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 think that many people do take net zero as a wholesale, which is sadly what happens with most big campaigning movements. You can't escape that, it's the destiny of large scale human organising. It's the same for all the institutions we build and all the campaigns we ever run, no matter how needed and well-intentioned. Even people who spend time studying net zero policies, however, would struggle to come to certain conclusions because there is so much contradictory information out there unless you are a scientist yourself with oodles of patience and time to pore over data you can't be sure that what you are reading is not some industry lobbyist's ingenious spin.
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.
This is why I follow you. There is much I can agree with in this essay and it’s really helpful to see it debated from a rational, rather than ideological perspective, from the left.
One thing I would take issue with is your perception of Davos. For me capitalism is only reacting rationally to progressive overreach. When the left abandoned holding big business to account for its treatment of workers, in favour of saying the right things about BLM, trans rights and all the rest of the omnicause, big business rubbed its hands and put rainbows on its website. You’re correct, a cynical misrepresentation…but when presented with an open goal.
I’m old enough to remember the chaos trade unions brought to the country in the 70’s. Thatcher was a correction, and now the pendulum had swung way too far. Pulling it back should be what the left is for, but for everybody, not just its favoured minorities. Splitting people into identity groups was something the left did and the right is now driving wedges into the gaps that opened up.
I also read your essay on changing the right’s minds. That struck me as a rather pointless exercise in tribal loyalty. Both left and right (at least non extreme versions) will agree easily on basic concepts of human wellbeing. Much more useful debates are around very specific policy issues, like this one on net zero.
As an example on the changing tribal loyalty question, I am a supporter of private schooling. Thats not because I’m right wing, it’s primarily because my daughter scrimped and saved to send her kids to one in the absence of a decent local state school. Reading (or was it listening to) your argument for the abolition of charity status was the first time I’ve seen a well reasoned argument against and it made a lot of sense to me.
I could still be convinced if it is shown to have had an overall positive benefit. I understand approximately 30,000 children have since left the sector to go into state schools, which have lost over 2,000 teachers since the policy was introduced. If that’s just wrong (it came from a right wing source) I’d look again. As it stands it looks like 30,000 kids potentially had their life chances reduced for no apparent gain. So your fairness argument remains solid and convincing, but the real world results have been negative.
Returning to net zero. The whole thing feels like politics by sound bite. On one hand, the world will burn if we don’t reduce our 0.8% of global emissions to nought in 4 years, on the other the policy is single handedly reducing the nation to penury. In fact, moving reliance away from fossil fuels is obviously logical. It’s also logistically impossible by 2030, and politically undesirable in the current economic climate. That should be a data driven debate for infrastructure experts and economists. I hope you manage to find some.
PS How is your free speech initiative progressing?
With North Sea oil the issue is that you could green light extractions tomorrow and that wouldn’t solve our problems, and I find it very opportunistic that some people use it just to bash Ed Miliband on the head, who is a principled, intelligent and capable man, and by no means the designers of the UK’s service/London, service-industry focused economy. For me I support extracting it because we will use that oil and gas anyway, we may as well use our own. It may not be cheaper supply because of international markets but it is more secure and stable than relying on international supply chains. The tax revenue we raise may not be significant after all the state subsidies we will have to pour in, but if there are jobs to be saved, even a couple of thousand to me would be worth saving (and it is actually a lot more, possibly tens of thousands). Which is why I want to know if automation would wipe off most of those anyway and the companies have found a convenient boogeyman which the media already hated.
On Davos, capitalism is the supreme system, so it’s not progressive overreach that has allowed capital to exploit ESG, but it’s capitalism itself which is an exploitative system rather than a system that has genuine priorities of human flourishing and community interest.
