Tag: Just Transition

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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John Wesley’s Twinned Toilets, and other scenes from Central London

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

On the Metropolitan Line on the way to the joint unions and climate movement rally for a just transition outside the Treasury building, a bloke gets on the tube wearing a blank expression and a black jacket with the legend “Find your own way” on the breast pocket. Its hard to tell if thats a personal philosophy, or advice.

Rising up through Westminster tube station, built at a time of intense de-industrialisation and therefore designed to look like the inside of a power station, a crocodile of kids on a school trip walk across on a higher level. They are wearing scarlet peaked hats, which are a bit MAGA, but, small as they are, they seem calmer, more mature than the people you get at Trump rallies. Odd moment at one of those recently. He complained that the teleprompter had cut out. You mean that stuff is scripted?

At the Portals of Power. Outside the Treasury building (author with Greener Jobs Alliance banner in evil looking black hat).

A lively rally outside the Treasury. A mix of Scottish trade unionists and other UNITE members, the Stop Rosebank campaign, Campaign Against Climate Change, Greener Jobs Alliance, Greenpeace and Scottish FOE. More women than men, including among the speakers. Lots of speeches and chants, people passing sometimes bemused, but a lot of honked car horns and fist pumps from drivers. A letter signed by 60 organisations calling for the government to fund a transition for North Sea Oil and Gas workers so their skills can be redeployed, handed in at the end. It would cost about a billion a year – small change given the totality of government spending and a sixth of what they are spending on maintenance on the Trident missiles they occasionally misfire into the Carribean on tests. Hopefully, when it was handed in by a delegation that included UNITE and Greenpeace representatives, someone from the Treasury was engaged in a discusion about it and was given some food for thought.

In the basement of Central Hall Westminster, the enormous HQ of the Methodist Church, they have a cafe that is a bit hidden away, named after John Wesley, founder of the Church, which a little group of us from the Greener Jobs Alliance repaired after the rally for a bit of caffeine fuelled repair and bounce ideas off each other. Its a light and airy cafe. A bit of a discovery. Good coffee. One of my comrades in Green arms was very complimentary about their bacon rolls. Its a little odd because Wesley himself was not especially fond of coffee. In his Primitive Physick, his rather austere guide to diet and exercise he notes that “Coffee and tea are extremely hurtful to persons who have weak nerves.” However, while he was not especially fond of coffee, he definitely didn’t like tea, blaming it for “Symptoms of a Paralytick Disorder” in himself and, watching people on the street, concluded that there was a lot of that about. He gave it up altogether in 1746, arguing with a friend that “You have need to abhor it as deadly Poison, and to renounce it from this very Hour.” Now they sell mugs with his face on it, but without the quote.

Although, equally oddly, he didn’t note that coffee and tea can be exteremely hurtful to persons who have weak bladders, one of the best things about the place is that they have twinned their toilets with facilities their church has built all over Africa. Every urinal has a little photo above it of a thatched shack in Zambia, or the DRC explaining where it is. They are all unique. The urinals are all the same. None of them is by Duchamp. The shacks are like the Ventilated Improved Pit toilets at Vanghani school in Limpopo, South Africa that I visited in 2005. A gigantic pit with a long drop from a basic toilet seat. The idea being that whatever goes down will be absorbed and the hole will never fill. Works very well. No need for flushing. The pictures felt like humanity and hope.

On the corner outside Westminster Hall, a bloke in his sixties is standing with a home made contraption with a message about the overuse of plastics that looks like a full size crucifix for plastic bottles, which hang from the cross bar like shot game birds. Its so large that its hard to miss. I go over and offer some encouragement and find out that he is doing it off his own bat, not attached to any campaign, just personally motivated to get a worthwhile message out there. Beats sitting at home watching Homes under the hammer I guess. I suggest it might be an idea to have a map showing nearby water fountains and he says that there aren’t any nearby, and those that do exist are often hidden away in odd corners, perhaps so they don’t get worn out by anyone using them.

Opposite him, a big blue banner and EU flag with the slogan “We’re still here because Brexit is still crap”. I think this might have been the bloke who played “Things can only get better” as an accompanyment to Rishi Sunak’s ill judged General Election announcement; one of the things contributing to Sunak’s increasingly frustrated demeanor as he talked on through the wind, talked on through the rain, and walked back into Downing Street very much alone. Perhaps “Singing in the rain” might have been better.

By the statues in Parliament Square, a tour guide rattles through his spiel to a group of teenagers with 1,000 yard stares. General Smuts is turning green behind them.

On my way back down the tube, a family of French tourists walks up the steps towards the exit. As they get half way up, the two toddlers with them, who look like illustrations by Shirley Hughes, look up and out and catch an eyefull of Big Ben at a sharp angle, framed by the humdrum surroundings of the exit and backlit by a bright blue sky, all tall, gothic, gold and glittering in the sunlight, and their eyes widen and jaws drop – “OOOOH! Wah!”

