The slides from Simon Pirani’s talk at the Scot.E3 conference
Simon edits the People and Nature blog and is the author of Burning Up – a global history of fossil fuel consumption. In the introductory session of the conference he argued that Climate Change is an injustice multiplier and that Net Zero and Technological Transition are frauds. He asked how do we defend workers’ rights in the climate emergency and whether there are spaces we can carve out while capital dominates.
At that time I was four years’ retired, after 40 years as an offshore oilworker. I was experiencing a personal renaissance, as Extinction Rebellion (XR) crashed onto the streets.
My article wasn’t particularly radical or controversial. Certainly not to most XR rebels who were its target audience. And it still today, at least in part, reflects what is a fairly mainstream position in the climate movement.
I wasn’t really focussed on XR’s demands as such – e.g. getting the government to “tell the truth”. Even then I wasn’t convinced that that was very likely, but I certainly didn’t disagree. I knew next to nothing about the popular assemblies that XR was calling for, or about whether Net Zero was remotely achievable by 2025.
But I’d been hugely impressed by the way Extinction Rebellion had burst onto the scene, blocking bridges over the Thames the year before. That’s when I’d become aware of the movement.
By this time, I was troubled about global warming and thought that it would take the masses to intervene in this existential issue. Really all I wanted to do was to bring my own experience to bear on the situation.
I’d been flabbergasted that many rebels I’d spoken to had little awareness of the North Sea oilfield’s existence.
I felt that the “fossil fuels” that were understood to be the major source of greenhouse gases when burned, were in fact still pretty much a “concept” – something in their heads, rather than real stuff mined by real people in our patch.
My article called on the climate movement to turn towards the oil workers with a call for a “just transition”.
Just transition of course was not my formulation, but was a concept that I swallowed whole, and expected would appeal to the offshore oil workforce on some level and might be the basis for workers to mobilise around.
This, after all, was the workforce that had engaged in a huge struggle after the 167 deaths by burning and drowning on the Piper Alpha platform, albeit 30 years previously.
In what now seems like an age since 2019, we’ve seen virtually no response from oil and gas workers, despite a concerted turn towards them by parts of the climate movement.
Perhaps the one concrete thing is that we know that they would be more than happy to transfer from offshore oilfield to offshore wind field … if they can keep the lifestyle and the wages.
But the workers are still in lock step with their trade unions (the minority that are actually organised) and with their employers, with Big Oil globally, and with our government.
Short of a massive storm event on the North Sea creating another major tragedy, it’s hard to see this unholy alliance unravelling any time soon.
But while I’m not embarrassed by the 2019 article, I don’t think it reflects the reality we’re experiencing, never mind the future we’re facing. That is why I came back and asked Simon for the use of his blog again.
Right now, everywhere, we have an accelerating pattern of disasters, intermittently destroying lives and the natural environment and by all accounts driving the tendency towards mass extinctions of species.
We’ve seen a succession of global heating-induced disasters rock the planet. The floods in Pakistan, the fires in the Amazon, and today in California, stand out for me. It’s relentless. You’ll have your own list.
Can I tell the future? Well obviously not. But, as far as any layman can understand the climate science consensus, it seems that we’re way way further down the road to a radically different global climate, and massive changes to local weather that cause mayhem and misery.
My characterisation of the industry/government strategy as “business as usual” was, and remains, accurate, I think.
The court decision last week, that the process that gave the go-ahead for the development of the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields on the North Sea was unlawful, should pose absolutely no problem for the industry that was complicit in the hanging of Ken Saro-wiwa, and has been involved in human and ecological atrocities across the globe.
Not much of a problem either, I’d have thought, for Rachel Reeves and Sir Starmer with their Growth & Growth & Growth mantra.
The concept of a transition – never mind “just” – from fossil fuels to renewables, led in any part by the massed ranks of the proletariat self-organised in the offshore unions, now looks like an ongoing exercise in self delusion.
Long before XR was set up, in 1989-90, I was desperate to get some sort of an idea of the nature of the relationship of oil and capitalism – something that might inform me whether the rank and file Offshore Industry Liaison Committee (OILC) could chew what we’d bitten off by organising strikes and platform occupations after the Piper Alpha disaster. [Note. Here is an interview with Neil about this, and an archive of the rank and file paper he edited, Blowout.]