On private schools, thank you for the kind words. I do not use 'fairness’ as an argument against them, nor do I have anything against parents who follow their purest instinct, to give their children the best future they know how to, and send their kids to private schools. Though arguably some send them to boarding schools for less altruistic reasons. My arguments are always that:
1) they make less of a difference than you may think for a happy life; it’s more important to have a healthy home environment and emotional closeness, and if financial stress from fees exacerbates that, then that is a bad choice,
2) it does insulate you from the rest of the world; it does create a fractured citizenry, it does create an elite that is cut off;
3) Private schools' demand is unresponsive to fees, which have skyrocketed above and beyond inflation over the last decade, mostly because usually other family members chip in. The number of students is down at all schools because fewer children are being born. Private Schools are not suffering uniquely.
4) Most Private schools treat themselves like private businesses, investing increased student fees in pools and multiple theatre buildings and other fancy stuff, which I have zero intention to stop parents from buying access to for their kids (anymore than I would stop them buying them nicer clothes), but that then does become a luxury good which should be taxed on a normal VAT. Of course, not all private schools are the same. But the numbers people are quoting don’t add up.
On Net Zero, I can’t find anything to disagree with in what you’ve said. As oil extraction is both labour intensive and heavily automated, I’d doubt AI is going to make an immediate difference, at least until robotics are significantly more advanced … but I don’t know and would be interested what you find out.
I don’t know Ed Milliband and you obviously do, so I’ll bow to your assessment of the man. He is clearly a very effective politician having had more success than any other I can think of in advancing his prime agenda. We’re in agreement about some of the fault lines in that agenda.
An example that is closer to me is his rescinding of permission for the coking coal mine in Cumbria. The Scunthorpe steel works (that the government saved) needs that type of coal. Instead of creating jobs in Cumbria, we import that coal. It’s very hard to see logic rather than ideology there.
On Davos, there will always be centres of power in any human collective. All of them claim to be focussed on human flourishing, all of them prioritise their own hold on power. Animal Farm just describes the way human beings are.
For a while, post war, we hit quite a sweet spot. Parliament, business, the unions, the media and arguably (still) the church, each had enough power to keep each other in check. Now parliament seems to have given away large chunks of its influence, and much of the media, arts and even the church have embroiled themselves in culture wars, exacerbating the divisions between the very working class that the left is there to protect. Meanwhile global business, acting (as we all do) in its own interest, has gleefully exploited these divisions.
Capitalism has contributed hugely in creating the modern West. The healthiest, wealthiest, most diverse, most tolerant societies that have ever existed in human history. It isn’t the problem per se, it’s the balance of power that’s now badly out of whack.
On private schools I’d have to find your article again. My main takeaway was that a VAT exemption on what is arguably a luxury good was an irrational and unfair exemption. I think you’re right.
Given the huge over representation of private school pupils in the upper echelons of all our institutions, I think it’s difficult to argue that it isn’t an advantage in pursuing a successful life. Your point about other influences is entirely valid but very difficult to unpick.
The rest of that argument is just about facts. If 30,000 children have moved from private to state schools that clearly has nothing to do with demographic decline. But is it true? I suspect neither of us know for sure.
1. Somebody has to look out for the Lumberjacks. That's the job of a Labo<u>r party.
2. Somebody needs to Get The Prices Right. In the fossil economy we got one price catastrophically wrong: we stubbornly priced CO2 emissions at zero. And avoidance of CO2 at zero. In the climate crisis that price must be higher. That is the primary job of the Green gang.
Here in far out west Sagebrushistan, we have discovered that employing more Lumberjacks increases the carbon value of the forests that we tend. We have the California Carbon Fund turning Flaky Local Currency (USD) into physical carbon assets. We have innovated a forests carbon bank.
Loggers ("Lumberjacks" to the Pythonist Tendency) are paid rates that came out of collective bargaining. Thank you International Brotherhood of Electric Workers for looking after the chainsaw people, a few of whom maintain the vegetation under the power lines.
This happened first in California, where the loggers talked to both the Unions and to the indigenous sovereignty (e.g., Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada), who like the Loggers' suggestion that the Tribal sovereignty grant patents to the unrecognized Avoided-CO2 other forests.
