad of actors; the EU, the UK Government and the Scottish Government (a fourth of we count the profit seeking of the private firms).

In recent weeks Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer suggested EU state aid rules did not preclude government action to save the yards, the GMB union demanded to see the legal judgement (as well they should) the Scottish Government alleged informed them of the limits of their action. Meanwhile, Sundry Scottish nationalists repeated the now well-worn approach of blaming Westminster exclusively, while some Scottish Labour activists pretended things might be significantly different were their party in charge at Holyrood.

It’s one thing to apportion blame where it is merited. It is another to raise this portioning to a pathology, with mutually guilty actors redefined as healthy and malicious to serve a wider (but shallow) political perspective.

In one sense, it is absolutely true that EU state aid rules can be got around when the political will exists, especially when both the London and Edinburgh governments, whether they like it or not, are soon to leave the bloc. But this misunderstands the relations between the EU and its member states. The EU is not a ‘transnational’ organisation that submerges national sovereignty beneath a common project. It is an organisation of class rule, just as the national governments that operate within its structures.

As such, there is an organic unity between Brussels and London, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Brussels can expect national governments to adopt an appropriate attitude to state aid rules (varying in implementation from powerful Berlin to relative supplicant Athens with everywhere else in between) understanding that the lineage of power between these elite actors is coherent and conjoined.

In the case of Scotland and the Bifab yards, the EU provides the excuse (governments can only supply so much finance to industrial ventures under these circumstances) and the Scottish Government, aware that rules and instituted authorities are negotiable (as elsewhere on the continent – not least Germany) opts for full and grovelling supplicancy. This happens for reasons both domestic and foreign. The foreign policy terms are obvious enough – the SNP leadership wants to align an independent (and devolved) Scotland with Brussels, and wants to signal submission to rules in advance. Additionally, as is common across the EU, the Scottish Government doesn’t want to encourage demands for the protection of jobs and industries in Scotland – particularly when industries like North Sea oil are shedding jobs rapidly.

These attempts at distributing criticism to sub-factions of the ruling class have become commonplace on the left in recent years. It is this projection that has led to the abundance of adjectives before the words ‘capitalist’ and ‘capitalism’: disaster capitalists, neoliberal capitalism, late capitalism, fossil capitalism. Finance capitalism is counter-posed unhelpfully to productive capitalism. Whole new strata of ‘oligarchs’ with ‘dark money’ are constructed.

It is no bad thing that, for the purposes of analysis, we can identify sub-categories of broader class structures. But this is most often done to ignore the organic totality of the capitalist system – its highly evolved capacity to manage internal divisions and reproduce a coherent social order – and to appeal to more rational or even moral elements in the establishment.

In a recent analysis for the Guardian George Monbiot made this case explicit by distinguishing “housetrained capitalism” which “seeks an accommodation with the administrative state, and benefits from stability, predictability and the regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors” from a more pernicious “warlord capitalism”. These housetrained capitalists are the same who for decades have viciously de-regulated British society, leading to an utterly dysfunctional state incapable of a robust response to the pandemic. They are the majority capitalist bloc who support the continued attacks on workers in Rishi Sunak’s latest pay freeze. But in the minds of Guardian writers they ought to be protected from a dangerous insurgency of their peers.

It’s time to take capitalism seriously. That means not separating it out into ‘bad’ and ‘good’ (or simply ‘less bad’) factions and institutional centres. The temptation to do so is a conservative one; those who no longer believe in a mass, democratic challenge from the base of society typically look up to competing factions at the pinnacle. But the fundamental division is society is not between capitalist factions marshalling vying visions of their rule, but between all the elements of their class and those who produce the wealth of society, but do not control it.

BiFab – time for action

On November 16^th, 2017, hundreds of workers at the BiFab fabrication yards in Fife marched down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile towards the Scottish Parliament in a magnificent show of determination to save their jobs. Three years on, and despite nearly £54 million investment from the Scottish Government, the hope raised on that day lies in tatters. BiFab could have been a milestone on the path to a zero-carbon economy. Instead, it stands as a warning that should not be ignored.

