Crunch time for GKN, the most advanced worker led transition struggle in history
XMAS APPEAL: Crunch time for GKN, the most advanced worker led transition struggle in history
The battle by ex-GKN workers in Florence to convert their autoparts factory to zero carbon production under workers control is at a critical stage – and you can help. Find out how below and watch a video of the story of this historic struggle so far – PLUS the latest from the most important strike in Britain, a siginificant victory for education workers in Bristol, and what you can do to help prisoners on hunger strike for Palestine
GKN: Cash urgently needed to start production under workers control
Those of you who have been following the incredible just transition struggle of ex-GKN workers in Florence (and if you haven’t, you can catch up by watching the video above) will know that the regional council have been stalling on their commitment to put together a consortium to buy the factory off the current owners and hand it to the workers to produce cargo bikes and solar panels – all under workers control, and for the benefit of communities, not for profit.
Now, after delaying the process for months – increasing the suffering of the workers who have now had no wages for 15 months – it’s fallen apart.
The main reason seems to be the drive to war and the increase of arms spending across Europe, with most of the banks who agreed to fund the project now demanding that the workers produce weapons rather than zero carbon products based on equality and social justice. And as the workers point out, “the former GKN is an example they can’t afford. Because a conscious community, insurgent, through the convergence of social and climate justice shows that an alternative would be possible.”
So now the workers have made the decision to go it alone and do everything themselves. Which means raising substantial sums of money from our own workers organisations, social movements and civil society.
1) Make a donation to the workers’ crowdfunder, which has a target of 2 million euros. You can make a donation by clicking here. So if you were looking for somewhere to donate to for Xmas, this is the place!
2) If your trade union branch or organisation, or a collection of individuals can afford 500 euros, that’ll buy you a share in the workers cooperative and be part of the assembly that will collectively run the factory if the workers win. CLICK HERE TO BUY A SHARE
IMPORTANT: IF YOUR GROUP HAS ALREADY PLEDGED TO BUY A SHARE, CLICK ON THE LINK ABOVE TO PAY THE 500 EUROS FOR IT
And a warning: the form to buy shares is not easy to fill in. Having just done it to buy the share for the UK rank and file workers delegation that visited Florence last year, we can give you some help below; if you’re still having trouble, please feel free to email us at info@reelnews.co uk and we can talk you through it.
If you’re not in Italy, fill it in as an individual, not as an organisation. If you try to do it as, for example, a trade union branch, you’ll get a load of questions that are impossible to answer because our union branches are not set up in the same way legally as Italian union branches. So you’ll have to pick a trusted individual who doesn’t mind paying the 500 euros out of their personal bank account and then getting it back from the branch.
Most of the questions are meaningless – but what you answer doesn’t matter. The questions are obiously geared to a generic shareholder issue for companies – but don’t worry about the fact that none of the answer choices fit your situation, just pick anything – the answers seem to be completely irrelevant, so for example there’s no need to reveal your financial circumstances.
When you get to the page that says “send link to continue on your phone, or scroll down to continue, choose the phone option. You’ll findthat it’s actually impossible to scroll down, so in fact you have to continue you on your phone – which is actually just to take a picture of your passport as proof of identity. Once you’ve done that, it’ll return you to your computer.
Once you’ve finished this part, you’ll have to wait for another email to set up payment. This comes in a few minutes, but then once you’ve set up payment (bank transfer seems to be easiest), you’ll have to wait for up to 48 hours for it all to be cleared to actually transfer the 500 euros.
Hopefully that hasn’t put any of you off! But if it feels daunting, please get in touch – we’ve done it and can help you do it very quickly.
We’ll leave the last word to the workers: “After 4 years of struggle, 15 months without a salary, and 8 months of unemployment, all may seem lost. But at the same time, it may all be enough to claim that, “after all, we won”. The lessons we can learn from this struggle are enormous, its historical legacy will not fade away, and its example will speak for years to come. Then, why insist (on continuing the struggle)? Because we cannot afford to lose this fight and “they” cannot afford to let us win. Because it started with the “simple” aim to keep the factory open, but ended up exposing every “systemic” issue that is dragging us towards the catastrophe today.”
