Greener Jobs Alliance

Paul Atkin says Labour’s muffled climate message is a gift for Reform 

The Spending Review in June set the ambiguity on climate in stone. Any government rising to the level of the climate crisis would be governing as a campaign. Every measure, every plan, would be built into a programme of social transformation and popular mobilisation to create a greener society and economy, both here and abroad. But we don’t have that. Climate is one item on an ever-shifting list of missions or benchmarks or milestones with no core to them, as the government tries to tinker in the face of the screaming need for bold changes. 

We are in a period of damage limitation, as the US under Trump has gone full rogue state on climate. This puts direct pressure on a deeply Atlanticist Labour leadership. At the same time, US dark money directly funds climate denial in the UK – with tinpot MAGA impersonators Reform wanting to reopen flooded coal mines and blast furnaces that have cooled solid, and mandate university courses in steam train technology. They really do! And the hollowed-out Tory leadership, trying to keep up, has abandoned the previous consensus on Net Zero by 2050. 

This is backed by the media; with assertions that the costs of the transition are too great. This, of course, is true neither in the short nor medium term, and “in the long term”; as Keynes might have remarked, if we don’t make the targets, “we’re all dead”. 

Currently, there are a number of flashpoint arguments. 

North Sea Oil and Gas 

The government has rightly banned new oil and gas investment in the North Sea. Continued investment would not protect jobs. Between 2013 and 2023, 400 new drilling licences were issued, but jobs in offshore oil and gas more than halved. New investment now would barely make a blip in the ongoing decline of an exhausted basin. By 2050, the North Sea Transition Authority projects that, even with new investment, production of oil in the North Sea would be less than a quarter of what it is now, and of gas, a thirteenth. If the ban were overturned, the relentless loss of jobs would continue. What’s urgently needed instead is a plan for offshore workers. Fossil fuel transition research and campaign group Uplift (www.upliftuk.org) in their New Deal for the North Sea report propose a focus on three areas: skills and training; workers’ rights, conditions and pay; and building community empowerment, wealth and local ownership (page 8). The whole movement should be campaigning for these, including the relevant unions in their quarterly meetings with the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. 

Transition to Electric Vehicles 

Now that the range of cheaper new EVs is arriving, there is likely to be increasing momentum in their direction. Rearguard actions by manufacturers here and in the EU, to delay the implementation of mandates to compel them to sell a growing proportion of EVs or face fines, reflect their difficulty in doing so profitably. In the US, this has taken the form of digging in not just on internal combustion engine (ICE) technology for vehicles but also abandoning efficiency and pollution standards (good news for oil producers, bad news for everyone else). Questions for UK-based car manufacturing are:-

1) Whether the existing companies – all overseas owned apart from niche companies – can hack the transition;

2) Whether the government can attract overseas investment from companies that can do so, or, in the case of Chinese companies, will be allowed to under Trump’s tariffs blackmail;

3) What demands do the unions/workforce make if it can’t, and some of these companies go to the wall? 

There is a related issue regarding supply chains for ICE vehicles, which have far more components than EVs do. This means the writing is on the wall for those companies and everyone who works in them, unless alternative production plans can be developed. The Worker-led Transition Team, set up by the TUC and NEON (neweconomyorganisers.org/worker-led-transition) to protect the future of manufacturing jobs while accelerating climate action, is working on this as a matter of urgency. 

House Building Standards and Heating Systems 

Retrofit should be considered part of this. Fortunately, the existing Warm Homes plan has been salvaged in the Spending Review. Nevertheless, this suffers from the structural problems in the UK construction sector, which is dominated by big developers on the one hand, and micro businesses on the other. The latter are notoriously mixed in their quality, level of expertise and conscientiousness; this can result in poor work, with the wrong materials, sometimes causing black mould.

Government investment provides an opportunity to re-municipalise construction work, with local authorities retrofitting whole estates en bloc to get economies of scale, employing a direct labour force on union terms and conditions with proper training and apprenticeships through local FE colleges. This would require more serious levels of investment, but would pay off in reduced bills, better health, higher levels of local employment and tax receipts, and a regeneration of local pride in place. 

