If you live opposite the vacant site in Northumberland that was supposed to become the Britishvolt ‘gigafactory’ pumping out batteries for the electric car industry, or near the Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight where half the 600 workers have been told they face redundancy, you might just struggle to believe that Britain is in the midst of a net zero jobs boom.
Yet that is the striking claim that is being made by CBI Economics and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
The net zero sector, it says, grew by 10.1 per cent last year, added £83.1 billion in gross value added (GVA) and accounted for 951,000 full-time jobs – an additional 125,700 created in the past three years.
This is, needless to say, what Ed Miliband wants us to believe. He has responded to the report by saying: ‘These numbers speak for themselves. Net zero is essential to growth, and money in working people’s pockets.’
Except, of course, the numbers don’t speak for themselves. They mean very little without understanding how a ‘net zero job’ is defined. This, however, is where it becomes a little opaque. The back of the report does include an appendix on methodology, but it doesn’t quite answer the question: are these all really jobs that wouldn’t exist were it not for the government’s legally-mandated net zero target?
Among the businesses included in the survey, it says, are ‘organisations dedicated to energy management and energy infrastructure development’, ‘companies focusing on landfill management’ and ‘companies providing energy from low-carbon sources’. This would appear potentially to include any company involved in the running of the National Grid, any company running a landfill site and the entire staff of the nuclear industry. Yet all these industries would exist if we didn’t have a net zero target.
I asked the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit for some clarity on these points. What counts and does not count as a net zero business, it told me, is defined by an algorithm developed by a company called The Data City. This, it said, ‘uses specific criteria to determine “relevance” to net zero’.
‘As a result,’ it went on, ‘we exclude businesses whose main activities are not related to net zero, which means that decarbonisation activities in traditional sectors are not captured.’ It said ‘waste incinerators or oil and gas companies would not be included’.
Yet that would still seem to allow counting the entire nuclear industry as a net zero industry, even though it has existed since the 1950s, long before climate change became an issue. It would also appear to leave open the possibility that the entire staff of National Grid might be counted.
I asked for a list of the companies which are counted as part of the net zero economy but was told: ‘We cannot provide the full list of businesses … as it is proprietary data from The Data City, which we have paid for access to.’ If they have paid for it, I don’t see why they can’t pass it on to me, but no matter. I did also contact The Data City for some clarity, but I haven’t yet received a response.
The figures make little sense, either, unless they are balanced against the jobs that are being lost as a result of net zero commitments. The ECIU doesn’t claim its figure to be a net figure. But we can at least tot up a few of the job losses from businesses which themselves have blamed net zero targets as being at least part of the reason for plant closures: 2,800 jobs at Port Talbot and other plants run by Tata Steel, 1,100 jobs to be lost with the closure of the Vauxhall plant in Luton, 400 jobs to be lost with the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery. It is no compensation to these employees that, say, a local authority has created a post as ‘net zero delivery officer’ or a carbon trading company has created a few jobs in the City.
The International Renewable Energy Agency is certainly not so bullish about Britain’s green sector. The UK, it estimates, has 57,000 jobs involved directly in renewable energy, just 0.35 per cent of global jobs in the sector – in spite of Britain accounting for around 1 per cent of the global population.
China, on the other hand, accounts for 7.3 million of the 16.2 million jobs worldwide. That doesn’t exactly breed confidence in Britain’s net zero sector. By frantically trying to expand wind and solar energy to try to reach net zero, we are certainly creating jobs – but a rather large number of them appear to be in China, which is making our solar panels, wind turbines and much else besides.
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