Showing posts with label environmental issue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environmental issue. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre  ☠ Martin McAllister came into Crumlin Road prison in 1974. 

Earlier the same year had had escaped from Portlaoise Prison after 19 IRA prisoners blasted the walls and dispersed quickly beyond the long arm of Paddy Cooney's rule of law enforcement. Housed in the Crum at the time we were envious of their success.

Martin's freedom was to be short lived. Six weeks after his escape he was shot and captured during a gun battle with the British Army in South Armagh from where he hailed. After a spell in Musgrave Park Military Hospital he was shunted off to join us within the gloomy architecture of the Crum. As well as being an accomplished IRA volunteer Martin was also a talented sessions musician. He could strum both a rifle trigger and a guitar string. 

After the burning of Long Kesh in October of 1974 and the subsequent riot in the Crum, Martin embarked on a hunger strike and later a hunger and thirst strike in a push back against harsh measures introduced by the jail governor who would go on to manage the H Blocks during the blanket protest and hunger strikes. 

Sentenced to ten years, Martin was moved to the cages of Long Kesh. On the forced departure of the then camp O/C, Brendan Hughes in January 1978 - on trumped up charges - to the H Blocks where he went on to lead the Blanket protest, Martin assumed the command of the republican prisoners in the cages. For the six months that I spent under his leadership before I too ended up in the H Blocks, he was a capable and firm O/C who got the job done.

He left the Kesh in 1979 on completion of his sentence and, if memory is not deceiving me, he was extradited to Dublin to face trial for the Portlaoise escape. I hadn't seen him for years but when in the RVH about 15 years ago for a minor operation, on discovering he was in the same complex I strolled down to his ward and paid him a visit. 

In recent years Martin took to campaigning on environmental issues, protecting, as he saw it, the folk of South Armagh and beyond from harm.  Given the serious injuries he had sustained from a body external to the community it was particularly galling to learn that he had again been badly hurt, this time by someone internal to the community. His assailant has been described in the media as a millionaire suspected of being a fuel smuggler. The attack left him "with life-changing injuries, including impaired eyesight and a haematoma on his brain." He also sustained numerous broken bones in his facial region. After beating him unconscious in front of his wife, his assailant "kicked, punched and repeatedly slammed a car door on the hands of his victim, who was unable to defend himself." 

One of the issues Martin had campaigned against was the wash from dodgy diesel polluting the environment. He said he felt the reason behind the attack on him was because he “stood against the dumping of diesel sludge”. In his evidence to a Dublin court he claimed he was assaulted because he had challenged his assailment Eugene Hanratty Snr, about allegations of diesel sludge dumping, and that in 2010 he had raised the issue in Crossmaglen with then-PSNI chief constable, Matt Baggott, telling the court that this made him "very unpopular with certain people". He explained:

I am lucky to be alive. If my wife Mary hadn’t been with me that day, which she wouldn’t usually be, I don’t think I would have survived. He opened the car door and began to hit me over the head with something. I passed out ... Then he dragged me from the car and I came around briefly. He was hitting me with his fists and then gave me what I can only describe as a penalty kick to the head before I passed out again. He then proceeded to dance on my hands and arms ... I remember very little but I am still living with the medical consequences to this day. Witnessing the attack had a big impact on my wife Mary also.”

After a lengthy judicial process, frequently disrupted, his attacker was jailed for four years. Martin welcomed the verdict saying he had at last received justice. 

While never a cheerleader for people going to jail - a bias on my part - it would be impossible to keep a straight face while justifying a non-custodial sentence. Those seeking to protect the environment from the rich and their pollution, are themselves in need of protection from brutality.

 ⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

Justice Delayed But Not Denied

Noel Byrne ✒ My six grandchildren were born between 2006 and 2018.

If I am fortunate enough for my genes to continue in a diluted form through two more generations, my great great grandchildren will be living around the beginning of the next century. What sort of a world will they be born into? Will they be looking back and questioning how this generation destroyed the planet, their home? Will they be asking who stole their future?

When the historians at the beginning of the next century look back they will see that this generation was the first generation to become aware of the damage they were doing to the planet, and the fact that we ignored that knowledge. We stole the future!

Future generations must be protected, they are completely disadvantaged because they have no control over the decisions this generation makes which will eventually impact their lives. Their very existence may in fact be threatened.

We presently have the power to alter the human genome and to do so may completely change future generations without either their knowledge or consent. Their choices will be restricted by the decisions of their predecessors.

The destiny future generations face will be the result of choices made in the past.

In any civilized society we protect the incompetent and the infirm and ensure they are protected from those who might take advantage of them and either advertently or inadvertently exploit them. Future generations must also be protected in a similar manner. They need a proxy or an advocate for their cause.

Such an advocate would need to be done at a global level, such as by the United Nations.

We may be unable as a national group to lobby the government, but we can both as individual Humanist’s and as local groups lobby and canvass for the changes necessary to preserve the planet for future generations. We as Humanists have a responsibility to the unborn future generations. Future generations are not just an abstract concept. Future generations are real people just not yet born. Because they are unable to vote or lobby today or influence present policy-making, so it is crucially important for us to understand their needs. We must somehow heed the voices of the future generations. Among the things we might be able to do individually is to prevent any further deterioration of the environment, and where possible restore ecological balances and we also need to try and prevent any further destruction of the planets biological diversity.

Presently air, land and sea are being polluted. There is major planetary degradation. Population is increasing at an unsustainable rate, the arms trade is growing, nuclear weapons are being stored, species are becoming extinct on a daily basis, the balance of the biosphere and the ecosystem are being altered, consumerism is becoming more rampant and we are aware of all this. We get reports and information daily on the damage we are doing to ourselves and our planet and yet we continue. Why?

For a century now, science and technology have been used for personal, national and regional profit to the detriment of the planet, of many in society and to the unborn generations. It is a strange irony that science and technology, rather than liberating humanity, are now the greatest threat to our quality of life and that of future generations. Both laissez-faire capitalism and technology are gradually destroying us and the future generations. Neither are sustainable or equitable. As the most advanced terrestrial life form we have now become the agents of change on the planet. We now control evolution and have usurped nature. It needs however to be an ethical evolution. We have become very smart technologically, but not very wise.

We are aware today of the interrelatedness and interdependedness of reality and that nothing exists in isolation. Each decision, policy and action we take has far-reaching consequences that will be passed on to posterity. That fact should be foremost in each decision made, whether at a personal or governmental level.

The Earth’s resources are limited. They belong to all generations and species. No species, country or generation has an exclusive right to the Earth’s natural resources. To date they have been passed down generation by generation. We have grossly exploited them. We must stop. We have an obligation and a responsibility to pass them on to posterity in a good and if possible enhanced condition. With our wonderful science and technology we must surely have the potential to enhance rather than degrade the planet. We must stop our greed and regulate our consumption to share the planetary resources with future generations.

The choices our generation is making will determine the destiny of the future generations. Our deeds may in fact decide how many future generations there will be. Accordingly we need to be very careful of the choices we make and be in awe and aware of their potential consequences. We do not want to hand down a legacy of despair to future generations. 

⏩ Noel Byrne is a retired Civil Servant and a Humanist, with a principal interest in Philosophy, and a particular interest in Ethics and Morality.

My Great Great Grandchildren

People And Nature ✒ An 8-minute video from the Sheffield Festival of Debate.


Harpreet Kaur Paul 👫 Tom Baxter ðŸ‘¬ Simon Pirani talk about whether hydrogen can play a part in the transition away from fossil fuels, and why it is being pushed by companies who want to slow that transition down.

