Should the left ditch net zero?
are we scaring the hoes ? workers first politics and public sector capacity
I intuitively prioritise taking care of people over anything else, including businesses and the environment. It’s a stupid and short-termist way to think, and ultimately the most human too. This is why I am a populist.
Net Zero’s worker betrayal
Nicholas Beuret, a left-wing climate change campaigner, has written a book about how Net Zero betrayed workers because the promise was for a revived industry with well-paid, secure jobs. Instead, we got more privatisation, more insecure, atomised jobs of one-off gigs rather than permanent employment. For example, independent contractors fitting heat pumps. Green jobs have also not been delivered at the pace expected and needed, or with similar remuneration. He is in the Jacobin this week, arguing that unionised workers in the UK oil industry consistently receiving pay rises above inflation explains unions turning against Net Zero.
Beuret argues that unions are misguided because it is not climate policy that is responsible for dwindling jobs in the North Sea, but geology and automation. He says there is not much oil left in the North Sea to make it a viable investment and automation has been eating away jobs for decades. But since fighting automation is much harder, unions grasp at what they can reach, i.e., a Labour Party environment secretary.
I am in favour of drilling in the North Sea because I prioritise the short-term economic needs of the people who work there versus the diminishing environmental benefit of the UK stepping back from drilling. I agree that the North Sea is not the golden goose it once was, but it’s something. This is where I struggle with Green campaigners. As well-intentioned as I believe them to be, I don’t think this argument cuts it with a father whose kids are in school now and who is about to lose his well-paid job for the sake of potential green jobs in 2032. Nor do I think it should. I feel the pain of angry dads more than those of scared environmentalists on this one, even if both have material concerns rooted in fact.
If our oil daddys would be losing their jobs anyway and this is all a clever ploy by big Gas & Oil and their media allies, then I would like to see the evidence that automation is responsible for job losses rather than, or more than, lack of new licenses, government delays and (less of a problem for me) high taxes, which is the right-wing argument. Can one of you energy nerds do the definitive analysis and let us know?
No perfect solutions for our energy crisis
The other point about North Sea oil is that even if we achieve our renewables goal in the short term, we will still need some gas and oil for a very long time. At the moment, we are importing it from Norway (fine), the USA (hmmm), and the Middle East ( fuuuuuck ). The green argument is that allowing more drilling will still be expensive, because companies will need subsidies to be incentivised, and it will be politically unpalatable.
I think all options are politically unpalatable.
When Green energy people start telling me the policy tweaks we can make to increase our output by this tiny bit or decrease prices by that tiny bit, my mind drifts into dystopian visions of masses with pitchforks and torches descending on Westminster looking for the “woke.” Their kids will be sent down the coal mines, and I will be deported long before current green energy policy is satisfactory for the dire economic pressure British people are feeling.
The hungry don't distinguish between the crumb you withhold and the loaves others hoard.
Which is why they would vote for Farage, who would privatise the shit out of everything. The worst-case scenario is Reform gets in next time around, scraps all the current energy policies, DOGE-style, and the UK suffers the same reputational damage the USA has under Trump. Only the UK is not the USA; we don’t have their deep capital pockets, natural resources and industrial base, so our reputation is really all we have to attract investment.
Left-wing pro-growth koolaid
Dale Vince, the renewables investor/climate activist/Labour donor, has also come out against Net Zero in recent days, saying how the branding has become toxic. He is right.
I was at the ARC (Alliance of Responsible Citizenship) conference last week, where some of the right-wingers on stage were saying that Davos is, in fact, the far left, and that there you can see how truly powerful the left is (rejoice, comrades!! we won!!). They were referring to all the government regulations and international organisations that impose top-down costs on consumers with their ESG requirements. It is a stroke of genius for the right to paint all these whitewashing, greenwashing, rainbow-washing corporate capital actors as the far left. The problem is not capitalism but over-regulation, they said. Ok, sure, but who benefits and who loses out? Capital benefits; the workers lose.
I put an adjacent question to David Lawrence at Arguably event last night. The left criticism of pro-growth social democrats is that there is often no ideological project or vision behind it. It feels like a lot of cope in a capitalist world where you still want to be a left-winger because that’s your political identity, but your ambition and action-oriented nature make you make peace with our feudal system where the price for ‘doing things’ is being nice to rich people. Because, like Beuret’s argument against the unions, you don’t have the power to actually confront capital’s hooliganism. How is a pro-growth lefty different from a socially liberal, politically correct, thoughtful right-winger?
I rarely hear the pro-growth left in the UK at least answer that in a satisfactory way. David gave a good rebuttal to the argument that Davos is far-left. He said that under capitalism, scarcity and profit are in conflict, and capital is very good at exploiting scarcity to make profit. You see this in action in the housing market where, David said, leaseholders in the UK have to pay consultants for anti-terrorist protection. These are private companies using state regulation for profit.
I add to that that it is because liberal capitalist ideology is so hegemonic that they get to frame this as a problem of socialist overregulation, rather than the natural end state of an exploitative system. But the people most equipped to make these arguments rarely do so to avoid scaring the hoes (displeasing rich people, i.e. donors and powerful owners of stuff we need for politics, like media).
I am all for being strategic, and I 100% agree with David that growth needs to be the number one priority for a country with the UK's stagnant economy. You need money for nice things, and a rich liberal, right-wing biased state is more pleasant to live in than an socialist poor one. But when all is said and done, what are we doing differently than the last time? The market will take care of the market; who is taking care of the people? If we are embracing the AI revolution, what lessons are we taking on board from the industrial revolution on the deal we gave workers and our living environment?
I want the UK to build state capacity, not let privatisation cannibalise it. The claim that private entities always beat the public sector because competition sharpens them is simply not true and must be challenged from the pro-growth left.