ExxonMobil has announced plans to close the Fife Ethylene Plant (FEP) at Mossmorran in Fife in February next year. Up to 400 jobs will be lost if the closure goes ahead.
The announced closure of the gas treatment plant closure may have consequences upstream for its supply terminal at St Fergus in Northern Aberdeenshire. St Fergus is the landfall terminal for all the gas produced in the Central and Northern UK Continental Shelf fields and the recently opened North Atlantic West of Shetland fields. It also receives gas from the Western Norwegian sector.
Gas at St Fergus is primarily treated ‘fractioned’ to a standard acceptable for distribution through the UK National Transmission Authority network, which in turn supplies further treated gas into the National Grid. The treatment plant at Mossmorran receives the entirety of its ‘wet’ gas from St Fergus.
The site and plant of Mossmorran is jointly owned and operated by Exxon/Mobil and Shell UK.
The wet gas at Mossmorran is divided into two separate product streams:
Shell separates liquids further to produce methane vial its Fife Natural Gas Plant which is sent into the National Grid network, as well as some chemical feed-stocks for export.
Exxon/Mobil uses an ethylene plant to ‘fraction’ the wet gas into ethylene as a feed-stock forpetro-chemicalproduction via its Fife Ethylene Plant as well as:
Propane, butane and other liquid gases for further treatment for fuels and also grease and other lubricants.
Last year Exxon/Mobil produced over 830,00 tonnes of ethylene, over 50% of which was exported to Europe and the US. Until recently Exxon/Mobil used a direct pipeline to Ineos Grangemouth plant.
Braefoot Bay is a private facility which handles almost all of the output of the two Mossmorran operations, and is presently at 85% capacity. It operates under the joint ownership of Exxon/Mobil and Shell UK and is entirely dependent on the export requirements of Mossmorran. The port has two jetties- a deep-water jetty capable of handling 40,000- 80,000 tonne vessels, and the smaller, for 5,000- 10,000 tonne tankers.
The main tanker loading is via floating ‘roof’ tanks are continuously ‘toped-up’ from large quayside storage tanks.
At Mossmorran, there are around 90 directly employed in control rooms and plant management. with most engineers, electrical and welders etc being subcontractors directly employed with Balfour Beatty. Virtually all Balfour Beatty workers are members of Unite.
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.
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.
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.
Ideological delusions and military secrecy that this generated has left Britain with one of the most uneconomic and unreliable power generation liabilities on the planet
The second part of an article by Scot.E3 activist Brian Parkin which was first published on the rs21 website on August 18, 2023. It (and the first part) provides useful background for the discussion on nuclear power that took place on October 18 2025 at the Scot.E3 conference.
In the first part of this short series, Brian Parkin showed how Britain’s nuclear power programme was a consequence of a nuclear weapons project intended to maintain Britain as a top flight imperialist nation. Here he explains how the ideological delusions and military secrecy that this generated has left Britain with one of the most uneconomic and unreliable power generation liabilities on the planet.
British governments after 1945 pursued a consensus of national recovery based on the re-energising of a depleted economy via new technologies and a welfare state social contract, to drive up productivity and profits to a level capable of sustaining Britain as a world power.
But the post-war ‘spheres of influences agreement’ of 1945 between the USA, Russia and Britain rapidly gave way to the Cold War and a new arms race. The Cold War divided the world into two armed camps, and with the formation of NATO in 1949, much of western Europe fell under the leadership of the USA against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. A year later, with the outbreak of the Korean War, it became clear that sections of the US military were lobbying for the use of nuclear weapons as first strike options.
What was clear within this new order was that Britain’s sphere of influence had dissipated into that marked out by the US nuclear super-power. But Britain nevertheless persisted with its own atomic bomb programme, as well as a V bomber programme as the means of delivering it. For Britain’s cold warriors, this was central to a military first-strike nuclear capacity which would keep them on a par with the USA. As the armed forces Chiefs of Staff Committee put it: ‘If we did not develop megaton weapons (hydrogen bombs), we would sacrifice immediately, and in perpetuity, our status as a first-class power’
Imperialism, independence and isotopes
This ambition was under-written by a total of six Magnox reactors – two at Calder Hall (now Sellafield) and four at Chapelcross in Dumfries – which were central to western plutonium production for H-bombs. By 1958 these reactors had a total capacity of 250 Mw of electrical output. But like the commercial Magnox stations to follow, these reactors proved at times to be unreliable, and the technology posed dangerous challenges. And while Britain was a useful source of cheap plutonium, the USA harboured doubts regarding Britain’s ability to sustain both the empire and a first strike nuclear capability.