Hydrogen: Green Gas or Greenwash? - YouTube

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Hydrogen ➖ Green Gas Or Greenwash?

Simon Pirani As the UK prepares to host international climate negotiations in November, London’s local authority is pressing ahead with a £2 billion-plus climate-trashing tunnel project that is incompatible with decarbonisation.


The Greater London Authority’s Silvertown Tunnel, together with the government’s £27 billion motorway upgrade scheme, makes a mockery of the UK’s claim to be “leading the way” on tackling climate change.

The tunnel project also shows that climate hypocrisy is bipartisan: it’s the biggest spending decision this decade by Labour’s most powerful elected official, London mayor Sadiq Khan. Labour, like the Tories, talks “green” – while piling up the most frightful problems for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Anti-tunnel demonstrators in Greenwich, September 2019

The tunnel is deeply unpopular locally. The long list of opponents includes four local Labour MPs, four Labour-controlled local councils, eight Constituency Labour parties and 20 Labour branches, the Greens and Liberal Democrats in London, dozens of community, trade union and environmental organisations, groups of doctors and teachers, and a long list of researchers of climate science, air pollution and transport policy.

The tunnel, a terrible idea long before Covid-19, looks even worse now: long-term transport projections are being rewritten and Transport for London desperately needs financial and management resources for other things. But the Mayor and other GLA officials have resisted calls for a review tooth-and-nail.

Download this whole article as a PDF here.

Here are six reasons why the tunnel destroys the GLA’s claim that it takes climate change seriously.

2. Building the tunnel, even before a single vehicle went through it, would cause plenty of carbon dioxide emissions.

Transport for London has estimated that the concrete and other materials used to build the tunnel would have 82,077 tonnes of embedded CO2 (i.e. CO2 emitted during the manufacture of those materials). That’s roughly what a Boeing 737-400 would produce in 7000 trips of 900+ kilometres.

Another Transport for London report put the embedded CO2 at 108,961 tonnes, and emissions during construction (including the removal and transportation of 42.5 million tonnes of waste) at another 44,318 tonnes. (See endnote for sources.) But no complete life-cycle analysis has been done. And no account taken of the construction of auxiliary roads, lorry parks and other infrastructure.

Moreover, all these emissions would only be a small part of the tunnel’s climate impact. Far greater damage would be done by emissions from the extra traffic produced by the expansion of the road network.

2. More roads produce more traffic – and this tunnel would too. And that would mean more CO2 emissions, when the climate emergency requires that they be cut, fast.

It’s not only common sense that building more roads produces more traffic, it has also been proven by decades of transport research, including reports commissioned by the UK government in 1994, 1998 and 2018.

The GLA claims, falsely, that a road toll on the Silvertown tunnel, and the Blackwall tunnel nearby, would prevent extra traffic. The Stop the Silvertown Tunnel Coalition has produced abundant evidence (e.g. in a recent letter and in this report) that it would not. A toll on the next crossing down the Thames, at Dartford, has not stopped traffic far exceeding the planned capacity.

What counts, after all, is not the number of cars using a particular stretch of road, but the inexorable increase in the number of cars – and in this case, HGVs – provided for by the inexorable expansion of the road network.

The modelling conducted for the tunnel project perversely minimised the induced traffic effect – in particular, by assuming that the total number of trips across the Thames would not be changed by a new tunnel. The Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition sounded the alarm on that, most recently, to the London Assembly oversight committee in February. (See 9 February letter here.) No answer from them, yet.

The GLA’s plans to tame traffic lag behind the UK government’s plans, which in turn lag behind what is needed, Jaise Kuriakose of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research explained on a recent webinar about the tunnel. (Watch here, starting at 12 minutes).

The level of carbon emissions allowed in the GLA’s pathway “exceeds that in the UK government net-zero pathway, let alone a Paris-compliant target”, Kuriakose said.

Lots of research shows that demand reduction – in this case, less transport – is important for near-term reductions in emissions, because the new technologies [e.g. electric vehicles] will take time to implement.

Joanna Haigh, Distinguished Research Fellow at Imperial College London, also spoke at the webinar, pointing out that while UK emissions as a whole have fallen over the last 30 years, those from transport have gone up.

National and local governments are key determinants of whether people choose to drive or to use public transport, she said. “If government and local authorities make it easier for people to go on public transport, that is what they will do.”

3. Underlying the transport problem is a climate policy problem. The GLA climate targets fall far short of what is needed to tackle dangerous global warming. While the climate emergency requires actions above and beyond those targets, the tunnel would go in the opposite direction.

The carbon budgets (i.e. the amounts of carbon that can be pumped into the atmosphere) that the GLA allows itself are far greater than the ones worked out by the Tyndall Centre, with a view to London contributing to the 1.5 degree target. The Tyndall calculations are part of a project to help UK local authorities with decarbonisation.

The yawning gap between what the Tyndall Centre scientists say is needed, and what the GLA is aiming at – in trajectories published in 2018, in the Zero Carbon London document – is shown on this graph, put together for the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition.

The Tyndall Centre’s carbon budgets imply that emissions in London need to fall by about 12% per year during the 2020s. The GLA is only aiming at 5%.

The third, grey, line on the graph is perhaps the most frightening of all. It shows the operational assumptions about transport sector emissions that managers in Transport for London are working with.

They expect carbon emissions from transport to fall by less than one tenth between 2012 and 2036, whether or not the Silvertown tunnel is built. (The graph, as a downloadable file with full explanatory notes, is here.)

This suggests that not only are the GLA plans on emissions far behind what is necessary, but also that no effort has been made to reconcile those plans with what transport managers are doing on the ground.

Indeed the London Transport Strategy includes an incredibly unambitious target for reducing traffic: to cut the number of vehicle-kilometres driven in the capital by just 10-15% by 2040. How does that fit with cutting carbon emissions by 5% each year (as the GLA claims to want to do), let alone by 12% (as the Tyndall centre proposes)? No-one knows.

4. This is not just about London. It’s part of a wider problem: the UK’s climate targets are a long way from what is needed.

When it comes to tackling dangerous global warming, and changing the transport system to do so, there is little difference between the Labour-controlled GLA and the Tory government. Both claim to lead the world on climate; both are investing heavily in carbon-intensive road networks.

London’s Silvertown project goes hand-in-hand with the government’s Road Investment Strategy, under which £27.4 billion will be spent on expanding the Strategic Roads Network. If this goes ahead, carbon emissions from the transport sector (currently 28% of the UK total) will most likely go up, in the next critical few years, when they need to fall sharply.

Transport for Quality of Life estimates that the investment programme “will make carbon emissions from the Strategic Roads Network go up, by about 20 million tonnes of CO2, during a period [2021-32] when we need to make them go down, by about 167 mt CO2”. The Transport Action Network is challenging the whole thing in court.

At UK level, as in London, the road-centred transport strategy – along with other relevant policies (energy sector, housing, and so on) – falls short of decarbonisation targets. At UK level, as in London, those targets themselves are way behind what climate scientists say needs to be done.

Scientists at the Tyndall centre last year published a key paper on how the UK’s and Sweden’s climate targets fall short, entitled A Factor of Two.

They argued that decarbonisation needs to move at least twice as fast as implied by the Climate Change Committee five-year carbon budgets – targets that the CCC says the government is, in any case, on course to miss.

