I don’t do social media, except for a very infrequently-used LinkedIn account. But LinkedIn is bad enough. Lately, it seems that whenever I log into the site, I find myself being assailed by adverts from Lloyds Bank, which is desperately keen that I should hear about something called the “Just Transition” and Lloyds’s own role in “turning vision to action” in this regard.
What is this ‘Just Transition’? The definition that you see everywhere in global governance circles (such as the website of International Labour Organisation) reads as follows:
A Just Transition means greening the economy in a way that is as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned, creating decent work opportunities and leaving no one behind.
The idea here is that we are to escape from “silos in our mind [sic]” between “environmental and climate issues” and “social justice”, and recognise them to be one and the same thing. Anybody who insists that there are trade-offs to be made between going green and economic development for the world’s poor is just being a shortsighted and pedantic ninny. We can in fact have all of our cakes and eat them; we can transition away from using fossil fuels and get equality and get rapid economic development as well. In fact, the implication often goes, the three things are necessarily mutually reinforcing.
Nobody can actually explain in concrete terms exactly how they reinforce one another, of course. Apparently it’s supposed to happen through things like “new economic models” and “new metrics”. And when one burrows down into the detail concerning what these new economic models and metrics really are, one finds only vapidity: a word salad of statements like “broad range of stakeholders”, “timely, respectful and active dialogue” and “informed, participatory engagement that doesn’t slow the process down, but builds buy-in”. The idea is to avoid letting on to the general public that there are hard choices to be made when it comes to greening the economy, by insisting at every turn that there are absolutely no conceivable downsides. This gives the ‘Just Transition’ literature a quality that is a bit like old gossamer in a dark attic; when exposed to the slightest puff of wind it dissipates into nothingness, leaving only emptiness behind.
But picking holes in the concept of the Just Transition is like shooting fish in a barrel, and can wait for another day. The point is that, however inane the concept might be, Lloyds, it seems, is going all in on it. The bank has put together a “Just Transition Hub” as well as hosting various conferences on the subject, and seems to be trying to position itself at the forefront of high street banks when it comes to sustainability issues.
On the one hand, this is all pretty guileless; a crass and desperate attempt to co-opt environmentalism and associate a brand with mealy-mouthed and ultimately platitudinous niceness. It is a great shame (and one of the strangest aspects of the generalised death of old-Left politics in the West) that the No Logo critique of advertising has fallen into such abeyance in the internet age. Naomi Klein ought really to be out there having a field day with all of this, but lately, of course, she is mostly writing about how lockdown sceptics are among “the most dangerous men on the planet” and revealing herself to be intensely relaxed about big corporations making hay so long as the word ‘green’ is in the bumf somewhere.
But there is something more sinister going on here than simple greenwashing. Take a look, for example, at this statement by somebody called Chinyelu Oranefo, the “Director, Sustainability and ESG Finance” at Lloyds:
We have to ensure the next transition is Just [sic], so that all communities and stakeholders not only survive, but also thrive – not just because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s the transition approach which creates the ‘least friction’ and so is the pathway most likely to achieve success.
Apparently, “whilst previous energy transitions in the U.K. – such as the transition from coal to gas in the 1980s – resulted in the U.K. reducing its emissions by 50%, it also resulted in the disruption of communities, particularly in the north of England”. (You don’t say.) But don’t worry – Oranefo “is certain that a better result can be achieved in the transition to a Net Zero economy across all regions where communities, workers and supply chains are not left behind”. So that’s alright then. The details can wait for later.
Does it not strike you as odd (perhaps a better way of putting it would be: does it not strike you as odd that nobody else seems to think it odd?) to hear a director of a large bank talking in this way – as though she is a politician? What earthly business is it of Lloyds whether or not we make a ‘Just’ (I am being a good boy and using the capital letter) transition, whether this is the “transition approach… most likely to achieve success”, and whether indeed we make any transition at all in the first place? We have become used to business leaders behaving in this way, like po-faced sixth-formers lecturing their parents about the political issues of the day, but sometimes it is important to take stock and remind oneself exactly how impudent it all is. Lloyds is a high street bank; its directors are nothing but a bunch of 21st century Captain Mainwarings; they should be sitting in their offices eating currant buns and drinking Earl Grey tea; they are the last people on earth that anybody should listen to about anything except perhaps financial management.
