Climate Jobs – Employment, Energy and Environment

Climaximo at the Scot.E3 conference

The Portuguese ecosocialist group Climaximo contributed to the Scot.E3 conference

Leonor Canadas from the Portuguese group Climaximo spoke in the initial plenary session at the conference. on 18 October. Later she spoke in more detail about Climaximo – how they organise and what they do. We recommend checking out the Climaximo website.

In Climax’s words they are ‘an open, horizontal and anti-capitalist collective.’
They say:

We are the ones who refuse to lose everything without first trying to win, for the risk we take can’t be compared to the risk of not acting.

In 2019 we explicitly and consciously took on systemic change as our social and political mission, declaring a state of climate emergency within Climáximo and launching an in-depth process of internal restructuring. Every year we have updated the measures we take based on reality. In 2023 we changed everything. Read the current declaration of a state of climate emergency within Climáximo here: state of emergency.

The background to Climaximo’s approach to climate action and climate politics, and the sharp change they made in 2023, is summarised in the book All In which we reviewed on this website in April. You can find out how to get hold of the book and access more resources on the All In website.

Troublemakers at work

Links to useful resources from the Scot.E3 conference workshop on organising at work

At the Scot.E3 conference on 18 October Sally Heier facilitated a workshop on taking climate issues into the workplace. These are her slides.

If you’re in a workplace we’d encourage you to join the Troublemakers network. Troublemakers holds meetings and conferences that bring together people who are organising at rank and file level in their workplace.

You might also like to look at the Workers Can Win website which is packed with useful information about organising.

Climate and energy: building blocks for labour movement strategy

This article is based on a talk by Simon Pirani at the energy campaigns strategy day, organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change in Leeds on 1 February 2025. It was first published on the People and Nature blog.

The “key questions” we hope to discuss today, listed in the agenda, include “how do we cut through with our demands for a clean energy system”, “how do we create the necessary alliances” and “how do we turn the tide of right-wing weaponisation and scapegoating of climate action”.

I will comment on these questions by taking a step back, and considering some underlying issues about how we understand the world – issues that we will come back to again and again, as we are trying to develop political strategies. I hope this is useful.

Some of this will sound general, some of it some of you know better than I do, but my idea is to try to allow us all to consider the basics that underlie all the hard campaigning work.

I will comment on six points: two on politics, two on energy systems, one on technologies, and one on campaigning proposals.

1. To what extent can we talk about UK government “climate policy”? What is the effect of the government’s actions and the way to influence them?

The economic system that we live under has a built-in requirement to expand. Capital needs to accumulate continuously. The government’s function is to facilitate that.

And so the government’s default positions on things that matter in terms of global warming – airports, road building, regulation of the building industry, North Sea oil, and so on – are anchored in its attitude to economic policy (all about “growth”), which serves the needs of capital. Capital, in its drive to expand, undermines and sabotages all climate targets.

We, the movement, must not lose sight of how this works. This is how we end up with the chancellor of the exchequer talking nonsense about electric planes and biofuels, to justify reviving the discredited, climate-trashing Heathrow third runway proposal.

Our understanding of the relationship of capital and the government is obviously relevant to our political strategy.

Take for example the 2008 Climate Change Act, arguably the best bit of legislation we have, under which the UK carbon budgets are set, and which many of us here have used as a political lever for our arguments. Actually it is a double-edged sword. The Act is used by many politicians as a cover behind which to abandon actions that would address climate change.

A starting-point for a critique of the Act is research conducted at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and published in 2020, showing that if the UK sticks to its carbon budgets, it pours TWICE AS MUCH greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as it would under a fairly worked-out target.

The Climate Change Committee, supposedly “independent”, has always ducked the crucial question of what proportion of the global carbon budget it thinks the UK could fairly use. It considers what is “feasible”, not what is necessary.[1]

My conclusion from this is NOT that nothing can be done in the political sphere, but that we should recognise how the battlefield is actually set out. Strategies focused on convincing the government, without social movements behind them, will often fail.

2. Do we see the international climate talks as part of the solution, or part of the problem?

In recent years it has become clearer that the oil and gas industry, and governments of fossil fuel producing countries, have to a large extent taken control of the annual conferences of the parties (COPs) through their lobbying machines.

We should not give an inch to the oil companies and their lobbyists. But, in fighting them, we should beware of the idea that the international climate talks set a standard that, without these recent changes, we could return to. That was never the case.

I am talking here about the political agreements made at the talks, not about the scientific research summed up in the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change, that we should all follow as closely as we can.

(When I gave this talk, the very valid point was made in discussion that we can not just “listen to the science”, as some environmentalists say. There is not one “science”: scientific interpretations are also shaped and influenced by social forces and power relations, by the society in which scientists live.)

The international climate agreements were always based on the false premise that there could be green growth. They always combined tolerance for vast subsidies to the fossil fuel industries with the fiction of carbon trading.

And it is not only the climate talks, but all the post-1945 international political institutions, that are in crisis. The weakening of these institutions by Trump, Netanyahu, Putin and others is the outcome of a long process, not the beginning. The outrage of COP talks being run by oil company executives and oil-producing countries’ dictators needs to be seen in this context.