The authoritative Climate Action Tracker team, who work the numbers out differently, also deem the UK’s targets, and current policies, as “inadequate” to meet the goal, mentioned in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level.

5. The GLA and the UK government ignore scientists’ findings that existing fossil-fuel infrastructure (including roads and tunnels) endangers the goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels – a powerful reason not to build any more.

Emissions from existing fossil-fuel-burning infrastructure already “represent more than the entire [global] carbon budget that remains”, if warming is to be limited to 1.5 degrees, Dan Tong and his colleagues wrote in 2019.

They were following up on a pioneering paper by Steven Davis and colleagues, published in 2010, which estimated that the infrastructure that then existed was most likely correlated with a 1.3 degree temperature rise.

In the decade since that paper was written, the sale of fossil-fuelled cars has ballooned (in rich countries especially), along with air travel, coal-fired electricity generation and all the rest. The world’s fleet of SUVs has swelled from 50 million to more than 280 million.

Both of these research papers only surveyed devices that directly emit CO2: in the transport sector, that means cars, trucks and planes. But Davis and his colleagues highlighted the role of other “substantial” infrastructure that “produces and facilitates use of these devices”, for example “factories that produce internal combustion engines, highway networks dotted with gasoline refueling stations, and oil refineries all promote the continuation of oil-based road transport emissions”.

The highway networks and tunnels so fiercely championed by UK politicians could help to take global temperature soaring past the 1.5 degree level.

6. Because climate science and transport research shouts “stop this tunnel” so loudly, the GLA have resorted to deception and distortion to justify the project.

Just as Tory cabinet ministers paved the way for mass coronavirus infections last year, while falsely claiming to “follow the science”, so both Tory and Labour politicians are adding to the global warming disaster while claiming to adhere to “Paris-compliant carbon targets”.

The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, claimed in a letter to anti-tunnel campaigners that London’s carbon reduction pathway is “in line with […] IPCC trajectories that are consistent with a limited probability of overshooting 1.5C warming”. (Details in the Stop Digging report, page 15.) The graph above shows that that is just not true.

When challenged on the detail by campaigners, London’s deputy mayor for transport, Heidi Alexander, has repeatedly claimed not only that the tunnel project is compatible with tackling climate change, but e.g. that it is essentially a public transport project, or that “the terms of the Development Consent Order ensure that traffic congestion and pollution wouldn’t get worse” if the tunnel was built. Campaigners have countered the tide of misinformation with fact sheets, available here and here.

In a recent letter to residents who oppose the tunnel, Alexander cynically compared the projected emissions from building it (about 153,000 tonnes of CO2, see point 1 above), with a possible future reduction in emissions from electrifying London’s bus fleet (500,000 tonnes of CO2 per year). This is shameful obfuscation. Firstly, because the emissions from construction would be far smaller than those from extra traffic – which Alexander and her colleagues have stubbornly refused to quantify. Second, because potential future emission cuts from electrification are no substitute for urgent cuts needed in this decade. And third, because those cuts can be achieved without building any tunnels, and will no doubt be needed anyway to bridge London’s monstrous emissions gap.

South-east London’s famed Bansheees, demonstrating
against the Silvertown tunnel, August 2020

As opposition to the tunnel has raged through the Labour party in London, Alexander has made an especially bizarre claim that the project has been “independently assessed” by the C40 alliance of city governments “to be in line with the advice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the level of carbon emission reduction required to put us on track to staying within 1.5degC global warming”.

C40 has actually done nothing of the sort. Rather, its chief executive, Mark Watts, sent a letter to mayor Khan, confirming that London’s climate policies conform with a check-list of C40 recommendations (the Climate Action Planning Framework (CAPF)).

I have sent a string of emails to Watts about this. The latest said: 

Having studied the CAPF and associated documents, we [in the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition] presume that its purpose was to give guidance to city administrations on how to step up their efforts to decarbonise. We presume the CAPF was not intended to be used by those administrations to justify carbon-heavy projects that will defeat the decarbonisation objectives set out in documents. But this is precisely how the GLA is using the CAPF.

I’ve had no answer, from even the most menial flunky in the lavishly-funded C40 organisation. (If anyone there is reading this, please ask your boss to get in touch.)

Not only are leading Labour politicians in London trying to greenwash a climate-trashing road project, but they are also using C40 for the same purpose. They are corroding democracy, to defend the indefensible.

The conclusions are that, just as the political hostility to scientific research claimed tens of thousands of lives in the coronavirus pandemic last year, so the longer-term political resistance to the implications of climate science will produce damaging and dangerous results. The ruinous refusal to move away from fossil-fuel-heavy economic growth – and, in this case, car-based urban transport systems – takes longer than the denial of coronavirus science to work its way through to deaths and destruction, but it does do so.

Senior Labour politicians show the same willingness as the Tories to deceive and cheat, rather than abandon fossil-fuel-heavy policies. We will face a crescendo of this deception and cheating in the run-up to the climate talks in Glasgow in November, and we need to respond forcefully.

The GLA clearly has no social licence to go ahead with the Silvertown Tunnel, any more than the government has a social licence to start opening new coal mines. If ever there was a case for a campaign of civil disobedience, this is it.
 
Download this whole article as a PDF here.

The Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition

Electric cars are no panacea. The government’s focus on them is a sham – People & Nature, 23 February

Note. Materials and construction emissions, see TfL Silvertown Tunnel Environment Statement, section 13.4 and 13.7, and Silvertown Tunnel Energy & Carbon Statement, section 5.3.18.

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There’s Still Time To Stop The Climate-Trashing Silvertown Tunnel

People And Nature ✒ The UK government has put electric cars at the centre of its disastrous climate strategy, which doesn’t even aim for half the needed greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

Simon Pirani

The focus on electric cars – which goes together with a gigantic £27 billion road-building programme – is opposed by researchers of climate science, transport policy, engineering and urban planning. Their advice has in practice been ignored.

The Labour leadership is happy with the electric cars narrative, leaving researchers and campaigners outside parliament to point out that electrification, without an immediate, giant shift towards public transport, cycling and walking – and away from individually-owned cars – will never come close to decarbonising transport at any meaningful pace.

The numbers need to go down

In the run-up to the international climate talks in Glasgow in November, it is vital that the government’s cynical PR strategy is unmasked.

Support for electric cars was a highlight of the government’s ten-point plan for a “green industrial revolution”, announced in November. Sales of new petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2030 – that is, after the most vital decade for action on climate has already passed.

The plan includes a promise of about £2.8 billion to subsidise manufacture of, and infrastructure for, electric cars – just over one-tenth of the cost of the £27 billion national road-building programme. (That, transport researchers say, will add 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) to the atmosphere where a 167 million tonne reduction is needed).

Labour called only for a tweak to the government’s plan – bringing forward the ban on hybrid vehicles from 2035 to 2030. Even Greenpeace said the electric car policy was the “star of the show”, needing only more support for delivery.

The seductive logic, shared across the political spectrum, is that the cost of electric cars will soon fall fast enough that motorists will snap them up.

The fact that electric cars are far from “zero carbon” gets lost. (See Note 1 below.) The fact that, if we don’t want global temperatures to go more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, emissions will have to be cut at more than twice the rate the government intends, gets lost too. (See Note 2.)

The voices of researchers who actually study the role of transport systems in the climate crisis need to be amplified.

Why the ten point plan makes no sense

Although the 2030 phase out of petrol and diesel cars is welcome, “in reality it is a delaying tactic”, argued climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Dan Calverley in response to the ten-point plan. “Climate change requires immediate action, not a promise for action in ten years.”