And the punchline, as U.K. citizens will recall, is that even on the financial management side, that ‘perhaps’ is a very big one. This is the same Lloyds Bank, lest anyone forget, that had to be bailed-out to the tune of £20.3 billion by the U.K. taxpayer in 2009 as a result of its elementary failure to do the bare minimum expected of a large financial institution and keep itself adequately capitalised. We U.K. citizens are still down by around £3 billion on that bailout (which really makes it a bail-in for average Joes like you or me); and yet here we are 15 years later being hectored by the descendants of the directors who oversaw that debacle, and being told by them that the entire economy should be rebuilt from the ground up – and with their input.
It would be funny were it not so galling. But we shouldn’t lose sight of what is going on, here. The public may all now have forgotten about the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and its aftermath. (“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” as Milan Kundera once, Cassandra-like, warned us.) But I’m not sure that the banks have. In fact, while there seem to have been few, if any, lessons learned at all by the populace of the West from the experience of that period (the major exception perhaps being that the house always wins), the banks will have noted down a ‘key takeaway’. And it is this: if you can plausibly bill your own importance as being ‘systemic’ then it turns out you’ll be seen as too big to fail and will be very nicely insulated by the taxpayer from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – not to mention your own incompetence. The idea that if banks like RBS or Lloyds went bust the financial system would be blasted to smithereens and we would end up having to haggle with each other using seashells and hacksilver was always utter bunk, but it proved to be remarkably convincing in practice. And, it seems, ‘financing the Just Transition’ is another whizzo way of presenting oneself as being much more integral to everything than one actually us.
Hence, Oranefo is keen to remind us that “Corporates have a key role to play in facilitating a Just Transition”. And not just ‘corporates’ – finance, which will be the very ‘enabler’ of the entire project. But what is striking about the material produced by Lloyds and other financial institutions in this regard is the way it marries together the worlds of finance and government. Hence, Ingrid Holmes, Executive Director of the Green Finance Initiative, tells us that a Just Transition will require not just private capital but “a smarter use of Government money, clever use of incentives and a whole suite of new products from banks and other providers that enable people to be part of the green transition”.
It’s all about the public-private partnerships, in other words, which handily often seem to end up meaning that public money provides the safety net when things go awry. “If we accept that there are Just Transition goals that today’s market won’t support on their own, then we need to find mechanisms to ensure they are supported,” Holmes blithely goes on. (Read: taxpayer money.) She continues: “We also need to see more innovation in the use of public finance so that the U.K. Infrastructure Bank, for example, might provide a first loss guarantee to enable the rollout of property-linked finance to people with a range of income levels.” Ah yes, Government intervention to enable the rollout of property-linked finance to people with a range of income levels – we know how that turns out. David Hickey, a sustainability something or other at BlackRock, makes it all charmingly explicit:
Clearly, there are challenges… For institutional investors, a project has to have a competitive risk-return profile because they have a fiduciary responsibility… That won’t always be the case with projects that prioritise Just Transition goals. But that’s where philanthropists, retail investors or Government support [emphasis added] can play a role.
One suspects the role that is envisaged is a pretty big one.
There is a word for all of this, and it isn’t ‘capitalism’ but ‘corporatism’. (We might also try ‘cronyism’ for size.) And so it is that we find people who are ostensibly supposed to be the epigones of capitalism almost clamouring for more Government intervention and regulation. Oranefo, for example, calls out for “checks and balances around how capital is provided” for environmental projects, while Sam Gardner, Head of Climate Change and Sustainability for ScottishPower, welcomes the setting of rules on company reporting by HM Treasury’s new Transition Plan Taskforce. Mike Emmerich, Founding Director of a company called Metro Dynamics (which works with Lloyds “on green infrastructure”) meanwhile tells us that “the Government needs to ensure the right frameworks and policies are in place” and that “we need government to be present at the table”.