REEL News reported on BiFab in November 2017

In this post I tell the story of BiFab and argue for the importance of a radically different approach.

BiFab was founded in Fife in 2001. Initially based at Burntisland, it expanded to take over the huge construction yard just up the coast at Methil and the Arnish yard on the Isle of Lewis. The company played a significant part in fabricating platforms for the development of the west of Shetland oil and gas fields. As demand declined it began manufacturing jackets for offshore wind installations.

In 2016 the company won a £100 million order to manufacture jackets for the Beatrice windfarm in the Moray Firth. The November 2017 crisis was sparked by cash flow problems linked to this contract. At this point the company employed around 1400 workers, although notably 1200 of these were on agency contacts rather than direct employees. All these jobs were at risk.

BiFab workers responded by occupying the yards, ensuring that no valuable equipment could be removed, and, on the 16^th November, they marched on the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Government stepped in, providing a £15 million loan that ensured that the firm avoided going into administration. The occupations ended and work on the jackets for Beatrice resumed. But the relief was short lived. The Beatrice contract was nearly complete, there was nothing else in the order book, and agency contracts were just not renewed. The workforce was scattered to the winds.

In April 2018 the Scottish Government brokered a take over of the company. The new owners were DF Barnes, a subsidiary of the Edmonton based Canadian company DV Driver. The Herald on Sunday has recently revealed that DV Driver obtained ownership for £1. The Government retained a minority stake.

Since the takeover, opportunities to build jackets for major new North Sea windfarms have been up for grabs. One of these, ‘Neart na Gaoithe’, is just a few miles off the Fife coast from the BiFab yard at Methil. Another, Seagreen, which, when complete, will be the biggest in Scottish waters, is just a bit further north, off the coast of Angus. But contracts have gone to overseas yards in Spain, Indonesia, the UAE and China.

So, despite a Scottish Government investment that may reach £52.4 million, BiFab is close to total collapse. The Scottish and UK Governments argue that despite, or because, of their stake in the firm, European competition rules made it impossible for them to guarantee the BiFab bids.

The trade unions representing BiFab workers have contested this view. The Courier newspaper noted on October 29^th that

‘In a legal opinion for the GMB and Unite trade unions, Lord Davidson has described the Scottish Government’s reasoning as “remarkable”, given the looming end of the Brexit transition period and suggested Scottish ministers could have deferred any decision until after Brexit on December 31.’

This legal view is clearly true; however, focusing on interpretations of the law misses much more important issues. The Scottish Government is firmly wedded to the idea that the transition to a zero-carbon economy can be carried through by private enterprise. BiFab is just one of many examples of how this approach fails. Bids are allocated primarily on price and when the ‘cheapest’ bidder is located on the other side of the world that’s the one that’s chosen. The fact that this results in massive carbon emissions as jackets are shipped to the coast of Scotland isn’t factored in. Equally important the bidding system favours international companies that operate on a world stage and take no responsibility for joined up planning of transition in the local economies from which they profit.

To achieve zero carbon, we need much shorter supply chains, so that construction, energy generation and consumption are brought much closer together. Demanding that the manufacture of jackets and wind turbines takes place in Scotland is not about putting Scottish workers first but a necessity for the rational use of resources. Different locations offer different combinations of renewable energy resources, but sustainable energy production is necessary everywhere. Tackling the climate crisis requires local and global perspectives. Climate jobs are needed in every part of the world. It’s important to stress that while construction and energy production should be as local as possible – international solidarity requires that knowledge should be shared freely and that financial and material support is provided to countries in the global south. This of course is the opposite of what happens now as new innovations are locked into commercial patents.

Leaving transition to the market relies on the expectation that multiple independent decisions made by individual companies on the basis of maximising profit will achieve the goal of a zero-carbon economy. It’s an incredibly inefficient approach. Consider wind, a resource that’s abundant in Scotland. There has been a rapid growth in offshore wind powered electricity generation but at the same time the numbers working in renewables in Scotland has fallen, reducing local skills and knowledge and impacting on local economies. A partial transition but one that has been inherently unjust, and which puts obstacles in the path of the full transition that we need.