The plan passes the buck of mitigating climate change to another government, several electoral cycles down the line. More importantly, it obliges our children to remove colossal quantities of (our) carbon directly from the atmosphere, or attempt to live with the consequences of dangerous climate change. […]

Far from being a ‘green revolution’, this is simply business as usual, where the predict-and-provide paradigm of car ownership and road building go hand in hand.

That last point was echoed by Nick Eyre of the Centre for Research on Energy Demand Solutions, a prominent UK energy policy researcher. The government plan is “very far from a coherent strategy”, he wrote.

It “reads like a shopping list of interesting technologies that might be grafted on to the existing energy system” – but “fails to recognise the more fundamental needs for change and links to other policy areas”.

The plan mentions £9.2 billion for public transport, cycling and walking – but “on closer inspection, none of this is new money”, Eyre pointed out. So that would just put pressure on austerity-damaged local councils … while the £27 billion road building plan stays in place – albeit under legal challenge.

For transport researchers, the electric-car-focused plan was proof of government indifference to their calls for integrated transport policy that reduces the number of car journeys, and the speed and number of cars, and boosts public transport, cycling and walking.

“If we really were committed to reducing climate-damaging carbon emissions […] we would cancel road building and switch all the funding to world-best joined up thinking about transport”, wrote John Whitelegg of the Foundation for Integrated Transport.

But of course the government is not really committed, at all. And Whitelegg pointed to one reason why … car culture, that is such a key element of 21st century capitalism:

The prioritisation of cars goes deeper. We allocate huge amounts of space to cars that could very easily be used for green space, affordable housing, trees and parks. We encourage anti-social, unpleasant pavement parking in residential areas so that children and other pedestrians have to walk in the middle of the road. There is no space for anyone with a pushchair or wheel chair. The car takes up space that belongs to the people and this is ignored by councils and central government.

University-based transport researchers have churned out dozens of articles, over years, explaining ways of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

A recent one highlighted that in order to meet the climate targets implied in the 2015 Paris agreement, the UK would need, first, to ban hybrid cars (that can run on either petrol or electricity) as well as petrol and diesel ones, and, second, support “lifestyle and social change” that would alter the nature of journeys people need or want to make, and encourage non-car ways of making them:

Only the earlier phase-outs [of fossil-fuel-heavy vehicles] combined with lower demand for mobility and car ownership would make significant contributions to an emissions pathway that is both Paris-compliant [i.e. hits the targets set out at the international climate talks in Paris in 2015] and meets legislated urban air quality limits.

Engineering researchers come to similar conclusions via a different route. They reason that the best way to slash fuel use quickly – not in ten years’ time – is to cut the total weight of cars on the road.

Researchers at Cambridge published analysis showing that “fostering vehicle weight reduction” could save more emissions by 2050 than current policies that focus on electrification – unless there is “an extreme decarbonisation” of the UK’s electricity grid, e.g. more than 50%.

Simple. Obvious. But resisted tooth and nail by motor manufacturers.

Thanks in large part to those companies, the average weight of cars in Europe has risen from 1320 kg in 2005 – when they already knew fine well about global warming – to more than 1400 kg now.

Cars on average carry 1.8 people, who weigh on average about one-twelfth of that … “so almost all petrol is used to move the car, not the people”, says the Absolute Zero report, which proposes how the UK could go to zero carbon with current technologies.

The authors’ scenarios imply that the UK could get to a place where non-fossil electricity generation is three times the current level, and transport without fossil fuels uses 60% of the energy it uses now. And that would mean:

Either vehicles are modified – with regenerative braking, reduced drag and rolling resistance (better tyres), and weight reductions, or we can choose to use them less – through ride-sharing, better freight management or an overall reduction in distance travelled.

Simple. Obvious. And because the motor manufacturers won’t hear of it, the government keeps away from it.

Changing transport systems, so that we can live more happily with fewer vehicle-kilometres, is not just about cars, or even just the roads and parking spaces. It is also about the design and layout of the cities in which we live.

Volkswagen’s new ID.4, an electric SUV. Not good for decarbonising

Current transport and land use planning practice is “fundamentally unsustainable” at a time of climate emergency, warned a report last month by the Royal Town Planning Institute (hardly a bunch of rebellious eco-warriors).

It called for urban planning to be turned upside down to avoid locking-in “car dependent lifestyles”.

The report proposed a four-step pathway. The fourth step is “fuel switching”, i.e. electrification of transport.

But before that, the report urged, (i) “all new development” has to be “planned, designed and delivered to achieve net zero transport emissions”; (ii) demand for transport should be reduced “through local living”, i.e. remaking cities so that necessities (schools, doctors, shops, and so on) are within walking distance; and (iii) government should encourage a shift from private vehicles to walking, cycling and public transport.

Simple. Obvious. But of no interest to the property developers who rule the roost in urban planning.

Researchers vs politicians

Since policy is influenced so profoundly by the relations of wealth and power in society – by the motor manufacturers and property developers, by car culture –researchers who seek to advise government sometimes wonder whether they are hitting their heads against a brick wall.

Jillian Anable, one of the UK’s foremost transport specialists, vented her frustration at the University Transport Studies Group conference in 2019. “We are letting more and more water on board our Titanic, while our implements to bale ourselves out are getting increasingly ineffectual”, she said.

Three decades into the climate crisis, the transport sector is 98% dependent on fossil fuels, she reminded her colleagues.

“We need a profoundly more challenging mitigation agenda than the academic community has countenanced to date”, she argued. “We have to expose the gap between current measures and what needs to happen.” To “produce the knowledge we need to tell the truth”, research needs to go further, to “challenge the dominant frame held by policymakers” of “neoclassical engineering and microeconomic approaches”.

By implication at least, this call to go further was answered by Giulio Mattioli and his colleagues in an article published last year that highlighted five key elements of the “car-dependent transport system”: (i) the automotive industry; (ii) provision of car infrastructure; (iii) the political economy of urban sprawl; (iv) the provision (and, I would say, lack of provision) of public transport; and (v) cultures of car consumption.

This thorough analysis of the social and economic drivers obstructing decarbonisation concludes that:

Alternatives to car-dependent transport systems will have to be civic-minded, strategically coordinated for the public good […] Such alternatives can not benefit from a purported technocratic or apolitical presentation: instead, they should be argued for on the firm grounds of public coordination and delivery of public goods for all, while continually exposing the hidden workings of car-dependent transport systems.

This goes way beyond the framework of advising government that constrains so much work.

It underlines that the rift between research and politics – which has been so dramatically exposed in the last year with respect to the coronavirus – runs deep when it comes to climate change.

Where’s the opposition?

In the UK, this gulf between rational thinking and politics is deepened by the Labour Party’s crisis. There is no functioning political opposition to the dysfunctional government.

Labour’s wimpish response to the government’s ten-point plan was just a symptom. Its own muddled climate policy is tied to discredited notions of pumping up “economic growth”. In fact the “green industrial revolution” slogan was coined by Labour and then stolen from it, and made infinitely more vacuous, by Boris Johnson and his corrupt cronies.

The gap between words and actions runs through Labour’s climate policies as it does the government’s. London mayor Sadiq Khan, arguably Labour’s most powerful elected politician, talks about tackling climate change – but his biggest spending decision has been to go ahead with the £2 billion Silvertown Tunnel project, which would help ensure there is more traffic in the coming decades, when it’s so vital that there is less.

