Tag: energy

Reflections on the National Climate and Nature Emergency Briefing

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Introducing the National Climate and Nature Emergency Briefing to a packed Westminster Central Hall last Thursday morning. Chris Packham noted that this was the first briefing of its kind, aiming to present the facts from eminent scientists aimed at “decision makers”; MPs, Local Authority, business, faith and union leaders, cultural influencers, so that the state of the crisis can be fully appreciated and acted upon with the level of urgency that it demands.

It is little short of a scandal that this briefing had to be generated from the bottom up, when it is an obligation of all countries that have signed the Paris Agreement – under Article 12 – to educate their population on the nature and state of the crisis and the measures needed to deal with it. This should be being done by the government, and by the media.

The follow up campaigning from this Briefing is aimed at getting them to do just that, putting a similar event on all major TV channels with a proper level of government support. Everyone should sign their letter demanding that. Link here.

Packham stressed the importance of following the science, and noted the failures to do so that have just come out in the Covid inquiry. The delay to the first lockdown against scientific advice. The “eat out to help out” scheme, devised by Rishi Sunak in the Treasury, with no scientific input at all, both of which led to unecessary deaths. In the case of climate breakdown, ignoring the science will repeat the history, but this time as even more of a tragedy and even less of a farce.

There were nine speakers emphasising different aspects of the crisis, which overlapped in places. I’m summarising here, with a few additional comments.

Professor Natalie Seddon argued that Nature should be seen as “critical national infrastructure”. The UK is in the bottom 10% of most nature depleted countries, with an overall decline of 19% in wildlfie abundance since 1970, only 3% of land area protected and only 25% of peatlands, 14% of rivers and 7% of woodlands considered to be in a healthy condition.

Without the restoration of peatlands and wetlands and measures in urban areas like Copenhagen’s Sponge Parks, the 5 million properties currently at risk of flooding will grow in number and frequency of risk.

The benefits for mental, and physical, health from access to nature and urban green space is recognised by the more than 50% of people who think that the government isn’t doing enough to regenerate it; and the paradox of trying to “build, baby build” by removing environmental regulations on developers is that nature depletion through short termist eco system degradation damages GDP.

Professor Kevin Anderson laid out the bare bones of Greenhouse gas emissions in a way that pointed to the intense weather, social, economic and political turbulence we are heading into at pace.

He noted that the range of variation in GHG emisisons during the ice ages, from deepest ice age to warm interglacial periods, was no more tha 100 parts per million (PPM). During the Anthropocene, the entire period from about 10,000 years ago to the last two centuries, the variation was no more than 20 PPM. Since 1750, the increase has been from 280 PPM to 425 PPM – 145 PPM (half as much again as between ice age and interglacial) in just 300 years. And its still rising. The central – absurd – contention of climate change denial is that this has no impact.

An average global temperature rise of 2C will be extermely dangerous. Current climate impacts are at 1.4C. Getting to 3C or 4C poses generalised social and economic breakdown and war.

The remaining “Carbon Budget”, the amount of total extra emissions allowed before a temperature limit is breached is 130 Gigatonnes for 1.5C. At present rates of emisison, that will be breached in three years. It is 530 GT for 2C. That will be breached in 13 years at current emissions. Current projections are that emissions will begin to fall this decade, but at a rate far too slow to avoid these breaches.

Emissions would have to fall 20% a year to save 1.5C and 8% a year for 2C.

The UK tends to be self congratulatory about its record, but has only reduced emissions at a rate of 0.6% a year since 1990. To meet an equitable target, as a wealthy country with a long record of carbon emisisons that are way higher than its global fair share, it would have to reach zero carbon emissions by 2039 and reduce them at a rate of 13% a year to get there. On this basis, the Net Zero by 2050 target allows the UK to have three times its fair share of carbon emissions; so a bit more humility about “global leadership” might be in order.

Doing this requires the right kind of technology and changes in social norms.

We need to go flat out for renewable energy, electric transport and insualtion, while avoiding “delay technologies” like Carbon Capture and Storage (which has been hyped for thirty years but only managed to sequester 0.03% of fossil fuel emissions in 2024). These tend to be high cost (for us) and high profit (for owners).

The damage done by the discretionary income of high income, high emitting people has to be confronted as we need a society of “private sufficiency and public luxury”, as “it is now too late for non-radical futures”.

Professor Hayley Fowler examined oncoming weather impacts, pointing out that the climate we have now is “the least extreme climate you will experience in your lifetime” and that, so far, both rainstorms and heatwaves have been more intense than models have predicted.

Mega storms, in which 8 months worth of rain falls in a few days, are becoming more common. The damage done is unimaginable until it happens.

By 2050, on current trajectories, 1 in 4 homes would be at risk of flooding

Our current infrastructure is built for a world that no longer exists. So, if adaptation to whats coming isn’t built into all planning, we will be in a state of permanent crisis management, as “natural” disasters pile up and intensify. So, every pound spent now to avert as much of this as possible will save many pounds in having to deal with it.

Professor Tim Lenton explored Tipping Points. These are sudden dramatic shifts for the worse just from carrying on doing business as usual. As we are currently at 1.4C additional average global heating and heading for 1.5C by 2030, we are already seeing drastic impacts on coral reefs, the Amazon and methane emissions from melting permafrost in the Arctic. All these together have the potential for a runaway scale of emissions that will be beyond our ability to mitigate.

The biggest and most apocalyptic of these is the risk of overturning the Gulf Stream (AMOC), as the Greenland Ice Shelf pours billions of tonnes of cold fresh water into the North West Atlantic. All surveys show that the AMOC is weakening. The only question is how much and how fast. Some climate models for a 2C increase world project a situation in which the Arctic sea ice in February would reach as far as The Wash, average temperatures in London would be -20C – in Edinburgh -50C – with two frozen months in mid Winter. Summers, however, would be hotter than they are now. It would be impossible to grow food and there would be insufficient water to sustain the population in the South East in the Summer. Infrastructure engineered for a temperate climate would buckle under conditions more severe than currently in Irkutsk. That would mean most people from the UK would find themselves climate refugees: looking for a safe place in a world rapidly running out of them, as in this scenario, harvests from bread basket areas would halve.

Countering these prospects are the need to promote positive technological and social tipping points in power generation, transport, and residential emission, with strong mandates to phase out fossil fuel use.

Professor Paul Behrens looked in more detail at Food Supplies, noting that the Syrian civil war resulted from a several years long drought that forced farmers off the land into cities in conditions of precarity and poverty.

At present, the chance of a major crop failure in major bread basket areas is 1 year in every 16. When we get beyond a 1.5C increase, that comes down to 1 year in every 3. At 2C, its every other year. As we are certain to be beyond 1.5C by 2030, we are heading for hungry times – and everything that goes with them.

The UK has had 3 of its 5 worst recorded harvests in the last ten years. 80% of its farmers see climate change as a threat to their futures. At present the UK grows 54% of its food, so 46% is imported. 25% of UK food imports are from the Mediterranean region, which is being hit hard by climate change too.