Then in 1958, the first British H-bomb test took place on Christmas Island in the Pacific. This was followed by an amendment of the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement, mainly as a means of controlling British nuclear activity by limiting its share of targets within USSR airspace. For a while the plutonium deal with the US remained a one-way street, until UK nuclear strategy became based almost entirely on H-bombs. This now meant the Britain becoming dependent on the US for its supply of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) necessary for completing the reaction implosion, and thereby boosting the nuclear yield. This was the first stage in the unravelling of the myth of Britain’s ‘independent’ nuclear weapons.
Perhaps the most farcical aspect of the nuclear ‘special relationship’ was the complete American control over Operation Blue Danube – the joint USA-UK European nuclear attack plan. This gave the USA the power of veto over any first strike by the RAF. Overall American command of Nuclear Forces Europe meant that all nuclear weapons, even those at RAF V bomber bases, were in practice American property. All nuclear weapons manuals, fuses, fuse locks and fuse codes were kept in a secure vault on the RAF base, and the agreement provided that ‘…in the event of any RAF personnel attempting to obtain any secured items without superior and strategic authorisation, the [American] marine guards should exercise the duty to shoot (him/her/them) dead’.
Uncritical accountancy
Following the successful production of plutonium from the initial Magnox reactors, the Labour governments of the 1960s decided to proceed with a large-scale civil nuclear power programme. Any doubts regarding the costs of this venture were set aside by the strategic ‘need’ for plutonium, and the belief in nuclear power as protection against a possible miners’ strike. Given such strategic values, even the most basic cost-benefit analysis was regarded as wholly unnecessary.
But in 1988 all of the UK’s nuclear power secrets fell onto the desks of the National Union of Mineworkers Research Department, with the performance and costs of every reactor revealed. They showed that Magnox units constructed under ‘even under the most favourable and lowest Treasury discount (interest) rates, had at best performed at twice the cost of coal-fired stations’. They were hopelessly inefficient, in large part due to inherent design flaws such as fuel-rod alloys with a tendency to react explosively on contact with water, and graphite cores which could start to burn at high reactor temperatures. For these reasons, Magnox stations had never run at full capacity.
The figures were even more dismal for the second generation of Advanced Gas (cooled) Reactors (AGRs). Intended to run continually while being re-fuelled, these reactors experienced both fuel rod and control rod jamming. Steam temperatures were rarely optimal and heat exchangers often over-heated. These flaws combined to make them impossible to run at anything like full capacity, with utilisation sometimes as low as 18%. EDF, which would later take them over for almost nothing, described them as ‘basket cases’. One Treasury official in the run-up to electricity privatisation described them as ‘…the most expensive engineering folly ever under-written by the UK taxpayer’.
The dog and the lamp-post: the US-UK special relationship
The super-power dreams embodied in the V bombers had quickly foundered on Russian advances in air defence. With the shooting down of a US spy-plane high over central Russia in 1960, it was clear that no RAF plane with atom-bombs was going to reach its target. In a way this suited some American strategic thinking, as shown by a White House directive of April 1961 which called for a ‘downgrading’ of the ‘special relationship’ and for ‘forcing a greater UK integration into Europe’.
This allied integration could best be hurried by ‘not prolonging the UK bomber force’– a task quickly achieved through the American failure to complete air-launched missiles upon which the RAF pinned its future strategic role: first Bluestreak (abandoned in 1960) and then the Skybolt (scrapped 1961). But the US was sensitive regarding ‘The UK’s loss of prestige and self-esteem’, hence the sop to share in its Polaris nuclear submarine deterrent, by basing the American vessels at Holy Loch, just 25 miles from Glasgow.
Privatising Prometheus
The eventual privatisation of the UK electricity industry went ahead in 1990, but only on the basis of the government footing the bill for untold nuclear liabilities, and the power stations themselves being split between two companies: Magnox Ltd, a wholly government operation set up prior to the oldest stations being handed over to a Nuclear Decommissioning Agency; and EDF, which acquired the AGRs for a notional peppercorn price, and was also allowed to operate its own power sales company.