I was looking for some sort of an understanding of the possibilities and opportunities. Where did any of this lead?
Thirty-five years later, and along comes Adam Hanieh with his book Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market (reviewed here and here). He says, as I read him, that the capital system and fossil fuels are inextricably entwined.
His book begs the question, at least for me, of the likelihood that the capital system can turn off oil and gas, and replace the world’s energy needs from renewables, before climate chaos becomes the norm.
The vision this question conjures up, in my imagination, is of someone ripping out their own heart with one hand, while trying to construct a replacement organ with the other.
Meanwhile Jean-Baptiste Fressoz tells us, in his book More and More and More: an all-consuming history of energy (Allen Lane, 2024), that that holy grail of the climate movement, a “transition” to renewables, is in fact a pipe dream, a chimera.
There never was, it seems, in human history a precedent – an energy transition – corresponding in any way to the fantasy we hold of fossil fuels being replaced by renewables. Oil didn’t replace coal. Coal didn’t replace wood. It’s just been “more and more and more”.
The history, Fressoz insists, is of “symbiotic” relationships. Burning coal leads to using (more) wood. The exploitation of oil and gas drives (more) wood and (more) coal to be used, and crucially, renewable energy adds to and encourages the use of (more) wood and coal and oil and gas in such a way that Fressoz sees no plausible scenario where global heating might remain within 1.5, or 2.0 degrees C.
We’re looking at “three degrees C – a catastrophic increase” he says. “How can we make do with less and less and less?” he asks.
And Brett Christophers, in his book The Price is Wrong: why capitalism won’t save the planet (reviewed here) challenges another growing orthodoxy. The idea is firmly out there that now that the price of renewables is right, that renewables are “cheaper” than fossil fuels.
This, the argument goes, will inevitably, according to the laws of the market, mean that renewables will supplant fossil fuels. Only who would have guessed that in fact “the price is wrong”, and that all along it’s been profits, not prices, that drive capitalism?
Let’s suppose that you’ve checked out these authors for yourself, and found that my very crude argument, largely drawn from my reading of them, casts reasonable doubt on the idea that there is a snowball’s chance in hell of the current “powers that be” getting us out of this mess.
Then your next step might be to have a look around for the Leninist parties that are going to wrest global power from the current crop of megalomaniacs and oligarchs and downright genocidal bastards. Where are the forces that will lead us over the barricades, kalashnikovs in hand, to capture the state (everywhere) and plan our way out of this one?
Perhaps that’s not the place to look. Perhaps it’s going to be more complicated.
If you are, like I am, disabused of almost every certainty you ever held dear, then there is at least one step that might help us “take care of ourselves”. No! This is not about Lush bath bombs (if they are still a thing). It’s not about playing Radio 3 in the mornings instead of exploding from bed shouting and swearing at Radio 4’s climate-deniers-lite.
April 2012: Volunteers running a centre where Hurricane Sandy survivors could stock up on staples. Photo by Liz Roll/ Creative Commons
“Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire” is the subtitle of Adam Greenfield’s book Lifehouse (Verso, 2024). The “care” he’s talking about is putting human need, human relations and self organisation at the centre of our practice – in a period when it would seem that we are going to have to learn to survive and make worthwhile lives with less and less and less.
And all this in the face of escalating climate emergencies and the inevitable breakdowns they provoke.
The book is rooted in Greenfield’s own experience as part of Occupy Sandy, which had morphed out of Occupy Wall Street, organising relief to the victims of the hurricane that hit New York in 2012.
He draws material together from the way people have been self organising in the face of inadequate official support, abandonment and just downright open hostility, in places as disparate as Rojava in Kurdistan; Jackson, Mississippi, in the USA; Greece in 2010, during the debt crisis that exploded health care; and in California, where the Black Panthers organised from the late 60s to the early 80s.
The book is “optimistic”, not “hopeful”. Greenfield inveighs against hope, and lays out a rationale and a blueprint for a practice, and a physical space, that offers us a place to organise and the chance of shelter and community and dignity.
This is a rant, not a series of book reviews. And it may turn out to be no more prescient than that one from 2019.