A very real political consequence of all this is that some activists, confronted by the horrific scale of the climate crisis, conclude that the future will inevitably be worse than the present.

These are real fears. And against the background of these fears, e.g. in Extinction Rebellion and organisations that have grown out of it, some people articulate what I call disaster environmentalism, always emphasising the worst possible outcome and minimising our own agency.

This is a very important discussion, and I do not think people active in the labour movement can cut themselves off from it.

We also need to recognise that, as the consequences of climate change become much more visible – floods, wildfires and other disasters – we will see much more civil disobedience by climate activists, and much more state repression in response.

Defending those activists, even those whose methods we might not agree with, is central, in my view.

3. What is our framework for understanding how fossil fuel use can be reduced?

First, let’s question the whole idea of “energy transition”. It has been poisoned, distorted beyond recognition, with misuse by the representatives of capital. In their telling, this “transition” will be led by oil companies, car manufacturing companies, “big tech” and their technofixes.

If you think I am exaggerating, look at the way it was discussed during the prime minister’s visit to Saudi Arabia just before Christmas.

A valuable perspective on this is presented in a new book by the historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: an all-consuming history of energy. He shows that previous so-called “energy transition” were actually additions: coal burning did not replace wood burning, but added to it; oil did not replace coal, but added to it.

And certainly right now in China, the world leader in building renewable electricity generation capacity, those renewables are being added to a still-expanding mountain of coal, not replacing it.

A second concept we should question is that “energy” is an undifferentiated thing, bought and sold as a commodity. Energy, like labour, has been commodified over the past several hundred years, by capitalism. But that is not a permanent or natural state of affairs.

Our movement should aspire to the decommodification of energy; we should think of it as a common good that people should have access to by right.

How do we move in that direction? How do we start to disentangle the system that currently delivers energy to people in the form of electricity, heat, or motive power? I suggest we start by considering the technological systems through which fossil fuels are burned and turned into these things that people can use.

I mean technological systems in a very wide sense: not only power stations and electricity networks that burn gas and produce electricity, or petrochemical processing, but also industrial and agricultural systems, urban built environments, transport systems – that all run predominantly on fossil fuels.

These technological systems are embedded in social and economic systems, and stopping fossil fuel use will involve transforming all of these.

Thinking about it in this way, we can identify three ways of reducing fossil fuel use.[2] Starting at the end of the process, where the energy supplies people’s needs, these three ways are:

a. Changing the way that energy is used. For example, replacing car-based transport systems with systems based on public transport and active travel. People do things differently, and better, using far smaller quantities of energy carriers (that is fuels, or electricity or heat, different forms energy takes).

b. Reducing the throughput of energy through technological systems. For example, replacing gas-fired heating with heat pumps run with electricity. The same result is achieved, keeping homes warm, using a small fraction of the fossil fuels burned previously.

c. At the start of the process, replacing fossil fuel inputs with renewable inputs. This is capital’s favourite change, because it does not imply reducing throughput or people living differently. Nevertheless, in my view, we in the labour movement also favour it. For producing electricity and heat, it is quite straightforward. As you know, for other things, such as making steel, it is much trickier.

I suggest this framework because in our campaigning work we are hit with a constant barrage of nonsense about decarbonisation, such as we heard from the chancellor this week about electric planes and biofuels. None of us have to be engineers to answer this stuff, but we need robust analytical categories to work with.

In energy researchers’ jargon, the use to which energy is put at the end of these technological processes – getting from place to place using petrol, heating a room using gas – are called “energy services”. From the 1970s, environmentalists argued that the economy should focus on delivering these services with less energy throughput.

“Energy services” is not a term I would use uncritically. But it’s worth knowing that there are piles of research showing how these energy services can be provided, with a substantially lower throughput of energy carriers.

(Three different, and I think complementary, takes on the UK economy are the Absolute Zero report produced at the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zero Carbon Britain report and Shifting the Focus, published by the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions.)

4. What do we say about “demand reduction”?

Because mainstream political discourse treats energy as a commodity, it also talks about supply and demand. Actually, demand for energy is a phantom.

No-one wants energy. What people, or companies, want is energy services. These are provided by energy carriers. We want heat, or light, or we want to get from one place to the other. If the technological systems, and the social and economic systems are changed, we can get these same outcomes using far less energy.

Furthermore, energy use is differentiated. The use of energy by a pensioner to keep warm can not be compared to the use of energy at a much greater rate for a company executive to take a plane flight, or a data centre to meet increased electricity demand for crypto currencies or AI.

This should be the starting point for our political strategy. We do not want demand reduction, as our right wing opponents claim. We want to use energy differently, as part of living differently – which is surely what the labour movement has always aspired to, long before the threat of global heating loomed in front of us.

5. How do we understand and respond to technofixes?

Technologies are instruments of labour, used by people in taking from nature their means of subsistence and the material basis of their culture. But those processes go on in specific sets of social relations – for the last three centuries or so, dominated by capital.

Just as labour is shaped and controlled by social forces, so are technologies. So we should beware of thinking of technologies outside of their social context.