A third of price inflation in 2023 was driven by climate impacts, helping generate an increasingly febrile politics. 40% of food experts believe widespread civil unrest linked to food shortages is ‘possible or likely’ in the UK within the next 10 years. Over 50 years, nearly 80% of experts believe civil unrest was either possible, more likely than not.

To avert this, we need a sharp shift in diet to eat a lot less meat. A mostly plant based diet would cut about 60% of UK agricultural emissions and free up a lot of land to grow more food as, at present in the UK, more than half of agricultural land is devoted to animal farming. This would also have positive health impacts, saving the NHS £55 million a year and his remark “if we don’t adapt, it will be forced upon us” drew a spontaneous round of applause.

This point was reinforced by Professor Hugh Montgomery’s contribution on Health, who noted that a shift to a plant based diet and more active travel would have a positive impact on strokes and cardiovascular, cancer, lung diseases, diabetes, and most other common illnesses and causes of death. At the same time, a consequent reduction on obesity could save the NHS up to £126 billion a year.

He also stressed that, as an emergency doctor, when faced with an emergency “you don’t treat it with words and homeopathy” and you have to be very frank with patients about what their situation is and whether they are prepared for the struggle to get through it.

He noted that actuaries, not climate scientists, have assessed that, in a 3C world there is a likelihood of 4 billion deaths from socio political failure (almost 1 in every 2 people) and concluded that we need “transformational change”.

At present, the food industry is concerned that it cannot rely on “predictability of supply”.

This was again underlined by Lt General Richard Nugee, speaking on National Security, who noted that food inflation is already at 4.9% and cited Alfred Henry Lewis’s 1906 remark that “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” He argued that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that parts of the world are becoming uninsurable and there is a grave risk of “cascading crises” which erode trust and social solidarity, overwhelming governments and undermining consent, leading to an ungovernable state. In this he echoed the assessment of the US military in 2019 that, as climate impacts broke down US society, the armed forces would be drawn in, first as emergency support, but inexorably taking on state functions as civil society broke down and, eventually, overwhelmed themselves.

More problematic was his stolid framing within the UKs current “defence” orthodoxy, enshrined in the Strategic Defence Review; which cements the UK’s alliance with the United States which, under the Trump adminstration, is a complete rogue state on climate; seeking “global energy dominance” by doubling down on fossil fuels and trying to drag the rest of the world down with it. Any country that allies with that, and everything that flows from it, is part of the problem.

While he hinted that “authoritarian populism” is a threat to “Western Democracy”, he did not specify whether he was referring to Trump and Farage as enemies within, or whether this was code for the conventional “rising powers” narrative directed at Russian and China that underpins the SDR – possibly both. This left him with an impossible contradiction; that its possible to spend an additional £77 billion a year on “defence” – the amount required to meet 5% of GDP – and at the same time invest enough to avert climate disaster within our existing economic system. It isn’t. And simply asserting that we “must” doesn’t resolve it. A choice has to be made between a military confrontation of choice, and global cooperation to avert climate breakdown and, as the General said himself. “Climate change is a threat now; and one thing I was taught in the military is that you have to face the threat in front of you as it actually is, not how you’d wish it to be”.

Professor Angela Francis looked at the economics of transformation, noting that “the status quo can seem attractive, even if its a dangerous place to be”, but the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action; and it won’t be cheaper later.

The All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Committee projection is that the UK’s current Net Zero by 2050 pathway would cost just 0.02% of GDP.

A fast transition would save the global economy $12 trillion of damage. A slow transition just $6 Trillion. No transition… just takes the hit.

An example of this is that energy price inflation would have been 11% lower had we made a faster shift to heat pumps. So, the damage from delay is already being felt.

She stressed that market economics takes the environment for granted. Stable weather. Fresh water. Free pollinators. Fertile soil. And that without regulation, any investment comes as an additional cost. So, strict regulation is essential.

Faced with the consequences of their actions, fossil fuel companies, could have diversified and shifted. Orsted is an example of one that has. But most haven’t, and are digging in on their core product, because fossil fuels are very profitable. We therefore need a massive, permanent windfall tax to make it less so.

Her final point that the transition has to be made to work for “low and middle income” people was underlined by Tessa Khan from Uplift, who noted that the decline of the North Sea, with half the jobs going in the last 15 years even as new investment continued, has to be met by a structured plan for transition to decent jobs in renewable energy and that electrification has to be more affordable than the status quo.

This can be done. Half the UKs recessions since the 1970s have been caused by fossil fuel price spikes. The cost of subsidising the spike in gas prices at the start of the Ukraine war was £64 billion and the additional costs to households and busiensses was another £60 billion. The UK is still dependent on gas to heat over 80% of its homes.

In an energy system based on renewables the fuel inputs from the sun and the wind are free forever. Prices for renewable technologies are falling steeply. Down 50% for offshore wind and 70% for solar and 80% for battery storage in the last ten years.

Renewables are more efficient that fossil fuels. A typical ICE car will only use 25% of its fuel to actually move its wheels and the FF system as a whole wastes about 2/3 of the energy that goes into it.

But, at this point, we need a lot of upfront investment to make the shift; upgrading the grid, shifting to heat pumps. That is a matter of political priorities and energy bills can be restructured to match the lower costs of renewable energy generation.

The governments plan for a million clean energy jobs in the electrification of our energy system needs investment to make it work comparable to the wholesale shift from town gas to natural gas that was done in just under ten years in the 60s and 70s.

A point nudged at here is that this would require the state to take back control of the sectors needed to do this. In the 60s, British Gas was a nationalised company. In the same period it was possible to build hundreds of thousands of affordable council homes because Local Authorities had substantial Direct Labour Organisations (and most architects worked for LAs). When Angela Francis talked of the need for “trusted” companies to carry out the wholesale insulation of housing that we need, she begged the question of which companies they might be – given the fragmentation and fly by night character of far too much of the current UK construction sector. To do the job, we need the right tools. We can’t do it with the broken ones we have.

Professor Tim Berners Lee, chairing and summing up set a challenge to “reset the national conversation” using the clips of the speeches and upcoming film that will be put on tour in the Spring arguing that the “survival of society” depends on a “WW2 level of leadership”, but that the necessary emergency legislation and investment will need consistent public pressure to challenge the misinformation and gaslighting and force the pace so that the UK can “come together and lead the world out of trouble…along with other proactive countries”. Although framed in traditional unreconstructed nostalgic British narratives (that terrible yearning to “lead the world”, when the UK did so much damage the last time it tried to) that recognition that that would have to be done with “other proactive countries” hints at a dawning recognition that geopolitical alignments will have to shift to respond adequately to the imperatives of the climate emergency.

He ended with the point that “hope is a dicipline” which, together with Brian Eno’s remark from the floor that “movements catch fire when they recognise themselves” are good thoughts to sustain us.

There is a further urgent point, implied by the Briefing but not explored by it. Kevin Anderson’s point about the pace at which climate limits are being breached overlaps with the impacts on food supply and severe weather impacts which are already developing. These warnings have usually been posed to political leaders as warnings. This is what will happen if you don’t react enough. The student protests before the pandemic had a similar focus. Here’s the truth. Act on it. These impacts are already beginning, and whatever is done now they are likely to deepen in the immediate future. This poses serious economic and political disruption.

