Most political parties in the U.K. sell the new green revolution by pointing to all the new skilled jobs that will be created. The British Government looks to produce no fewer than two million such ‘green’ jobs by 2030. But there is little sign of all these new opportunities. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently reported that there were 526,000 green jobs in 2020, but they include workers in the waste business, electric vehicles, education and management of Government bodies. Back in the day we would have called people working in such occupations dustmen, mechanics, teachers and bureaucrats. Most of the jobs being claimed simply stick a ’green’ label on either existing occupations, or are people switching, as in the transport business, to working on new products.
There are also a large number of ‘make work’ jobs listed in the ONS report including environmental charities, environment-related education, in-house environmental activities and environmental consultancy. Speculative ventures that are unlikely to turn into significant future businesses such as hydrogen supply and carbon capture and storage are included.
About 10% of the green jobs are to be found in charities, while many other occupations in waste collection, water treatment, repairs and forest management have always existed. Work on making more energy efficient products is hardly a new activity. It is probably not an exaggeration to state that the ‘great reset’ under way in the collectivist Net Zero project has barely created more than 150,000 genuine new jobs in the U.K. But the economic damage is mounting steadily. Across Europe, the high price of energy caused by a transition to unreliable wind is causing significant de-industrialisation, while the food production industry is facing potential collapse with a green war on fertiliser and meat production. Try telling 3,000 redundant steel workers in Port Talbot and the farmers who have been blocking roads across the continent that they are in the forefront of an exciting new green industrial revolution.
People are starting to twig. Gary Smith runs the GMB union which is heavily represented in manufacturing industries, and he recently noted the small number of jobs that are being produced by green technology. In an interview in the Spectator, he said that communities along the North Sea can see wind farms, “but they can’t point to the jobs”. He added that much of the green work seemed to be either London-based lobbying or clearing away the animal casualties of wind farm blades. “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds,” he observed.
At least the ONS is trying to identify actual green jobs that have been created. Windy politicians can take more creative liberties – step forward London mayor Sadiq Khan, Chairman of the sinister green billionaire-funded C40 group of around 100 city mayors. He told the UN Climate Ambition Summit last year that “new data” from C40 revealed that over 14 million green jobs have been created in 53 C40 cities alone. Of course there are those who understandably start counting the spoons whenever Khan starts talking about stats and data these days, so it is instructive to see what the Mayor’s own contribution in London is to this highly improbable jobs total. In 2020, he launched London’s Green New Deal fund with £10 million to “support” around 1,000 green jobs. Other ambitions include tackling the ‘climate emergency’ and addressing inequalities. The cynical might observe that this is a drop in the bucket for an economic stimulus, let alone stopping the climate changing and providing woke solutions to the ever-expanding list of victim causes. If there are any new job details provided they tend to feature insulating homes, which in the case of London’s drafty Victorian housing stock is likely to need billions of pounds rather than Khan’s paltry figure.
More details of Khan’s supposed green jobs can be gained by examining the funding that he has given to a number of skills hubs to prepare London for the expected tsunami of green opportunities. The hub lead is the Capital City College Group covering 12 London boroughs, and it says it will “focus on green occupations in the construction sector including roles in waste and recycling management, off-site manufacturing and pre-fabrication, gas engineers and heating/plumbing technicians and electric vehicle charging point installations”. None of these jobs are new except installing EV charging stations. This latter occupation is a displacement activity since a higher number of EVs on the road will lead to fewer jobs installing and maintaining petrol pumps and the delivery of fuel. Indeed it can be argued that much of the money collected for green activity is displacement since it removes genuine job-creating wealth from the private sector and pours it into vast subsidies and second-rate jobs in uneconomic, inferior technologies.
Back on Planet Reality, the threads are unravelling on the insane Net Zero project. Politicians, belatedly, are starting to realise that removing hydrocarbons from an advanced modern society will send humanity back to the caves, as explained by COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber. Even the BBC has cottoned on with Laura Kuenssberg asking if, in the wake of the opposition Labour party ditching its £28 billion a year green commitment, “the politics of climate change [are] going out of fashion”?
The journalist Ross Clark has written an excellent review of the obvious retreat from Net Zero for Net Zero Watch, noting that the project was always going to require a multitude of new technologies, “many of which have yet to be invented or scaled up to commercial operation”. Already, he notes, many of the potential solutions such as hydrogen heating have started to fall by the wayside before they have been established. Reliance is being placed on an ever-smaller pool of technologies, and many of these, too, are creaking under the weight of expectation, such as wind and solar energy, he writes.