Protest in London against the proposed Silvertown Tunnel

The Labour-controlled Greater London Authority have simply ignored the reality that more roads produce more traffic, and defended the tunnel with the false argument – identical to the government’s – that electrification will make traffic “zero carbon”.

As campaigners in London (me included) have shown, the tunnel project is incompatible with London’s own emissions reductions targets, let alone those implied by the Paris climate conference.

How to turn the tide

So while politicians enthuse about electric cars, and motor manufacturers use them as greenwash, all the carbon emissions reductions from electric car use are being wiped out by the relentless rise in SUV use.

In 2020, a global reduction of oil use of about 2 million tonnes (40,000 barrels a day), achieved by people switching to electric cars, was “completely cancelled out by the growth in SUV sales over the same period”, research published last month by the International Energy Agency (IEA) showed.

While more than 3 million electric and hybrid vehicles were sold in 2020, SUV sales fell – but only to about 27 million, bringing the world’s total SUV fleet to more than 280 million, up from less than 50 million in 2010.

And the SUVs made a noticeable contribution to climate change. Energy-related greenhouse gas emissions fell by about 7% in 2020, across all the categories the IEA tracks … except those from SUVs, which edged up by 0.5%.

What’s more, the electric vehicles being sold are getting larger and heavier, on average, earlier IEA research showed.

Clearly, meaningful action to tackle climate change and make city life better means cutting the total number of cars on the road.

It means communities fighting for investment in cheap and free public transport and infrastructure for cycling, walking and genuinely energy-saving transport modes such as electric scooters. It means combating the influence of motor manufacturers and the car culture on which they thrive.

It means social and labour movements making common cause with workers in the motor industry, to seek ways to use their skills, without producing climate-wrecking gas guzzlers – as is starting to happen with aviation workers.

And it means recognising that electric cars – which, over the long term, can combine with fossil-free electricity generation as a means of transport – are not a short- or medium term fix for the climate emergency.

Note 1. Why EVs are not zero-emission

➤ Calling electric vehicles (EVs) “zero emission” is meaningless propaganda. Greenhouse gases are emitted when the car and battery are manufactured, and very often from the power stations that produce the electricity. There are heated controversies about EVs’ lifecycle emissions, measured in grams per kilometre travelled (g/kw), compared to petrol and diesel cars. The bottom line of a recent study by Carbon Brief was that EVs in Europe are usually more than twice as carbon-efficient (i.e. twice as “clean”) as petrol and diesel cars, depending on the make and where the battery is produced. That analysis cast doubt on a headline-grabbing study by the IFO institute in Germany, which warned that EVs would “barely help to cut emissions”. Over time, EVs have the potential to improve carbon efficiency still further, compared to petrol cars, with better batteries and lower-carbon electricity.

➤ Carbon Brief found that, in the EU, a Nissan Leaf used half the carbon emissions of an average petrol car on a lifecycle basis. Half is not “zero”.

➤ Much depends on how the electricity is produced. In Paraguay or Iceland, where it comes from hydropower, the carbon “cost” of an EV is only that of making the car and battery. But in China or India, where most electricity is produced from coal and EV markets are growing rapidly, most EVs will do worse than comparable petrol cars in greenhouse gas terms. (This is one of many studies with numbers.)

➤ Lifecycle assessments do not include emissions from building and maintaining roads and parking spaces, and the knock-on effect of discouraging non- and low-carbon forms of transport. (The numbers are complex. See Transport for Quality of Life’s work on the UK to get an idea.)

➤ EV purchases do not necessarily mean that buyers are giving up petrol cars. Research from Norway, which has gone furthest in electrifying transport, shows that the availability of EVs has increased the proportion of families who own more than one car, and decreased the proportion that use public transport to commute.

➤ Plug-in hybrid cars (PHEVs), often counted as “low emission”, are being given low emission values from tests, but their real-world emissions are on average two-and-a-half times higher, a briefing by Transport & Environment reports. In 2017 in the UK, researchers fumed, a quarter of all plug-in cars registered were “an SUV in the form of a PHEV and one of the most polluting cars on the road”.

➤ Apart from the carbon cost, EVs use metals, in particular lithium, that are mined in the global south under conditions that heap suffering on the people that live there. The huge expansion of EV manufacture envisaged by car companies implies a disastrous assault on those people. Some of the implications were examined by Jamie Morgan, an economist, in this article.

Note 2: Policies lag behind carbon budgets, which lag behind reality

Transport is the UK economic sector that accounts for the most greenhouse gas emissions (in 2019, 113 MtCO2e, 22% of the total). A report commissioned by the Climate Change Committee (CCC), a public body, said in December last year that transport emissions would have to be cut by 70% by the mid 2030s, for the government to meet its own climate targets.

These targets are expressed as “carbon budgets” covering five-year periods. The CCC warns that the government is unlikely to meet them: in the jargon, it is “off track” for the fourth (2023-27) and fifth (2028-32) carbon budgets.

In a letter sent to the government in October 2018, the CCC chair, Lord Deben, specified just how far off track. In 2030, when the CCC wants transport emissions down to around 68 MtCO2e/year, it a projected a 14 MtCO2e/year shortfall due to a “policy gap”, and a further 42 MtCO2e/year “at risk due to lack of firm policies and measures or those with delivery risks”.

In plain language: if the government does not get a grip (and there’s no sign of that, more than two years later), transport emissions could be more or less unchanged by 2030.

All that sounds bad enough. Worse still, climate scientists insist that the “carbon budgets”, on which government and CCC agree, would not even deliver half the necessary emissions cuts.

A key research paper that takes the scientific conclusions of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, and applies the principle that rich countries should bear more of the burden (“common but differentiated responsibility”, in the jargon), gives the UK a carbon budget of 3700 MtCO2e for the whole 21st century – compared to the 9000 MtCO2e implied by the government’s targets.

The paper, by Kevin Anderson and others, assumes – unlike the government – that negative emissions technologies will play no substantial part in the next few decades. That means, the authors say, that the UK needs, starting now, to cut emissions by more than 10% per year – as opposed to the 5.1% implied by government targets.

The paper’s assumptions are very modest. That 3700 MtCO2e budget for the UK is based on an assumed global budget, for the 21st century, of 900 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e). A briefing paper by the ecological economist Tim Jackson, with a slightly different angle on the IPCC’s numbers, says the UK’s budget is 2500 MtCO2e, and the global budget 420 GtCO2e. It all depends on how much risk of going how far above 1.5 degrees higher than pre-industrial times you think makes sense.

In my view, caution is desirable with all these numbers, because discussion of them often implicitly assumes that politicians and diplomats at the climate negotiations have a right and duty to rule on these matters. I don’t think that, but I do think the science in the IPCC reports is a good place to start in working out our view on emissions cuts. But the government obviously does not. 

⏭ Keep up with People And Nature.  Follow People & Nature on twitter … instagram … telegram … or whatsapp. Or email peoplenature[at]yahoo.com, and you will be sent updates. 

Electric Cars Are No Panacea ➖ The Government’s Focus On Them Is A Sham

People And NatureA plan to pipe hydrogen, instead of natural gas, to millions of UK households is being pushed hard by the fossil fuel industry. 

Gabriel Levy

It sounds “green” – but could wreck efforts to make homes truly zero carbon, using insulation and electric heat pumps.

Oil and gas companies support switching the gas grid to hydrogen, as a survival option in case of decarbonisation, as hydrogen is usually fabricated from gas.

