Tag: scote3

Post-election battlegrounds for climate and social justice 

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

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

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

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

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

(i) confront and confound the government, and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Public ownership in the electricity system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The National Grid’s Nechells electricity substation near Birmingham

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

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

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

3. Community energy and decentralised renewables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Opposing false technological solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Energy use in our homes and transport 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Bringing the issues together

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let Us Rise Up

Hilary Horrocks reports from Florence where sacked GKN workers continue to fight to keep their workplace open under public ownership and workers’s control.

Five thousand supporters joined a march in Campi Bisenzio, near Florence, on Saturday evening (6 April 2024), organised by the sacked workers at the huge GKN factory who have been fighting for two-and-a-half years to keep their workplace open under public ownership and workers’ control Their campaign has argued, with the participation of academic researchers, for a just transition towards the production of socially useful items such as cargo bikes and solar panels, vital in the battle to save the climate. The dispute and the occupation of the factory continues, since an Italian labour court ruled against the final attempt to dismiss the 400 GKN employees just before the deadline of 1 January this year, but the workers are not receiving any wages.

Shop stewards from the ex-GKN workers’ collective at Campi Bisenzio, Florence, leading 5,000 marchers in the latest demonstration of support. The large banner bears their slogan, Insorgiamo (Let Us Rise Up) Image by Hilary Horrocks

The demonstration at the weekend was called by the Collective in response to the cutting off of electricity to the plant by management stooges, part of a campaign of intimidation against a Festival of Working Class Literature held outside the factory at the weekend. But the Festival – attended by thousands of predominantly young people, went ahead, with impressive sessions by committed speakers on working-class writing internationally.

The Collective is appealing for financial support and for subscriptions to a co-operative ownership scheme for the factory.

The video is a recording of a Climate Justice Coalition webinar on the GKN worker’s struggle.

“DISCOBEDIANCE” DANCE FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE

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.

Get Glasgow Moving

Sign the petition

There’s till time to sign the petition to Glasgow’s regional transport authority which is  currently deciding whether to begin the process of taking Strathclyde’s buses back into public control using new powers in the Transport Act 2019.

They are due to announce their decision on Friday 15 March. GGM is doing everything they can to ramp up the pressure on SPT Board members before then, including delivering the petition to them on Friday 23 February, 9:30am ahead of their Board meeting.

Please help them reach their 10,000 target by signing and sharing the petition link with all your friends, family and colleagues before then: https://www.megaphone.org.uk/p/BetterBuses

JOIN GET GLASGOW MOVING’S EVENTS

Come down and support the events outside SPT Offices, 131 St Vincent Street, Glasgow, G2 5JF

Better Buses for Strathclyde Petition Hand-in
Friday 23 February 2024, 9:30am

Better Buses for Strathclyde People’s Rally
Friday 15 March 2024, 9am

Help build a really strong turn out. It’s the people of Strathclyde vs. the private bus company bosses in the fight to take back our buses!

Fossil Fuels and Right-Wing Populism

Pete Cannell from ScotE3 was invited to introduce a discussion on Fossil Fuels and Right-Wing Populism at a recent meeting of Dumfries TUC. This is a slightly edited version of his talk.

This post explores the way in which right wing populist parties use climate denial as a key part of their agenda.  In thinking about the topic, I found Andreas Malm’s excellent book ‘White Skin – Black Fuel on the danger of Fossil Fascism’ very helpful.  Early on in the book, Malm notes that: 

“All European far-right parties of political significance in the early twenty-first century expressed climate denial.”

The book weas written 3 years ago but it’s hard to think of more recent exceptions.  So, there’s definitely something to be explained here.

Clearly climate denial didn’t start with the rise of right-wing populism.  From the 1970’s onwards the major oil and gas companies, particularly Exxon, were researching the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the environment and at the same time funding organisations like the Global Climate Coalition in the US whose role was to argue that pushing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere was not a problem.  Privately they knew from early on that fossil fuel extraction would have a devastating effect on the global climate.  In 1995 the GCC in an internal document wrote that 

“the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied”

but in public they denied it.  