The purpose of political formations like Reform, or Tommy Robinson’s current – here and elsewhere – and the reason they are so lavishly funded by the likes of Musk, is to make sure that the political response to that combines climate denial and xenophobia, to take the heat off the people who have caused the crisis and make us fight each other instead.

This poses a challenge to the labour movement both on how we resist this and, in conditions of social crisis, how we collectivise a response based on solidarity – whether thats to food shortages (which are usually managed by the market with price increases that further impoverish the poorest but could be addressed by rationing policed by unions taking control of resources in supermarkets and warehouses, in the event government doesn’t step up) or whole communities inundated by floods (which private insurance will no longer cover).

This is a link to the materials from the Briefing which can be used to get discussions going with people you know.

Climate Myth Busting

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This is the content of a talk I gave on a lunchtime Teams meeting with members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) as part of a series they are holding this week to help kick start the Year of Trade Union Climate Action. Now that, for the first time, elements of the far right launched a physical attack on a climate march in Manchester at the weekend we can see how weaponised lies have violent consequences; making combatting them all the more urgent.

What I aim to do in this brief talk is identify the main sorts of climate denialist mythmaking – firstly on the science, secondly on the social and economic front – identify where they come from and why they can be so potent and suggest sources of info to counter them.

The overarching aim of climate misinformation is to muddy the science, to confuse, deflect and delay. As such it doesn’t have to be coherent or consistent.

Climate Science itself is very clear.

1 Gases like CO2 and methane trap heat in the atmosphere. As you add more of them, you trap more heat. Do this continuously and you will get a trend of global heating – a greenhouse effect.

2 The main source of greenhouse gases is industrial and agricultural activity, primarily burning fossil fuels. Since the start of the industrial revolution in around 1750 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been pumped up from 280ppm to around 425 ppm today.

You sometimes get people who say that temperatures aren’t rising, most often as sarcky asides during cold snaps – where’s that global warming then, huh? But most people most of the time now know temperatures are going up, because its what they are experiencing. The hottest years on record are all in the last ten.

So the arguments you tend to get are that that these rising temperatures aren’t due to greenhouse gases but due to other “natural” factors. Temperature has always varied. Its been hotter and colder in the past. Its all due to other, natural factors that are way more powerful than anything we are doing. All these arguments amount to an absurd proposition. That you can add 145ppm of ghgs into the atmosphere in just under 300 years with no effect whatsoever.

Nevertheless, to briefly touch on these arguments

1 Volcanic activity tends to have a cooling effect. The year without a summer in 1816 caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. Not a useful explanation for things generally heating up.

2 Solar activity goes in cycles and in the last 40 years the variation as been below 0.1%. Since 1750, the burning of FFs has had 270 times the impact of solar activity. So, no explanation there.

3 Long term variations in the Earths orbit and tilt, caused by the gravitational pull of the larger planets, which have indeed been responsible for much more dramatic shifts in global temperature than we are seeing now, “snowball Earth”, forests at the South Pole, go in what are called Milankovitch cycles which take place over 100s of 1000s of years. The cycle we are in the middle of now would imply a slight cooling effect at the moment, if we weren’t forcing the pace. So, yes, things have been significantly hotter and colder at points in the past, but those factors are not operating now, while the forcing effect of greenhouse gas emissions IS happening now.

One last one on the science. Farage and the like express incredulity that CO2 is classed as “pollution” when it is actually plant food. A wonderful illustration of the principle that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. CO2 is NOT classed as pollution – paradoxically pollution has tended to act to cool the atmosphere, and successful attempts to clean it up, like in China in the last decade or so, has accelerated heating. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. And that’s the problem. It does encourage some plant growth, but this is limited, and counteracted by the impact on plants of rising temperatures on habitats – as trees can’t migrate – and extreme weather on harvests. As we’ve seen in the UK in the last couple of years. And as rising chocolate and coffee prices are witness.

Leaving aside social media, and the algorithms promoted by big tech, which generate excessive attention for emotive misinformation – if you read most UK newspapers you get a very weird and hyped view of the world just from their choice of adjectives.

Climate targets are always “unhinged”, or “lunatic”, or “eye watering”. Politicians identified with them, like Ed Miliband, are always “swivel eyed” or “eco loons” or “hypocrites”.

Renewable energy is always derided as “expensive” and/or “unreliable”.

All of these are free floating. They don’t attach to any reasoned argument, but the constant repetition of “the eye watering costs of net zero” creates a delusion that is taken for granted. Its what the press does on many issues of course.

This venom is being generated from the fossil fuel industry and its political tools, from Trump to Farage to Claire Coutinho.

Like any industry facing an existential threat to its profits FF companies are acting with the same sense of social responsibility as the asbestos and tobacco companies did before them in denying any association between their products and cancer – and are acting from the same playbook – funding “think tanks”, buying up lobbyists and astroturf media outlets like GB News, running bot farms to deny, deflect and delay.

As they now Donald Trump in the White House, pushing for “Global US Energy Dominance” through doubling down on fossil fuels and trying to force the rest of the world to do the same – they now have control of the world’s biggest bully pulpit to speak power to truth.

Part of this is an ideological war on reality. Defunding and closing down government departments scientific and academic bodies that research or monitor or regulate climate impacts or wider harms to the environment, banning use of climate related terms in government documents, even setting up a Federal body to edit academic papers so that they don’t challenge the Administration’s line that “climate change is a hoax”. US academics at international conferences have taken to using burner phones.

This works very directly at home, and there is straight government to government pressure to shift policy against renewable energy, but through the immense financial clout of FF billionaires they are also funding pro Fossil Fuel political formations like Reform in the UK, to which the more traditional Right is bending. As Kemi Badenoch put it to the FT in the summer, for the Conservatives now “the model is Javier Millei”.

The formula that the BBC use about this is “the political consensus on net zero has broken”. What they do not note is that the scientific consensus has NOT. What was a 97% agreement on the human causes of climate change among scientists according to surveys in 2013 has now risen to 99%. We need to be clear that what this means is that Parties like Reform and the Conservatives do not have a policy that grasps reality, which means that having an “impartial” or “balanced” debate on this issue gives undue weight and attention to bad faith fantasists.

Looking at some of the things they say.

Overall, its going to cost too much to meet NZ targets. As if doing nothing, or doing things more slowly, can be done with impunity. We are already in a situation in which the costs of failing to act earlier are starting to hit us. “Natural” disasters are becoming more intense and frequent. Recovering from them increasingly costly and debilitating. Parts of Canada, Florida and California and the rest of the world are becoming uninsurable. The UK environment agency has projected that 1 in 4 UK homes will be at risk of flooding by 2050. And, in a sign of the decline of business ethics that comes with this, a third of the victims of the recent US wildfires were subject to scams in the aftermath. We will have reached a civilisational tipping point when the costs and effort involved in recovery is too great, as we are hit by one impact after another like a flurry of blows from a boxer that will KO us. The OBR has projected that, if unaddressed, climate related risks could drive the UK’s national debt to 270% of GDP by 2070, up from less than 100% today. THAT would be eye watering.