An example is the internet. It transformed communication and access to information in ways that have changed all our lives. But we can also see how, in the hands of powerful corporations, it is being used to reinforce the most dangerous changes in society – the growth of dictatorship, the defence of genocide, and deception and lying on an industrial scale. Witness, too, the frightful expansion of energy-intensive data centres, particularly to facilitate cryptocurrency use and AI.

In the energy sector, bad or questionable technologies are supported by capital for its own reasons: those on which attention are currently concentrated are carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen, the primary social functions of which are as survival strategies for oil companies.

Technologies that have the capacity to serve humanity – I am thinking here particularly of solar, including decentralised solar – are distrusted by capital, which seeks to control them.

As a movement, we need to develop our collective understanding of these technologies and our critique of them. A great example has been set by the informal group set up by campaigners and researchers working on CCS.

6. How do we confront the right-wing myths that climate policies are bad for ordinary people?

My conclusion from the last several years of campaigning on climate issues is: to get beyond the small number of people who have thought through the issues, we need to focus firstly on demonstrating the potential of policies that address both global warming on one hand, and social inequality on the other.

This is the way to counter the populist right wing narrative – which has also been taken up by Labour politicians and, on the issue of North Sea oil, even by union leaders – that action on climate change will inevitably hurt ordinary people.

Some exemplary campaigning, looking at how to move away from oil production on the North Sea without repeating the disaster that was visited on coal mining communities in the 1980s, has been done in Scotland. Another good example is the Energy for All campaign, launched by Fuel Poverty Action, which now has widespread support.

An example I know at first hand is that of our campaigns around transport issues in London. A couple of years ago we had to face the fact that our long-running campaign to stop the Silvertown tunnel, which will produce more road traffic and therefore more carbon emissions, had failed. The tunnel will open in April.

In discussions about how to keep together the unity and goodwill we had built up, a number of us felt that we should become more politically ambitious, not less, and advocate policies that clearly address social inequality at the same time as addressing climate and air pollution. This brought us to the demand for free public transport and the formation of Fare Free London.

Although this is a very new campaign, we have had nothing but positive responses, from unions representing transport workers and many other organisations.

We hope that, by shouting more loudly about this, we will cut right across the demoralising political diversion, launched by the populist right at the Uxbridge by-election and shamefully latched on to by some Labour right wingers, around the Ultra Low Emission Zone.

The call for free public transport flies in the face of thirty years of neoliberalism, opens the city to all and strikes a blow for social justice, and can also help to get cars off the road and make demonstrable progress towards decarbonisation. Nothing would make us happier than to see this issue taken up in other parts of the country and to move towards a Fare Free UK campaign. SP, 12 February 2025.

[1] The CCC does not say what proportion of the global budget it thinks the UK could fairly use. Instead it makes a political judgement about what a rich country, with a long history of fossil-fuel-infused imperialism, can manage. In its own words, it starts with what it deems to be “feasible limits for ambitious but credible emissions reductions targets in the near term” (Sixth Carbon Budget report, pages 319-325)

[2] I set out this argument in more detail in a talk at the Rosa Luxemburg foundation in Berlin, and in my book Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption

Three years of the GKN occupation

Watch this new film from REEL News

New Reel News film out today with all the details of this visionary struggle,as GKN workers mark three years in occupation with an incredible outdoor concert followed by a huge demonstration through the centre of the city – at 2 o’clock in the morning ….and with major steps forward in the most important just transition struggle anywhere in Europe, we’re asking for your help to fund a rank and file contingent to go over to Florence for the first international shareholders assembly.

For more details and how to join the delegation to the international assembly in Florence on 12/13 October 2024 co to the REEL News website

Why we need direct works departments

This ScotE3 article was first published in the August edition of the Scottish Rank and File Newsletter

The built environment accounts for 40% of end use carbon emissions. So, construction has a big part to play in tackling the climate crisis. Most of the emission reductions need to come through retrofitting the existing housing stock.

Campaigns in Edinburgh, Glasgow and elsewhere have highlighted the importance of retrofitting, the impact it could have on jobs for construction workers and on the quality of life of residents – particularly the hundreds of thousands current living in fuel poverty.

But there’s a real problem – both the Scottish Government and Local Authorities have no plans for large scale retrofitting in the next decade and they believe that the private sector will drive the transition. As University of Westminster researcher into the construction industry Linda Clarke says, this ‘is a sector beset with problems, not least low levels of unionisation in much of the private sector apart from engineering construction. Over half the workforce is classified as ‘self-employed’ for tax purposes, most firms (c. 97%) are SMEs – many of which are micro firms, the subcontracting chain can be very extensive, including labour-only subcontracting, and there are massive ‘skill’ shortages.’ And on top of all this there is no training infrastructure.

Retrofitting the Scottish housing stock requires planning, coordination and a big input from Further Education Colleges to provide the necessary skills training. Private construction firms have little interest in this. In ScotE3’s view it’s essential that construction workers and climate campaigners come together to campaign for the rebuilding of Direct Labour Organisations in every local authority. As Linda Clarke says ‘… DLOs, … operating on a non-for-profit basis, politically accountable, unionised, inclusive, offering secure, employment and good working conditions, and providing monitored work experience for trainees, are an obvious way to carry out large-scale retrofitting.’

