The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) appears to be at least a month late in producing its latest estimate of so-called green jobs. Don’t bother is good advice. Hunt the green job – a category that cannot be defined since all jobs that avoid direct processing of hydrocarbons can be rebranded with a virtuous label – is an annual statistical joke. Last year, the ONS informed us that in 2023 the number of people employed in “environmental charities” was similar in number to the 47,000 at work in renewable energy. But the truth is starting to dawn. There will be no green revolution no matter how much state money is thrown at the project. Few recent projects in the UK demonstrate this more clearly than plans to waste £22 billion of public money to capture carbon dioxide from the same British factories that Net Zero deindustrialisation is already closing at a rapidly gathering pace.
Led by the energy policies of the Mad Miliband, the economically illiterate Labour Government is diverting vast sums of money from productive job-creating use to fund technologies that are unproven, unlikely to scale and simply uneconomic. This latter class includes wind power, where the lie is told that it is cheaper than gas while British electricity suppliers drive away productive business by charging prices as high as any in the developed world. This presumably comes under the heading of a ‘Noble Lie’, a convenient and much used political weapon embedded throughout the entire fast-fading fake climate emergency project.
Barely a day goes by without the laws of physics intruding on the green boondoggle. In 2020, flush with £1.5 billion of cash from the French government, Airbus promised an emission-free hydrogen-powered plane by 2035. Nobody it seems told them that huge on-board insulated tanks storing highly explosive hydrogen at minus-253°C made no technical or economic sense. Airbus has now quietly dropped the project, returning to the real world where everybody else knew it was totally unfeasible.
Hydrogen use is of course still flavour of the month, mainly because the deluded think it can back up unreliable wind and solar power. It can’t of course and in the world governed by the laws of science only gas can currently do that. But gas is not green and perhaps even worse it is produced by private companies, so the Mad One is pouring concrete down fracking wells in poor areas of the North, and refusing to issue new oil and gas licences for offshore explorers in soon-to-be-poor towns in Scotland and the North East of England. Meanwhile His Madness is having a quiet word in China’s ear and telling them he would rather the solar panels destined to blanket prime agricultural land were not made by slaves. What next, you might ask. Telling the Congolese not to use children to mine cobalt for the electric cars of the truly virtuous who motor amongst us. Or perhaps taking note of the growing evidence that onshore windmills the size of the Eiffel Tower are having a devastating effect on wildlife and clearing the countryside of everything from the smallest fly to the largest eagle. Perhaps not – economic cluelessness goes hand in hand with rampant hypocrisy in the grisly green echo chamber.
The so-called green revolution relies almost entirely on state-directed diversion of capital under cover of the fake climate emergency, a narrative curated by governing elites and their trusted mainstream messengers for decades, and almost any whacky scheme can be justified. And few are whackier than wind power, a technology first seen in Britain in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189). Nobody would build a windmill these days unless the state bribed them with huge subsidies – payments that add £15 billion to electricity bills paid by rich and poor alike every year. Payments that are slowly and surely helping to destroy what remains of Britain’s manufacturing base. Payments, it might be noted, that could build 20-30 modern hospitals in Britain’s run-down cities – every single year.
As with most if not all state direction of industrial capital, the jobs destroyed in the private sector will not be balanced, and certainly not increased, in the new make-believe green world. For starters, they are often in the wrong place. Any new jobs will be dispersed across the UK, while many industrial jobs relying on hydrocarbons are concentrated in well-established industrial regions. It is presumably assumed that workers will move towards the new jobs, but that largely failed to happen in the 1980s when deindustrialisation wiped out coal mining. Few workers were retrained and the valleys of South Wales have never really recovered their proud working class traditions and livelihoods. Arguments can of course be made that industries naturally die away and are replaced by superior technologies. But anyone making that argument for the green revolution is frankly an idiot. The harm is all self-imposed and is part of a wider global Net Zero collectivist agenda. Under a Labour Welsh Government today the green revolution means cancelling a bypass planned to reduce the bottleneck in the vital M4 Newport tunnel and closing steel blast furnaces in Port Talbot, throwing thousands out of work.
Worker mobility is an issue rarely considered by politicians, who often view themselves as citizens of anywhere. Few considerations of family and community ties seem to trouble their decisions. Recent research in the United States highlights a lack of mobility in the working class communities and suggests that the geographic mismatch between current fossil fuel workers and any emerging green job opportunities is a significant bar. In fact, the authors suggest that only 2% of fossil fuel workers are likely to transition without significant policy interventions. The UK is of course a much smaller geographic area but similar constraints are likely to apply. As can be noted, previous phases of deindustrialisation have tended to leave many communities high and dry. The slow materialisation of new jobs in industrial areas battered by green policies, and almost certain limited worker mobility, will present significant challenges in the future. Quite possibly the British Government is hopeful that any labour constrictions can be solved with its near open border policy and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of mobile migrants every year.
In the meantime we look forward to the latest, one might say heroic, attempt by the ONS to convince us that green jobs are increasing in the British economy. ‘My old man’s a dustman’, ran the 1960s song, an occupation now relabelled by the green bean counters as ‘My old man’s a sustainable recycling operative’. Titles might change but the job does not, and he probably still wears a dustman’s hat, is possessed of a pair of cor blimey trousers and lives in a council flat.
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.