The British nuclear power project arose from what was essentially an imperialist H-bomb imperative. As such, it escaped any public economic scrutiny. Instead, it became a key component of the post-1945 great British super-power illusion. Failures in the Magnox reactors were denied because their main job was to produce plutonium for the British nuclear ‘deterrent’. That same arrogant disregard of accountability and high secrecy still marks the nuclear power project to this day.
And now of the AGR fleet, only Heysham 2, Hartlepool and Torness remain in operation, up to 2028, at which point the highly subsidised Pressurised Water Reactor at Sizewell B (the only one ever built in Britain) will be the only pre-privatisation nuclear station left running. When they close, the costs of decommissioning will fall to the tax-payer, a bill that may well run into the next century. But we can be certain of one thing: the plutonium breeding reliabilities of Calder Hall, Chapelcross and the undisclosed number of ‘civil’ Magnox’s. Because somewhere at the leaking, creaking and decaying Sellafield complex, there are 139 metric tonnes of the deadliest material known to humankind with a half-life of 82 million years.
Why is nuclear power, a persistently failed energy technology, still so important to the British ruling class.
This article by Scot.E3 activist Brian Parkin was first published on the rs21 website on July 22, 2023. It (and its second part) provides useful background for the discussion on nuclear power that took place on October 18 2025 at the Scot.E3 conference.
Torness – the remaining operational nuclear power plant in Scotland
After seventy years of scientific effort and countless investments, the holy grail of ‘electricity too cheap to meter’ remains as elusive as ever. Here Brian Parkin searches for reasons why a persistently failed energy technology is still so important to the British ruling class.
The Attlee Labour government of 1945-50 was committed to both a radical social policy programme at home and a colonial-imperialist continuity project abroad – the latter very much approved of by the British ruling class. Before the end of World War II, allied summit conferences at Moscow, Tehran and Yalta had produced a post-war agreement on ‘spheres of influence’ where the USA, USSR and Britain would control their respective allies, colonies, protectorates or dominions as spoils from their joint wartime efforts. But this was not an alliance of equals: the USSR was economically devastated, Britain was economically exhausted, while the USA was on the edge of what was to become the biggest and most protracted economic boom in the history of capitalism.
The USA had also, via the ‘Manhattan programme’, acquired the most devastating weapon ever – the nuclear bomb. Despite the involvement of UK scientists, the USA was initially not prepared to share its bomb making secrets with Britain. And furthermore, the USA was against the UK and France retaining their colonial empires.
A whiff of hydrogen
A clandestine British nuclear programme had begun in 1940, and with the involvement of British scientists in the US nuclear project, the idea of ‘catching up with the Yanks’ almost counterbalanced the losing of empire, and led to hopes of a recovery of imperial status by other means. So it was not long before construction began on a nuclear facility at Windscale in Cumbria (renamed Sellafield in 1981), along with what was initially the highly secret facility at Aldermaston in Berkshire.
These developments arose from a secret decision taken by a small meeting – GEN 75, in January 1947 – when despite an austerity economy it was agreed that the UK should defy the USA’s intransigence and go ahead with its own nuclear weapons programme. As Ernest Bevan, Foreign Secretary and former right wing union boss said: We’ve got to have this thing over here. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it!’
By 1950 a reactor at Windscale had produced highly fissionable uranium235 (the ‘active ingredient’ of an atomic bomb), and by 1952 had produced enough for the first British bomb test on October 3 that year. Then, by stepping up its Magnox reactor programme, Britain was able to produce sufficient plutonium239 for a hydrogen bomb test on May 15 1957. But this came at a high cost. On October 10 1957 Unit One of a Magnox reactor core became over-critical, to the extent that its graphite core caught fire, and for three days released the highly dangerous isotope iodine131 to the outside atmosphere, which on a conservative estimate caused over 400 cancer deaths.
News of this incident was kept confidential, mainly to prevent information getting to a USA government unconvinced that Britain would be a reliable nuclear partner. This was a particularly important as by then a considerable proportion of the plutonium for the USA’s weapons programme was coming from the UK Magnox reactors.