Net Zero might be starting to fall, but it seems there are still plenty of ‘charity’ jobs in the green economy. Or more accurately, activist work in operations funded by elite green billionaires intent on promoting a wealth and job destroying supra-national reset of global civilisation.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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And….. If it ever came to electricity rationing? The smart meter adverts never seem to mention two salient facts:
1. High usage households (e.g. those using 10kwh per day to put 40 milesworth into their EV) can be identified.
2. It is technically possible to disable a domestic supply remotely via smart meter.
So regional blackouts can be replaced with selective supply disruption via a per-household usage cap. Still, ones EV might still fullfil a significant portion of its function by virtue signalling on your driveway.
Personally I think rationing unlikely. £1/kWh is going to result in a big switch-off. Government intervention in the form of price controlled excepted.
Smart Meters are all about surge pricing, think Economy 7 on steroids.
I don’t really get how surge pricing would “work” without smart appliances that automatically pause during a price surge (laundry, refrigeration, heat pumps). All surge pricing would otherwise accomplish is profit gouging. Look at what happened to Griddy in Texas.
As of 1Jul2022 all new car chargers must be “smart” so that’s one small step towards smart appliances. Only a few hundred million to go …..
And they will make it technically possible to charge extra tax for car charging, rather like excise duty on fuel pumps, with VAT on top.
I wouldn’t rush to use the term “profit gouging”.
If I have an open cycle gas turbine generator, or a grid scale battery, or a Dinorwig style hydro facility, I only make money when the grid is desperate for power, so most of the time my asset is sitting idle. These facilities would never be funded unless they could pay for themselves.
Part of the solution to high prices is levelling out demand and avoiding expensive peaks.
Ah but this article fails to factor in the smugness quotient, there are few things that can provide the level of smugness that is apparently derived from driving an electric car. In terms of smugness points per k/watt per mile, nothing can touch an electric car.
Not so smug when they are stuck on the hard shoulder waiting for the RAC
Exactly. When you run out of liquid fuel in your lovely fossil fuel vehicle, just get a bottle (preferably with a lid), and off you trot.
Go flat in a BEV, and a tow is your only option.
And even less smug if they’re stuck in the middle lane of a “SMART” motorway …… waiting to be demolished by an HGV.
Especially if the car has a green band on its number plate, allowing virtue signalling to a wider audience.
Love this comment.
I am even more smug than the average EV driver because I bought a Tesla two years ago with free supercharging for the lifetime of the car, so Elon is picking up the bill.
I apologise if that has raised anyone’s blood pressure to dangerous levels
I’m sorry but buying an electric car is a very dumb thing to do.
– They are more expensive
– They are actually not that cheap to run
– It takes ages to recharge vs a couple of.minutes for a normal car
– You can’t do long trips with them
An electric car has literally zero practical benefit vs a normal car. Not one.
Electric cars are for virtue signalling and for people who get a buzz from using the latest technology. That’s it.
They’re a massive con.
Please think about the environment before disrespecting EVs. They emit zero CO2, since all their electricity comes from renewables. I know this because my energy company says my lekkie is 100% renewables. Pretty much all energy companies claim 100% renewables.
Since only 43% of UK electricity is zero carbon (renewables and nuclear), it does make me wonder where the other 57% goes.
I also wonder if I plug in an EV, where the incremental load on the grid is met from? That would be gas then…. So that means an EV is a ‘displaced emission vehicle”, powered from a CCGT gas station running at about 50% efficiency. Since modern Atkinson cycle combustion engines are hitting mid-30s efficiency, the environmental benefit of an EV is, at best, marginal. Factor in the manufacturing CO2 overheads, and the energy involved lugging a 500kg battery around and ….
You were right all along…. They are a massive con..
..…. and the child/slave labour involved in mining the rare earth elements
They also refer to Elon Reeve Musk (government subsidy truffle hound par excellence) as “Elon Himself”.
They also write tweets addressed to their hero about their very heavy, very expensive and very badly put together electric sofas. The tweets generally start “Love my Tesla Elon but…” followed by a string of things wrong with their Teslas.
And the proper plural of Tesla is Teslae, don’t you know.
Elon thought he could skip PPAP.
And the only reason the other car manufacturers make BEVs is because greenwashing governments mandate it.
For limited company directors like me, I did the maths and I’m significantly better off with hiring a new EV for 3 years compared to maintaining my previous 10 year old diesel, or hiring a new petrol/diesel inside or outside of the business.
The tax breaks on the Benefit In Kind made it a total no brainer. Trust me, I did some detailed calculations accounting for taxes, maintenance, fuel, depreciation, etc, and EV came out way on top. This was when electricity was about 17p/kWh and diesel about £1.20/litre.