To read Linda Clarke’s full article on retrofitting and the construction industry go to https://greenerjobsalliance.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/GJA-Newsletter-60-FINAL.pdf

Grangemouth – fight for jobs

Scotland’s only petrol refinery, based on the Firth of Forth at Grangemouth, is scheduled to close in 2025. The closure is not a cause for celebration by climate campaigners, it will be replaced by a new refinery in Antwerp and 500 workers at the Grangemouth site will lose their jobs. The closure is in no sense part of a transition away from Fossil Fuels and even less is it part of a just transition.

The march assembling outside the Grangemouth stadium – image Pete Cannell CC0

The huge 1700 acre Grangemouth site is owned by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS. They bought the Grangemouth petrochemical plant and the refinery from BP in 2005. Then in 2014 the company raided the pension fund originally established by BP and in turn de-recognised the plant unions. The refinery part of the site is now run by Petroineos, a joint venture between INEOS and the Chinese state-owned oil and gas company PetroChina.

Unite, the main union at the refinery is leading a campaign to ‘Keep Grangemouth Working’. The union is calling for action to ‘Extend, Invest and Transition’. On 3August, they organised a march and rally starting from the Grangemouth stadium on the edge of the INEOS site. Around 600, including refinery workers and their families, and trade unionists from around Scotland and further afield marched to a rally held in a local park. There were a handful of climate activists.

At the rally Unite Scottish Regional Secretary Derek Thomson talked about how the union was campaigning locally to raise awareness of the impact that closure would have on jobs and the local economy. Unite believes that the new Labour Government may be able to persuade Ratcliffe to extend the life of the refinery. The Tories pledged to provide 700 million Euros in credit to support the development of the new Petroineos refinery in Antwerp and they think that if Labour were to question this it would provide leverage.

Grangemouth is a critical campaign for the climate movement. There are moments when decisions are made and actions taken, or not made and not taken, that then resonate through the movement and shape its future trajectory. If the Grangemouth refinery is closed it will be such a moment. In Scotland another such time was the failure to take the BiFab fabrication yards into public ownership in the autumn of 2017. The loss of 1400 jobs at BiFab offshore renewables technology yards discredited the idea that action over climate offers opportunities for employment. The closure of Grangemouth would be not just a blow to the workers, their families and the local economy, it would also send political shockwaves through the climate and workers movements.

At the rally on 3 August the speaker from Friends of the Earth Scotland received a great response from the Unite members in the crowd. It is important that the union and the Grangemouth workers see transition to a sustainable future as a positive goal. However, there is a real weakness in the current campaign. Unite’s strategy seems to be based on pressurising INEOS into extending the lifetime of the refinery. But there’s no evidence that Ratcliffe is interested in doing this or interested in planning for a sustainable transition. And it’s not that Grangemouth is unprofitable – simply that Antwerp would be more profitable. None of the speakers at the rally criticised INEOS. Implicitly or explicitly the focus was on partnership with the company.

At a time when all the indicators suggest that global heating is increasing faster than the most pessimistic predictions, companies like INEOS and BP are doubling down on investment in fossil fuels. They aim to make mega-profits while they can. In these circumstances, when action to decarbonise is overdue, working in partnership with big oil, while talking about the need for transition and social justice is simply greenwashing. It won’t save jobs, and it sets back progress towards transition.

So, what’s the alternative? Public ownership, and democratic planning that involves energy workers is essential. To build the mass campaign that could make this possible the unions and the climate movement need go beyond slogans.

The private sector is simply not capable of the kind of planning and coordination that is needed to save jobs and manage a just transition.

Convincing energy workers, winning hearts and minds and building the mass support for public ownership requires brutal clarity about what the oil and gas companies are doing. The profits they’ve made and continue to make, the huge subsidies they continue to attract and the way they expect us to clean up their mess. Grangemouth has been a site for petrochemicals for a hundred years. Without an enormously expensive cleanup the site is only suitable for industrial use.

Partnership with INEOS is a dead end. The company has no loyalty or regard for the workers or the local population. There’s no guarantee if the refinery closes in 2025 that the rest of the operations on the site will continue much longer, and with it, the loss of over 2,500 jobs. Ratcliffe expects us to pay the huge cost of cleaning up the site. And the residents of Grangemouth having lived with the stink and pollution of the plant for decades will remain with a toxic legacy.

But to win hearts and minds and build the campaign there also needs to be a plan for change. The vast site at Grangemouth could become a hub for a wide range of renewable technologies. There’s room to establish new facilities, there’s good communications by land and via the Firth of Forth and there is an established workforce and a cluster of further and higher education institutions in the region that could support the development of a new low carbon economy.

The nature of the plan matters. At the Grangemouth rally – ex-MP and deputy leader of the Alba Party, Kenny MacAskill argued that Grangemouth could prosper through the development of green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. But these are the solutions that are promoted by Offshore Energy UK, the organisation that represents the interests of the UK oil and gas sector. Both technologies may have some use in the future but the industry focus on them right now is aimed at maintaining oil and gas production, and the infrastructure and systems that support it, for as long as possible. Opportunities for rapid progress lie in Wind, Solar, Wave and Tidal technologies together with energy storage and a new smart distribution grid. Ending partnership between unions and big oil also requires a new and critical view of what technologies support jobs and employment and support rapid decarbonisation and a break from the fake self-serving solutions that are advanced by the oil and gas industry. Which technologies are prioritised is not simply a technical choice but also highly political.

