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Labour’s climate promises melt in the heatwave

In her latest climate blog, Sam Mason argues that Labour must have a strategic climate plan from day one of taking office. The watering down of Labour’s recent commitment to block new North Sea oil and gas licences for reasons of political expediency bodes ill for a green future.

AS THE MET OFFICE ISSUED THEIR FIRST HEAT WAVE WARNING of the summer and pictures of New York engulfed in smoke from the “out of control” Canadian wildfires fill our TV screens, you would think people were starting to join the dots on climate change.  Indeed, the announcement that Labour will block new north sea oil and gas licences was a positive step that along with the commitments for a green prosperity fund seemed to show the party was doing just this.

Unfortunately, what we have seen is that a week is indeed a long time in climate politics. Both commitments have been melting away in tune with the rising thermometer and the Labour Party is bowing, not to the realities of climate change, but political expedience.

Watering down the committment on North Sea
oil and gas licences is bowing to
political expediency

The GMB’s General Secretary Gary Smith was quick to call out the oil and gas announcement as “naïve” and populist.  A strange statement given we are on the verge of exceeding the Paris climate agreement ‘limit’ of 1.5C degrees of global heating in the next few years, which will and does threatens all workers.

Unite similarly attacked the announcement as headline grabbing and a promise of “jam tomorrow” but, with an important difference. Unite emphasised need for detailed transition plans for workers in the North Sea led through a process of collective bargaining that guarantees jobs, pay and conditions for all workers and supporting industries. A demand they are right to insist on together with public ownership of energy.

IN THE FIGHT TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE – life and livelihoods cannot be decoupled.  Whether that is for workers in the north sea or the millions in East Africa who have been impacted by the worst drought for 40 years. A war of words on yet to happen pledges of action won’t put food on the table for any worker or address the urgent need to take serious action to decarbonise the economy.

Rachel Reeve is back-tracking on Labour’s
green prosperity spending

As the oil and gas ‘pledges’ get watered down, Rachel Reeves has decided to start rolling back on the party’s green prosperity spending commitment. Far from fiscally responsible, it shows that Labour really isn’t thinking about the kind of detail and plan trade unions are calling for in the much-needed energy transition. Further, it helps to re-enforce the cynicism that unions have in the promised jobs of renewable energy.

The science of climate change doesn’t care about fiscal responsibility, and its impacts on the economy will only increase the further we are from taking action.  Damage to infrastructure and social consequences such as on health all bring additional costs and burdens on already struggling public services. Investment in the work needed for both mitigation and measures to adapt to the impacts of climate change will not only be good for the UK, but also globally.

While the UK has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions in the transition from coal to natural gas in the 1980’s it remains one of the largest contributors to cumulative CO2 emissions.  This underlines the historic responsibility of the UK to fulfil its “fair share” in climate funding for countries on the frontline of climate impacts, namely in the global south, and to ensure a transition rooted in justice that recognises the disastrous impacts on communities here of the past deindustrialisation. This funding means having a plan and putting serious investment behind it from day one.

Reversing Labour’s commitment to nuclear weapons could free up billions for strong public services and a just transition for workers

And if Rachel Reeves is concerned about where they will find the money from, there are two obvious places they could start with – nuclear. Reversing the commitment to nuclear weapons and Trident renewal would free-up billions to invest in energy transition, warm homes, strong public services and a just transition for workers that would secure jobs and ensure protections of livelihoods.

This second is removing the fetish with nuclear power, the most expensive form of energy. Whilst Keir Starmer has said the Tories have been a “shambolic failure” in delivering on nuclear energy, the historic failure of nuclear power projects to deliver on time and budget should be enough in itself to say it provides neither energy or climate security. Hinkley Point C backers EDF have announced further delays and billions of cost increases.

Keir Starmer asserting such delays would be avoided because they would have a “strategic plan with real purpose” is to the contrary. Any plan including nuclear power would continue to add to the delays in accelerating the renewable energy transition, developing storage capacity, and reducing energy consumption by transforming buildings and public transport. All of which would be jobs rich.

In what could be a long, over hot summer, the only ‘lobby’ the party should be listening to is the climate, which is telling us through our lived experience of climate impacts not least on workers across the globe, we are running out of time for politician’s lack of strategic vision on this.

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We need socially useful production, not manufacturing of destruction

In her latest climate blog for Labour CND, Sam Mason takes issue with the GMB composite at the forthcoming Trades Union Congress arguing true solidarity with our sisters and brothers across the world means public investment in socially useful production not more weapons of mass destruction

In 2007, Nicholas Stern made this much referenced quote:
“Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen. The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming. We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century. The problem is global and the response must be a collaboration on a global scale.”

THIS DEFINITION of “market failure” is said to stem from free markets failing to maximise society’s welfare.  Something which we are witnessing to catastrophic ends in the respective energy and climate crises. Evidence if it was ever needed, free market economics and the privatisation it walks hand in hand with are not the best way to address the global challenges facing us. This includes climate change but also increasing inequality, public health, diminishing social protections, decent unionised work and threats of war and nuclear conflict.

One area which remains free of the market mantra is defence spending, however.  Of course, private sector companies benefit from this but it is through the investment of public money, and for ends that do nothing to meet the needs of workers and people, here in the UK or globally. Something well understood by the former Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards committee in developing their Alternative Corporate plan for socially useful production in the 1970’s.

The GMB notion, misleadingly entitled economic recovery and manufacturing jobs, is an agenda for warmongering and nuclear weapons

WHILE THE IDEAS of worker’s plans as espoused by the Lucas shop stewards have gained some traction in recent times across the labour and climate movements, unfortunately some industrial unions are still pinning job creation plans to the mast of defence spending. The GMB motion to be debated at the postponed TUC Congress in October under the misleading title of “economic recovery and manufacturing jobs”, is an agenda for warmongering and nuclear weapons, taking us in completely the wrong direction.