For the sake of the climate that our children will inherit and for the lives and livelihoods of the present generation there’s a pressing need for trade unionists and climate activists to campaign together for a new approach that integrates social justice with real, immediate practical actions to tackle the climate crisis. This means:

Systematic planning at local and national levels to plan a rapid transition to zero carbon.
Large scale public investment in new democratically controlled public enterprises to implement these plans.

These demands may seem a long way off. But we’ve seen during the pandemic that, when there’s political will, things that would have been considered impossible become possible. Old laws are thrown out and new laws are written. We’ve also seen how in the face of a crisis public systems deliver and private companies rake in profits and fail.

The first and immediate step should be an emergency action plan that takes the BiFab yards into public ownership, reemploys the workforce and puts the skills and knowledge of the workers at the heart of a sustained commitment to develop the yards as hubs for the engineering initiatives that are essential to a worker led just transition.

Pete Cannell (November 25th, 2020)

The politics and practice of just transition

On Wednesday 16th October, 7.30pm we have a public meeting/discussion as part of the Edinburgh World Justice Festival

We plan to explore what is meant by justice transition and reflect on the need to develop the definition. There’ll also be some film clips on struggles for just transition around the world.

We’ll finish with discussion on making just transition core to the politics and practice of the movement. Who we need to reach, how we can reach them and what are the priorities for action.

Fife, fighting for our future

An important march and rally for the local community, trade unionists and environmental activists in Kirkcaldy on Saturday – fighting for climate jobs and a sustainable future. The ScotE3 banner will be there. Assemble 11am at Kirkcaldy Town Square. Facebook event at https://www.facebook.com/events/228664054720454/

Harland and Wolff: occupying for nationalisation, jobs and the climate

As workers at Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard fight to save their jobs, demanding nationalisation as the employer goes into administration, Brian Parkin from ScotE3 reports on the response from the UK Construction Rank and File group, argues for solidarity and highlights links with action to tackle the climate emergency. This article was first published on http://www.rs21.org.uk

The mighty shipyard of Harland and Wolff, whose enormous cranes, Samson and Goliath, dominate the Belfast skyline, is now facing the final phase of closure. Most famed for being the shipyard that built the ill-fated Titanic, these yards and their local supply companies employed up to 30,000 workers at their peak. Now, after repeated capacity and job-sheddings, only 121 workers remain.

The remaining workers have been given redundancy notices, but have said no to the supposed inevitability of market forces and the whims of hedge-fund capital. In a bid to save their jobs, they have mounted a workplace occupation. These men and women of the Unite and GMB unions are not looking back to the days of mighty ocean liners and battleships. Instead, they have evaluated the productive assets of the yards and have seen them as part of the vital industrial capacity that can begin to turn the tide in the battle against climate change. They have combined their technical skills with their knowledge of the Harland and Wolff production potential with a vision of how they can fabricate the structures and internals of wave, wind and tidal units that can harness the vast renewable resources that can provide clean, affordable and abundant energy.

All too aware of empty promises and crocodile tears of politicians and would-be investors, the workforce have played their ultimate hand: they have occupied and taken over the means of production in order to prevent asset strippers and bailiffs moving in and destroying further the productive potential of their sole means of production – and with it the hope of clean energy technologies so badly needed as climate change accelerates.

But these workers cannot fight alone. So far their unions have promised official support. But that support will be conditional – until a prospective bidder comes along with the any rescue bid inevitably demanding further flexibility and productivity promises of the workforce. Which is why the example of the UK Construction Rank and File in promising solidarity is so important. And now, within weeks of the global climate strikes and protests on 20 September, the climate change movement has a concrete example to put workers’ action centre stage.

Harland and Wolff and an emerging campaign of former BiFab workers in Fife are at last bringing together the issues of jobs worth having within a campaign for a planet capable of being saved.