The regional sovereignty (State of California) recognizes both the indigenous sovereignty in forests management, and the value of the carbon assets.
The Sierra Club is feeling a bit left out, but when the Tribe approves the Greenies are reduced to muttering about how nobody is listening to them.
Danged loggers and Indians made them redundant. Too bad the nice people who staff the enviro NGOs don't join unions.
See, that's why whatever new green industry comes out needs to be unionised. The UK circumstances are different. What does the Sierra club want? Something different or just to feel useful?
You think there are differences in circumstance between the United Kingdom (the scale at which you work) and Sierra County (my favorite manifestation of popular sovereignty). We agree at least that the union is essential.
The Sierra Club was founded by John Muir, first to protect Yosemite. An early fight was in opposition to the damming of Yosemite's sibling Hetch Hetchy, a spectacular glacial gorge, now used badly to store water for San Francisco and to energize San Francisco's (unionized!) Municipal Railway transit system.
Yay infrastructure! Yay public power!
The Sierra Club took off in the 1960s in the fight against an insane program, promoted by the Democratic administration of Governor Pat Brown (Jerry's dad, my father's boss, nepo-baby alert), to turn Golden Gate Park into a ginormous freeway interchange.
The Sierra Club was central to that fight, which marked the emergence of the Green Left in San Francisco and elsewhere across the United States. My labor-left parents were Sierra Club members, as was I in my turn until I wasn't.
During the 1980s the Club was a key opponent to the Reagan-era “Sagebrush Rebellion” rollback of environmental regulations. This was primarily about fossil exploitation on public lands, but turning the National Forests into tree farms was part of the Reagan program. After all, as he said while flying over the redwoods “if you've seen one tree you've seen them all. “
The Sierra Club caught the blame for the collapse of the timber industry after the greedy bastards cut down all the high value trees, laid off the loggers, and went into real estate.
Then the next generation of trees sprouted in the disturbed soil of the industrial forestry, and grew into the dense fire prone mess we know have.
The Sierra Club has failed to make the jump from opposing the capitalist Oncelers, to engaging with the forests as they now are.
A lot of this is class. It was the loggers of my hometown of Loyalton, and of Quincy, who blamed the Sierra Club for the loss of their jobs. With our evangelist churches and bodacious mountain-talk dialect (I speak Cal-Ozarkian as well as my daughter elocutes in the gentle tones of Cheltenham Ladies College), and the damage our forebears wrought on our magnificent forests, it is pretty easy to despise the Loggers of Loyalton.
Indeed, smart economists value loggers highly, at least because without loggers economists would be the most despised occupation in the political economy of California.
Another Brit-adjacent daughter working in forests policy (in the California Natural Resources Agency) informs me that I am as out of date as usual, that in the Agency there is now growing recognition of the Green values of labor in logging.
Also, ICE agents are more generally despised than even economists.
There is plenty of room for people raised in Sierra Club households in carbon-banking forests stewardship.
They just have to learn that Lumberjacks are OK, whether or not we dress in women's clothing and hang around in bars.
1. The uk political class has no priority other than The War On Russia. They same can be said of the european political class. If they have to ditch Net Zero as part of that war, they'll do it without a second thought, especially as Net Zero triggers the Americans, whom they need to fight Russia for them.
As for the consequences, those are for the poors to have to deal with.
2. Speaking of Americans, the US military is by far the biggest polluter on the planet. Nobody raises a peep.
You are exaggerating on the first, a deadly sin! On the second, the US insisted that military pollution is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, but it's not like the UK has much power over what the yanks do or don't.
I note that the uk has all kinds of opinions on US policy, such as how they howl like schoolgirls getting dumped, at any suggestion that the US abandon The War On Russia.