But is Greenfield, broadly speaking, right? No point in just hoping so. The point of his book is, it seems to me, not just to understand the world but to change it. I’ve heard that somewhere before. A first step might be to have a look.
What has oil got to do with the history of the global capitalist economy? Pete Cannell reviews Adam Hanieh’s account.
A version of this review was published originally on the rs21 website.
The first commercially successful oil well in California was tapped in 1876 at Pico Canyon in Los Angeles County. Oil extraction and oil profits spurred the rapid growth of the city of Los Angeles. As I write this review 150 years later, LA is on fire. Crude Capitalism – Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market charts the development of the oil industry from its early beginnings and shows how its history is intermeshed with the development of the world economy. It’s a book about oil, about the climate crisis and the environment, about economics and the dynamics of the capitalist system. The Los Angeles fires are one more instance, and not even the most destructive, of the global impact of rising temperatures and changing weather patterns. If you want to understand how oil and capitalism link events in 1876 and 2025 and the forces that shaped and continue to shape our world, then Crude Capitalism is a must read.
Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
In 1995 the rulers of the world met in Berlin, ostensibly to tackle the threat of global warming. In the following three decades more carbon dioxide has been added to the atmosphere than in the previous two hundred years. In the same period annual methane emissions have more than tripled. This exponential increase in greenhouse emissions should not be a surprise. Hanieh begins the first chapter of the book by noting that a decade before the first COP, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) was already investigating the connection between human activities and changes to the earth’s biological, chemical, and physical systems. When their report was published in 2004, they noted that
The second half of the twentieth century is unique in the entire history of human existence on Earth. Many human activities reached take-off points sometime in the twentieth century and have accelerated sharply towards the end of the century. The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.1
Crude Capitalism sets out to explain why the mid-twentieth century was such a critical turning point and why despite decades of blah blah blah (to quote Greta Thunberg) the exponential increase in global greenhouse emissions continues.
The core of the book is a chronological account of the development of the oil industry from its early beginnings until the present day. The story begins in the United States in the late 1890s. The second chapter explains how the rapidly developing oil industry became dominated by huge vertically integrated corporations such as Standard Oil. The structure of the new industry owed a lot to the particularity of US property law. The oil majors consolidated their grip through cartels and oligopolistic structures. These modes of organisation were adopted internationally in the decades that followed. A theme that runs through the book is the way in which the oil industry has become global, growing and adapting and often acting as a trail blazer for innovation in organisation and new techniques of capitalist exploitation. An example of this, in the British context, is the privatisation of the North Sea oilfields, which was at the forefront of the neoliberal reconstruction of the British economy.
With World War I, the focus of the book moves to the Middle East and Russia. One of the great strengths of the book is the way in which it deals with imperialism and how economic and military competition ties the global oil industry and the global arms industry together in an embrace of exploitation and callous destruction of the environment and possibilities for genuine human development. World War I generated a massive increase in demand for oil. The British Navy transitioned to an oil-based fleet. Britain’s colonial activities in the Middle East and its role in dismantling the Ottoman empire were critical for Britain to meet its growing demand for oil. It met this demand by developing new oil fields in Iran and Iraq. Collaboration between US big oil and British colonial interests in this new arena of exploitation paved the way for the US majors to go global.
The real acceleration in oil production, chronicled brilliantly in the central part of this book, came after World War II, when European economies joined the developmental path already well established in the US. At this point, the use of oil as a feedstock for plastics and synthetic fertilisers took off on a mass scale. Oil’s initial success lay in its energy density – a given volume of oil provides far more energy than coal or wood – but over the course of the second half of the twentieth century the ubiquity of plastics meant that, in Hanieh’s words, ‘commodity production had become a derivative – or a by-product – of the production of energy.’This transformation of commodity production to a system powered and based on oil remains the dominant system in the global economy. This continuing domination is the reason why greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
In the last decade the US has once again become the largest single national producer of oil and gas. Yet at the same time as the Chinese economy has grown, the centre of gravity of the global industry has shifted east to Asia and new interdependencies have grown between Asia and the Middle East. 22 years after George Bush declared victory in Iraq, the largest oilfield in that country is run by a private Chinese company. But there is also a shift in power from private to state capital: the three biggest oil firms in the world are owned by the Chinese and Saudi Arabian states.