The UK Construction Rank and File passed the following motion at its annual general meeting on Saturday 3 August:

The Annual General Meeting of the UK Construction workers rank and File note the heroic factory occupation of the Harland and Wolff plant in Belfast in their bid to save jobs.
We further note their demand that the present plant and jobs therein be turned over to the production of renewable energy technologies that will not only meet the growing demand for clean renewable sources of energy, but will also make a vital contribution to the fight against impending and potentially catastrophic climate change.
In their present struggle the H&W workers are showing the way by which in the fight for jobs, the conversion of employment and means of production can be redeployed into both socially and environmentally dedicated ends.
We commend the leadership on Unite for the official support that they are extending to the H&W occupation and call upon the wider labour movement to take up the fight for jobs, communities and the energy needs and environmental responsibilities of future generations.
Furthermore, we urge all workers to support next month’s climate strikes and protests, both as a show of solidarity with H&W, but as a sign of the commitment to the working class’s vital role in the fight against climate change and our planets environment and eco-systems.

Save-Our-Shipyard-e1565021353605-696x431 Photo: Unite construction branch on twitter

Sea Change – a review

In May we welcomed the publication of an important report on North Sea Oil and Gas. Ann Morgan shares her reflections on the report here.

Sea Change: Climate Emergency, Jobs and Managing the Phase Out of UK Oil and Gas Extraction

Introduction

Sea Change highlights the tremendous potential for a just transition and in outlining the scale of the potential increase in new climate jobs provides convincing evidence that trade unions, activists, politicians and economists can utilise in designing a sustainable economy.

Bella Caledonia calls the report a ‘landmark’. A landmark is defined as a’ turning point’ or a ‘critical point.’ However, as the report is released there are very mixed messages from policy makers. On the one hand the declaration of climate emergency by the Scottish Government and many local authorities and on the other the Oil and Gas Authority press release on 10^thJuly 2019 announcing new licences for exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons.

The Gas discovery by the Chinese State Owned CNOOC in January this year is said to be the largest in over a decade. Exxon Mobil and Shell and other oil companies are busy extolling the virtues of Natural Gas, greenwashing thus

‘This versatile and abundant resource is contributing to emissions reductions all over the world’

No word of emissions of methane (research is currently underway to assess methane emission underestimated previously in the North Sea). As we know methane is a potent greenhouse gas and natural gas is not a ‘bridge’ fuel as the report emphasises.

Just transition

The ScotE3 draft manifesto defines a just transition as

‘One that ensures no individual or community suffers economically or socially as old jobs end and new jobs are created’.

Sea Change makes it clear that a just transition to renewable energy is manifestly possible with the potential that three new climate jobs could be created for every North Sea job at risk.

Just transition is the way to win hearts and minds and the Sea Change report gives an informed and detailed bridge to that improved working and living environment. An effective campaign is needed to turn around the Oil and Gas Authority (OAG) insistence on opening up applications for the 32^ndround of licensing.

Alternatives

To end fossil fuel dependence and move to the alternative, a clean and safe working and sustainable environment, will not be easy. However the structured and planned transition that Sea Change describes cannot be ignored. The report notes that oil and gas was developed with Government support and intervention. Indeed the big energy companies continue to attract subsidy for their hydrocarbon activities. It argues that it is now high time for intervention and investment to enable a renewable transformation.

Sea Change is an outstanding analysis of the importance of energy at the ‘production’ level and has relevance in the systemic changes required, in public ownership, in governance and accountability and in designing new social models. The report further illustrates a point also made by Asbjørn Wahl that solutions cannot be made on an environmental/scientific analysis alone. Action is required to change the power imbalance nationally and internationally.

The need to end extraction

Sea Change documents the current impact of North Sea Oil and Gas and demonstrates in the starkest terms that the continued practice of Maximum Economic Recovery (MER) Is incompatible with the Climate Change Act and emissions reduction. Mary Church Head of Campaigns at FoE (Scotland) puts it succinctly

‘ Climate Science is clear that we urgently need to phase out fossil fuels, yet the government and big oil companies are doing everything they can to squeeze every drop out of the North Sea … we must ban further exploration and redirect the vast subsidies propping up extraction towards creating decent jobs in a clean energy economy.’