But the hydrogen strategy cuts across the approach recommended for years by housing policy wonks and architects: to use insulation to slash the amount of heat needed, and install electric pumps (which work like fridges in reverse).

The gas grid: better to replace it with heat pumps.
Photo by Ran-Allen / Creative Commons

Leeds Trades Union Council (TUC) last month launched a campaign in favour of retrofitting homes with high-quality insulation and heat pumps.

It’s an issue many people can unite around – those fighting for better housing and tenants’ rights, campaigners against fuel poverty, trades unionists fighting building industry cuts, and all of us who want to tackle climate change.

And there’s a choice to be made we cannot avoid.

If the gas grid is switched to hydrogen, that will block for good the electrification-and insulation approach, that heats homes better, more cheaply, with technology that we know works, and is truly zero-carbon. We cannot have it both ways.

We will be locked into extra dependency on fossil fuels, instead of speeding the shift away from them.

That gas-to-hydrogen switch is being planned in north-east England by Northern Gas Networks (NGN): its H21 project would convert 3.7 million homes and businesses by 2035, and 15.7 million by 2050. NGN is asking the government to fund an engineering study for it.

This article is a guide to the debates and to more information. It covers:
hydrogen and its drawbacks:

  • whole system solutions: existing technologies to decarbonise heating
  • the government’s no-strategy strategy and how we could resist it; and
  • industry lobbying.
There is a short appendix with a non-technical guide to the technologies.

Hydrogen and its drawbacks

Hydrogen is touted as a “green” fuel internationally, because governments seek industry-friendly paths to decarbonisation, and oil and gas companies offer this false solution.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) last year published a report on hydrogen, which noted active support for it by the Chinese, Brazilian, Indian, Australian and many European governments.

In July this year, the European Commission published its “hydrogen strategy for a climate-neutral Europe”, which advocates state support for hydrogen to replace gas in industry and transport – but also mentions household heating as a possible use, as does the European Hydrogen Alliance’s declaration.

Much of this is based on a totally unproved assumption: that technology to produce zero-carbon hydrogen can be made to work at scale. That is a long way off, and may never happen.

There are two supposedly carbon-free types of hydrogen: “blue” hydrogen made from natural gas, from which the carbon is removed and stored; and “green” hydrogen made by electrolysing water. Neither has ever been used at large scale.

At the moment, about 70 million tonnes of hydrogen is produced per year globally, and 98% of it is “grey” hydrogen, made from natural gas … without carbon capture. So it emits a huge amount of greenhouse gases – almost as much as the aviation industry. (See below for more details on the technologies.)

Large-scale “blue” or “green” hydrogen production is far away for three types of reasons.

  1. Cost. The European Commission estimates that “blue” hydrogen would cost €2 a kilogramme at today’s prices, and “green” hydrogen €2.50-€5.50/kg, compared to €1.50/kg for existing “grey” hydrogen.
  2. Technology. “Blue” hydrogen needs carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that does not yet work at scale anywhere. Transporting hydrogen might not be the walk in the park that some companies claim, either, this presentation suggests.
  3. Resource use. “Green” hydrogen uses huge quantities of electricity and water.

Take the NGN project. It would by 2050 need 8 million tonnes of hydrogen per year, equivalent to 300 Terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity.

To supply that amount of “green” hydrogen, Friends of the Earth says, would need 140 Gigawatts (GW) of wind-powered electrolyser capacity – compared to a current total UK wind capacity of 22 GW (which supplies about one fifth of the UK’s electricity). Plus the same amount of water as is used by 1.2 million homes.

The Sun in hydrogen light … but on earth, the hydrogen
has to be released from compounds. Photo from the Science Museum

If “blue” hydrogen were used instead, 60 plants, as big as the world’s biggest, would have to be built … fitted with that CCS technology that is still in development.

I am not arguing that hydrogen – especially “green” hydrogen – could never be used, during and after the transition away from fossil fuels. But now, it is not a priority or a game-changer.

Today, most hydrogen is used in oil refining and fertiliser manufacture. Hopefully, much of this current use will disappear, along with fossil-fuelled industries. There may well be new uses, because low- or zero-carbon hydrogen might be the best substitute for fossil fuels e.g. to make steel. Hydrogen is also good for storing energy.

But why, in any sane world, would you start by searching for new ways to use hydrogen, as governments are trying to do now?

Why would you even think about using hydrogen to heat people’s homes – when technologies that work, that are already in use (retrofitting, electricity and heat pumps) could do the job better?

You wouldn’t.

Unless you were seeking ways of wringing the last few bits of profit out of oil and gas production.

Whole-systems solutions: existing technologies can decarbonise heating

There is nothing radical about proposing insulation and electric heat pumps to replace gas for households. Recent reports by the Institute for Public Policy Research (advocating a national investment programme), Friends of the Earth (reiterating the value of heat pumps against hydrogen) and the Carbon Trust (on London, arguing that “heat pumps are the primary technology choice”) make the case. For a working retrofitter’s view, see the Sure Insulation site.

Government and parliamentary reviews, too, have found that heat pumps and insulation are the way to go. (They have also looked at a hybrid heat pump system, in which a heat pump provides heat for 85% of the time, but switches to a gas boiler during colder periods.)

The government’s business and industry department (BEIS) did a big review of home heating options in 2018. It concluded that, first, there should be a “growth in no or low-regrets low carbon heating” measures, including heat pumps, biomass boilers and solar water heaters. But BEIS said that, long term, all technologies had to be looked at – and kept the hydrogen option open, by commissioning the engineering company Arup to do a feasability study.

The parliamentary Committee on Climate Change also did a big study on hydrogen in 2018, and concluded that it is “best used selectively, where it adds most value alongside widespread electrification” – and providing CCS could be got to work properly. Most urgent, the CCC pointed out, is “strategic certainty about how the decarbonisation of heat will be delivered in the UK”.

(The detailed analysis for the CCC was done at Imperial College. It showed that a hydrogen-based approach would be more expensive, especially if the aim were zero carbon, and that up-front investment makes more sense to stop emissions. There is more from Imperial on “smart and flexible heat” here.)

All this paperwork underlines that an integrated approach is needed. Buildings need to be upgraded and insulated; different types of heat pumps and different installation methods are called for; expertise and training have to be developed; in some areas, district heating networks make sense.

This is exactly the sort of thing local government has always done, and the neo-liberal assault on local government makes it harder. That’s discussed in research of heat systems governance by Janette Webb (see her articles including “New Lamps for Old”, “Emerging linked ecologies for a national-scale retrofitting programme” and one on why heat decarbonisation cannot be done by markets).

The no-strategy strategy, and how to oppose it

 In the face of this pile of evidence that, more than anything, home heating needs a strategy – the government has avoided adopting a strategy. It “has yet to make any firm decisions about which pathways it prefers”, this report on the Renewable Technology site explained in July.

The politics of this is very clear.

In the face of climate crisis, the government must choose between an integrated strategy, best implemented through local government, relying on existing technology … or a no-strategy strategy that takes the lead from powerful private companies with unproven technology.

Insulation works, and it cuts down the need for heat

The no-strategy strategy fits with this government’s maniacal, neoliberal hatred of the public sector – one of its few ideological principles. That was what motivated its no-strategy strategy on coronavirus testing and tracing, with devastating results, costing tens of thousands of lives.

A heat decarbonisation strategy will have to be fought for in opposition to the government – just as health workers, scientists and others have had to fight for a coronavirus strategy.