As a strategy outright denial had its limitations.  The Kyoto protocol signed in 1997 marked the beginning of a new strategy – a shift from denial to greenwashing.  

The three core tenets of Kyoto are:

  1. Postpone the showdown with Fossil Fuels into distant future.
  2. Place no serious limits on fossil fuel extraction.
  3. New opportunities for generating profit.

In the UK, the industry’s plans for the North Sea are a good example of postponing any showdown with fossil fuels.  The strategy is based on continuing extraction through to and beyond 2050 and the development of a so-called net zero oil and gas basin.  Here net zero depends on heroic assumptions about techno-fixes such as carbon capture and storage combined with creative accountancy that ascribes all responsibility for the carbon in the oil and gas that’s produced to the users.  Globally there are virtually no regulatory limits on the production of fossil fuels.  It’s assumed that any run down will be as a result of market forces.  At the same time trading carbon permits has been highly profitable in financial terms and has allowed the industry to claim that the trade contributes to reducing carbon emissions.  There is next to no evidence that carbon trading and offsetting has reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

So as far as big business goes, we are still in the era of greenwashing.  Big oil and gas are at pains to argue that they want to protect the planet.  And almost all governments around the world are in lockstep with fossil fuel industry in this strategy.  Practically, depending on local circumstances the form that greenwashing takes varies, but everywhere it’s about maintaining or enhancing the profitability of fossil capital and preserving the existing infrastructure.  So, in the UK for example hydrogen is touted as the answer to domestic cooking and heating.  In the short to medium term this would probably mean higher carbon emissions than the existing use of natural gas and if ultimately the hydrogen was all green, i.e. produced by electrolysis it would be fantastically inefficient.  Requiring the use of up to seven times as much electricity than would be required to simply electrify cooking and heating.  But it’s attractive to the industry because it enables the continuation of existing economic and technical infrastructure.

The result of all this is that investment is skewed away from forms of energy use and production that are sustainable and rapidly achievable – and rather than supporting a just transition for workers and communities existing inequalities are maintained and ramped up. The ongoing cost of living crisis in which poor consumers of gas and electricity contribute to eye watering profits for energy producers and distributors is a case in point.

And it’s this that has provided fertile ground for right wing populist parties.

Five decades of neo-liberalism has syphoned money and resources from public to private and increased inequality everywhere so that working class people are anxious or scared about climate, cost of living, war, housing, growing old – in a world where the belief that their parents or grandparents had that things would be better for the next generation is dead.  Most people don’t trust established politicians – established parties offer variations on the same neo-liberal agenda.  Into this vacuum has stepped forms of right-wing populism that purport to offer alternatives to the ‘establishment’.

Right wing populism takes different forms – sometimes taking over long-established parties – Trump and the Republican Party in the US.  Or in the UK the continuing rise of right-wing populists as a major, perhaps majority faction within the Tory party.  Sometimes emerging from explicitly fascist formations, for example, Le Pen in France or Meloni in Italy.  And sometimes completely new organisations, for example the AfD in Germany.  None of them are into Greenwashing.  They are all about Climate Denial.

In Spain a prominent member of right wing populist party Vox explains climate change as 

“any change on the sun, the moon, the rotation of the earth, volcanoes and naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena but absolutely not on CO2 emitted by humans. It would, said Abascal, be ‘very arrogant’ to believe that humans could alter the climate. It would be ‘even more arrogant’ to think that the alteration could be rectified by ‘coercive laws and taxes’.”

The AfD in Germany has increased its influence through organising around climate issues, demonising perhaps the biggest climate movement around the world, foregrounding the cost-of-living crisis and agitating around the farmers protests.  Often supported and facilitated in this by the state and the police.

It’s obviously not just climate that is building the new far right.  Climate issues intersect with the legacy of neo-liberalism, migration and racism and the failure of the left to provide an alternative that speaks to working people’s insecurity and against individualistic solutions.  The far-right populists feed off social media fuelled confusion and conspiracies.  Very often angry or frightened people looking for answers find them in apparently anti-establishment and authoritative voices online.  