Crude Capitalism is withering in its critique of the oil industry’s corporate greenwashing. Hanieh notes, for example, that BP’s erstwhile rebranding as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ involved spending ‘more on the corporate rebrand than it did on renewable energy.’The rebrand was short-lived and while many of the big companies are increasing their investment in renewables the rate of increase in investment in hydrocarbons is even faster. Twelve of the biggest companies plan to spend more than $100 million a day on new hydrocarbon projects up to the end of the decade. In addition, the industry is using its power and wealth to push technofixes that are often of limited or no utility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions but allow for the continuation of the infrastructure and systemic economic relations of fossil capital. In Britain the industry body Offshore UK has rebranded itself as Energy UK and its focus on Carbon Capture and Storage and Hydrogen is slavishly followed by the British government.
Adam Hanieh is absolutely clear about the obstacle that big oil continues to present:
Oil, in other words, remains at the core of our economy and our energy systems; without dislodging it from this position there is no possibility of ensuring a future for humanity.
The strength of Crude Capitalism is that it shows how the oil industry is the result of a system that always puts profit first. The final paragraph sums it up:
We cannot behave as if the problem of capitalism does not exist, or can be ignored, or as if our current rulers can be convinced to take an alternative path through the sheer force of scientific evidence. This is an irrational economic system that pits the interests of a tiny few against the vast majority, and only by taking political and economic power away from the logic of the market will it be possible to build a different and better world.
[1] Will Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure, Berlin: Springer, 2004, 81.
Simon Pirani reviews Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market by Adam Hanieh
Review by SIMON PIRANI of Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market by Adam Hanieh (Verso 2024) Witnessing genocide can be paralysing. The horror of Israel’s onslaught on the civilian population of Gaza seeps in to the spaces in our heads, interrupting and disrupting attempts to think. My memory keeps connecting Gaza to the Vietnam war, news about which filtered through to me as a young teenager. My sheltered world was shattered by the cruelty with which innocent people were slaughtered and tortured, on the orders of governments I had vaguely assumed should protect people. I see teenagers going through analogous thought processes now.
How can it be that, half a century on, the grotesque “civilisation” that stalked Vietnamese villages has evolved, to produce the monstrous Netanyahu regime? What does this tell us about the many-headed hydra we are fighting, and humanity’s attempts to resist it?
Adam Hanieh’s book Crude Capitalism dissects one of the hydra’s heads – oil, and the corporations and states that use it to reinforce their wealth and power – and offers us a view on the part it plays in the whole organism. Reading it helped me to think of the horror of Gaza not as an aberration, but as a logical outcome of capital’s dominance in the twenty-first century.
Crude Capitalism tackles its big, difficult themes with precision and attention to detail. It is beautifully presented and organised.
The first part of the story Hanieh tells, of oil’s initial growth, plays out in the early twentieth century, in the US, and to a lesser extent in Iran, Azerbaijan and in Latin America. In the second part, from the mid twentieth century onwards, Middle Eastern oil resources and the battles for control of them loom large. And this is part of the background to the deluge of war crimes now being committed against Palestinians.
The connections are not direct. Regimes centred on vicious ethnic cleansing, like Netanyahu’s, are produced by capitalism; capitalism thrives on oil. But there are multiple mediations. Hanieh’s approach to these is an antidote to the simplifications that all too often circulate in radical political circles.
Physical control over oil production was crucial in the early twentieth century, but that has long ceased to be the case, Hanieh argues.
In the 1960s and 70s, against the background of powerful anti-colonialist movements, control over oil production shifted substantially from the powerful US- and European-based multinationals to state-controlled national oil companies, in the Middle East above all.
But capital and its state machines adapted. The US, which during the 1950s and 60s had superceded Britain and France as the dominant imperial power in the Middle East, established strategic and military relationships with the Gulf states and the Shah’s regime in Iran (at least, until the latter was overthrown in 1979). In the 1970s, the Saudi and Iranian monarchies were one pillar of US power in the region; Israel was the other.