By contrast, the OBR also projects that the cost of meeting the UK’s net zero targets over the 25 years to 2050 is £116 billion; less than £70 per person per year, or 19p per person per day. Are anyone’s eyes watering at the prospect of that. A snip at the price I’d say, and certainly worth the investment to secure a liveable planet for our grandchildren.

Specific arguments they raise…

  • The UK is only 1% of emissions, so what we do doesn’t matter.

The UK is responsible for its 1%, as every other country is responsible. No one gets a free pass, or is entitled to freeload on the efforts of others. The UK’s historic emission are far higher than average or our fair share, one estimate in the Lancet was that it was 7%. That’s from a few years ago and might be on the high side as estimates go, but we do have some living down to do. Also, emissions by consumption in the UK are 2% of the global total, so we have to carry our own can.

  • The UK is ahead of other countries, taking on an unfair burden and there are no prizes for coming first

This isn’t an approach they’d advocate for the Olympics, but the prize is a liveable planet; rather more important than a gold medal and worth forcing the pace on.

The UK is not in the lead. We are about seventh – which is pretty good and we should be proud of it – but this isn’t about where we are in relation to other countries, and wanting to slack off and drop back into the pack that’s just jogging along and hoping for the best, its grasping the fact that the faster we move the more we limit the damage. That’s the prize.

  • What’s the point of the UK doing anything when China/India…?

There’s a point because if we weren’t doing anything, everything would be worse, irrespective of what anyone else does.

In the case of China, which has a per capita carbon footprint somewhat higher than the UK but half that of the US, its emissions are peaking and have been at a plateau for about 18 months. Coal production has peaked and their coal fired power stations are currently operating at about 50% capacity as they are redefined as back up. The projection from the IEA and others is that China’s emissions will fall much more quickly than they have in the developed countries because their deployment of renewable energy and EVs is on such a vast and rapid scale – solar farms the size of Bristol. This is having a knock on effect globally, with the export of renewable technology alone knocking 1% off global emissions last year and the impact of EVs replace FF cars significantly reducing global oil demand. India is also moving very fast towards renewables and their per capita carbon footprint is about half that of the UK. Its worth noting that 60% of developing countries are more advanced in getting their electricity from renewable sources, and electrifying their entire energy supply, than the US is.

  • Your energy bills are high because of “stupid net zero”

UK energy bills are high because 1. they are set by the price of gas, which is higher than the cost of electricity generated from renewable sources. In fact Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) shows that in 2024 UK wholesale electricity prices would have been over 30 per cent higher if there had been no wind power generated in the UK 2. 25% of the bill goes in profits for the energy companies.

  • Heat pumps don’t work when its cold

This will come as an enormous surprise to the 60% of people who use them in Norway.

  • EVs have a higher carbon footprint than FF cars

The manufacture of EVs is more carbon intense than for FF cars, but over their lifetime, the impact of the manufacture is cancelled out after about 2 years or 15,000 miles. As batteries become more efficient and last longer, this will become ever more the case. And, in passing, all the elements of batteries, and wind turbines for that matter, can be recycled, so we are not going to be left with mountains of toxic waste (as if we don’t have that now, take a trip to Rainham).

  • We can’t stop global heating, we just have to live with it

Trying to implement the Paris Agreement has cut the projected increase in global temperatures for 2100 from a catastrophic 4C to 2.8C on current policies and between 2.3 – 2.5C on current pledges. That’s still bad, but we’re moving in the right direction and need to accelerate not slack off. Every 10th of a degree makes a difference to how damaging and costly this will be.

Adaptation without mitigation would be impossible because the damage would be so severe that we couldn’t cope with it. Swiss Re has compiled a list of countries that are most likely to face ecological collapse if heating is left unabated. It starts with South Africa and Australia, which the rest of the world might be able to cope with, but number three on the list is India; one in every 5 people on the planet, with conditions deteriorating everywhere else too. Nightmare.

It ain’t (just) what you do, its the way that you do it

Some genuine problems are built into not transition itself, but the way its being done. An example is the botched insulation schemes run by successive governments which have been based on providing subsidies for householders to employ barely competent, or downright fraudulent, white van men – with the same sense of social responsibility as the FF companies – to use inappropriate materials, installed in an inappropriate way leading to 93% of them causing black mould and having to be redone. This growing wheat in flower pots, consumer led approach takes the fly by night, fragmented, micro business dominated UK construction industry as a given and will continue to cause disasters if persisted with in any warm homes programme. What we need instead is a proper level of investment in the reconstruction of Local Authority Direct Labour Organisations, with properly trained and educated unionised workers (who see insulation as part of a social mission to rescue their communities and therefore see their work as important to get right and a source of pride, not just a job) through local FE colleges, working on a street by street plan to get the maximum economies of scale, insulating the areas with the worst fuel poverty first to get the earliest and greatest reduction in costs, in fuel use and carbon emissions and all the health benefits that flow from that (including the mental health benefits of no longer being under the cosh from the meter).

Cuba’s solar turn

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This is the text of a talk I gave at the National Education Union’s inspirational Cuba Solidarity Education Conference on 15th November.

In the last year there have been numerous reports of the fragility of Cuba’s power grid, resulting from four major incidents of widespread power cuts.

The problems of the grid are based on

  • over reliance on ageing oil fired power stations, supplying 84% of electricity supply, which have been difficult to maintain under the US sanctions regime
  • fuel shortages, as most of the oil is imported from Russia or Venezuela, both of which are also under stringent US sanctions; one of which is in a proxy war with the US, the other threatened with imminent invasion by it.
  • the impact of US financial sanctions choking off access to loans to finance improvements in the system.

Peak daytime demand can reach up to 2500 MW, leaving a gap of between 800 and 1300 MW leading to widespread cuts.

These power cuts – not uncommon in the global South – have a hard impact on people’s lives, from cutting off water pumps and refrigeration (so you’re food goes bad) to knocking out communications. Back up generators are often insufficient because they also depend on diesel, which is in short supply, thanks to the sanctions again

The way out of this crisis has had two aspects.

1) Investment in repair and maintenance and energy efficiency in the existing fossil fuel grid with some engineering support from Russia, firming up 850 MW of supply.

2) Work with Chinese assistance this year to build 55 solar farms capable of generating 1200 MW, which should be enough to cover any shortfalls by the end of the year – with a further 37 solar farms due to be completed by the end of 2028 to account for increases in demand and provide a bit of a buffer. On a smaller scale, 22 wind turbines are being refurbished to generate another 30MW.

We should not that this development is not peculiar to Cuba, but is becoming a pattern across the global South. 60% of developing countries now have a higher proportion of their electricity generated by sustainable sources than the US does.

Fig 1 shows the pace of this.