A couple of the key messages of the Lloyds Bank Just Transition Conference (disclaimer: not necessarily the views of Lloyds itself) summarise all of this quite neatly:
Government policy will do much to set the terms of debate, but companies, investors and other stakeholders must embrace the Just Transition and consider what it means for how they operate. … A Just Transition is aligned with large corporates’ growing sense of purpose, as well as offering attractive business opportunities.
From “Government policy” to “attractive business opportunities” in just a few short sentences; that is the name of the game, of course, and one is immediately reminded, reading all of this guff, of Adam Smith’s old saw: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Everybody in the world of finance, it seems, is busily identifying brilliant wheezes through which to present themselves as ‘systemic’ in this new and special way: as the ‘enablers’ of Net Zero and as integral elements of the only means through which to fund the gigantic upheaval in the economy which it will necessarily require. Once they were too big to fail – ideally now they will also be too green to fail – and will be able to go on identifying “attractive business opportunities” in perpetuity.
All of this, of course, serves to remind us that we have not yet even begun to reckon with what happened in the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and its aftermath, or the change in culture to which it gave rise – both on what one might call the demand side of finance and the supply side of Government. On the one hand, financial institutions learned two very important lessons during that period – that Government was terrified of bank runs, and that politicians would be able to find vast sums from behind sofas to fund almost any amount of ‘recapitalisation’. On the other hand, Government learned to stop worrying and love a good splurge; in 1996, President Clinton had fretted about spending $25 billion bailing out the Mexican Government during the peso crisis, but that was mere pocket change in comparison to the sums spent during the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis: $800 billion of stimulus in 2008 and then another $800 billion or so a year later. (In the U.K., the sums were just as eye watering for all that they were of a smaller scale – some £137 billion on bank rescue packages alone.)
This, to deploy an overused word, created a truly toxic mixture of incentives, with both banks and governments necessarily drawing the conclusions that: a) one doesn’t really have to be all that careful about investment decisions, and b) national debt is a notional concept that, at the very worst, can be dealt with by some other unlucky people who haven’t been born yet, and long after you are dead.
This is the world which we now inhabit – as the up to £410 billion which the U.K. Government alone spent on financing lockdowns in 2020-21 aptly demonstrates – and it is a world which lacks any sensible way to process what exactly is wrong with the entire Just Transition concept. To a people who have been trained into thinking that Government can simply conjure up money to solve problems and to a financial sector who increasingly sees its future chiefly in suckling at the teat of the state, the whole thing will obviously make perfect sense – just like it makes perfect sense for the U.K. DWP’s disability benefits caseload to reach seven million in 2027-28 (up from three million in 1995/96), and for benefit expenditure in the U.K. overall to have roughly trebled since 1978. All that the rest of us can do, watching in dismay from the sidelines and wondering who is going to be putting bread on the table in 30 years’ time, is to console ourselves with another old economist’s line: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And when you eat enough cakes, eventually you will find out you don’t have any left.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. He is the author of the News From Uncibal Substack, where this article first appeared.
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This lunacy is just communism by a different name.
How can corporations be promoting communism you might ask.
These corporations are run by technocrats, on behalf of plutocrats.
And that is exactly the structure of communist states. Societies run by technocrats and where a plutocratic elite sit above everyone else.
The uber wealthy plutocrats of our society have got ahead of the game and decided to establish the system themselves with them at the top before someone else does it instead. It’s their very clever way of avoiding their own heads ending up on the ends of stakes.