Brute military force was only one aspect of imperial domination. Crucial, too, Hanieh argues, were changes in economic relationships, and in the financial system, through which control was maintained over oil revenues.
In the 1960s, oil producer countries’ governments, led by Venezuela, had forced through changes in oil pricing that disadvantaged the powerful US companies that had stakes in their oil fields. The Saudi monarchy, too, demanded a bigger slice of the cake. The US responded by changing its own tax rules so that, while more oil money flowed to Riyadh, the largest oil companies continued to earn record profits.
In the 1970s, price shocks shattered the monopolistic pricing system that had served the biggest companies. Action by the producer nations, coordinated through the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), took control of prices out of the multinationals’ hands. Crude oil prices quadrupled in 1973-74, and doubled again in 1979.
In the 1980s, there was further momentous change: oil increasingly became a traded commodity; wealth and power poured into intermediary trading firms. The oil profits that had once flowed mostly to rich-country corporations were now pouring into the Gulf states especially.
Oil refining in Saudoi Arabia
These “petro dollars”, flowing to countries outside the circle of imperialist powers in unprecedented quantities, became a big factor in financialisation (the expansion of international money markets, supercharged by computerised trading) and globalisation (the minimisation of capital controls and other trade barriers associated with neo-liberal economics).
(Forty years later, the flow is greater than ever. The Gulf states accumulated an estimated two-thirds of a trillion dollars in current account surplus in 2022, when, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil prices shot up.)
“Petro dollars” became “euro dollars”, funding that gathered in markets outside the US, denominated in its currency. The dollar, the status of which as a reserve currency had been endangered when it was unhooked from the gold standard in 1971, was reinforced.
Forms of money and the rise of the euromarkets, the dollar’s position as international reserve currency, the dominance of Anglo-American financial institutions, the chains of debt and the rise of neoliberal orthodoxy – these were not the automatic outcomes of dry economic processes centred in north America and Europe, but inextricably linked to the geopolitics of oil and the US presence in the Middle East.
By focusing on these “subterranean global roots” of the new financial system, Hanieh writes, “it is possible to shift the ways that we usually think about the control of oil”.
This is not simply reducible to territorial power and the ownership of foreign oil fields – it is also a question of the control of oil’s wealth.
To understand the killing fields of Gaza, we need to think, on one hand, about US military supplies to the Gulf states and Israel and the deranged ideologies that propel Israeli soldiers to massacre – and, on the other, about these “subterranean roots” that run through the banks, financial centres, trading houses and the City of London.
We are dealing with a many-headed hydra that combines wealth, power and terror in complex ways.
These relationships belie myths, such as the idea that our enemies fight repeated wars for oil. Actually, they rarely do.
The devastating 2003 US- and UK-led invasion of Iraq, Hanieh reminds us in a footnote, was “not so much about the seizure of Iraq’s oil as about the protection of the Gulf monarchies”.
He quotes another historian of the Middle East, Toby Craig Jones, who pointed out that capturing oil and oil fields has not been part of the US’s strategic logic for war, “but protecting oil, oil producers, and the flow of oil, has been”.
Oil does not just produce cash wealth. Once out of the ground, it is transported long distances, usually by ship (itself a hellishly oil-intensive business). It is refined into products: tarmac and bitumen; fuels from petrol to aviation fuel, the supply of which has shaped military, industrial and agricultural practices, and consumer markets, for a century; and ethylene and other raw materials for petrochemical plants.
Hanieh, in contrast to other big-picture historians of oil, foregrounds this “downstream”. He shows that, from the start, the US and European oil giants’ strategy was vertical integration, i.e. control of the whole process, down to the petrol stations.
Motor cars, the ultimate consumer good that consumes so much oil, loom large in this story. So does the burning of oil in power stations. Hanieh picks out for more detailed treatment the petrochemical industry, where oil is used not as an energy carrier that can be converted into mechanical motion, heat or electricity, but as a raw material.
He traces the origins of petrochemical processing in Germany; its development (if that is the right word) during the second world war as an arm of the Nazi military machine; and the US’s post-war acquisition of German technologies by theft and expropriation. Petrochemicals, while US- and European-dominated through the late twentieth century, are expanding rapidly in the Middle East and China in the twenty-first.
