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.
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Has anyone considered the very real possibility that Ed Milliband is ill? that he has some form of clinical insanity? it would go a long way to understanding the sheer absurd lengths to which he is going in order to stop us using fossil fuels. Why pour cement down a fracking well to block it up, to prevent it ever being used? when the law has put in place sufficient restrictions for it ever taking place in this parliament and without a reversing of the law. He is surely doing the equivalent of a Crusader smashing, destroying and removal of all buildings effigys, and people who practised a different religion in order to wipe any chance of it continuing in the future.
I do believe he needs to be examined as he is clearly obsessed in a very dangerous way and is as a result a danger to humanity.
Concreting over wells is simply Scorched Earth Policy and is actually preposterous. We are governed by ideologues that will stop at nothing to get their own way and as a result we now have electricity prices 3-4 times higher than in the USA, where they continue to use fossil fuels for the benefit of the citizens, and it is only going to get worse in the UK and all countries pandering to the UN/WEF pretend to save the planet eco socialist fraud.
He’s concreting the fracking wells to prevent any future government reversing his decisions. To restart a dormant well you need a lot less investment than drilling a new one – so at a stroke he has made any future decision to frack for gas more expensive than it need be.
However, it is quite possible to drill new wells and the gas will still be there for future generations when the lunacy abates. The current government’s attempt to constrain future governments decisions will fail.
If he’s I’ll then the whole world’s political establishment is. Reference the earlier article on the impact of the sun, you’d have thought any uncorrupted politician would suggest checking it out before wasting £trillions on stuff of doubtful utility.
Mental condition: narcissism, psychopath.
I think the only solution is a straight jacket and a padded cell
Rope is cheaper, and hempen rope is “sustainable”.
Yes, i’ve thought that for some time
It costs money to do that and concrete is not CO2 friendly. This is about trashing capitalism – the goal of the green movement since communism failed.
Wind is cheaper than gas —–TRUE. As a fuel wind is free and gas is not free. You need to bring it from the ground and that costs money. But harnessing the wind is not free, and the wind needs the gas powered plants ticking over waiting for the wind to stop, which is often and many times unexpectedly, often at times of greatest need etc. So anyone who says “wind is cheaper than gas” is deliberately only telling you part of a story. Then we have the situation where the more wind you have the less reliable the grid, the more backup you need all costing more and more money, and as we reach beyond the reserve margin, storage will be required to avoid blackouts. This storage which is not yet developed except pumped hydro is very expensive, often costing 10 to 20 times more than the actual energy it is supposed to be backing up. As a result we have spiralling costs, destruction of the economy that depends on low energy costs, and a country totally covered in thousands of turbines, solar panels and thousands of new pylons to take the renewable energy to the grid. This is total absurdity. There is no need for this mad rush to Net Zero in such a short time frame, all because of the madness of the global warming groupthink politics which is lying to the UK citizens that there is a climate crisis and that we in this country must be world leaders in fixing it.———-Then after all of this nonsense about wind being free or cheaper than gas, our government then ties the price of wind to the price of gas so that we never get any benefit from the “FREE WIND”. —-It is outrageous eco politics that is taking people for a ride, and I would go so far as to say it is the greatest pseudo-scientific fraud ever perpetrated.
“Wind is cheaper than gas” is an utterly meaningless statement, intended to mislead.
Indeed.
No resource has any value in its natural state. The value comes when it is put to beneficial use, and its cost is the capital required to do so. If the cost input exceeds the output value, then that is a loss. The cost input to provide electricity from wind and solar exceeds the value of output, because of the intermittency cost – the indirect cost of alternative generation to provide power when wind/solar cannot, and to stabilise the grid.
And… a resource does not exist until Mankind invents it by finding a beneficial use for it. Iron ore, oil, coal were not “resources” in the Stone Age, for example.
The Earth has no resources, only Mankind has resources.
All pretty obvious- though you have put it very succinctly. Sadly I suspect many don’t grasp it, such is the degree of economic illiteracy. Should be compulsory in every school.
And it’s used that way constantly by the MSM. You only have to read the comments sections on any MSM article on energy costs, to see 90% of people believe wind turbines and solar are ‘free / low cost’… I’d say less than 10% of posters actually understand the real cost, once intermittency and subsidies are taken into account. Whether most people think the electricity is simply waiting for them, behind their sockets or something, I don’t know. In a way it’s perhaps a reflection of the historic level of reliability of the British national grid has enjoyed, which Millibrain is slowly destroying
Yes – see my reply to JXB.
Yes but because it is actually true that the wind is cheaper than gas as a FUEL, it allows the charlatans to mislead the public.
“Worker mobility is an issue rarely considered by politicians, who often view themselves as citizens of anywhere…”
…Likewise in a corporate past life, the new C.E.O. with family based on another continent from a previous C.O.O. position, opting to boost the share price (and annual bonus) by moving the whole caboodle on a whim from one side of a country to the other, in order to access “a world-leading corporate ecosystem.”
No evidence-base whatsoever cited for putting thousands of working and family lives through the mangle and splashing a corporate billion on a vanity project.
As for Kommissar Miliband, someone please send for straightjacket, largactil and 50 ml syringe.
We’re a smallish firm – about 60 people. I guess some of them are easily fungible but most are not. If your people are not important to your business then you might not have the right people. When we moved offices we were at pains to ensure it was very near the old one so as not to discombobulate the staff.
Could he not have had the head band of the hat adjusted for him? Or does he believe he has a brain the size of a planet? Or perhaps some PR person was having a laugh?
Command & control economy because we are back to Marxist-Socialist Labour revealing its true colours.
Jobs are a cost. If more jobs are being created than currently required to produce the same or lower output, this is a loss to the economy = makes us poorer.
If these jobs are created by subsidies using taxpayer cash = reduces economic activity = makes us all poorer.
It is why free market capitalism regulated by supply, demand, prices, innovation and technological advance together with consumer choices = prosperity. Exhibit A: Industrial Revolution. For the alternative: USSR.
Indeed we are. But the Conservatives are as committed to net zero as Labour. In fact, THE CONSERVATIVES SET THE NET ZERO BY 2050 TARGET. Not Labour.
Labour pushed through the Climate Change Act, but with the target of an 80% reduction. The Conservatives upped the target to 100%, or net zero.
The Conservatives remain committed to the 2050 net zero target. It is still their official party policy. Don’t be fooled by occasional sceptical comments from them that fall short of committing to a change in policy.
Is there a single ‘green’ technology that has proved beneficial? Answers on a postage stamp.
Great – let’s get all the workers to sell their houses to move to the jobs and be made poorer by the costs of moving, of buying and selling a house and oh yes, have thousands of pounds stolen from you by the state in a tax known as stamp duty.
And a good day for this article as our ignorant scrounger of a PM Two Tier No Idea Kier is spouting lies at the energy security jamboree in London before he goes off to a lovefest with global fascist Usually Fond Of Lying. If we had a functional opposition we could expect a rebuff of all of his lies but not with Olukemi Adegoke or of course the great Messiah who is too busy moving his company into the centre-left Uniparty ground as he proposes all the immigrants can stay under an amnesty.
Does anyone else worry that Milliband and Labour are deliberately trashing the country? It is the sort of thing I heard Marxists fanntasizing about when I was back at university a couple of years ago.
Worry? That’s clearly what they are doing imo… question is, how can we stop and reverse it?
Never forget that Mad Miliband is fully supported by the Mad Monarch of Windsor.