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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Customers?!
FFS!
If they don’t buck their ideas up I’ll use another department for my State Pension!
Yes, HMRC use “customers” also as if you have a choice.
That comes from some very expensive management consulting …
As an ex-employee I can confirm that DWP policy, and it certainly was and is policy is to refer to anybody claiming benefits as a “customer.” I refused. I never ever referred to a claimant as a “customer,” they were ALWAYS claimants.
My logic, repeated frequently was…
“Well they are not going to take their business elsewhere.”
This is the sort of garbage rhetoric that is embedded in the Civil Service and for the vast majority of staff they see no other logic. The majority are woke and extremely lazy.
Huxley you are a very unusual individual. In a good way. Much respect.
Many thanks MAk. Very kind of you.
Yeah that’s like “thanks for your patience” – as if I had an option!
I was on hold on the phone to HMRC today with their interminable musical loop being regularly interrupted by messages telling me that me that my call was important to them. Clearly it wasn’t at all important or they would have answered me sooner,…!
I was amused rather, after a blue light episode, to be asked if I would recommend the hospital to family and friends for emergency care?
As it happens the care I received was excellent and I’m still here as a result, but I did ask them where else I might have gone under the circumstances… no response, so far!
For emergency care?
I would have expected that there wouldn’t be the time to ponder.
The problem isn’t where they work, it’s that there’s nothing that requires them to work or that can be easily done to replace underperformers. Those that want to do minimal work can do so.
It’s also that they’re protected from consequences by the system.
A few years ago I had to call DVLA for something. As it happened I had time on my hands, so was able to hold… for nearly an hour. Long story short; I complained to my MP and, when the answer came it was to say that all calls to DVLA are answered within 10 seconds and therefore there was nothing that needed attention, everything is hunky dory… so, the moment your call is ‘answered’ and you go into the queue is all they measure. I imagine this kind of jiggery pokery is rampant through every facet of the civil service?
Where’s the hard evidence that working from home is related to productivity?
Motivated people will work wherever they need to or can. Well supervised people will work wherever they have to.
This article is about the DWP staff who are apparently neither motivated nor well supervised and will leave customers on hold for unreasonable amounts of time.
I know what it’s about, what I can’t see in the excerpts is any reference to hard evidence that current poor productivity is related to working from home.
tof, if you have never worked in the Civil Service you will never understand that it really is another planet.
I can imagine. I know a couple, one county council and one Whitehall, who work hard and are intrinsically motivated, but probably they are the exception. One is a socialist and has devoted his life to the public sector, the other is decidedly not a socialist and is actively working on starting his own business or moving into the private sector – not a surprise but a shame as he’s exceptionally bright.
Elcom (Electoral Commission) are still I believe “working” from home and boy can they give people the run around on the ‘phone. An absolute shower.
PS I’ve just logged off work (at home, 5 days a week) – not done tons of hours today, just my standard 7.5ish, spread out a bit so I can fit other things in that make me happy and a better worker when I am working. Whenever I am on calls and there are people in the office there’s a cacophony of noise from chatting – how anyone can work in that environment is beyond me!
When I visit the office every so often I am a lot less efficient. My work requires focused concentration for long periods of time, and my excellent boss understands this. When I am in the office I often arrive late in the morning so I can then stay late and get some work done after everyone has gone home and I can be certain I am not going to be interrupted.
Working from home is what everyone used to do, let’s face it.
But yes, an ill-motivated and ill-managed individual will find a way to avoid work wherever they are. The worst offenders in my experience are the “managers”. Where the Civil Service is concerned, I imagine this effect is multiplied many times – other people spending other people’s money on what other people tell them are other people’s problems, so no-one cares about quality service or product and they don’t care how much it costs.
This is why state must be as small as possible. Where’s Maggie when you need her?
100% agree
I look back on my early days of commuting into London and working in the office with fondness, and perhaps for some of our younger staff who choose to do that it’s the same now (we have a lovely office available for people who prefer it, as many or as few days as they choose), but at my advanced age I find my lovely home in a more rural setting (or wherever I am with my laptop) much improve my quality of life. Horses for courses. If your staff are valuable to you, look after them as long as they deliver the work.
We did internal studies – WFH was a mess. Office productivity measured in outputs, alignment, and meeting KPIs was achieved by being in the office. GDAD (geo agile projects) also suffered from failure – about 60% failed in some way (failure needs clear defining).
Interesting. Overall it has made little difference to us – some have been more productive, others less. What aspects of WFH do you think made the difference?
During the earlier lockdowns my whole department (bar one) worked from home. We did all the usual stuff to the usual schedule, occasionally popping in to the office for the odd day when necessary and delivering paperwork to each others homes as necessary. I’m sure some of my staff didn’t work exactly office hours, though I did (plus some as I didn’t have to commute), but we all achieved the same output as normal and management accounts were published on time.
I guess, as a small team, we after motivated to do what we always did. I suspect that the behemoth that is the Civil ‘Service’ doesn’t have the same motivation…
That chart… ‘Annual change in productivity growth‘.
Change in growth? Rate of a rate? Really?
So in Q1 2021 there was a -10% change in growth of productivity compared with a year before – or 90% of the growth in productivity from the year before? No mention of a decline in productivity at all?
“Not a word has been spoken about what’s in the interest of the child. The reality is if you’re holding down a job, it’s very difficult to spend adequate time with the child”
Best to get another government department or an expensive stranger to look after your children. Longer term, it’s easier to get them wearing masks and be vaccinated without the burden of parental consent.
What we have to be aware of is that this collapse in civil service productivity, productivity which I would argue is largely immeasurable, is deliberate. All our public services are being collapsed:
The police pick and choose who to arrest and similarly arbitrarily pick and choose what they might deem arrestable offences depending on lots of factors – skin colour, religion, height, weight, sex or lack thereof, length of time to end of shift.
Most of the above can be applied to the NHS although here the game is to make lots of noises while doing F A except creating waiting lists.
ELCOM – absolutely brilliant at knowing nothing and doing less while sending you round in circles and all while we interrupt their watching of ‘Flog It’ or some such crap.
We are deliberately being led and manipulated in to believing we are a Third World shit hole and within a couple of years we will be.
The tory Party has undergone a controlled demolition orchestrated from within. The same demolition processes are being applied to all the mechanisms of state. Kneel is already overturning Parliamentary traditions eg rearranging the David Amess Bills Day and other procedures.
The country is being dismantled from within. Our history is being rewritten such that the glories of Empire are now the greatest sins the world has ever seen. There will be no let up. Why do we think the Khant was installed in Londonistan on the back of 1.2 million votes? He has been placed there to do precisely what he is doing – destroy the greatest capital city in the world.
So the crap of working from home is just one small element in the whole and that is the demolition of the United Kingdom.
Everything is linked.
“We are deliberately being led and manipulated in to believing we are a Third World shit hole and within a couple of years we will be.”
Perhaps that’s why there’s been a trend over recent years of eateries with a run-down look so that people get used to it before it stops being a choice.
Yes more than likely.
E-mail to all staff: “A failure to return to work on Mondays or Fridays will be construed as indication of your wish to terminate your employment…”