Yes, you need to plan long journeys a bit better, having an idea which service stations you might want to stop for a 20-minute meal at to get a 75% recharge, but I can live with that since I only need to drive that far that 3-4 times a year.
For solar panel owners like me, the increasing electricity prices won’t make much difference, and for the off-grid preppers, the latest cars and chargers, combined with solar panels, let you effectively run your house off-grid, discharging the battery while the rest of the street collapses into a blackout. If you have solar panels, I’d argue these cars make you less dependent, rather than more dependent, on the state.
The smoothness in the acceleration, compared to the jerking gears of a combustion engine, has impressed every passenger I’ve had.
Once the tax breaks are gone, perhaps a combustion vehicle will become more economically attractive again, but I will miss the convenience of not having to drive to, and queue at, petrol stations.
When the next poor sod delivering the 150th Amazon parcel of the day to your front door in his 10 year old diesel Toyota, having paid 20% VAT on his fuel. Having contributed to your feed in tariff for your solar panels (that he would have liked to have but couldn’t afford). Having paid his excise fuel duty, higher car tax, congestion charges etc, do remember to thank him for contributing to your gargantuan tax breaks you’re enjoying just because you could afford to spaff £70K on a new Polestar/Tesla, whatever. Will he think of you as a eco-warrior saving the planet for his kids or a benefit junkie screwing the working man?
I don’t make the rules, I just learn to operate within them for my own benefit. I don’t get the feed in tariff, but can understand why you would assume so.
£70k hasn’t been ‘spaffed’, the car has been hired. EV simply works out cheaper for me, and I imagine for quite a few other people too, so it’s disingenuous for anyone to say that EVs are a stupid choice. I’m not in this to save the planet, I’m in it to reduce my costs.
FYI my Amazon guy drives a 1 year old BMW.
I, for one, appreciate Caustic highlighting the economic benefits of hiring&driving an EV. Anyone annoyed should direct their grievances towards the government that concocted the “sloped playing field” rules that made this a sensible economic proposition.
I am not familiar with the tax breaks he referred to, but if they’re anywhere near as warped as my solar FIT payments of 60p/kWh then he might be enjoying considerable savings.
I agree. People cannot generate their own petrol at home!
The entire basis of shunning a source of energy which is 14 times more energy dense than electric batteries is, frankly, bonkers.
No it’s about creating a serf class whose movement you can control, which is perfectly if yr part of the predator class.
Now government has seized control of the energy grid through regulation only a fool would buy an electric car. Yr “friendly”
politician can turn yr movement on avd off at will.
If you have an EV as well as sufficient solar panels to provide for all your domestic electricity needs AND the ability/time to trickle-charge your car at home, it might just be worth it. I don’t have any of those things, so I won’t be wasting £25,000+ to get an inefficient, impractical EV ….. when I have a perfectly good 5 yr old, petrol driven Hyundai i10 (which is all I need).
The other aspect is the weight of Electric cars and the fact they do not require road tax. Heavier cars will wear out roads quicker as well as being more dangerous in collisions because of the greater mass.
‘There are no solutions, only trade-offs’ – T. Sowell
Excellent analysis, Nick.
It would be interesting to see these figures net of tax.
I reckon if you remove tax it’s already (ie before the price cap rises) at least twice as expensive to fuel an electric car than a petrol one.
However, if EVs take over the chancellor will need to tax them as heavily as petrol/diesel are taxed now. Oops!
Paul Bird
EV owners use an off peak tariff to charge at home, and most journeys are not long enough to require charging en-route.
But, yes, on the road charging will get more expensive, unless you’re one of those super smug b*stards like me that owns a Tesla with free supercharging for the lifetime of the car.
It’s not free – for the lifetime of your vehicle someone is paying.
No, someone is not paying, Tesla Inc are paying
I guess they did not imagine that electricity prices in Europe could ever go this high.
To update the sums a bit, today I paid 168.7p/l for petrol (21 p/l less than late June). That’s about 17.6 p/kWh thermal, based on 9.5 kWh per litre. Allowing for about 33% efficiency in my Toyota hybrid car (the theoretical peak efficiency is 38%), it’s about 53 p/kWh traction output – not a lot different from the projected day rate mains power charge.
Petrol/electric hybrids have many of the benefits of electric traction, but without the snags of pure battery electric ones, both financial and practical – unless you live in certain areas with special charge regimes.
If you deducted tax (VAT and fuel duty, plus all the congestion charges etc) from the comparison, using petrol or diesel over electricity would be a no brainer.