Meanwhile…British insecurity
In 1945, largely at the instigation of the USA, the United Nations held its inaugural session in California. As the war’s biggest victor, the USA wanted to legislate for a world fit for American capitalism. The United Nations gave this a semblance of legitimacy, though it was dominated by a Security Council mostly composed of American allies. And although Britain was on the Council, fear for its fading imperial lustre spurred the Labour government to press ahead to become a paid-up member of the ‘nuclear club’.
But nuclear club membership was nothing without a means of delivery. So in 1947 the government instructed the Royal Air Force to issue specifications and tenders for a new generation of jet-powered long-range, high altitude bombers capable of carrying and dropping nuclear bombs on what, by now, were going to be Russian targets.
Thunderbirds are GO! Britain’s ‘V Force’
By 1952 the UK’s first nuclear-capable bomber – the Vickers Valiant – flew. At that time, the intention was to keep at the forefront of a Western first-strike nuclear alliance, while never forgetting the longer-range requirements of rule over what was left of the empire, and the Commonwealth – hence the presence of V bombers in Rhodesia (the colonial name for Zimbabwe) and Malaysia as late as the mid-1960’s.
By 1964, the RAF had an incredible 159 total of Valiant, Vulcan and Victor bombers, each capable of being airborne in three minutes and in Russian airspace within 72 minutes. However, Russian air-defences had improved to the extent that the V bombers’ maximum altitudes rendered them sitting ducks by around 1965. So then a medium-range series of joint US/UK air launched missiles was considered, only for the US to pull out of the project. The Vulcans last flew in the Falklands war in 1982, carrying out a long-range and not very successful bombing of Port Stanley Airport, before being taken out of service.
‘Atoms for Peace’
On August 27 1957, a small Magnox reactor on the Calder Hall site at Windscale had some of its secondary coolant steam diverted through a turbine to mark the beginning of the world’s civil nuclear power age. The initial contribution to the National Grid was an intermittent four megawatts (then enough to power some 4,000 homes). The idea of nuclear power from a weapons grade plutonium reactor had arisen due to the sheer waste heat given off, and the huge effort required in cooling the process to a safe level.
This ‘seminal’ event was the first step to what was untruthfully called a peaceful civil nuclear power age. What it rather was, was the continuation of a plutonium programme with a significant power byproduct. The military-civil linkage was still intact – as was the superpower nuclear delusion which had spawned it.
Hedging the nuclear bet
The modest Calder Hall event gave rise to a speculative frenzy of nuclear optimism. The very idea of power from nuclear fission created an aura of technological supremacy, and the illusion that Britain could become a leadership nation unafraid of the challenges of power and the military means of exercising it. Because something like that kind of ideological hubris must have fuelled what came next.
In 1959 it was agreed to proceed with a nuclear power programme with a technology ‘proved’ by the Magnox experience at Windscale. This meant a generation of new reactors fuelled by ‘natural’ uranium with graphite moderated cores and with a primary carbon dioxide cooling system. But although the main aim of the new Magnox stations was the production of electricity, some plutonium would be a secondary byproduct.
At this point it is worth recalling the political/economic situation the fading British empire had to face. In 1956, a failed military intervention by Britain and France had failed to resolve the ‘Suez crisis’, sparked by the fear of losing of the Suez canal as a gateway to Asia and Gulf oil supplies. At this point a government committee decided that for energy security reasons, it was decided that Britain would require 6,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity by 1965.
This bizarre reasoning – Britain did not use oil for power generation – was primarily rooted in a ruling class paranoia, which saw nuclear power capacity as protection against a possible miners’ strike. Here nuclear power provided balm to a fading imperial delusion and a deep and abiding fear of organised labour. In Part 2 we shall see how ignorance, hubris and fear continue to fuel the British nuclear tragi-comedy.
Simon Pirani reviews More, More and More: an all-consuming history of energy
Review by Simon Pirani of More, More and More: an all-consuming history of energy, by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Allen Lane, 2024). This article was first published on the People and Nature blog.
We really are in climate trouble now. The intergovernmental climate agreements, for whatever they were worth, are in peril. The target of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees is effectively lost. A more chaotic global order beckons, as Trump lashes out furiously at the international institutions the declining USA so long dominated.