This is why the Leeds TUC initiative, which appeals to local government to act, is welcome.

The Leeds TUC has recognised a techno-fix for what it is – damaging to society and the labour movement. Its campaign could be a focus for all who want to tackle dangerous climate change.

If you are in a trade union, an environmental campaign group or a community organisation, please discuss the Leeds TUC’s document and the actions it proposes.

If you are in a union, you could challenge trade union leaders’ support for the oil and gas industry’s hydrogen initiative.

Instead of such support, the labour movement should:

First, embrace technologies that are in society’s best interests – which for heat decarbonisation means retrofitted insulation and heat pumps;

Second, demand that firms producing filthy-dirty “grey” hydrogen take action to reduce the horrendous levels of greenhouse gas emissions they produce; and

Third, urge that future hydrogen use be limited to applications that are socially useful and don’t add to the climate crisis.

This approach could and should be part of a broader perspective of just transition, now starting to be discussed by workers on the North Sea where the gas is produced.

Lobbying on steroids

The H21 project is at a crossroads. The companies who sponsor it – NGN, the gas network firm Cadent and the Norwegian oil company Equinor – got state funding for a series of initial reports: £9 million from the Ofgem Network Innovation Competition (NIC) in 2017, mainly to fund safety assessments; and another £6.8 million in 2019 to test the technology at a specially-built site at Spadeadam. (Update from a H21 manager here.)

But H21’s plea for a much larger dollop of state funding – £125 million, half the cost of a Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) study, originally scheduled to start this year – has not so far been heeded, despite the “urgency” explained in the H21 North of England report (available here, although temporarily (October 2020) missing).

Meanwhile, the government has announced another project – to support an industrial complex on Teesside, making “blue” hydrogen for transport – that could be an alternative source of demand for natural gas being pumped from the North Sea … and has as little as H21 to do with tackling the climate emergency.

Despite the question marks over H21, the oil and gas industry’s lobbying machine in support of hydrogen for heat decarbonisation is trundling on, with greater force than ever.

In July, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hydrogen issued a report urging “more ambitious” support for hydrogen, including “mandating hydrogen-ready boilers by 2025”.

And in August, the gas industry “scored a success in persuading the Environmental Audit Committee [of the House of Commons] to back its plans for using hydrogen […] in domestic heating”, the 100% Renewable UK blog reported.

The committee chair, Philip Dunne MP, deceitfully suggested that hydrogen is “the most cost-effective option” for “parts of the UK energy system”.

Tom Baxter, a chemical engineering researcher, questions the pro-hydrogen arguments in this article.

Gas network companies have also jumped on the post-Covid financing bandwagon, asking for a huge state hand-out for conversion to hydrogen. And cement manufacturers – who, like energy companies, need carbon capture and storage – have joined the queue for state funding.

These relentless lobbying efforts are funded by a range of companies including hydrogen, transport, carbon capture, gas network, engineering and chemical firms as well as oil and gas. Their greenwash proliferates through the Decarbonised Gas Alliance and Hydrogen Strategy Now.

Some good research on these lobbyists’ methods, by academics at Exeter University and Imperial College, warns of “the capacity that incumbents have to promote their storyline”.

Hydrogen. Quick technological catch-up

Hydrogen is the most common, and lightest, element in the universe, but only exists on earth combined with other elements. People started fabricating hydrogen from compounds and using it e.g. for balloons in the nineteenth century. Today there are three main types of hydrogen:

■ “Grey” hydrogen. Fabricated by removing the hydrogen (H) from methane i.e. natural gas (CH4), or from coal. This is how 98% of hydrogen is currently made. It is extremely emissions-intensive. For every tonne of hydrogen made from gas, 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) goes into the atmosphere; for every tonne from coal, 19 tonnes of CO2.

The Petra Nova carbon capture and storage plant, recently mothballed.
Photo by RM VM (creative commons)

The 70m tonnes of hydrogen produced in 2018 caused 830m tonnes of CO2 emissions, the IEA calculated. That’s a healthy chunk of the world total of 42 billion tonnes – about the same as total emissions from Indonesia plus the UK – and nearly as much as the global aviation industry, which emitted 915m tonnes in 2019.

Most hydrogen produced now is used for oil refining, and ammonia production to make chemical fertilisers. Some is used as part of synthetic gas products, mainly for manufacturing steel, or methanol.

■ “Blue” hydrogen. In this process, instead of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere, it is captured and stored. The capture process, steam reformation, is straightforward for about 70% of the emissions and gets really tricky above and beyond about 85%.

Steam reformation splits methane into CO2 and synthetic gas (carbon monoxide plus hydrogen); in the second stage, the synthetic gas is mixed with steam; more CO2 is removed and hydrogen produced. Other similar processes are partial oxidation, which uses oxygen in the air as an oxidant instead of steam, and autothermal reforming, which combines both methods.

Note on carbon capture and storage. This can also be used in gas- and coal-fired power stations. Usually the carbon is captured after the fuel has been burned. Then, as with carbon from hydrogen production, it has to be transported and stored. CCS has been in development for about 40 years, but there are still only 20 projects in development in the world. Only two of these ever actually functioned, and one of those two (Petra Nova in Texas) was mothballed in August. (A good analysis is here.) CCS is greenwashed as the key to “green power”. Some politicians, and some international climate talks documentation, claim that bioenergy with CCS could play a big role in global decarbonisation, but climate scientists and engineers think that is nonsense.

■ “Green” hydrogen. Produced by electrolysis of water. The electricity could come from fossil fuels (in which case it would not be green), nuclear power or renewables. The process is proven, but is very energy intensive and very inefficient.

If electricity from renewables were to be used, this could be the most “carbon light” way of producing hydrogen. But huge targets for “green” hydrogen production are sometimes published without being reconciled with other huge targets for renewably-produced electricity. Is producing hydrogen ever going to be the best way to use this electricity? The IEA says that just to produce the 70m tonnes of hydrogen the world economy uses annually would need 3600 TWh of electricity, more than total European consumption. The electrolysis also needs huge amounts of water – 9 litres for each kilo of hydrogen.

Gazprom, the Russian gas company, sees potential in producing hydrogen by methane pyrolysis, a related technology.  


Hydrogen For Homes Is A Terrible Idea. We Should Fight It

People And NatureMost UK oil workers would consider switching to another industry – and, if given the option to retrain, more than half would choose to work on renewable energy, a survey published today shows.

 
The survey blasts a hole in the argument by trade union leaders that every last drop of oil must be produced, supposedly to preserve jobs. Actually, workers are ready to move away from fossil fuel production – as long as they can work and their families don’t suffer.

 Let’s go! Wind turbines, with an electricity sub-station, in the
North Sea (German sector). Photo: SteKrueBe / Creative Commons

The 1383 offshore workers who responded to the survey crave job security, above all. Nearly half of them had been laid off or furloughed since oil prices crashed in March.

Many complained about precarious employment and the contract labour now rife on the North Sea.

The survey, Offshore: oil and gas workers’ views on industry conditions and the energy transition, was put together by Platform London, Friends of the Earth Scotland and Greenpeace.

The survey’s authors seem to be the first people who have actually asked workers what they think.

The Scottish government has a comfortably-funded Just Transition Commission, including trade union chiefs, that recently ran a consultation on its interim report.

But it was campaign groups, working with activists on the ground, who bothered to talk to offshore workers.

The survey, distributed via social media and targeted advertising, garnered 1546 responses. The results excluded replies by 163 people who work in midstream or downstream industries, and are focused on the 1383 respondents who work upstream. That’s a representative sample: about 4.5% of the workforce.