As the US under the Trump administration abandons Biden’s ambitions for an America First energy transition, with the inflation reduction Act as a magnet to pull green investment into the USA and away from its competitors (and allies) – with, as now the world’s leading petro state – a straightforward reactionary attempt to prolong the fossil fuel era as long as possible- the rest of the world, when it can avoid being strong armed into forced contracts to buy environmentally ruinous US LNG with a carbon footprint 30% worse than coal per unit of energy – is moving fats towards electrification.

This is underpinned by several factors.

1. Its cheaper, especially solar – and getting more so. As a relatively new technology we are seeing rapid gains in efficiency and cost reductions. Costs fall about 20% every time deployment doubles. And we’re currently on course for more than doubling by 2030 and trebling by 2035. So, now 2/3 of global energy capital goes into electro-tech. FFs by contrast are becoming more expensive as old established fields like the North Sea dry up and new fields are relatively difficult and expensive to extract from.

2. It cuts costs long term because once the panels are in and the wind turbines up, there’s no need to import fuel. The wind blows. The sun shines. The batteries store. No charge. This underpins related decisions like Ethiopia banning the import of FF cars because they want to cut their fuel import bills.

3. Fossil fuels are wasteful. 2/3 of energy generated is lost. Electric motors are 2 to 4 times as efficient. So we can do a lot more with a lot less. A way to envisage this is in Fig 2. One container ship of SPs will generate as much electricity as 50 ships full of LNG and 100 ships full of coal. This is also true of mining, in which the total amount of extracted metals required for sustainability by mid century as equivalent to the amount of coal mining that had to be done to meet demand just in 2023.

With 70% of the world’s renewable energy potential in the global south and the massive potential supply, primarily from China, that we can see in Fig 3, there is now a real potential for generating a non polar world, in which each place becomes free to express its unique version of our common humanity by breaking the lock hold that FF based imperialist countries have on them.

The Trump administration’s attempt to assert “US Global Energy Dominance” is currently taking the form of a threatened invasion of Venezuela, to get direct control of the world’s largest energy reserves and the rare earths it needs, not for the energy transition but for its military.

One last domestic point. While delegates at the COP have been heard expressing relief that the US government isn’t there sabotaging the process from the inside – they are corralling their political supporters everywhere on common toxic themes of climate change denial, racism, repression, deregulation and privatisation, militarisation and the insidious intrusion of big US tech companies into monitoring every aspect of our lives. As Kemi Badenoch puts it to the FT, for the Conservative Party now “The model is Javier Millei”.

In this sense, the NEU’s internationalism, anti war, anti racism and climate campaigning come together, and we should coordinate more.

China and Climate – the Question of Leadership

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Image from Tricontinental Instutute for Wenhua Zongheng China’s Ecological Transition Dec 2024.

This is the full version of a talk I gave as part of a Panel on China’s leadership role in fighting climate change at the Friends of Socialist China Conference in Bolivar Hall on 27th September. As it would have extended to twice as long as I had, a drastically pruned version was delivered, and an even pithier version was published in the Morning Star during the week. I’m putting this up here for anyone who might find the missing bits stimulating.

I edit the Greener Jobs Alliance Newsletter and convene the National Education Union Climate Change Network, but am speaking in a personal capacity because both organisations contain a range of views about China and its role in climate change. These are mine.

Marx used to quote Hegel’s dictum that “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk” to note that people by and large learn from events only after they have happened. In the case of the climate crisis, dusk is falling already and we know what is happening. 

IPCC Reports are very clear about the increase in greenhouse gases, the increase in global temperatures that arise from that, and the impacts are increasingly documented, as well as reported as they happen. We are experiencing it. It’s not a single cataclysm that may or may not happen some time in the future. It is happening now. Slowly from the point of view of political/electoral cycles, but with terrifying rapidity in geological terms; such that we are in a crucial decade in the century that will make or break human civilization. 

I’d add that from COP to COP the IPCC sets out possible scenarios for how the crisis will unfold. So far, we have been heading consistently along the “unlikely worst case scenario”. 

I’d also add that most people see the unfolding of this crisis as following an almost Fabian path of inevitable gradualism, but, in physics as in politics, the tendency is to have a long period of apparent stasis, in which forces build until you hit a tipping point, and there are then sudden dramatic shifts that are unimaginable until they happen, but make the previous period unimaginable once they have. 

As the joke used to go, “Whoops comrades, yet another unforeseen historical inevitability”. 

The impact of the crisis on China itself is already severe (at 1.3C globally above pre industrial averages, but China already at 1.6C above). 

  • this July 2025 alone, the value of “direct economic losses” due to flooding, landslides, earthquakes and drought was equivalent to $7.3bn and “road damages” amounted to $2.2bn, according to the Ministry of Transport.
  • The 30,000 deaths related to heatwaves in 2023 was almost double the average between 1986-2005. 
  • Droughts in 2024 hit more than 11 million people, more than 1.2m hectares of crops and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences estimates that climate-related yield reductions could amount to 5% to 10% by 2030 – so, in five years – under current warming trends. 
  • One study estimates that key cereal crops could lose around 2.6% yield per degree Celsius of warming, with more vulnerable regions facing up to a 12.7% loss. Another study projected up to 37% yield decline within decades if warming continues unchecked.

Challenges

China’s response aims to build a moderately prosperous socialist society as an ecological civilisation. The connection between the two is expressed in the Two Mountains proposition popularised by Xi Jinping – that green mountains with clear water are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver.  So, as China grows, it will grow greener. So it’s not Socialism with green bits, let alone a Kruschevite vision of the conquest of nature, but Green Socialism.

And the socialism is essential to the greenness. One Australian commentator put it in the grudging way that Western commentators who grasp the reality nevertheless can’t help but do 

“The authoritarian regime put the heft of the state behind clean technologies at a scale and pace difficult to imagine in most democracies.” 

What this means is that if you have socialist planning you can make strategic decisions for the common good that won’t be sabotaged by the vested interests that buy elections and control “western democracies”.

Or, as a Canadian commentator put it. “China is pushing power sector transformation through central planning. It can build clean infrastructure quickly”, as “China sees the old fossil fuel growth model as not sustainable and increasingly unable to sustain long-term prosperity.” To put that another way, if the socialism that’s built isn’t green, it won’t last.

But China’s colossal state driven investment in what it calls “the three news” – solar power – electric vehicles and batteries – along with wind power-  is leading to a global tipping point as the cost of renewable energy is now cheaper than that generated by any fossil fuel – and set to become even more so. And this is having an impact on countries in the rest of the world that are far from being socialist.

Last year, crude oil imports to China fell for the first time in two decades, with the exception of the pandemic. The International Energy Agency expects China to hit peak oil in 2027.

As China had driven two-thirds of the growth in global oil demand in the decade to 2023, global demand set to plateau then drop before 2030. This makes continued investment in fossil fuel exploration, or power plants, increasingly risky. Banks that have traditionally put huge resources into FF investments are beginning to get cold feet, even as they row back on explicit green commitments. This is, paradoxically, putting the US Fossil Fuel drive at odds with markets.

This is because the sheer scale of China’s investment is mind boggling and this is increasingly the core driver of China’ economy; which in turn is having a global knock on effect.