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 think that many people do take net zero as a wholesale, which is sadly what happens with most big campaigning movements. You can't escape that, it's the destiny of large scale human organising. It's the same for all the institutions we build and all the campaigns we ever run, no matter how needed and well-intentioned. Even people who spend time studying net zero policies, however, would struggle to come to certain conclusions because there is so much contradictory information out there unless you are a scientist yourself with oodles of patience and time to pore over data you can't be sure that what you are reading is not some industry lobbyist's ingenious spin.
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.
This is why I follow you. There is much I can agree with in this essay and it’s really helpful to see it debated from a rational, rather than ideological perspective, from the left.
One thing I would take issue with is your perception of Davos. For me capitalism is only reacting rationally to progressive overreach. When the left abandoned holding big business to account for its treatment of workers, in favour of saying the right things about BLM, trans rights and all the rest of the omnicause, big business rubbed its hands and put rainbows on its website. You’re correct, a cynical misrepresentation…but when presented with an open goal.
I’m old enough to remember the chaos trade unions brought to the country in the 70’s. Thatcher was a correction, and now the pendulum had swung way too far. Pulling it back should be what the left is for, but for everybody, not just its favoured minorities. Splitting people into identity groups was something the left did and the right is now driving wedges into the gaps that opened up.
I also read your essay on changing the right’s minds. That struck me as a rather pointless exercise in tribal loyalty. Both left and right (at least non extreme versions) will agree easily on basic concepts of human wellbeing. Much more useful debates are around very specific policy issues, like this one on net zero.
As an example on the changing tribal loyalty question, I am a supporter of private schooling. Thats not because I’m right wing, it’s primarily because my daughter scrimped and saved to send her kids to one in the absence of a decent local state school. Reading (or was it listening to) your argument for the abolition of charity status was the first time I’ve seen a well reasoned argument against and it made a lot of sense to me.
I could still be convinced if it is shown to have had an overall positive benefit. I understand approximately 30,000 children have since left the sector to go into state schools, which have lost over 2,000 teachers since the policy was introduced. If that’s just wrong (it came from a right wing source) I’d look again. As it stands it looks like 30,000 kids potentially had their life chances reduced for no apparent gain. So your fairness argument remains solid and convincing, but the real world results have been negative.
Returning to net zero. The whole thing feels like politics by sound bite. On one hand, the world will burn if we don’t reduce our 0.8% of global emissions to nought in 4 years, on the other the policy is single handedly reducing the nation to penury. In fact, moving reliance away from fossil fuels is obviously logical. It’s also logistically impossible by 2030, and politically undesirable in the current economic climate. That should be a data driven debate for infrastructure experts and economists. I hope you manage to find some.
PS How is your free speech initiative progressing?
Sent from my iPhone
With North Sea oil the issue is that you could green light extractions tomorrow and that wouldn’t solve our problems, and I find it very opportunistic that some people use it just to bash Ed Miliband on the head, who is a principled, intelligent and capable man, and by no means the designers of the UK’s service/London, service-industry focused economy. For me I support extracting it because we will use that oil and gas anyway, we may as well use our own. It may not be cheaper supply because of international markets but it is more secure and stable than relying on international supply chains. The tax revenue we raise may not be significant after all the state subsidies we will have to pour in, but if there are jobs to be saved, even a couple of thousand to me would be worth saving (and it is actually a lot more, possibly tens of thousands). Which is why I want to know if automation would wipe off most of those anyway and the companies have found a convenient boogeyman which the media already hated.
On Davos, capitalism is the supreme system, so it’s not progressive overreach that has allowed capital to exploit ESG, but it’s capitalism itself which is an exploitative system rather than a system that has genuine priorities of human flourishing and community interest.
On private schools, thank you for the kind words. I do not use 'fairness’ as an argument against them, nor do I have anything against parents who follow their purest instinct, to give their children the best future they know how to, and send their kids to private schools. Though arguably some send them to boarding schools for less altruistic reasons. My arguments are always that:
1) they make less of a difference than you may think for a happy life; it’s more important to have a healthy home environment and emotional closeness, and if financial stress from fees exacerbates that, then that is a bad choice,
2) it does insulate you from the rest of the world; it does create a fractured citizenry, it does create an elite that is cut off;
3) Private schools' demand is unresponsive to fees, which have skyrocketed above and beyond inflation over the last decade, mostly because usually other family members chip in. The number of students is down at all schools because fewer children are being born. Private Schools are not suffering uniquely.