Fossil-fuel-based plastics and other synthetic materials, Hanieh argues, have displaced natural materials such as wood, cotton and rubber. “By decoupling commodity production from nature, there was a radical reduction in the time taken to produce commodities, and an end to any limits on the quantity and diversity of goods produced.”
This was a qualitative transformation: petrochemicals helped capital to achieve revolutions in productivity, labour-saving technologies and mass consumption; “birthed in war and militarism, they helped constitute a US-centred world order”. Our social being is bound up with a seemingly unlimited supply of cheap and disposable petrochemicals.
I hope Hanieh’s arguments on petrochemicals are brought to the centre of discussions about the transition away from oil, and what that implies for the socialist project of confronting and defeating capitalism.
First, the flow of oil as a raw material through the petrochemical industry needs to be put in the wider context of the colossal flow through the capitalist economy of extracted materials, including metals, minerals, concrete, asphalts, and living matter such as biomass and farm animals.
A team led by Fridolin Krausmann recently estimated that the aggregate of these material flows swelled 12 times over between 1900 and 2015. Eric Pineault has attempted to draw on this work, and that of ecological economists, to develop a Marxist view of this aspect of capital’s earth-shattering drive to expand.
Second, an issue of interpretation. I do not think the petrochemical industry “decouples” production from nature: it is another way of processing, and reprocessing, materials accessed from nature. Hanieh has, though, pointed to something hugely important, and dangerous, in the way that synthetic materials corrupt and deform humanity’s relationship with nature. Pinning down exactly what should be a concern to us all.
In the final chapter of Crude Capitalism, Hanieh surveys oil companies’ response to the threat of climate change. Having spent decades funding climate science denial, they have in the last decade reversed their public stance, accepted global heating as a fact … and become “enthusiastic converts” to the concept of “net zero”, as warped by politicians, that displaces genuine greenhouse gas emissions reductions with chimerical techno-fixes, above all carbon capture.
“By appearing to transform themselves into part of the solution”, the oil companies “not only hide their ongoing centrality to the fossil economy, but aim to frame and determine the societal response to climate change”, Hanieh warns.
The companies embrace technical false solutions – biomass, electric vehicles and hydrogen – that have moved to the centre of establishment climate policy. They are betting on expansion of the synthetic consumerist dystopia underpinned by petrochemicals. And their Orwellian grip on politics, hand in hand with producing-nation dictators, is on display at the international climate talks – last year (Abu Dhabi) and this (Azerbaijan) more than ever.
Ecosocialists, who endeavour to bring together the fight to overcome humanity’s disastrous rupture with nature with the fight for social justice, must first confront the fact that energy production and infrastructure “remain solidly in the hands of the largest oil conglomerates”, Hanieh argues.
Secondly, though, we need to acknowledge that while these firms are a “major obstacle” to moving away from oil, “they are a manifestation, not a cause, of the underlying problem” of capitalist social relations.
Let’s not only recoil in horror at the genocide: let’s also dissect and better understand the many-headed hydra. This book helps.
There will be a protest outside the SSE AGM in opposition to the company’s disastrous plans for a new gas burning power station in Peterhead.
SSE already owns the existing power station in Peterhead, which is Scotland’s biggest polluter. A new plant will lock people in Scotland into reliance on expensive and polluting gas for decades – well past the Scottish Government’s 2045 net zero target.
SSE’s Annual General Meeting is for the company to celebrate their huge profits and their expansion plans.
We want to make sure that their bosses and shareholders know that people are not happy about their plans for new fossil fuel infrastructure, so we will be holding a demonstration outside the Concert Hall venue. It will be a family friendly protest, and everyone is welcome!
Here are some train times that will get you in by train if you’re coming from: Aberdeen – 9.44 train gets into Perth at 11.15am Glasgow – 10.07 train gets into Perth at 11.11am Edinburgh – 9.39 train gets into Perth at 11.06am Dundee – 10.55 train gets into Perth at 11.15am
Thanks to Friends of the Earth Scotland for this information
We 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.
Climate campaigners from Extinction Rebellion Scotland, Divest Lothian and Global Justice Now Scotland danced (and leafleted) outside the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association Conference at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre on 28th February to highlight the flawed climate risk models used by pension funds and to call on the funds to stop investing in fossil fuels.