  • With just 17.2% of the world’s people, China has half of the world’s solar, half of the world’s wind power and half of the world’s electric cars. 
  • Of every four” offshore wind turbines installed globally in 2025, 3 of them will be in China.
  • In April this year, China installed more solar power than Australia has in all its history 45.2GW. In one month – at a rate equivalent to a power station every 8 minutes. 
  • Last year China installed as much renewable power in one year as the US has in its entire history, and this will accelerate.
  • They are building enormous solar and wind farms in arid parts of the Western interior. To give an idea of the scale of these things, they are two thirds of the way through building a solar farm in Tibet that is the size of Chicago. (Projects like this all over arid areas are also having a positive impact on holding back desertification and boosting agriculture, as condensation from the panels feeds grasses which can be grazed by sheep).

As a result China’s domestic emissions are peaking, even as demand for energy increases. In fact energy prices went down in the summer even as demand for a/c boomed during heatwaves. Emissions were down 1.6% in the first half of this year. That’s vital because China’s emissions are 30% of the global total. If China gets this wrong, we’re in real trouble. 

China now has 57% of its energy generated by renewables, compared to just over 50% for the UK. 

Coal power is still massive in China, and its rise to prosperity came through climbing up a mountain of it. 

However, coal is now explicitly being defined as back up to a grid structured around renewables and there is now significant overcapacity – leading to these plants only operating around 50% of the time. Coal consumption dropped by 2.6% in the first half of this year, even as the economy grew by 5%, showing that the shift in reliance is picking up pace.

A question that this poses as quite an urgent matter is planning for transition in heavy coal dependent provinces like Shanxi, which is 75% dependent on coal mining and coal derivative industries. If the transition is as fast as it might be, this could pose a serious problem locally unless alternative industries are planned and built in as part of the process. I’d be interested in any debate going on in China about how that will be addressed.

Global impact

All this is feeding through globally and this is crucial. Taken individually, there are a number of European countries, like Finland, that have made a faster shift away from fossil fuels and have a higher per capita investment, but you’d expect wealthier countries to be able to do that. The stunning thing is not that some have, but that most haven’t. And none of them are having the global impact that China is.

Though there are a few residual projects, China’s decision to abandon coal investment overseas has been a pivotal decision. 

More than 60% of emerging and developing economies are leapfrogging the US and Europe in clean electrification thanks mostly to China’s exports of cheap solar panels. 

  • Pakistan last year added as much capacity in rooftop solar as they’d previously been able to generate from their entire grid. 
  • This is now being picked up in parts of Africa, with solar panel exports from China up 60% this year. This is from a low base, but the potential is enormous. In countries like Kenya, Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia, the DRC, Botswana, Zambia Nigeria and South Africa solar imports have grown by factors of between 3 to 8. The liberating potential of no longer being dependent on imported fossil fuels, the capacity to install micro grids and distributed power to widespread rural communities could provide the same technological leapfrog as when SATphones (mobiles) made landline technology redundant in Africa. Abundant, cheap solar electricity also allows the continent to be slung together with a High Speed Rail network, not dependent on medium range flights burning kerosene. 
  • Outside Africa, in countries like Brazil and Vietnam, the adoption of solar, wind and battery storage is outpacing not only fossil fuels, but also the business-as-usual strategies of many rich economies, let alone the delirious reactionary stance of the USA. 

China’s clean energy exports in 2024 alone shaved 1 per cent off global emissions outside of China, according to Carbon Brief, and this will accelerate during the next 30 years. 

Reuters reports that  87% of power generation investment in emerging economies and China flowed into clean energy in 2024; and as China is the pivot nation in the global system, three-quarters of global fossil demand is now in nations that have already peaked.

Three factors underlie this. And these are quotes from Reuters, so not from a source the right wing press here would call “eco fanatic”.

  1. Physics: Fossil fuels are wasteful: two-thirds of the energy in coal, oil or gas is lost to heat or inefficiency. Solar, electric motors, and heat pumps are two to four times as efficient. We can do more with less energy at far lower cost. That is expressed very well in this graphic. 
  1. Economics: Fossil fuels are commodities built on extraction: as reserves deplete, it gets more expensive to access what’s left. Look at the North Sea. Electro-based technology is manufactured: so the more that gets built, the cheaper and better it becomes. On average, costs fall by around 20% every time deployment doubles. In most of the world, solar and wind are now the lowest-cost new power. Investment follows – today, two-thirds of global energy capital flows into “electrotech”, while oil majors are investing more in stock buybacks than in new wells.
  2. Geopolitics: The old energy system left three-quarters of humanity dependent on expensive, imported fuels. Electro-based technologies unlock local resources. Almost all countries have enough sun and wind to meet their energy needs many times over. In fact, emerging and developing economies hold 70% of the world’s solar and wind resources and 50% of the critical minerals for the energy transition.

What this means is that the Western model of development is not needed for the majority of the world. Thanks to China’s investments in renewables, they can modernise in their own way – and that means that the future does not, and cannot, look like the USA.

So, to elaborate on the last point, China is leading on climate because it is not doing what the US is doing, nor following it in a race to the bottom

Ma Zhaoxu ,China’s vice-foreign minister says, “regardless of how the international situation evolves, China’s proactive actions to address climate change will not slow down”.

The Trump administration, as we know, is locking the US into a suicidal entrenchment in increasingly outmoded FF technology. “Drill baby drill”. 

In rolling back Biden’s attempt to suck green investment into the US, Trump has, as many commentators have noted, abandoned the future. This doesn’t simply involve domestic economic self sabotage, with more expensive FF plants kept running and pushing up bills, offshore wind farms cancelled imperilling supply in regions like New England, but also a completely reckless wrecking ball taken to disaster emergency relief and any state scientific or academic research related to the climate and the impacts of it – setting up a vetting committee to make sure that published papers don’t challenge the administration’s line (so US academics at international conferences have taken to using burner phones). 

That means that US policy is based on a set of lies about climate change, and actively has to suppress the truth about it. Ultimately, a policy based on lies comes back to bite you.

The US is now the world’s leading petro state. And part of Trump’s trade offensive has been to get the US’s subordinate allies to buy its exports of LNG – whether they need it or not. 

Some of this involves fantasy figures. The EU deal to buy $750 billion worth of US LNG exceeds the capacity of the industry to produce it, tanker fleet to transport it and European LNG terminals to process it (and the EU can’t mandate member states to buy it anyway). The US/UK nuclear deal is similarly fanciful. They are aiming beyond the capacity of their own system.

But the purpose of it is to lock as much of the world as possible into FF bondage. They actually have a Department of Energy Dominance. And it’s why the increasingly shrill arguments coming from the most overt political subordinates of the US – Reform here, with the incredible shrinking Conservative Party yapping along in their wake, with an increasingly panicky right wing press in full sneering support – are actually aiming at consolidating UK energy dependence on the US, no matter how ruinous the cost. 