Protest against the Peterhead Gas Power Station

Thursday 18th July 11.30 am – 1pm

Perth Concert Hall, Mill Street, PH1 5HZ

Peterhead Power Station Image by James Allan CC BY SA 2.0

There will be a protest outside the SSE AGM in opposition to the company’s disastrous plans for a new gas burning power station in Peterhead.

SSE already owns the existing power station in Peterhead, which is Scotland’s biggest polluter. A new plant will lock people in Scotland into reliance on expensive and polluting gas for decades – well past the Scottish Government’s 2045 net zero target.

SSE’s Annual General Meeting is for the company to celebrate their huge profits and their expansion plans.

We want to make sure that their bosses and shareholders know that people are not happy about their plans for new fossil fuel infrastructure, so we will be holding a demonstration outside the Concert Hall venue. It will be a family friendly protest, and everyone is welcome!

Here are some train times that will get you in by train if you’re coming from:
Aberdeen – 9.44 train gets into Perth at 11.15am
Glasgow – 10.07 train gets into Perth at 11.11am
Edinburgh – 9.39 train gets into Perth at 11.06am
Dundee – 10.55 train gets into Perth at 11.15am

Thanks to Friends of the Earth Scotland for this information

Government accepts “error in law” on coal mine decision!

We’re pleased to be able repost this from South Lakes Against Climate Change. The campaign against the West Cumbria coal mine had been fighting for the last decade. The case for the mine has been in tatters for a long time.

Protest at the site of the proposed mine – image by Pete Cannell CC0

The Secretary of State (SoS) of Levelling Up Housing and Communities (LUHC) has accepted that there was an “error in Law” in the previous decision to grant planning permission for the mine. The Government will therefore not be defending the decision, made in December 2022, to grant planning permission for the new mine, and will argue that it should be quashed.

In a reasoned and careful “Statement of Reasons” the SoS explains that the re-assessment is the result of the Supreme Court’s recent judgement on the “Finch v Surrey County Council” case. It is now clear that the combustion emissions, i.e. from the use of the Cumbrian coal, should have been assessed as an indirect effect of the new extraction in the Environmental Impact Assessment.

If that is agreed by the Court, the planning application goes back to the SoS to make a fresh decision.

This is HUGE news. We don’t know what West Cumbria Mining will do, but we are pretty sure that the Hearing of our legal challenges will open on the 16th July as scheduled. Only the Court can quash the planning consent, and that is what we are hoping for.

Post-election battlegrounds for climate and social justice

On 4 July, the climate-trashing Tory government will be replaced, as good as certainly by Keir Starmer’s “changed” Labour party.

For all its talk of “green prosperity”, Labour plans to work closely with the corporations that profit from North Sea oil and gas and from generating electricity – and who intend to produce, and use, fossil fuels for as long as they can.

*A protest at government offices against the Rosebank oil field project, January 2023. Photo by Steve Eason*

Labour’s plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from homes and cars are hopelessly timid, because of its conviction that private business does it best.

Under Labour, we will in my view make progress against social injustice and climate change only insofar as social movements and the labour movement:

(i) confront and confound the government, and

(ii) show that action on climate change, far from costing ordinary people money as the extreme right claim, is 100% compatible with combating social inequalities.

In this article I try to identify the likely battlegrounds between our movements and a Starmer-led Labour government:

Fossil fuel production and the path away from it (part 1); electricity generation at national (part 2) and local (part 3) levels; avoiding false technofixes (part 4); and changing the way energy is used in homes and transport (part 5). Part 6 is about bringing these separate, but connected, issues together.

1. Transition away from fossil fuel production on the North Sea

The election-time slanging match about the North Sea’s future has featured politicians’ and union leaders’ cynicism at its worst. In opposition to this, our movement needs serious conversation about how to fight for working people’s livelihoods and run down oil and gas production simultaneously.

The political war of words has focused on Labour’s commitment not to issue new licences to explore for oil and gas in the North Sea.

The Scottish National Party, which fears losing parliamentary seats to Labour, has lashed out with a claim – shown by BBC Verify to be false – that this would cost “100,000 jobs”. This is “a clear about-face” from the SNP, which last year “committed to a built-in bias against granting new licences”, the Politico web site reported.

“Exaggeration and misinformation helps no-one”, given the urgent need for “a clear-eyed conversation about how to ensure that Scottish workers benefit from the transition away from oil and gas”, Tessa Khan of the climate advocacy group Uplift said.

But exaggeration and misinformation is exactly what leaders of the Unite union, which represents many North Sea workers, contributed. They withheld support for Labour’s manifesto, because of its North Sea policy (as well as for much better reasons, such as its employment policies) and endorsed SNP leader John Swinney’s nonsense.