4) Most Private schools treat themselves like private businesses, investing increased student fees in pools and multiple theatre buildings and other fancy stuff, which I have zero intention to stop parents from buying access to for their kids (anymore than I would stop them buying them nicer clothes), but that then does become a luxury good which should be taxed on a normal VAT. Of course, not all private schools are the same. But the numbers people are quoting don’t add up.
Thanks for your response.
On Net Zero, I can’t find anything to disagree with in what you’ve said. As oil extraction is both labour intensive and heavily automated, I’d doubt AI is going to make an immediate difference, at least until robotics are significantly more advanced … but I don’t know and would be interested what you find out.
I don’t know Ed Milliband and you obviously do, so I’ll bow to your assessment of the man. He is clearly a very effective politician having had more success than any other I can think of in advancing his prime agenda. We’re in agreement about some of the fault lines in that agenda.
An example that is closer to me is his rescinding of permission for the coking coal mine in Cumbria. The Scunthorpe steel works (that the government saved) needs that type of coal. Instead of creating jobs in Cumbria, we import that coal. It’s very hard to see logic rather than ideology there.
On Davos, there will always be centres of power in any human collective. All of them claim to be focussed on human flourishing, all of them prioritise their own hold on power. Animal Farm just describes the way human beings are.
For a while, post war, we hit quite a sweet spot. Parliament, business, the unions, the media and arguably (still) the church, each had enough power to keep each other in check. Now parliament seems to have given away large chunks of its influence, and much of the media, arts and even the church have embroiled themselves in culture wars, exacerbating the divisions between the very working class that the left is there to protect. Meanwhile global business, acting (as we all do) in its own interest, has gleefully exploited these divisions.
Capitalism has contributed hugely in creating the modern West. The healthiest, wealthiest, most diverse, most tolerant societies that have ever existed in human history. It isn’t the problem per se, it’s the balance of power that’s now badly out of whack.
On private schools I’d have to find your article again. My main takeaway was that a VAT exemption on what is arguably a luxury good was an irrational and unfair exemption. I think you’re right.
Given the huge over representation of private school pupils in the upper echelons of all our institutions, I think it’s difficult to argue that it isn’t an advantage in pursuing a successful life. Your point about other influences is entirely valid but very difficult to unpick.
The rest of that argument is just about facts. If 30,000 children have moved from private to state schools that clearly has nothing to do with demographic decline. But is it true? I suspect neither of us know for sure.
Green lumberjack here.
1. Somebody has to look out for the Lumberjacks. That's the job of a Labo<u>r party.
2. Somebody needs to Get The Prices Right. In the fossil economy we got one price catastrophically wrong: we stubbornly priced CO2 emissions at zero. And avoidance of CO2 at zero. In the climate crisis that price must be higher. That is the primary job of the Green gang.
Here in far out west Sagebrushistan, we have discovered that employing more Lumberjacks increases the carbon value of the forests that we tend. We have the California Carbon Fund turning Flaky Local Currency (USD) into physical carbon assets. We have innovated a forests carbon bank.
Loggers ("Lumberjacks" to the Pythonist Tendency) are paid rates that came out of collective bargaining. Thank you International Brotherhood of Electric Workers for looking after the chainsaw people, a few of whom maintain the vegetation under the power lines.
This happened first in California, where the loggers talked to both the Unions and to the indigenous sovereignty (e.g., Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada), who like the Loggers' suggestion that the Tribal sovereignty grant patents to the unrecognized Avoided-CO2 other forests.
The regional sovereignty (State of California) recognizes both the indigenous sovereignty in forests management, and the value of the carbon assets.