One of the survey’s most sobering results is that, when asked if they had heard of a “just transition”, a staggering 91% of survey respondents said no. (The term “just transition”, nowadays used and misused by politicians, was coined by trade union militants in the 1990s to define the need to fight for social justice during the switch away from fossil fuel burning and other ecologically ruinous practices.)

The Offshore report’s authors comment:

Clearly, campaigners and NGOs lobbying for just transition, and policymakers tasked with implementing one, have failed to reach oil and gas communities – the people who ought to be most central to transition plans.
Despite not sharing vocabulary with the chattering classes, North Sea workers are very clear that the future lies away from oil and gas.

Asked, “would you consider moving to a job outside of the oil and gas industry?”, 81.7% said yes, 7% said no and 10% said they did not know. The survey’s authors commented:


The fact that a huge majority of workers are interested in leaving the industry speaks volumes about the stability and future of oil and gas. There are of course a multitude of reasons why anyone would consider changing jobs, but it is clearly that the offshore workforce is willing to make large lifestyle changes given the opportunity.
In case studies and written responses, the vast majority of offshore workers state that they are fed up with the lack of security, decreasing employment rights and hostile conditions.


Of the 7% who would not consider moving, the three main reasons given were that they were close to retirement age; that the offshore work schedule allowed them to spend time with their families; and concern that their skills would not be transferable.

Asked what was most important to them in considering a move, respondents replied: (1) job security (contract length, pension, etc), 58%; (2) pay, 21%; (3) similar work schedule, 11%; (4) health and safety regulations, 5%.

The survey’s authors reported “a palpable exhaustion with the precarious nature of work offshore”.

North Sea workers are also ready to participate in the transition to renewable energy production, judging by the survey.

Asked, “if you could receive training or education to help you move to a new part of the energy sector, what education or skills training would you be interested in?”, and allowed to choose as many of ten options as they liked, the responses were:

Offshore wind 53%

Renewables 51%

Rig decommissioning 38%

Carbon capture and storage 26%

Non-energy sector 20%

Solar installation 19%

Geothermal technologies 18%

Battery technologies 16%

Transport 15%

Electrical engineering 13%

Other 2%.

A barrier to the transition to renewable energy is the lack of adequately-funded training schemes, the survey showed. Respondents complained that they are expected to pay for courses and qualifications themselves – and the bills are counted in thousands of pounds.

Survey respondents criticised the lack of government support for workers:

The overwhelming majority [of respondents] asked for some form of training, support to leave the industry or investment in renewables. Other prevalent themes included a need to invest in decommissioning, financial support and local supply chains.

The report ends by saying that Platform, Friends of the Earth Scotland and Greenpeace will be running a participatory consultation of oil and gas workers across the UK. “Workshops will enable energy workers to draft policy demands for a transition that works for them, and a renewables industry they want to work in.”

The report urges “energy workers, union branches, local communities, environmental groups or other stakeholders” to get involved.

Today’s report shows that North Sea workers are well aware that the false choice that trade union leaders talk about – fossil-fuel production or unemployment – has nothing to do with reality.

On the contrary, a move out of the oil industry could be, from workers’ point of view, a chance to say goodbye to precarious contracts and the constant fear of sudden lay-offs.

Offshore workers’ readiness to retrain to work on renewable energy, as shown in the survey, strikes a refreshing contrast with trade union officials’ approach. They back the oil companies’ and governments’ plans to keep pumping oil until there is no more money to be made from it.

Edinburgh May Day, 2019.
Photo: Friends of the Earth Scotland / 
Oil, coal and resistance

The oil companies present this climate-wrecking policy in “green” wrapping paper, Vision 2035 – which cynically claims to aim at “net zero” emissions, while continuing to pump a million barrels a day.

But the underlying strategy of “maximising economic recovery”, i.e. wringing out every last drop, is unchanged.

This approach is not only incompatible with combating dangerous global warming, but also avoids focusing on the really urgent job of closing down oil and gas production and planning other futures for workers and communities (as NGOs have argued in the Sea Change report, for example).

In April, when the oil price slump triggered a new wave of lay-offs, the union bosses reiterated their sympathy for “a longer term investment strategy” in oil, rather than accelerating the switch to non-fossil technologies. The Unite, GMB, RMT, Nautilus International, BALPA and Prospect unions all fell in line, rather than treating the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to leave behind the fossil-fuel-centred economy.

Surely what is needed now is a real discussion in communities and among workers about how to shape the just transition, to achieve social justice and to contribute to tackling climate change. Hopefully, the participatory consultation proposed in today’s report will be part of this. GL, 29 September 2020.

Comments by North Sea workers (from the report)

On precarious work …


■ As I was self employed prior to April, the company put me on a PAYE contract even though the government delayed its implementation of the IR35 rule [rules that apply to off-payroll work contracts]. Consequently I now earn less, have to pay for all my courses out of my wages, and I have no employee safeguards or protection. It seems the oil companies have got away with everything but the workforce gets hammered. […] A union won’t stop this, it needs government intervention to hold these companies to account in the way they are treating the entire workforce.

■ I’ve gone to agencies who employ contractors as staff, and have had to go back as an independent contractor and take a 25% pay cut. This is happening on a wide scale. It’s very attractive to companies because they have to take on the risks of employees. I fear in the long term that IR35s will allow for companies to get rid of workers whenever they want. They have zero risk, they can take 150 guys and then get rid of 150 guys six months later.

On retraining …

■ At my last job […] our safety guy had worked in oil for 15-20 years. He applied for a job on [a wind farm] and it was going to be offshore. He was told he’d have to do the offshore survival course for wind. If he wanted the job he would have to spend at least £1000 for offshore wind qualifications. But the main theory behind offshore survival is surviving a helicopter crash, and it’s the same helicopter if you are going offshore to a wind turbine or an oil rig. Even a half day conversion course would be better, because as it stands it’s perceived as a money-making scam.

■ We need retraining and a job at the end of it. I can’t get any work. I was an agency worker so I get no money or help whilst not working. I have to use the money I have previously earned to live. I can’t claim one single penny from the government, it’s soul destroying. I am 52 years old and I feel my life is finished already.

■ Offer courses either free or heavily subsidised, unlike the last downturn in oil and gas where it was an absolute nightmare to get funding for retraining. They made it so difficult and unrealistic that the local governments basically pilfered the funds for themselves. They should offer better rates than what is given from the completely useless and proven to be absolutely abysmal Universal Credit. No-one can survive on that.

On the energy transition …

■ Up until now we’ve been quite reliant on oil and gas for transport, heating and generation of electricity, and obviously that’s going to have to change. […] If we want to look at training people towards understanding how we maintain our planet, it’s really important that people understand that there are ideas out there that are fantastic. But of course, not all of them are that sustainable, including biomass. I’m interested in a degree in tidal generation, mostly because we live near Montrose and there’s a three square mile basin that fills with seawater every day. […] It empties and fills twice a day, and I can’t help but think ‘surely we could be taking advantage of that’.

Offshore: oil and gas workers’ views on industry conditions and the energy transition

Scot.E3 (Employment, Energy, Environment) – a grass-roots campaign for just transition

The North Sea: the reaction to Piper Alpha – about union organisation in the 1980s

Oil, coal and resistance: a wee history of Scotland’s fossil fuel industry 



North Sea Workers Ready To Switch To Renewables, Survey Shows