The report finds that:

The Uk ‘s 5.7 billion barrels of oil and gas in already operating oil and gas fields will exceed the UK’s share of carbon emissions agreed in the Paris Climate goals. Currently Government and industry aim to extract 20 billion barrels.
The additional oil and gas extraction enabled by recent subsidies will add twice as much carbon to the atmosphere as the phase out of coal power saves.
Given the right policies, clean industries could create more than three jobs for every North Sea oil job lost.

The authors call for the withdrawal of the OAG authority’s 32^ndlicensing round. They recommend that the UK and Scottish Governments work with affected communities and trade unions in a managed phase out of North Sea oil and gas, investing in education, retraining and reskilling (although it is acknowledged that many existing jobs are highly skilled and transferable) and influencing the priorities of the Scottish National Investment Bank with a significant degree of public ownership. Infrastructure costs can be met with a rapid phase out of oil subsidies underpinned by a fiscal policy of support for clean energy to at least the level to which the oil and gas industry have been supported.

Otherwise the future looks bleak. The report notes that

Offshore oil industry increasingly pressurised (See RMT union’s report on North Sea working conditions)
Renewables – currently no significant UK jobs creation with manufacturing jobs going overseas
Oil and Gas extraction from newly developed fields would push the world beyond climate limits

In short, the Westminster and HolyroodGovernments face a choice between two pathways to stay in climate limits.

Deferred Collapse: Continue to pursue Maximum Extraction through subsidies until worsening climate impacts force rapid action to cut emissions globally. The UK Oil industry collapses pushing workers out of work in a short space of time.
Managed Transition. Stop approving licensing permits and tax breaks and phase out extraction.

Climate jobs

The report argues that a National Energy Strategy can mean an energy transformation that meets climate commitments while protecting livelihoods and economic well being. Local manufacturing and workforce participation needs to guide this transformation with new approaches in economic development, strong trade union rights and sectoral bargaining.

‘Clearly it is an ambitious project to transform the UK energy sector within a couple of decades, just as the rapid development of the North Sea was an ambitious project …’

The report models the impact on the oil and gas workforce of ending the development of new fields. Taking into account the jobs created through decommissioning and forecast retirement in the existing workforce, it estimates that 40,000 existing oil workers (direct and support chain) may need to be in a different job by 2030. To examine the scale of jobs that can be created in compatible clean energy industries and the level of policy ambition necessary, it models the numbers of new jobs that would be created in offshore wind, marine renewables and energy efficiency retrofits, sectors that have strong overlaps with existing oil and gas skills and finds that the number of jobs created will be at least three times more than the number lost.

Social Justice

The report also highlights the international justice commitment to ensure transition is fastest in wealthier countries and end operations, which harm poor communities and workers (Jake Molloy in the RMT report notes the harsh working conditions for Asian migrant workers in decommissioning in the North Sea for as little as around £3 an hour). Decommissioning should be paid for by oil companies and decommissioning plans should detail and provide for a Just Transition for workers.

Overall, Just Transition plans, guided by climate limits, should provide structured pathways for the existing workforce, new workers and communities. Terms and conditions of workers must be safeguarded and accountability to trade unions and local stakeholders in place.

Finally, the authors report that in other policy arenas restrictions on the supply of harmful substances (e.g. ozone depleting chemicals and asbestos) targeted the substances, whereas with fossil fuels only measures to slow the consumption have been taken leaving the market to determine extraction. This is beginning to change. It is to be hoped the banning of fracking in Scotland and UK wide in future will serve as an example of legislative measures to make unsafe practices unlawful.

It is worth noting that the authors place no great faith in carbon negative strategies such as capture and storage. While these technologies may have their place in future developments, philosophy of enabling business as usual must be guarded against. To finish with the words of the authors

‘Oil and Gas sucks investment …’

Investment in renewables could swiftly move us to reduction in emissions within climate limits.

‘Today’s decisions shape the long term energy future’.