A coal miner in Xingtai, China, which now burns coal at 15 times the rate that Britain did in the 19th century / Photo: Wikimedia commons
New rounds of fossil-fuelled capital expansion threaten. AI and other technologies, far from helping, turn the screw of rising energy consumption. And pathetic, shameful politicians assure us that capital will meet the challenge with its “energy transition”.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s wonderful book shows how the whole idea of “energy transition” is deceitful and dangerous – “bad history”, on which we can not base our visions of the future. If we are to find real answers to the climate crisis, we will need better understandings of energy and material dynamics than that.
There are two main parts to Fressoz’s argument. First, he shows how clunky, stagist simplifications, such as “transitions”, have distorted historians’ understanding of changes in technologies and fuel uses. False assumptions about past “energy transitions” are used to support comforting but illusory narratives about how we might move away from fossil fuels.
Second, he explains how, in the 1970s and 80s, a future “energy transition” – a shift of technologies, firstly to nuclear power – became the dominant, false “solution” to global heating, largely at the bidding of the US ruling elite. He interrogates the ideological prejudices that influenced the economists, energy analysts and other scholars who fed this narrative, and shows how it took hold – albeit not unchallenged – in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the 1990s.
Energy history
The first part of the argument concerns tonnes of wood, coal, oil and other energy carriers. In the popular imagination, and the work of some careless historians, wood was displaced by coal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and coal by oil in the twentieth. But that’s not what happened.
Far from wood being left behind by coal and oil, in the twentieth century more was consumed than ever, in buildings, railways, crates, barrels, cardboard, paper – and pit props in coal mines. Far from coal being left behind in the “age of oil”, global production and consumption has risen in the twenty-first century to unprecedented heights.
“After two centuries of ‘energy transitions’, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood”, Fressoz writes (page 2). China now burns coal at about 15 times the rate that Britain did at the height of its “age of coal”.
That’s the “More, more and more” of the book’s title. But this is not just about quantity; it is also about the complexity of energy systems in which wood, coal, oil and other materials are used in increasingly interdependent ways.
To underline the point about wood and coal, Fressoz describes the heavy dependence of twentieth-century coal mines on the availability of wood for pit props. “Without abundant wood, Europe would simply have had no coal, and hence little or no steam, little or no steel and few or no railways”, he writes (page 55).” Things have changed, but this is not a transition, he insists: “rather, we should be talking about a symbiotic relationship that intensified during the nineteenth century, followed by a gradual disengagement that really began in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Even now, hundreds of millions of people rely on woody biomass for basic fuel needs; in Africa’s big cities, charcoal is a fuel of choice – two or three times more energy-dense than wood, and transported by oil-fuelled vehicles. “This new energy system is based on a combination of wood, muscle power and oil”, Fressoz writes (page 124).
Women workers loading timber for pit props in the UK in 1943. Photo: Imperial War Museum
Neither does it mean much to talk about a “transition” from coal to oil, Fressoz insists. While the wood-coal symbiosis weakened in the late twentieth century, the coal-oil symbiosis became stronger. More steel from coal-fired furnaces was needed to extract and transport oil, and to build hundreds of millions of oil-consuming cars and other oil-driven machinery. Conversely, mining coal from huge open-cast operations, and transporting it ever-greater distances, needed oil.
If the coal-to-oil “transition” did not happen, then the fashionable idea that it reshaped the relationship between labour movements and political power makes no sense. Fressoz offers an iconoclastic take-down of this false logic.
His bluntest questions are for Timothy Mitchell, who argues in Carbon Democracy: political power in the age of oil (2011) that the workers’ movement’s advance in Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was closely linked to coal miners’ economic power, while oil, extracted with significant capital and minimal labour, largely undermined labour.
Carbon Democracy’s “enthusiastic reception in the academic world testifies to an appetite for materialist explanations of politics and a paradoxical lack of interest in the history of production”, Fressoz writes (page 86).
‘Energy transition’ as politics
The second part of Fressoz’s argument concerns “energy transition” as a political discourse centred on technological innovation, an ideological cable that binds together governments’ “climate policies” and corporations’ PR fables.
He starts in the USA in the 1920s, when the apparently eccentric technocratic movement urged “transition” from capitalism to a society based on the most efficient use of energy and labour, through the rational deployment of technology.