So, what’s to be done.  I think we can see the embryo of an alternative in the picket lines and in the huge response to the ongoing horror in Gaza.  It’s struck me standing on UCU picket lines last year, and then again in the last few months picketing and leafleting outside the Leonardo arms factory in Edinburgh, how many of the passing drivers beep their horns and wave.  Early in the morning many of them are white van drivers, very few of them will be in a union.  There’s are real possibility of breaking the rise of the populist right.  But if I’m right about why they’ve been able to build on climate I think part of what a revitalised left has to do is set it’s face firmly against partnership with fossil capital and clearly against solutions like CCS for continuing oil and gas production and hydrogen for domestic heating that preserve the power of fossil capital.  And that means for example that UNITE, RMT and GMB need to stop supporting the oil and gas industry’s North Sea transition deal.

Solidarity with GKN workers – join r+f delegation to Florence

From REELNews

GKN: Rank and file trade union delegation to Florence, are you interested?

Reel News are planning a rank and file trade union delegation from the UK to visit the GKN factory in Florence; not just to show solidarity to this important struggle, but also to spread the workers’ visionary ideas back here. And with thousands of jobs under threat at Port Talbot steel works (of which more below), and Grangemouth oil refinery due to close in 2025 with the loss of another 400 jobs, we can all learn a lot from what’s happening at GKN.

Many of us have been warning for years that if we don’t start planning a just transition away from fossil fuel production, it’ll be imposed on us – and thousands of workers will be thrown on the scrapheap. Now that’s starting to happen, it’s never been more urgent to fight for the alternative: a green future that would create literally millions of jobs globally as well as saving the ones currently under threat.

We’re still waiting to hear back from the GKN workers when would be a good time to visit, but at the moment we’re thinking maybe mid April, depending on how things develop. We want to time the visit for either a big mobilisation/demonstration, and/or if they actually start production under workers control. So the timing might well change. But for the moment, get in touch at info@reelnews.co.uk if someone from your workplace is interested in coming – and especially if you want to help with organising the trip too.

Obviously we’re looking at taking workers directly involved in fossil fuel industries, but every sector needs to make plans for a just transition (click here for a film detailing ideas that came out of a union workshop on a just transition for the hospitality sector for example), so please get in touch if you’re interested wherever you work.

The bosses have now agreed to delay the sackings until at least June 2024, after a NYE party packed out the factory with 7,000 people; and in the past month they’ve DOUBLED the money raised in popular shares to over 600,000 euros.

So now the workers have extended the share scheme until June – and are now very confident they can raise the full million euros. So if your trade union branch, organisation, or even a group of friends want to support this visionary project, there’s still plenty of time. Share packages start from 500 euros.

You can find details of how to take part here, and see the end of the video for more ways you can help. As the workers say, they can’t create an alternative model to capitalist fossil fuel production in just one factory – but they can create an example of what is possible.

Update from GKN workers

For more on the GKN occupation and a link to the REELNews video check out this post.

On 9 July 2021, Melrose Industries announced the closure of its GKN Driveline (formerly FIAT) factory of car axles in Campi di Bisenzio, Florence, and the layoff of its workers (more than 400). While in many such cases the workers and unions settle for negotiating enhanced redundancy benefits, the GKN Factory Collective took over the plants and kick-started a long struggle against decommissioning. However, what makes the Ex GKN Florence dispute really unique is the strategy adopted by the workers, who sealed an alliance with the climate justice movement by drafting a conversion plan for sustainable, public transport and demanding its adoption. Such a strategy engendered a cycle of broad mobilisations – repeatedly bringing tens of thousands to the streets – so that the dispute is still open, and the permanent sit-in at the factory remains until today.

The workers were meant to be finally dismissed on 1 January 2024. The GKN Factory Collective had thus turned new year’s eve into a final call to action to defend their conversion plan. Such a pressure from below probably played a role in the labour court’s decision, announced on 27 December 2023, to overturn the layoffs for the second time. The 31 December 2023 concert in the factory and the subsequent nocturnal march across Campi Bisenzio’s industrial area became a mass mobilisation to relaunch the workers’ current plan to set up a cooperative for the production of cargo bikes and solar panels, as part of a broader vision for a worker-led ecological transition.