Contrary to what the motion says, a lack of investment in defence spending is not the reason for our lack of funding in our public services. The proposals in this motion would further reduce vital monies for these as well as investment in renewable energy, urgently needed retrofit and insulation of our homes and, essentially the creation of many more jobs including in the defence ‘company’ towns of Barrow.

WE HAVE JUST SEEN devastating of floods in Pakistan, said to be one of the “worst climate change-induced catastrophes ever recorded globally”. Pakistan contributes less than 1% to global greenhouse gas emissions, and rightly this ‘event’ has refocused debate on the responsibility of the global north around reparations and loss and damage.

However, Pakistan is also a heavy IMF indebted nation and nuclear weapons state.  None of which helped avert this recent catastrophe or will assist in the post flooding crisis of food shortages, displacement, destruction of livelihoods and health risks.

IF THE GMB MOTION PASSES at the TUC, this will be a catastrophic failure of the labour movement towards the global south. To show true solidarity with our sisters and brothers across the world, it’s time we reassessed our own transition. This includes support for debt cancellation, and a programme of global public investment in socially useful production, rather than collaborating in more weapons of mass destruction.

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Sam Mason’s climate blog

Samantha Mason is a member of the Labour CND committee and a well-known climate and just transition activist. This is the first of her climate blog for us, putting nuclear back into the climate equation.

Nuclear power is no solution to our energy crisis

The nuclear industry is losing no time in using the current energy and related cost of living crisis to bolster its position as a ‘silver bullet’ for the climate crisis. A contested technology in the transition to decarbonised power, it divides trade unions and labour movement more widely, and it isn’t entirely settled in the climate movement.

Nuclear power generation has been declining globally, and as recently as 2019, the International Energy Agency whilst supporting nuclear in the energy mix, was questioning its future.  Even as recent as 2006, the then Sustainable Development Commission didn’t see nuclear as part of the future energy mix.  So why the resurgence now?

At the United Nations COP26 climate talks in Glasgow last year, on the one hand the nuclear industry was crying foul that they had been omitted from the talks, and opportunity to put their case to the public as a grossly misunderstood industry. On the other side, there was a clear presence of the nuclear industry with several interventions including a letter signed by trade union leaders stating that the “world needs much more clean, reliable and affordable energy, and our members need secure, quality employment. Nuclear delivers both, and that’s why we need more nuclear.”

Clearly the challenge of decarbonising the power sector, and linked to it industry, transport and agriculture, is enormous as we seek to ‘electrify everything’ in a rapidly diminishing timeframe to have any chance of staying within the 1.5 degrees of global heating by the end of the century. This includes serious technical and resource questions before we even get to think of the economic and social questions of transition, and notably jobs.

But as our climate doomsday clock gets closer to midnight, its time we really put this debate to bed, and focus on developing a plan that coordinates across the whole economy and energy system. This includes understanding what we need energy for.

Firstly, there is nothing misunderstood about the nuclear industry.  It’s an old industry therefore the arguments on safety, length of construction time and cost overruns, waste disposal is well evidenced and understood, globally. 

It is expensive energy. Hinkley Point C is billed as the most expensive power plant in the world and locks UK consumers into “a risky and expensive project with uncertain strategic and economic benefit”. With difficulties in financing ‘new’ nuclear, the Nuclear Energy (Financing) bill which provides for ‘regulated asset based’ financing will impose all the risk onto consumers in England. A deal it’s recognised will push more people into fuel poverty.

Proponents of nuclear power argue the need for baseload power and its low carbon status. However interestingly one of the arguments against new nuclear by the SDC in 2006 was its inflexibility and applying a “big-bang [nuclear] fix” would undermine efforts to develop renewable power generation and energy efficiency measures.  Today we see this too with the proposal for new nuclear techno fixes such as Small Modular Reactors or the elusive quest for nuclear fusion.

There is no denial that trade unions should fight for the jobs of their members across the industries and sectors they represent.  But we also need to be visionaries. For an industry in decline, the skills of its current and future workers can be applied to the energy transition, and other work related to decarbonisation through a process of Just Transition.  The construction workers, building trades and pipe fitters are still needed.  More specialist roles which require particular nuclear science knowledge will not go away given the long legacy costs of nuclear power around decommissioning and waste. There is plenty of work to be done and the nuclear sector has been no less immune by the attacks on workers agreements as other sectors.

It is here that perhaps we get to understand why this renaissance for nuclear power and why we also have to question what this energy is for.  The need for a civilian sector to support a nuclear defence program is clear, and as outlined in the UK Government’s Nuclear Sector Deal. Research by academics at the university of Sussex provide some of the most compelling evidence on this.  And certainly the UK government’s increasing posturing around nuclear weapons supports this.

Finally, no energy solution can be assessed outside a framework of justice – for communities faced with uranium mining, and for workers who have been exposed to serious health risks.  And then there is wider justice for the victims of the nuclear industry that date to its origins from the development of nuclear weapons.

At the COP last year, we heard the harrowing reality for small island states and other climate vulnerable communities who have done least to contribute to climate change. This includes pacific island nations that have already suffered the horrors as testing grounds for the UK’s and US nuclear weapons.

If we want real justice, and a future for everyone on this planet, it’s time we came clean and ended our love affair with the atom. Nuclear power won’t solve any of the crises we are currently facing, and as it stands, is a deterrent to achieving a democratic and publicly owned energy transition that we urgently need.