South Korea built a world-leading steel industry out of sheer stubbornness. The World Bank refused to fund it. They called steel economically irrational for a country whose GDP per capita was then lower than Ghana's. The Koreans went ahead anyway, as a state-owned enterprise, paid for with Japanese colonial reparations. They put a former army general in charge, a soldier rather than a steel man. Korea had no iron ore and no coking coal; every raw material was shipped in from the other side of the world. Within a decade, it was among the most efficient producers on earth, and the World Bank cited it as a success story. The circumstances were considerably less helpful than the ones Britain finds itself in today.
Many like to say British culture is defective in comparison to Koreans; that is why we needed Thatcher and those after her to whip the state into shape by handing things over to disciplined private hands. But even under her premiership, the British state used to pull off beautiful public projects. On time and on budget.
Ed Hezlet pointed me to Brian George, the man behind Sizewell B, was employed by the state. He attributes their success to fostering strong relationships among the workforce and to a culture of radical honesty, where being transparent about mistakes did not make you feel punished but glad, because it meant being responsible for improving the project.
Nuclear could benefit from more state intervention if the state were willing to fight. If Great British Energy shoulders the funding, which will be extra but small fry in comparison to what is spent now, and the project management of the Rolls Royce sites, it would mean more institutional knowledge kept in-house. The workforce could be paid a share of the savings if the project comes in under budget, as an incentive to remain competitive. Ed suggested to me that the cost could be manageable for such a project in the long term if the state builds, then sells the de-risked project, and repeats the process.
In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping asked the Japanese to build him a copy of Korea’s steel mills. He was told the mills were the easy part; he would still need a manager like the general. Maybe, instead of watching our most talented people flock to the private sector, we make it easier for them to be visionaries in the public one. Maybe then more ambitious people will attempt to solve our Net Zero and growth conundrums without donors and shareholders sitting in the back seat of their mind.
Net zero the way its been being proposed is impossible and a red herring for oligarchic techno-feudalism and malthusian tyranny. You can tell this by what is trying to be done, and what is never mentioned. If we did holistic livestock management and keyline design on a large scale, we would be getting better crop yields, less flooding, healthier meet, more sustainable water use and water quality, and better grass yields for livestock. Where I live it builds an inch of topsoil a year. A year! More in other areas, less in others, but if it were done at a large scale we’d be desperately flaring natgas just to keep co2 levels high enough from all of the carbon getting trapped in soil. One cubic yard of soil weighs about 3000lbs. One cubic yard. Think about that. Multiply that by a billion *acres*. Then tell me with a straight face that all the heat pumps and electric cars and windmills are the way to save the planet. The math doesnt even work on those. Most of the left turned it into a smug as hell, corrupt, faddish religion, not a scientific movement, and it is infuriating.
I’m not an energy nerd unfortunately, just a plain policy nerd.
I wish there was a bit more honesty in the net zero debate. “Mitigation” (doing things which lower greenhouse gas eg solar, wind, electric vehicles etc) is expensive. We can’t ignore that. If it wasn’t expensive politicians wouldn’t need to get involved- we’d just buy it because it’s cheap. But it’s not. We are forced to buy expensive renewable energy (the most recent renewable auction locked us in at high prices for 20 years (much longer than the previous renewable auction where we were only locked in for 15 years) because no one was willing to supply renewables at high prices for only 15 years).
I don’t think politicians have been honest about what the highest industrial electricity prices in the world does to our economy. It is hurting our manufacturing and industrial sectors as well as new AI and data centres. Other countries get it. Industrial electricity is loads cheaper, they faced the same challenges as us but they’re a bit more pragmatic, and willing to see trade-offs about these things. And these other countries are coming to eat our lunch.
I don’t think politicians have been honest about the cost of transforming the grid and doing all the other things we need to do to transition to Green energy: paying high price for renewables is just the start, we will need new interconnectors (to bring electricity from Europe), we will need to replace our end of life gas power generation that we will rely on when renewable availability is low. All this is fine if it’s the right thing to do, but just tell us how much it costs, put it to voters and we can vote on it.
I don’t think politicians have been honest about using a policy of putting Scottish oil workers out of work and lowering UK GDP and tax. The purpose of closing the north Sea is not to lower our emissions (if anything closing North Sea has a slight positive impact on emissions - because as a result we have to import more gas which takes loads of energy to liquefy at source either in the gulf or in America so it can be transported in tankers, then loads of fuel to ship it over here, and loads of energy to de-liquefy into gas when it arrives).
But closing our north Sea oil production was never about emissions. The eco guys constantly tell us (eg during the recent Iran crisis) that increasing North Sea oil production wouldn’t affect the price of petrol that we pay - all true. But by definition that means increasing production of North Sea fossil fuel will not have the tiniest bit of impact on global demand for fossil fuel and therefore wouldn’t have the tiniest impact on global GHG emissions. So remind me again why we’re putting a load of Scottish people out of work? Why are we making the UK poorer, lowering tax in order to do nothing to GHG?
What the argument comes down to is: let’s put Scottish people out of work so we can try and influence the four biggest producers of GHG: US China India and Russia (>50% of emissions). Which again is fine, if that’s the argument politicians want to make they should be honest and say to people “I’m closing down our industry, putting UK workers out of jobs, because I have a god given certainty to believe that it will influence Trump, Xi etc. Scottish workers’ sacrifice will be the price worth paying.” Then voters will decide whether we believe the politicians who say Trump Xi et al will swayed by our sacrifice.
So we can all come to different views about how we weigh the costs and the benefits. But it’s the responsibility of politicians to be straight up with people - to tell the truth.