Which is why they have to invert the truth and argue that getting to sustainability is too costly. The OBR reckons it  will cost 19p a day per person up to 2050, a cost already eclipsed by just the food price rises from two bad harvests in the last two years. But, having to buy US LNG instead of using the sun and wind will impoverish us and risk the future.

This sets up a politics and diplomacy of volatile delirium based on wishful thinking backed up with open and extreme violence. The renaming of the Dept of Defence at the Dept of War shows how they have taken the mask off now. 

Given the factors outlined above, a success for the US would lock the world, and the US itself, into climate collapse. The sort of scenario outlined by one of their own think tanks in 2008 as a situation in which “countries with resources would have to engage in nightmarish episodes of triage. Deciding who, and what, can be salvaged from a disordered environment. The choices would primarily have to be made among the poor, at home and abroad”.

Something it’s in all of our interests to avoid. 

But, while the US still makes some of the weather – literally in this case – it’s no longer able to determine the direction of the world and, in my view, Trump is increasingly looking like the Emperor Diocletian, who restored the old pagan rites for the last time when their time had already gone. He is standing on thin ice, that’s getting thinner as the ice caps melt. As Bill McKibbon puts it in his optimistic article “Here comes the Sun”; “Big Oil spent more money on last year’s election cycle in my country than they’ve ever done before. And it’s why they’re now being rewarded with a whole variety of measures designed to slow this transition down, which may succeed. I mean, it’s possible that 20 years from now, America will be a kind of museum of internal combustion that other people will visit to see what the olden days were like.

But it’s not going to slow the rest of the world down much, I don’t think.” 

There is obviously a tension now in the UK government, with its attempt to dodge tariffs by bending the knee and crippling any possibility of positive investment by committing to an annual £77 billion black hole in “defence” spending, and the stated direction of the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero to make the UK an “electrostate”, which involves some cooperation with China, but would require more investment than the military spend will allow. US pressure has already excluded Huawei from 5G telecoms, and from the nuclear programme (which will make it unaffordable as well as useless). 

As this crisis unfolds and deepens, the cost of being shackled to the US and the cold war stance it requires against China will become more and more apparent. And a more live debate in the climate movement. And something we need to inject into “mainstream politics” in and through the unions, Labour, the Greens and Your Party.

Labour’s Climate Strategy – strengths and weaknesses.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This was an introduction given at the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group’s energy strategy day. Afterthoughts and updates, like the next few paragraphs, have been added in bold.

This introduction was delivered before Keir Starmer’s speech at COP 29, which made the very welcome pledge of an 81% cut in carbon emissions by 2035, but also included the promise that the government would not “tell people how to live their lives”.

This makes the way we live now somehow sacrosanct- and assumes that “people” are incapable of rising to the challenge of changing it if thats whats needed to secure a livable world for their children and grandchildren. It also ducks the government’s responsibility to implement Article 12 of the Paris Agreement which is a call for mass popular information, education and mobilisation campaigns, to enable society to act collectively to save itself.

Parties shall cooperate in taking measures, as appropriate, to enhance climate change
education, training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information,
recognizing the importance of these steps with respect to enhancing actions under this
Agreement.

As 66% of the public want more action to combat climate change, we should be mobilised to do so. We will have to get to sustainability by marching forward on both the technological transformation leg and the social transformation leg. We won’t get there if we have to hop hopefully on just one of them.

Labour’s strengths and weaknesses

I’d like to stress that there are a range of views in the Greener Jobs Alliance, and these are mine.

To start with a statement of the obvious, it doesn’t look as though the government sees itself as an instrument to mobilise society to transform itself to sustainability.

They treat the climate crisis as an item on a list – limited to a mission to make the UK a “Green Energy Superpower” – not the framework in which everything else has to be posed.

That leaves huge gaps. Some examples.

1.The current curriculum review for schools does not explicitly have addressing the climate crisis at the heart of it, although the current Ministerial team are open to a discussion about it in a way that the last was not.

2.A climate conscious budget would, as a minimum,

i) have raised fuel duty and hypothecated the revenue to keep the £2 bus fare cap and invested the rest in enhanced public transport.

ii) raised a wealth tax on incomes above £10 million per annum, as suggested by Greenpeace – to raise £130 billion over 5 years (1% of GDP) which, they argue, would raise the revenue to cover insulating 19 million homes, cap bus fares outside London at £1.65, and free for under 25s, fund an unlimited rail ticket for £49, provide retraining for the 3.2 million workers at risk in high carbon industries and shift agriculture onto an agro- ecological basis.

That might be optimistic, but its that scale of ambition thats needed, along with a relentless explanation of why its necessary as a national and international mission.

And to play fantasy Chancellor a little longer, a recommitment to the £28 billion a year future proofing investment with a plan for every sector that works with the relevant unions to develop it and identify the skills gaps that have to be filled. This applies to expanding sectors as well as high carbon sectors that will have to shrink.

Reeves and Starmer’s overall strategy is for “growth” – any growth – conceived in completely traditional terms, not framed as transformation. This can sometimes even be framed in a way that undermines the government’s own targets -as expressed in the recent Sun article under Starmer’s name headlined – “I will never sacrifice Great British Industry to the drum beating, finger wagging Net Zero Zealots”.

I guess that’s us. Perhaps we should all get badges.

Also, I don’t know if its just me, but does all this “Great British this, Great British that” have a really early Victorian feel to it?

3. This can also be seen in housing. The challenge is to build 1.5 million new homes a year. The GJA wrote to Angela Rayner in October last year whether all new homes would be

i) built to a zero carbon standard, with a sound level of insulation, heat pumps, electric cookers and hubs, solar panels as standard and no connection to the gas grid (as this would be a wasted investment).

ii) with all essential facilities within walking distance, integrated green spaces and trees, good public transport links and car clubs to reduce the burden of individual car ownership.

iii) zero impact assessments on water tables and sewage and other questions including who will build them? Arguing that there needs to be a plan to expand Local Authority Direct Labour Organisations with a link to local FE colleges to skill up the new workers we will need to do it

iv) And, crucially, the last question. If the aim is to use existing developers, how will you prevent them from blackmailing the government to water down standards to enable them to squeeze in more units, cut the proportion of social housing, sit on land banks and refuse to develop them, or claim that necessary environmental standards impact on their profits too much?

We didn’t get a reply, but there are indications that they could let developers rip through reducing planning restrictions even on the water table and sewage – which is quite extraordinary, given the massive concern about sewage in our rivers – and there are signs of a retreat on a solar panel default after push back from the industry which shows where the battle is. New rules ensuring that no new homes are connected to the gas grid are, however, scheduled to come into force by 2027 and implemented from 2028. The key question now is how stringent the environmental standards for new builds will be and not allowing the developers to kick the costs of meeting them onto households.

All this poses a question for the trade union approach to Just Transition. At the moment, the new TUC Worker Led Transition Team is focussed on enabling a transition in threatened high carbon sectors – cars, cement, steel etc – which is vital and important work, but we also need campaigns for employment that doesn’t currently exist. Construction and retrofit are probably the most promising sector for this.

The TUC WLT have been working since May and you can read about them and find their contact details in the latest Greener Jobs Alliance Newsletter.