Unite leader Sharon Graham suggests that a ban on oil and gas licences is the main threat to North Sea jobs. That is not true. It usually takes more than ten years from licence issue for a field to start production, so there is only a very indirect connection. In recent years oil corporations’ decisions to slim down their North Sea operations has posed a far more immediate threat.

If Labour reverses its ban on new licences, the only beneficiaries will be those corporations – while the planetary disaster threatened by climate change would come one step closer, as the heads of the UN and International Energy Agency have pointed out. Indeed there is a powerful case for scrapping the already-granted licence for the giant Rosebank field.

Unite says it wants to “see the money and the plan” for the transition away from oil and gas. But as its leaders well know, plans already exist.

The Sea Change report, published five years ago, showed how the North Sea workforce could expand, with investment in wind power and other renewables. The oil companies and Tory government have other ideas, set out in the North Sea Transition Deal – which proposes spending £15 billion on their pet technofixes, carbon capture and hydrogen. (See also part 4 below.)

*The Green New Deal Rising group disrupted an event sponsored by oil industry lobbyists at the Labour party conference in October last year. Photo by Jess Hurd*

Unite, along with other unions, accepts these false solutions, and calls for investment in hydrogen and carbon capture, as well as wind power.

Perhaps we should be talking about “rupture, rather than transition”, he said, to make gains for social justice and tackling climate change. This starts with uniting oil workers and Scottish working-class communitiesmore broadly. This is the conversation we urgently need.

At a recent gathering of trade unionists concerned with climate policy, Pete Cannell of the campaign group Scot E3 argued that, given the dominance of this technofix narrative, “it’s legitimate to ask whether ‘just transition’ is any longer the right framing”.

2. Public ownership in the electricity system

Labour will set up a “publicly-owned clean power company”, GB Energy, paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas producers. But GB Energy will own few, if any, electricity generation assets and will focus on partnerships with private capital. Labour also plans to leave the electricity transmission and distribution grids in private hands, and to leave largely unchanged the neoliberal electricity market rules that allowed corporations to reap billions by impoverishing households in the 2022 “energy crisis”.

Labour intends to capitalise GB Energy with £8.3 billion over the next five years: £3.3 billion for a potentially useful Local Power Plan (see part 3 below), and £5 billion to “co-invest in new technologies” including floating offshore wind and hydrogen, and “scale and accelerate mature technologies” including wind, solar and nuclear.

Labour’s loud claim that GB Energy will “lower [electricity] bills because renewables are cheaper than gas” is not credible. This would require, at least, an investment far greater than £5 billion, allied to a root-and-branch overhaul of electricity markets.

More likely, GB Energy will, at best, fund new technologies that financial markets prefer not to risk their own money on – or even follow in the footsteps of Tony Blair’s disastrous Private Finance Initiative, with which corporations milked billions from the NHS. The Guardian, apparently briefed by Keir Starmer’s team, reported that GB Energy will probably start with “investments alongside established private sector companies”, including the chronically over-budget Hinkley Point, Sizewell C and Wylfa nuclear projects.

The Greens and others slammed Starmer, when he finally clarified on 31 May that GB Energy will essentially be an investment vehicle. But a trenchant critique had already been published last year: Unite’s Unplugging Energy Profiteers report, which warned that “unless combined with a public purchasing monopoly, or significant market reform intervention, [GB Energy] will have no impact on distorted pricing in the wholesale market”, and “by concentrating very limited resources on de-risking experimental forms of generation, GB Energy will use public resources to underwrite and further increase future potential profits for the private sector”.

Unite, and the Trades Union Congress, call for public ownership to be extended not only in electricity generation, but also in the supplybusiness and in transmission and distribution networks. Labour madesimilar calls in 2019, but has now ditched them.

Underinvestment in these networks is a scandal as damaging as the water companies’ rip-off: tens of billions of pounds’ worth of network upgrades are needed to facilitate renewable generation and close the gap on missed climate targets.

*The National Grid’s Nechells electricity substation near Birmingham*

Already, there are 10+year queues for renewables to be connected to the grid; house-builders are fitting climate-trashing gas boilers because they can not access electricity for heat pumps; battery storage lies unusedbecause companies’ computer systems are out of date … all while distribution networks paid out £3.6 billion in dividends to shareholders in 2017-21.

The system is in such a state that even Rishi Sunak’s dysfunctional government took regulatory powers away from National Grid and put them in the Future System Operator. Nick Winser, the electricity network commissioner, warned the government that unchanged, the system would leave “clean, cheap domestic energy generation standing idle, potentially for years”. “Very few new transmission circuits have been built in the last 30 years”, he said: unless jolted, companies could take up to 14 years to build them.

To make the electricity network fit for the transition away from fossil fuels, wider public ownership is crucial. Our movement needs to work out how to coordinate the fight for it.

3. Community energy and decentralised renewables

Labour promises to spend £3.3 billion on a Local Power Plan, under which GB Energy will “partner with energy companies, local authorities and cooperatives to develop up to 8GW of cheaper, cleaner power by 2030”. Up to 20,000 renewable projects will return “a proportion” of their profits back to communities. But “the detail on these plans is sparse”, the New Statesman reported – and so it is surely up to community organisations and the labour movement to discuss effective ways this money could be spent.