Love a bit of awe and wonder.

“Capitalism won’t solve the energy transition fast enough”

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

These are the notes for a recent speech at my local Constituency Labour Party. The title and the quote at the beginning is from Jason Hickel, who is the Energy editor at the Financial Times; so has something of a horses mouth quality to it.

“There’s too much to do and, given the urgency and the need to get the solutions right, this isn’t a task for your favourite ESG focussed portfolio manager, or the tech bros. The sheer scale of the physical infrastructure that must be revamped, demolished or replaced is almost beyond comprehension. Governments, not Blackrock, will have to lead this new Marshall Plan. And keep doing it. The Western nations that did so much of the damage will have to finance the transition in the developing world – it is astonishing that this is still debated. Massive deficit funding will be necessary.(my emphasis)

For all the clean tech advances and renewable deployment in recent decades, fossil fuels share of global energy use was 86% in 2000, and 82% last year.”

The scale of the challenge

According to Adam Tooze we need to be investing $4 Trillion per year in energy transition. 

Others have argued as much as $6.5 Trillion per year

As the world economy is roughly $100 Trillion a year, between 4 and 6% of it needs to be invested in the transition.

A large sum, but to put it in context, last year (2022) subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to $7 Trillion and Fossil fuel profits were $4Trillion.

This is an opportunity – because there’s your magic money tree…but also a problem, because fossil fuels are so entrenched in everyday life and political power.

Fossil fuel companies have known about the effect of greenhouse gases for 60 years, and have reacted in the same way as the tobacco and asbestos companies did over the links between their products and cancer.

Even now, Shell is arguing that – to be compatible with their interests – Net Zero will only be achievable some time in the 22nd century (so between 50 and 100 years too late).

This entrenchment in political power is seen in Sunak’s latest announcements and more structurally in the high level of climate denial in the US Congress – where Senators and Congresspeople are bought up by FF companies. Showing once again that the USA is the best democracy money can buy.

This leads to a mind boggling level of cognitive dissonance. In 2019 the US military produced a report which stated that the impact of climate breakdown would lead not only to states collapsing around the world, but also that extreme weather events in the US itself would lead to infrastructure and civil society collapsing to a degree that they would expect to be called in to fulfil para state roles, before collapsing themselves from the overstretch that would impose. At the same time, they projected a need to be ready to intervene as the Arctic ice melts, to make sure that the US gets its customary lion’s share of the fossil fuel resources revealed under the ice; thereby helping fuel the collapse that they predict.

Which brings us to a related problem. The ratio of military to green transition spending. In the US, for every $1 allocated to green transition via the Inflation Reduction Act, they are currently spending $18 on their military. And this will get worse as the US and its allies, already responsible for two thirds of global military spending, are sharply increasing it.

The figures on this for China might surprise you. For every $1 they spend on their military, they spend $2 on green transition.

This means two things

  1. A shift from military to green transition spending is an urgent task for the climate and labour movement globally – and therefore the Atlanticist foreign policy framework of the current Labour leadership is as wrong as it can be – and will be thrown into complete crisis should Donald Trump be re-elected next year (which is highly possible).
  2. Countries that see themselves as Socialist are more part of the solution than they are given credit for. The one relatively developed country that the UN considers operates on sustainable lines is… Cuba.

Going back to Tooze to underline this point.

$4Trillion per year needed for energy transition.

Last year, $1.7 Trillion invested in renewable energy, but $1 Trillion was invested in fossil fuels. So, the net gain of 700 billion amounts to about 20% of what we need to be doing. Another way of looking at this is that we need to be doing five times as much as we are at the moment.

According to Tooze, China is the only country investing at anything like the scale and pace we need.

This is underlined by the International Energy Agency that reports that last year China invested 70% more in the transition than the USA and EU put together. And next year the projections are that their investment will be double that of the US and EU combined.

Specifically, in 2024, China is projected to account for 

50% of global solar installations

60% of new onshore wind

70% of new offshore wind.

Labour’s projected £28 billion a year would get us up to US or EU levels; so about half of where we need to be.

This week the IEA put out an updated road map to Net Zero and keeping under a 1.%C increase.

Their essential point is that this is still possible, but only if advance (rich) countries in particular up their targets and ambitions – the opposite of what Sunak has done this week – with an enhanced target of 2045 for Net Zero. No new oil and gas is a bottom line.

To have any chance of getting to that £28 billion, what we need is Just transition bodies with union and community involvement at every level in every sector – so plans for investment – and community mobilisation around them – can be made. This transition can’t happen as a “trickle down” process. It has to be forced up, and the unions in particular will need to take the lead on this, not react defensively.