In the 1940s came the atom bomb, which helped the US achieve unparalleled geopolitical and economic dominance. Its nuclear scientists found themselves in an unusually privileged position. In this milieu, long-term energy forecasting was all the rage – firstly, to convince politicians of the benefits of generous state investment in nuclear power, and, specifically, in breeder reactors that promised to produce new nuclear fuel more rapidly than they burned it.
Fressoz shows how nuclear lobbying sat comfortably with neo-Malthusian ideas about resources, including fossil fuel resources, running out due to population growth. Into this mix of ruling-class ideology, and the science influenced by it, came the issue of climate change:
Because the nuclear lobby was defending a very long-term technological option – the fast-breeder reactor – it produced a dystopian and innovative futurology, focusing not only on the end of fossil fuels, but also, as early as 1953, on global warming (page 154).
In the 1960s and 70s, “energy transition” was brought into wider public discourse, together with a new discursive battering-ram: “energy crisis”. That was a misnomer for the 1973 oil price shock, when social and political ferment in the Middle East and Latin America, culminating in oil company nationalisations and a partial boycott of sales to the USA, forced a shift in the terms of trade in the oil-producing nations’ favour. Fressoz argues that the “energy crisis” had already been invented by the nuclear lobby in the late 1960s: the battles over oil made it taken-for-granted common sense.
Energy system forecasting, too, went mainstream in the 1970s, thanks to the oil price shock and advances in computing. Fressoz shows that the computer models often focused on one technology superceding another, e.g. nuclear over oil, rather than the cumulative expansion of energy supply in the context of capitalist economic growth. He critiques the work of the Italian nuclear physicist Cesare Marchetti, who pointed to energy systems’ inertia, and argued that we could learn more about the future from historical statistics than from models that sketched a transition to nuclear dominance.
Fressoz concludes that, for half a century, energy research has focused too much on technological innovation and too little on the persistence of old technologies.
Even today, the many studies of technological diffusion hinder our understanding of the climate challenge. On the one hand, […] they say nothing about the disappearance of the old, making the assumption – implicit or explicit and in any case unjustified – that this would be symmetrical with the diffusion of the new. On the other hand, […] since energies and materials are in symbiosis as much as in competition, we simply cannot use a technological substitution model to understand their dynamics. Nonetheless, the experts are still comforted by the upturn in the diffusion curve for wind and solar power, as if it were equivalent to the disappearance of fossil fuels. (pages 178-9).
Who cares about the history of research, now we are confronted by climate crisis? We all should, because – as Fressoz shows in a fiercely polemical chapter on the IPCC – the technology-focused futurology summoned up by the “atomic Malthusians” of the 1950s, and written in computer code by the energy forecasters of the 1970s, now walks tall across the pages of the scientific reports on which the international climate talks rely.
By the 1990s, “a neo-Malthusian technological futurology for rich countries had suddenly become a safeguard plan for the entire planet … How was this scientific and political scandal possible?” Fressoz asks (page 180).
In the 1980s, as the climate scientists’ understanding of global heating improved, and fossil fuel burning confirmed as indubitably the main cause, it became clear that energy policy goals had to shift. The move away from fossil fuels had to be faster, not because of a Malthusian exhaustion of resources, but because of the damage done by the global economy’s constant expansion.
A meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the 1980s. Photo from the Geneva Environment Network
Corporate technological “solutions” to the 1970s “energy crisis” were now repurposed for this real climate crisis, Fressoz argues. The Nobel-prize-winning economist William Nordhaus, who sketched out the economic-growth-plus-innovation strategies that heavily influenced the IPCC, has much to answer for.
Fressoz quotes the minutes of the 1979 World Climate Conference in Geneva, at which oil company representatives talked of a long transition away from fossil fuels (to 2100), mainly by way of technological innovation, and many prominent scientists agreed – until the nuclear physicist David Rose warned that Nordhaus’s approach, of postponing the transition until new technologies and new capital made it less painful, was “the perfect recipe for climate disaster” (page 190).