Until now, central government has been a wrecking ball for community energy. In 2015, it changed planning rules, effectively blocking onshore wind projects. In 2019, it scrapped the feed-in tariff paid for electricity supplied to the grid from small-scale renewables. And for years – as decentralised renewables technology leaped forward internationally – it ignored calls to overhaul market rules. Small renewables projects were locked out of the grid by the need for a £1 million + licence, and other obstructions.

The Green New Deal all-party parliamentary group last year called for the regulatory system to be turned upside down, to end its bias in favour of the “big five” generators. It proposed a “European style ‘right of local supply’”; changes to rules on planning and public procurement; mandatory transparency of grid data; and other measures.

Such changes would make it possible to replicate the success of Energy Local in Bethesda, north Wales, which supplies locally-produced hydro power to households at below-grid prices. In April, the Common Wealth think tank proposed a “public-commons partnership” as the institutional form under which local authorities could develop such projects.

All this will take a fight, though. Otherwise, electricity corporates will spread their tentacles into decentralised renewables, as they are doing in the US and Australia.

Furthermore, we need to overcome the official labour movement’s residual reluctance to support community energy projects. The TUC’s recent renewables policy paper, which lists offshore wind, wave, nuclear and “zero carbon hydrogen” (?) as energy technologies – but not decentralised wind and solar – is, unfortunately, indicative.

Decentralised renewables, developed with cooperative, community and local authority forms of ownership and governance, can help to break corporate control of electricity provision, and open the way to democratise and decommodify it.

4. Opposing false technological solutions

False technofixes, including hydrogen and carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) feature prominently in Labour’s election manifesto – the outcome of lobbying by the oil industry, for which they comprise a survival strategy. Nuclear power – expensive, dangerous, and beloved of the military – is there too, grabbing funds from proven, socially useful technologies such as home insulation, public transport and decentralised renewable power.

While the case against nuclear has been made, and the false logic of CCUS exposed, over decades, the drive for hydrogen is more recent: it is the oil companies’ alternative to electricity-centred decarbonisation. Energy systems researchers argue that, while hydrogen may be needed in future e.g. for steelmaking or energy storage, it will never be suitable for home heating, and hardly ever for transport.

*Demonstration by HyNot, which opposes hydrogen for home heating, at the Green Expo UK in Cheshire, last week. Photo from HyNot twitter feed*

The Tory government has invested heavily in hydrogen, and the 2023 Energy Act provided a framework for its commercial development. But attempts to bribe communities into testing it out for home heating have hit setbacks. A planned test at Whitby, Merseyside, was cancelled last year after vigorous opposition by local residents and the HyNot campaign group. This year a second planned test at Redcar, Yorkshire, and a thirdone in Fife, Scotland, were both postponed.

Catherine Green Watson of HyNot said: “These postponements are great progress for our campaign. But on Merseyside we still have strong local political support for hydrogen in industry, which should not be the priority. Instead, we need to concentrate on upgrading the electricity grid.”

We need a discussion in the labour movement and social movements about the social role of these technologies. We could work towards unity around the principle that they should not receive state funding that could go to quicker, more effective decarbonisation paths.

5. Energy use in our homes and transport

Labour has scaled back its promises to invest in its Warm Homes Plan that will fund grants and low-interest loans for insulating homes and replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. Shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband last year talked about “up to £6 billion a year”; by the time Labour’s manifesto was published last week, this had shrunk to “an additional £6.6 billion over the course of the next parliament” (that is, over five years). Talk of upgrading 19 million homes had stopped; now it’s 5 million.

Labour has stuck with commitments to take railways back into public ownership, and to support municipal ownership and franchising of bus services. But it is also promising to “forge ahead with new roads”, and keep the transport system centred on private cars, at a time when researchers argue that this cuts dangerously across tackling climate change.

If Labour sticks to this course, determined by its neoliberal fiscal rules and by corporate lobbying, then key opportunities to cut UK carbon emissions, while improving people’s lives, will be missed. Researchers have been screaming for years that insulation and heat pumps, and superceding the car-centred transport system with better, cheaper public transport, are desperately needed to decarbonise homes and transport, the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Battles on effective energy conservation in homes, transport and throughout the economy are part of the war to limit climate change.

Labour’s commitments are too timid to reverse the disasters caused by Tory policies. In the decade from 2012, annual completions of home insulation upgrades fell by nine tenths. The measures announced by government last year would take 190 years to improve the energy efficiency of the UK housing stock and 300 years to hit the government’s own targets for reducing fuel poverty, National Energy Action stated.

As for roads, the government could cancel the £10 billion Lower Thames Crossing scheme, final approval of which has been delayed until October, and apply to all future projects the principle adopted by the Welsh government – that they can only go ahead if compatible with climate policy.

Labour may not only fail to deal with these gigantic sources of carbon emissions, but actually open up new ones. A grim example is Labour’s threat to overrule communities who question tech corporations who want to build fuel-guzzling data centres – which will help trash climate targets, to the benefit of those corporations alone.

6. Bringing the issues together

The stakes are high. Every new assessment by climate scientists underlines the conclusion reached by leading British researchers four years ago: that the UK’s decarbonisation targets are half as stringent as they need to be, to make a fair contribution to tackling global heating. The government’s own climate change committee says non-power sectors of the economy need to decarbonise four times faster than they are doing.