The whole green agenda is a new wave of communism
Indeed. Greta Thunberg (and doubtless others) don’t even make a secret of this: Greta Thunberg throws in her lot with the anti-capitalist Left – The Post (unherd.com)
“Does it not strike you as odd (perhaps a better way of putting it would be: does it not strike you as odd that nobody else seems to think it odd?) to hear a director of a large bank talking in this way – as though she is a politician? ”
It seems to me that many many “professions” and roles are now filled with frustrated politicians, saviours, do-gooders, priests whose motivations are primarily to glorify themselves while “saving the world” rather than executing the tasks that go with the role as efficiently as possible.
Would one call this “decadence”?
This is happening in all fields of work. Here in Canada, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons proposes doctors prioritize social justice over medical expertise.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/regulatory-college-proposing-canadian-doctors-prioritize-social-justice-over-medical-expertise-5535443
The regulatory college report is proposing a new model that would put the focus on social justice before medical expertise as part of a “vision for the future of medicine.” The report claims that the health-care system perpetuates “structural violence” on marginalized people. The new model of CanMEDS (the physician competency framework that explains the abilities required by physicians to meet the health-care needs of their patients) would seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, social justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, rather than medical expertise.
Thanks for this depressing information. Our civilisation committing suicide.
Many thanks for the Canada report. More on the ground feedback from Canada would be appreciated.
Best wishes.
I got so far but couldn’t go on reading the emptiness of Lloyds Bank’s announcements. It really is Emperor’s New Clothes stuff but it’s also worrying if the directors of a large bank think that empty meaningless words are something to be promoted, lauded, even proud of. What is wrong with these people?? If I was CEO of Lloyds, I’d have chewed off Oranefu’s ears with a ‘What the hell does this word salad actually mean?‘ followed by a ‘How long have you been working on this?‘ then a ‘And how much do we pay you to do this?‘ and finally a ‘You’re fired! There’s the door.‘.
Now, now Aethelred, I think we are beyond the point of attempting to infuse some reality in to these grifters.
They are the oposite of green. Green is the radiance of Carbon and that is why I take particular affront at this agenda. It is truly demonic in that it the very opposite of what it purports to be. It is an attack on the natural order of things and an attack on truth and beauty and they try to dress it up in ‘green’ which means look the other way as we rob you blind.
There is a word for all of this, and it isn’t ‘capitalism’ but ‘corporatism’
Actually, let’s rewrite that:
There is a word for all of this, and it isn’t ‘capitalism’ but ‘
corporatism’. Theft.Stealing from the Rich and the Poor at the same time, except the rich can afford it. And that is the whole idea of sustainable development. —Notice it is all the rich countries and people that have to reduce their carbon. But at the same time the poorest countries and people are denied fossil fuels and we fob them off with money for turbines in the third world and hand out welfare that we skimmed from the wealthier people to the poorest in our countries. —ECO SOCIALISM
“A ‘Just Transition’ means greening the economy in a way that is as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned, creating decent work opportunities and leaving no one behind.”
Right, so now we have the definition on the table let’s have a look at the ingredients:
Define greening the economy.
Fair and inclusive to everyone – define please.
Decent work opportunities – and these are what exactly?
How do we determine what constitutes left behind?
I dare say everyone posting on DS would have a different answer to any of the above.
Looking at decent work opportunities do such opportunities, however defined, come with decent salaries and who decides anyway?
Just transition – interchangeable with climate change. Total and utter Bullshittery. Meaningless psycho-babble.
If women are involved in a significant way in Lloyd’s, then this emotioneering nonsense is explained. Males normally tend to get on with the job. In this case lending snd managing money to make money. Women always bring baggage to work and start to weave that into the work they do. All part of the competence crisis we are suffering due to elevation of womyn and ethnic groups over obvious competency, knowledge and experience.
Chinyelu Orenafo ticks at least two of the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion boxes. She is a bl ack wo man. Did she really reach the level she has on merit? I doubt that many men would have wanted to go down that route anyway. One cannot be surprised at the garbage she has produced.
The eco socialists are colour blind don’t you know? ————Green is actually RED.