Just Transition doesn’t have to mean like for like jobs. I saw in Edie this week that there’s a skills gap for 50% of the jobs projected as “green” by 2030 – which indicates a huge demand and potential, but also a risk if that gap isn’t filled.

4. This also applies to Foreign Policy. David Lammy made a speech in September stating that the government would put climate change at the heart of UK foriegn policy.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if it did?

For him this had three components.

i) A “clean power alliance” to scale up finance for “clean power” in the Global South.

ii) Measures to unlock global finance to “leapfrog fossil fuels” there.

iii) Implementation of the 30 by 30 agreement (safeguarding 30% of land and oceans by 2030).

The problems with this are that the UK went to the recent Nature COP without a plan for 30/30. “Clean power” is sometimes used as a synonym for “green power” but it is also often used, especially in the US, as a specific description for the cluster of technologies being posed as an alternative to renewables; nuclear, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage.

Most crucially, unlocking finance does not mean increasing aid levels – which are still at 0.5% of GDP, with no plans even to get back up to 0.7%.

What Lammy means is trying to find investment opportunities for the City of London/UK finance sector. For this to work it would have to be profitable for them, as banks follow the money; which is why they have invested twenty times as much in carbon bombs as the Global South has received in climate finance since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

So this is a bit greenwashy, especially as the actual heart of UK Foreign policy is not prioritising fighting the climate crisis, but its strategic subordination to the United States; expressed this week by Starmer “looking forward” to working with Trump “in defence of our shared values” – even as Trump is poised to exit the Paris Agreement and trash all domestic environment protection measures and even the bodies that monitor them.

The question posed by this is the extent to which the government will adapt to US pressure; particularly as this is finding expression here in the alignment of every political force from the Tories rightwards on opposition to “the madness of Net Zero” or the “costs of Net Zero” as they put it. The use of these phrases is now ubiquitous and serves to associate “Net Zero” with “madness“ in people’s minds – pushed as it is by “eco zealots” and therefore by definition unreasonable – without the inconvenience of having to make an argument to justify the association; which they have to do because both are the opposite of the truth. The only thing mad about Net Zero is not reaching it in time, the costs of not getting there are enormous and, indeed, fatal.

As will be the end result of the increased military spending that they falsely pose as keeping us “safe”.

One aspect of US pressure is to sharply increase and prioritise military spending. Starmer is due to announce a schedule for the UK to increase its military spending to 2.5% of GDP straight after Trump’s inauguration, which will do little to appease him when he’s pushing for an eye watering 4%. This is dangerous in itself, but also sucks resources away from investing in transition and/or improving people’s lives; thereby deepening the cost of living crisis and the risk of war.

This is in the context of some EU leaders going to Trump, according to the FT, and suggesting “lets avoid a tariff war and team up against China”; thereby proposing to form a bloc with a climate rogue state against the world’s largest investor in renewable energy.

At the same time they are relaxing their formerly sacred fiscal rules to allow stepped up investment in military production and military focussed infrastructure investment, like strengthening bridges “so tanks can pass in safety” – to prepare for a continental war with Russia which, were it to happen, would kill us all. It is an explicit presumption of the current UK Defence Review that we are in ” a pre war period” with Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, or all four. This is suicidal lunacy and we don’t have to accept it.

In the context of Trump expecting these ruinous increases in military spending from all US subordinate allies, a better course for all of them is to seek peace and mutual security with the targetted countries. In Europe, that means finding a modus vivendi with the Russians that would allow a lasting peace in Ukraine – not just a pause while both sides feel they have to tool up for Armageddon – and a reduction in tensions and barriers across the whole of Eurasia.

5) Lastly, on the “Green Energy Superpower” project, there is good news and bad news.

The good news is

i) the unblocking of onshore wind and solar farms,

ii) the 2.5 times increase in offshore wind in this years Contracts for Difference auction – though this needs to double again next year and stay at that level to meet the 2030 target

iii) getting a fast feasibility study done from NEOS that its possible to get the grid in shape to take on all the new renewable energy sources – and finding that this would cut people’s bills

iv) moving zombie projects out of the planning system so those most ready can go first

…all this is positive and means there will be a substantial increase in renewable energy by 2030.

But,

i) The investment in CCUS and blue hydrogen announced last month is a misallocation of funds that could have more of a climate impact and create more jobs elsewhere.

ii) The failure to maintain the original plan for retrofit means that demand and emissions will be higher than they need to be.

iii) As does the insufficient focus on sustainable transport and the continued low funding for local authorities that makes most local climate action plans well intentioned and doing some good things – from bee corridors to LTNs and cycle paths, public EV charging points, officially approved guerilla gardening, school streets programmes and so on, but not resourced enough to qualitatively impact neighbourhoods.

Above all, and overarching, this is the lack of just transition bodies with mass participation at national. regional and local levels because, if I can misquote Lenin, Sustainability = electrification plus Just Transition Commissions.

The transition to renewables is not a threat to jobs in the North Sea, its the only lifeline that workers there have.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

My speech at the Rally for a Just Transition outside the Treasury last week

When people say “We have to make the transition to sustainable energy BUT we need to save jobs” we need to change one word in that sentence. “We have to make the transition to sustainable energy AND we need to save jobs”.

At the 2017 COP in Katowice – held in the middle of the Silesian coalfield, where the delegates said that they could smell the sulphur on the air – sensing a threat to their jobs, the local mineworkers branch of the Solidarnosc mineworkers union voted that climate change is not happening.

While that’s an understandable defensive reaction, it actually disarms these workers two times over.

  1. It makes it impossible for them to campaign to save their families and communities from the consequences of climate breakdown.
  2. It makes it impossible for them to defend their jobs, because that defence would be based on a fantasy.

That underlines the point that, whether we are a trade union seeking a future for our members – or a government seeking a sustainable future for society – we have to base our policies on reality.

Which brings us to the North Sea.

Oil and gas production in the North Sea is caught in a pincer that has nothing to do with government policy.

  1. The oil and gas fields are becoming exhausted – and even investment in new fields would make an insignificant difference to the speed of the decline in production, and therefore jobs.
  2. Oil demand has either peaked already, or will soon. That sets up a scenario in which the major oil companies are fighting like rats in a sack over the remaining profitable years. As oil demand declines, the only viable companies will be those able to extract oil from the easiest, therefore cheapest, places. That means OPEC, essentially. The Western oil majors will start to go to the wall in order of size and the extent to which their reserves are difficult/expensive to extract. The writing is on the wall for all of them, but BP and Shell will go down long before Exxon Mobil.

But these companies aren’t going down without a fight. They are pushing back hard against the shrinking of their markets, against taxes on their profits.

Part of this is the abandonment of transition plans from fossil fuels to renewables on the part of these comapnies because, in the short term, the former are more profitable. This dooms them and everyone working for them.

The bottom line is that the transition to renewables in the North Sea is not a threat to jobs in the North Sea, its the only lifeline that workers there have.

This is a video of the rally outside the Treasury.

📣 Please like & share the video to amplify our demands ahead of the budget!

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