Tackling climate change, while reversing the effects of 14 years of neoliberal austerity policies, will not be easy. Indeed, Labour does not intend to: both decarbonisation and social policy will be subordinated to their fiscal rules.

The labour movement and social movements need to challenge and push back Labour’s pro-fossil-fuel, pro-austerity approach.

We need to unite our forces and find the pressure points – be it saying “no”, to the Lower Thames Crossing project and similar, or finding openings for collective action, e.g. in the Local Power and Warm Homes plans.

To act effectively on climate, we need to keep in mind the necessity of holistic solutions, and reject illusory technofixes and greenwash narratives that claim to reduce emissions with one hand, and pour them into the atmosphere with the other. SP, 18 June 2024.

This article was first published on the People and Nature site. Republished here with thanks.

Making just transition possible

We were invited to contribute to a workshop on fossil fuels and developing a workers’ plan for just transition held in London on 13 April 2024 by the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group. This is a summary of the contribution made by Pete Cannell – responses to this piece would be very welcome.

Dundee Harbour – image by Pete Cannell CC0

The previous speakers have talked about some of the very important practical issues that are central to enabling a transition to a sustainable zero carbon economy. There’s plenty of evidence to show that phasing out oil and gas combined with serious investment in renewables creates more jobs. The Sea Change report, published in 2019, shows how switching from oil and gas to wind and solar would create a big net increase in jobs and how failing to make this transition would mean that targets to cut carbon emissions would not be met.

Similarly, home insulation, retrofitting and replacing gas with electricity for heating and cooking is essential, but critically dependent on a skilled workforce.

This workshop is framed around developing a workers plan for just transition. I would argue that the main elements of such a plan are in place. That being the case in the rest of this contribution I’d like to talk about why there’s not yet a simple consensus about a plan. Having a plan is clearly necessary, and critical to being credible in the eyes of working people who are not yet convinced.

In one sense we’ve made serious progress in the last five or so years, it’s now common sense in the climate movement to talk about the role of workers and the need for a just transition. I think in this respect COP26 in Glasgow was a watershed moment. But ironically in practical terms, in terms of action I think we’ve gone backwards in the same period. So, for example, the number of workers in renewables in Scotland is about the same now as it was in 2014. In the eyes of many workers talk of just transition looks like hot air. And in the hands of right-wing populist politicians, it fuels arguments that the climate crisis is not a problem and climate action is a threat. So, there’s a real danger that repetition of just transition, in the absence tangible steps that improve lives and livelihoods, becomes a form of greenwashing.

So, while we need consensus on what to do for me the 64,000-dollar question is

How do we build a mass movement with powerful roots in every workplace and working-class community that has the power to make the necessary changes happen?

I think the climate movement often underestimates the extent to which commitment to the North Sea and to the interests of the big oil and gas companies shapes and directs climate policy. Westminster, Holyrood, the energy sector trade unions and the oil and gas industry work in partnership through what used to be called Oil and Gas UK and has now been rebranded as Offshore Energies UK. They are all signed up to the North Sea Transition Deal and it essentially guides their actions. So, for example it’s hard to find a serious analyst who things hydrogen for domestic heating and cooking makes sense but using hydrogen in this way remains a key plank of policy for both Westminster and Holyrood. And while it does other options are not pursued. Why? Because hydrogen together with Carbon Capture and Storage is the best option for Fossil Capital that wants to maintain existing market dominance, infrastructure and (not least) profits.

For more than fifty years the big oil and gas companies have used their operations in the UK sector of the North Sea to blaze a trail for what we have come to know as neoliberalism; establishing practices that have been copied and taken up internationally. Outsourcing, multiple layers of subcontracting, vicious anti-union policies and the use of blacklists. At the same time the so-called free ‘market’ has been featherbedded by massive state subsidies which have exceeded taxation revenue.

In the old saying – if we had a choice – we wouldn’t start from here. All the evidence is that we are just going past the 1.5degree threshold and the scientific evidence is that change is taking place more rapidly than anticipated. This while the Scottish government which has been strong on rhetoric but feebly reliant on the market for action is judged to be a long way for reaching its targets and Westminster gives the green light for maintaining oil and gas production. And the most important unions remain wedded to a policy of partnership with the energy industry. To answer my earlier question, that partnership, is why we don’t have consensus about a plan. It’s the partnership that pulls in Unite, RMT and GMB behind CCS, Hydrogen and Nuclear.

In this context I think it’s legitimate to ask whether just transition is any longer the right framing for what we want or need.

We need to be clear about what we want to happen and largely that thinking is in place. But to make it happen – perhaps what we should now be talking about is rupture rather than transition. And the power to make that rupture resides within the working class.

North Sea workers are key, but the oil industry has been successful at keeping their organisation fractured and largely ineffective. I think it’s most likely that oil workers will become active participants in the rupture we need only if the mass movement we need is built across all sectors and in working class communities.

And if we are to win that mass participation then there’s no place for partnership with Fossil capital – and that means some very sharp arguments within our movement.