This project needs material solidarity now – over 600,000 euros have been collected by the popular shareholding campaign to launch the co-operative, moving closer and closer to the target of one million euros. All information on how to contribute, individually or as an organisation, can be found at the website www.insorgiamo.org.

Support the GKN workers in Florence

Thanks to REELNews for sharing this call

URGENT CALL OUT to support the
GKN workers in Florence –
Help them make a just transition
to producing cargo bikes and solar panels
under workers control

Already one of the most important climate justice struggles in Europe, the campaign by GKN workers is under imminent attack – and they need your help to complete their inspiring struggle

For over two years now, workers have been occupying the GKN autoparts factory in Florence to stop it from closing, in the longest factory occupation in Italian history.

They have received huge support in demonstrations of up to 40,000 people – and crucially, from the climate movement, which inspired the workers to come up with an alternative plan of production. 

Instead of autoparts, they plan to produce cargo bikes and solar panels, and use them to build a local economy based on the needs of people. They have already produced a prototype of the cargo bike; now they urgently need your help to make this “just transition” away from fossil fuels a reality.

The bosses are planning on sacking all the workers on January 1st so the first priority is to come to a New Years Eve event at the factory if you can, for a huge concert – and to barricade the factory. They’ve fought off redundancies before; with the same support, they can do it again.

But then they need to raise one million euros in a popular shareholder campaign, to start production off the cargo bikes and solar panels under workers control. So please share this video call out with trade unions, with environmental organisations, with everyone who wants to see a global just transition away from fossil fuels. Shares start from 100 euros, and already they have raised 315,000 euros – you can find details of how to take part at https://insorgiamo.org/100×10-000/.

You can also help by spreading their story; by offering to translate materials into other languages; and if you have the technical expertise, to look at the production plan to help improve it. Also, if you know of a cooperative or progressive group who would be interested in buying the cargo bikes or solar panels, that would be incredibly useful too. If you can help with any of this, email the collective at collettivo.gkn.firenze@gmail.com.

As the workers say, they can’t create an alternative model to capitalist fossil fuel production in just one factory – but they can create an example of what is possible.

Please support them in this absolutely crucial battle for a liveable, sustainable future.

What is the COP? Briefing 12 updated

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What is the COP?

COP is shorthand for conference of the parties.  Organised by the United Nations, it’s normally held on an annual basis, and it is the place where the nations of the world come together to discuss policy on climate action.   So, to give it its’ full title COP28 is the 28th annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  COP 28 is taking place in Dubai.

A history of failure

The first COP was held in 1995 in Berlin.  In terms of making an impact on greenhouse gas emissions the COPs have been an abject failure. The two most common greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane.  When COP 25 took place in Madrid at the end of 2019 the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had risen 67 parts per million by volume (ppmv) above the level it was at when the first COP met in Berlin. To put this in perspective CO2 levels increased by more during 25 years of COP discussions than they had in the previous 200 years.  Methane levels have tripled since 1995.  Greenhouse gases act like an insulating blanket over the earth’s atmosphere and are responsible for rising global temperatures.   So, the massive increase in the amount of these gases in the atmosphere is the reason why the climate crisis is now acute and why rapid action to cut emissions is so important.

Climate activists bring the message “Insure Our Future” to COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, on 6th Nov 2021. More: Original public domain image from Flickr

The Paris Agreement of 2015

Back in 2015 the COP (21) took place on Paris.  The conference ended with an agreement that has since been ratified by 189 out of the 197 countries that participated (The Paris Agreement).  Ratification committed countries to developing plans that would curtail global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees centigrade.  Those who have not ratified include some important oil producers.  The USA ratified under Obama but then withdrew under Trump only to return on the first day of Biden’s term of office.