The Sierra Club is feeling a bit left out, but when the Tribe approves the Greenies are reduced to muttering about how nobody is listening to them.
Danged loggers and Indians made them redundant. Too bad the nice people who staff the enviro NGOs don't join unions.
See, that's why whatever new green industry comes out needs to be unionised. The UK circumstances are different. What does the Sierra club want? Something different or just to feel useful?
You think there are differences in circumstance between the United Kingdom (the scale at which you work) and Sierra County (my favorite manifestation of popular sovereignty). We agree at least that the union is essential.
The Sierra Club was founded by John Muir, first to protect Yosemite. An early fight was in opposition to the damming of Yosemite's sibling Hetch Hetchy, a spectacular glacial gorge, now used badly to store water for San Francisco and to energize San Francisco's (unionized!) Municipal Railway transit system.
Yay infrastructure! Yay public power!
The Sierra Club took off in the 1960s in the fight against an insane program, promoted by the Democratic administration of Governor Pat Brown (Jerry's dad, my father's boss, nepo-baby alert), to turn Golden Gate Park into a ginormous freeway interchange.
The Sierra Club was central to that fight, which marked the emergence of the Green Left in San Francisco and elsewhere across the United States. My labor-left parents were Sierra Club members, as was I in my turn until I wasn't.
During the 1980s the Club was a key opponent to the Reagan-era “Sagebrush Rebellion” rollback of environmental regulations. This was primarily about fossil exploitation on public lands, but turning the National Forests into tree farms was part of the Reagan program. After all, as he said while flying over the redwoods “if you've seen one tree you've seen them all. “
The Sierra Club caught the blame for the collapse of the timber industry after the greedy bastards cut down all the high value trees, laid off the loggers, and went into real estate.
Then the next generation of trees sprouted in the disturbed soil of the industrial forestry, and grew into the dense fire prone mess we know have.
The Sierra Club has failed to make the jump from opposing the capitalist Oncelers, to engaging with the forests as they now are.
A lot of this is class. It was the loggers of my hometown of Loyalton, and of Quincy, who blamed the Sierra Club for the loss of their jobs. With our evangelist churches and bodacious mountain-talk dialect (I speak Cal-Ozarkian as well as my daughter elocutes in the gentle tones of Cheltenham Ladies College), and the damage our forebears wrought on our magnificent forests, it is pretty easy to despise the Loggers of Loyalton.
Indeed, smart economists value loggers highly, at least because without loggers economists would be the most despised occupation in the political economy of California.
Another Brit-adjacent daughter working in forests policy (in the California Natural Resources Agency) informs me that I am as out of date as usual, that in the Agency there is now growing recognition of the Green values of labor in logging.
Also, ICE agents are more generally despised than even economists.
There is plenty of room for people raised in Sierra Club households in carbon-banking forests stewardship.
They just have to learn that Lumberjacks are OK, whether or not we dress in women's clothing and hang around in bars.
Despising economists remains socially acceptable.
I can answer the call for an energy wonk on some of the questions you raise here!
We need to know how many jobs lost to automation versus goverment action !
Will dig in and report back to you within the next several days!
Working on some things related to UK energy and grid policy for a paper right now.
1. The uk political class has no priority other than The War On Russia. They same can be said of the european political class. If they have to ditch Net Zero as part of that war, they'll do it without a second thought, especially as Net Zero triggers the Americans, whom they need to fight Russia for them.
As for the consequences, those are for the poors to have to deal with.
2. Speaking of Americans, the US military is by far the biggest polluter on the planet. Nobody raises a peep.
You are exaggerating on the first, a deadly sin! On the second, the US insisted that military pollution is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, but it's not like the UK has much power over what the yanks do or don't.
I am not exaggerating at all.
I note that the uk has all kinds of opinions on US policy, such as how they howl like schoolgirls getting dumped, at any suggestion that the US abandon The War On Russia.