Let’s begin the sustainable revolution.

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Confronting corporate power

A month ago we reported on the launch of the “Fife Ready For Renewal” campaign to insist that production work for the new Neart na Gaoithe wind farm should take place at the currently unoccupied Bifab yards in Burntisland and Methil. On Friday 5th July the campaign stepped up a notch when 100 pickets assembled in Edinburgh.

Ex-Bifab workers, reps of 5 or 6 unions, School Strikers, ScotE3, Friends of the Earth and others surrounded the EDF Renewables HQ in Morrison Street, Edinburgh. An expert bugler, echoing his fanfares round the tall buildings, attracted a lot of passing attention. No uniformed police. Four School Strikers were lined up behind a very long banner. They were shy so we got them to go to the front. Good speeches. The plan had been to present a letter to EDF, listing questions and demands. But we arrived to find their door locked. So the questions and demands were magicked onto two long scrolls, which were displayed at the front of the protest and photographed. Then it was decided we should march round the side of the building to see if there was a back door open so the original letter could be presented. There was a back door – a big revolving one, behind which four large security guards retreated when they saw us coming – a lot of loud music and chanting by this time on a good PA system. Good large flags, multiplied by reflexion in glass walls. Two people were allowed inside to give the letter to the guards, then one worker managed to push his way backwards through the door with a big flag, which he waved at us through the glass with a big smile, while the guards pinioned him. There was a point when it looked as if the crowd would push through the door, but not this time. The guards nudged the worker back though the door, then decided to lock it. This was the best bit – a guard on his knees inside struggling to lock the door with a ground-bolt, but failing to get any of his big bunch of keys to fit. This gave a great photo opportunity, and was greeted with hilarity by the crowd, who offered technical training for EDF workers.

Thanks to Mike and Eileen for words and images.

Fife – Ready for Renewal

EDF renewables have the contract for the new Neart na Gaoithe offshore wind farm. Although the turbines will be located around 15.5 km off the Fife coast the company plans to source much of the infrastructure for the site from South East Asia.

The project aims to generate 450MW of renewable energy (enough to power all of Edinburgh) – this makes the decision to manufacture the jackets that the turbines rest on in the far east and then ship them around the world all the more ludicrous. It will create huge additional carbon emissions – the STUC reckons this would be the equivalent of putting 35,000 additional petrol or diesel cars on the road.

Simply on the basis of its carbon footprint, the argument for dropping the EDF plan and building the jackets at the BiFab yards in Fife is incontestable. But in the context of a climate emergency it also raises other fundamental issues about how Scotland plays its part in the transition to a zero carbon economy. Mary Church, Head of Campaigns at Friends of the Earth Scotland puts the case very well:

We urgently need to build the clean energy economy in Scotland to do our fair share of tackling the climate emergency. But the new clean economy must be created in a way that ensures the benefits and costs are shared fairly, both internationally and here in Scotland.

…

Crucially, it also means losing the opportunity to create decent manufacturing work in Fife, that could help kick start the badly need Just Transition for workers and communities currently dependent on high carbon industries here in Scotland.

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The skills of the BiFab workers are critical to a Just Transition. Fundamentally this is about social justice and about the contribution that Scotland can make to the global response to the climate crisis. We have abundant resources for sustainable energy production and workers with the skills required to build the new sustainable economy. However, if we are serious about dealing with a climate emergency it is essential to develop policy and institutions that enable public control and accountability.

The STUC together with Unite the Union and the GMB have launched a campaign, ‘Fife – ready for renewal’ to bring the work to Fife. And Nicola Sturgeon is backing appeals to EDF to move production to the BiFab yards. This is really welcome. But taking the climate emergency seriously surely requires going beyond call to the ‘social conscience’ of the big energy companies. There is a pressing need to develop a publicly owned energy company. Such a company could invest in production through new offshore wind, wave and tidal, take control of the grid and update it with new subsea connections and a smart distribution system and end the dependency on the market.

There is a public meeting in Buckhaven on June 20^th to build support for the campaign – details on Facebook.