Despite increasingly stark warnings from climate scientists, oil majors continue to uinvest far more in fossil fuel expansion than in renewables.
For example, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) is being developed by TotalEnergies to run for 1444km across Uganda and Tanzania. It will transport oil for export to the global north that will release 34 million metric tons of CO2 each year.
Many. UK pension funds including the University Superannuation Scheme, West Midlands Pension Fund and Lothian Pension Fund invest in TotalEnergies. However, the tide is turning. PFZW is the third largest pension fund in Europe. On February 24th it announced that has completed a two-year programme during which, 310 oil and gas companies that do not comply with the Paris Climate Agreement have been sold (including Shell, BP and TotalEnergies). It plans to significantly increase investments in companies focused on the energy transition.
Thanks to Divest Lothian for information and some of the text.
SSE and Equinor plan to build a new gas-fired power station at Peterhead in Aberdeenshire. The existing gas-fired power station in Peterhead is Scotland’s single biggest climate polluter. Building the new plant will increase pollution levels.
The so-called North Sea Transition deal between the UK and Scottish governments and the oil and gas industry is based on squeezing out every profitable drop of oil and gas from the North Sea. The Peterhead plant is part of this strategy. The investment that is planned should be directed into renewables.
The plan is up for approval by the Scottish government. Tell your MSP that rather than more gas we need investment in renewables, in retrofitting, in public transport and in a clean energy smart grid.
We were invited to contribute to a panel on North Sea Transition at the conference ‘Working for Climate Justice: trade unions in the front line against climate change’ at Toynbee Hall in East London on 27th of October.
Aberdeen – image by Pete Cannell CC0
Since we launched in the autumn of 2017 Scot.E3’s emphasis has been on building capacity for a worker led transition with a focus on workplace and community organising. Arguing for the rapid phase out of North Sea Oil and Gas has formed a central part of our campaigning. The Sea Change report, published in 2019, remains very relevant. It shows how switching from oil and gas to wind and solar would create a big net increase in jobs in Scotland and failing to make this transition would mean that targets to cut carbon emissions would not be met.
It’s very important that the climate movement has embraced the significance of North Sea oil and gas and a just transition for workers in the fossil fuel industries. That wasn’t so much the case in 2017. But two critical and closely linked challenges remain:
How do we build a mass movement with powerful roots in every workplace and working-class community that pushes for the necessary changes?
How do we engage workers in the energy sector, who are very aware that change is needed, but have very little confidence that it will be socially just?
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, 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.
The onshore construction industry has been on the same journey. In Scotland the Construction Rank and File group has grown a new network through taking the construction industry using direct action tactics, picketing sites, and building combative organisation from the ground up. Just under a year ago two Unite activists, working on the new high voltage transmission lines from the Moray Firth to central Scotland were sacked for their union activity just before Christmas. However, after the Rank and File group picketed the main subcontractor and Scottish and Southern Energy they were reinstated with full back pay. The group has been a consistent supporter of Scot.E3 and have very publicly advocated for the importance of building worker organisation to ensure that the energy transition is a just transition.
Despite many analysts and some industry insiders warning that oil and gas is an increasingly risky investment global levels of investment are high and currently booming while the industry remains determined to squeeze as much oil and gas out as it can out of the North Sea. Among Westminster’s policy turns there has been a consistent adherence to the North Sea transition deal which describes in broad terms how that it is to be achieved. The Scottish Government and the offshore trade unions remain signed up to the ‘transition’ deal. Pursuing this path means that investment in hydrogen and CCS is prioritised at the expense of renewables, condemning UK consumers to a high cost and uncertain future and undermining progress to a genuine energy transition. There’s no evidence that big oil has any particular commitment to the North Sea, and they must know that hydrogen for domestic heating is hugely problematic, but they are very keen to stick with false solutions that are compatible with the existing infrastructure and networks of fossil capital.