For new builds, there are two aspects: the energy standards required for each individual unit and the environmental impact of the whole project. The mandate for default solar panels is welcome, as is the requirement for new estates to be off the gas grid. These will save costly retrofits in the future and set up homes with electric heating and cooking from the start.  

Nevertheless, the Guardian has reported that “Housing projects that protect natural habitats, include public transport and divert wastewater from running into local watercourses are deemed too expensive” and that the Government’s message in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is that “the developer knows best and other considerations can take a back seat”.  

Couple this with the rhetoric from Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner about sweeping away red tape and consideration for bats and newts, and we can envisage a new generation of outer suburbs that are nature-depleted, polluting, miserable and isolated and that lock in car dependence for decades, missing the opportunity to build green and pleasant 15 minute communities that are nurturing to live in and have good public transport links to bigger centres.    

The bottom line is the bottom line, and the developers know best how to fatten it up. They don’t care about the social and climate missions that the government should put front and centre: another reason we need to re-municipalise house building.   

Transport 

There is no ambiguity about air travel. The Climate Change Committee has confirmed that opening new airports and building new runways is incompatible with controlling carbon emissions. Pretending that sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) will save us does not stand up to scrutiny. A strategy to shift investment into faster electrified rail for medium-length journeys – within the UK and the near abroad – and high taxation on frequent flyers (overwhelmingly business class) is essential to prevent these emissions from running away from us.  

The Spending Review commitment to rail projects in the North and Wales, and tram and bus systems in the mayoralties, is all welcome. We need a shift away from car journeys and the burdens of car ownership. But big expensive road schemes like the Lower Thames Crossing will simply generate more traffic onto a road system that is already wearing out. Devolving that funding to local authorities to fix dangerous and damaging potholes instead would do no further harm and make existing roads safer.  

Nuclear Power 

The Spending Review decision to meet the costs for Sizewell C and shift funding within GB Energy towards Small Nuclear Reactors , from the community level retrofit of public buildings that had begun, is a massive own goal. Nuclear power is, as the Institute for Energy Economics and Finance (IEEFA) put it, “too expensive, too slow and too risky”. For the same level of investment, ten times as much renewable energy capacity could be installed and, as the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) has pointed out, renewables are ten times more effective at reducing CO2 emissions than nuclear. They could also be installed right now to rapidly reduce bills and carbon emissions. Even making the heroic assumption that Sizewell, or the SMRs still at the design stage, will actually get built without the massive overruns and inflated costs that are standard in the nuclear industry, they still won’t generate any energy or supplant any gas until the middle of the 2030s. These decisions will keep bills higher for longer, locking in higher costs per kWh for as long as the contracts last.   

Schools Curriculum 

The national curriculum for schools is currently under review. This should be an opportunity for our education system to equip our young people with a sound understanding of the climate crisis and its causes, and engage them in the actions we need to deal with it. Climate must be embedded across all subjects, and all teacher training – including a crash campaign of continuing professional development for existing teachers not yet confident to teach or talk about it. Only this will tackle the chronic misinformation that leads to unaddressed anxiety on the one hand, and denial on the other. If the review simply tweaks the current curriculum, leaving climate siloed into Geography and Science, we will be letting our students sleepwalk into an unsustainable society.  

We also need a public information campaign to fulfil Article 12 of the Paris Agreement, which requires all parties to it to educate their entire population about the nature of the crisis and the actions needed. Where is it? 

A failure to carry society forward together on this front would open the door for Reform to drive us back, throwing away jobs and cheaper bills in the short term and survival in the end. 

The Greener Jobs Alliance (GJA) is a loose coalition of organisations, including Trade Unions and Environmental Groups, involved in climate change work. It was founded in 2010 to promote skills training and job creation to meet the needs of Britain’s rapidly growing low-carbon sectors and to green the whole economy.  It hosts a range of useful information at greenerjobsalliance.co.uk.