Fressoz describes how scientists, engineers, and social and political researchers sometimes resisted, cut across, worked alongside, or capitulated to the ideological pressure of capital. Or complicated combinations. I hope this account will be read, and thought about, by activists who in Extinction Rebellion’s heyday coined the slogan “listen to the science”, as though “the science” is a deity existing above and independently of the societies we live in and the rapacious capital that dominates them. It is not.
By 1988, when the IPCC’s Working Group III was set up, with a brief to advise governments on mitigating climate change, the aim of those governments, the US’s in particular, “was to regain control over international climate experts, who were quick to brandish emission-reduction targets without weighing up their economic effects” (page 199).
Did they bring the scientists to heel? Yes and no. In the run-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015, scenarios mapping slow progress were superceded by those envisaging rapid decarbonisation, in line with the 1.5 degree target adopted. But, as Fressoz shows, the most powerful governments had meanwhile proceeded in practice with the slowest decarbonisation trajectories.
As the gap between these pathways and reality widened, it was filled with a new technofix – “negative emissions” technologies such as carbon removal, that would help achieve “net zero”.
Without saying so, without discussing it, in the 1980s and 1990s, the industrial countries chose – if that word has any meaning – growth and global warming, and gave in to adaptation. […] Populations were not consulted, especially those who will be and already are the victims (page 211).
Fressoz concludes that the concept of “transition”, which lives on in the current obsession with carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and other false “solutions”, is “the ideology of capital in the twenty-first century. It turns evil into cure, polluting industries into the green industries of the future and innovation into our lifeline.” (page 220).
Past, present and future
To make the change that Fressoz suggests is needed – that is, to move away from fossil fuels by a deep restructuring of the economy – would require “a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense”, the economic historian Adam Tooze argues in an earlier review of More, More and More. But, he adds, “formulated this way, it can’t help but seem hopelessly out of reach”.
Maybe stabilising the temperature at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is out of reach, Tooze continues, but to assess the possibilities of the present moment, we need to look at the progress of decarbonisation so far: “it is change on a scale that would have been thought impossible until quite recently”.
Fressoz, by contrast, stresses that what looks like decarbonisation may not be. Historically, symbiosis between fuels took precedence over substitution. “The problem is that such symbiotic relationships still exist between ‘green’ technologies and fossil fuels”, he responded to Tooze in a letter (go via that link and scroll down to the end to see it).
In my view, that symbiosis is reinforced by the narrative of technological transition. And Fressoz further considers that narrative in an article just published in the academic journal Energy Research & Social Science.
He starts with Working Group III’s latest (2022) report, which mentions “technology” 2111 times, “innovation” 1667 times and “hydrogen” 1096 times – as against 232 mentions of “sufficiency”, 29 of “degrowth” (mostly in the references), and three of “prohibition”.
Fressoz proposes that this “technocentric focus” is caused first, because universities and research institutes “almost by design” prioritise novelty (e.g., focusing on hydrogen when sufficiency is more likely to matter for decarbonisation); second, research funding structures and intellectual property frameworks push scientists to work with industry researchers who are constrained by their corporate funders; and third, the way the IPCC itself operates.
He suggests that a milestone for mitigation expertise “will be the recognition that global carbon neutrality by 2050 or 2070 is not simply challenging but technologically impossible”. Accepting the impossibility of net-zero targets is “essential to freeing climate expertise from misplaced optimism and technological illusions”.
To my mind, the problem runs even deeper than this: we need to consider the ways in which the international climate talks, and the IPCC’s work, are not only part of the solution but also part of the problem. This involves questions about political power and its relation to capital.
Fressoz’s work, and his exchange with Tooze, make me think of four crucial research questions. First, we need a real assessment of current decarbonisation progress, as Tooze suggests – but conducted with an approach alert to the danger that e.g. expanding renewable electricity generation, desirable as that is, in the context of headlong economic expansion and capital accumulation may not result in any decarbonisation at all.
Second, we need to ask what a movement to forestall and obstruct that form of expansion could look like, given the global social and political conditions. Third, how can the fight against “technophilia” and technofixes be conducted most effectively? And fourth, what is our assessment of the international climate talks, and the relationship between science and political power around the IPCC?
This in turn begs another question raised in More, More and More: the position of researchers – whether historians and humanities scholars or scientists and engineers – in relation to power and capital. We are not neutral either.
Employment, Energy and Environment 