The cost-of-living crisis isn’t over. However, to date, the climate and workers movements have failed to nail the intimate connection between fuel and food poverty and the oil and gas industry. Perhaps there’s a lesson here. At a time when we face a drawn-out existential crisis there is a need for new ways of organising that bring unions and communities together in common understanding and common struggle. There are some examples of what this might begin to look like. In Scotland Edinburgh Trade Unions in Communities provides an innovative model, while in France social movement trade unionism is having an impact.
Pete Cannell and Brian Parkin take a critical look at Sunak’s recent oil and gas announcement.
On Monday Rishi Sunak flew to Aberdeenshire by private jet to announce that at least one hundred new North Sea drilling licenses will be granted in the autumn. A policy described by junior energy minister Alex Bowie as “maxing out our oil and gas reserves”. At the same time Sunak gave the go ahead to the Acorn Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project to be based at St Fergus near Peterhead. Acorn will be one of four CCS projects in the UK – the other three are in England.
At a time when fires rage across Europe, and North America and floods wreak havoc in China and elsewhere, the new oil and gas licenses have received widespread criticism from climate campaigners, climate scientists, the Scottish Government and even some Tory MPs. Reactions to the CCS announcement are more mixed. SNP politicians have welcomed the announcement. Carbon Capture is prominent in the Scottish Government’s draft energy plans and Sunak argues that CCS will mean that the net zero by 2050 target is still in scope.
In our view both strands of Monday’s announcement represent Sunak paying his dues to the big oil and gas companies. In the rest of this article, we’ll explain why.
For months the Tories have argued that the cost-of-living crisis is the result of a crisis of energy sovereignty caused by the war in Ukraine. In fact, the price of gas had rocketed upwards before the war. There was no shortage of supply, since most of the gas used in the UK is piped from the North Sea. Compared with the rest of Europe the UK is unusually reliant on gas for home heating and cooking. There is a real problem here – the North Sea gas fields are nearing the end of their lifespan. So given there is an overwhelming need to reduce carbon emissions the obvious answer is to start now, planning for the future by electrifying the domestic heating system and insulating homes alongside a planned phase out of the use of gas. The Tories are doing none of this. On paper they still say they want to replace natural gas by hydrogen. But the weight of evidence that this would phenomenally expensive and a hugely inefficient use of electricity to generate the hydrogen means that they are rapidly backtracking.
So is Sunak’s plan to license more oil and gas fields going to keep people warm. Not at all. First the new fields contain more than 85% oil, not gas (see technical note below). That oil would be exported on the world market. Much of the gas is ‘sour’ – it has a high sulphur content – and is unsuitable for home heating. So, we have the worst of all possible worlds – continuing use of fossil fuels at large scale when the climate science says that the use must stop and the likelihood of very high fuel bills and insecurity of supply. Only big oil and their shareholders come well out of this – the rest of us and future generations pay the price.
A close look at Sunak’s plans for Carbon Capture and Storage is equally disturbing. The technology proposed for CCS is untested at scale. Even if the most optimistic targets for carbon sequestration are met, they represent a tiny fraction of the total carbon emissions from the North Sea. At present the only source of carbon dioxide at St Fergus is the gas stabilising plant. In the long-term Carbon Capture may be able to play a role in helping reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – but right now the priority must be to cut emissions rapidly. The £20 billion allocated by Westminster to the 4 CCS projects could be spent on expanding the production of renewable energy, home insulation and developing the electricity grid.
The parallels with the Cumbria Coalmine project are powerful. There we have the Tories supporting the exploitation of a fossil fuel, coal, which is not wanted by the steel industry. With the new licenses and CCS, we have a plan for energy security and net zero which delivers neither. Quite simply both represent political statements by the Tory Government that affirm their unswerving commitment to fossil capital.
Technical note:
The proposed Acorn (St Fergus) (and other) CCS plants are designed to be emissions source dedicated- i.e. they are intended to sequestrate carbon from say, a power station or chemical plant flue stack- not the ‘general’ atmosphere, and as such they are demonstration installations.
Apart from the Peterhead sour gas power station, the other nearby CO2 source is the St Fergus gas terminal which adds about 3-4% carbon to the overall gas/carbon penalty.
Total North Sea reserve gas content is about 27% (73% oil). The new blocks have a much lower gas composition c.12%.
The carbon contents of the different fuels (compared with coal) is:
Employment, Energy and Environment 