In principle ratifying the Paris Agreement commits countries ‘to put forward their best efforts through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead.’  The reality has been that progress has been negligible.  The agreement is essentially voluntary and avoids specific targets.  Political economist and environmentalist Patrick Bond notes the ‘Agreement’s lack of ambition, the nonbinding character of emission cuts, the banning of climate-debt (‘polluter pays’) liability claims, the reintroduction of market mechanisms, the failure to keep fossil fuels underground, and the inability to lock down three important sectors for emissions cuts: military, maritime transport and air transport.’

COP fault lines

The COP is dominated by the big powers.  So, in the negotiations at every COP there are sharp divisions between the major industrial nations that are responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions and the global south, which endures the biggest impact of climate change.  At the COPs, and in the run up to them, there is also a great deal of activity from non-state organisations.  Businesses, NGOs and union federations lobby before the event and can obtain credentials that enable them to be within the main conference areas.  There is of course a huge imbalance in resources between the corporate lobbyists and the climate campaigners.  Groups that represent women, indigenous people and poor people struggle to have their voices heard within the conference.  The climate movement is mostly excluded from the conference zone by barricades and police.

COP28

Sultan al-Jaber, the president of COP28 in Dubai is also the director of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.  Before the COP began the BBC disclosed leaked briefing documents showing that meetings with international participants were being used to make new oil and gas deals.  Jaber denies that this is the case but in truth it should hardly be a surprise.  The Financial Times (FT) describes the COP as a trade fair for the oil and gas industry.  Total attendance in Dubai is said to be around 80,000 and dominated by bankers, consultant and lobbyists.  These people attend to do business while using PR spin to burnish their climate credentials.  The chief executives on the UAE’s COP28 guest list included interim BP chief executive Murray Auchincloss, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, commodity trading group Trafigura’s Jeremy Weir and Brookfield Asset Management’s Connor Teskey.  Huge asset management companies like BlackRock and Brookfield are investing in renewables and were involved in the $30bn fund launched in Dubai to invest in climate-related projects – but while total investment in renewables now exceeds investment in fossil fuels the latter has risen year on year for the last four years.  There is no sign of fossil fuels being phased out as is necessary to prevent runaway climate change.

Organising for the COP

From the start the COP process has operated within the domain of market economic orthodoxy.  It assumes that market forces will drive a move towards less carbon intensive technologies and hence reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  There have indeed been significant developments in sustainable technologies – particularly wind and solar.  And yet at the same time the big energy companies have pursued a ruthless drive to exploit new hydrocarbon resources in a way that is completely incompatible with even the most modest targets for limiting global warming.   Since the COP began global emissions have risen by more than two-thirds.  

The history of the COPs has been one of dreadful failure.  And yet for many climate NGOs representation and lobbying at the COPs is an annual priority.  The COPs are a huge exercise in greenwashing, a jamboree for the corporate decision makers who are very much the problem and not part of the solution.  So, yes, we should protest when the COP takes place but there’s a growing movement to say that what we should be doing is boycotting its institutions.  There is a real need for international coordination but to get the COP process has failed – we need  to break from business as usual.  This year as COP28 takes place in air-conditioned luxury in Dubai – Earth Social is organising a grass roots conference in Colombia – check it out at earthsocialconference.org  

Earth Social Conference

A message from the organisers of the Earth Social conference – timed to take place in Colombia as COP28 takes place in Dubai.

It boils down to whether we are honest with ourselves, or not.
UN climate summits are a joke that continue to push the bounds of absurdity.
Since they began, yearly global emissions have increased by more than two-thirds. Worse still, no plans have been made to phase out fossil fuels. Should we be surprised when industry lobbyists continue to dominate conferences? Can we expect anything different from this next summit, taking place in a petro-state, chaired by an oil company boss… Are we expected to buy into this charade…?

We, on the other hand, are climate realists. We see where we are being led. We know we need to apply the emergency brake to avoid earth system collapse. That’s why we refuse to participate in a process of trading empty promises any longer.

That’s why we are inviting climate realists to the Earth Social Conference in Casanare, Colombia, from 5th-10th December 2023.

Join us to build the collective force we need in order to pull the emergency break.

Although the conference is in person in Columbia on 7th December it is possible to join some of the sessions by Zoom. Click here to go to the conference website and register.