The net zero lobby just gets sillier and sillier. According to energy minister Michael Shanks, Reform’s policy of abandoning net zero targets is an ‘anti-growth ideology’ which would cost nearly a million jobs. Coming in a week when the Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported that the number of payrolled employees across the UK fell by 135,000 during Labour’s first year in power – with 25,000 lost in May alone (the month after the higher rates of employers’ national Insurance came into effect) – you might think that government ministers would want to avoid talking about job losses just at the moment, but no matter.
Shanks’ ‘evidence’ for his claim is a report by the CBI and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) claiming that the ‘net zero sector’ provides jobs for 951,000 people in Britain – 273,000 directly and 679,000 in the supply chain. It consists of 22,800 companies, who employees are apparently 38 per cent more productive than UK employees as a whole.
That, of course, all sounds fantastic. But the problem comes, as with so many of these things, when you start to look up the methodology. Who are these 22,800 companies who are counted as part of the net zero economy and whose existence is supposedly threatened by Reform’s climate policy? I did ask the ECIU when it published its report back in February for a list of these companies, but was told I couldn’t have it – as it is ‘proprietary data’ provided by an organisation called the Data City. Just try using that argument when trying to get a paper in scientific journal.
But it did provide the following definitions. The count includes ‘organisations dedicated to energy management and energy infrastructure development’, ‘companies focusing on landfill management’, ‘companies providing services and technology for the mitigation of pollution’, ‘companies dedicated to solid waste removal, management and processing’, ‘companies focusing on the technology and development of electric vehicles’ and ‘companies providing services for increased energy efficiency in buildings’. The first category could well include everyone who works for the National Grid, the second and fourth every waste management company in Britain, the fifth anyone who works for, say, Nissan, and the sixth any company that manufactures loft insulation or any builder who fits it.
Is Reform really going to put all these jobs at risk? The ECIU – and Shanks by quoting its research in this way – seems to be asserting that if we didn’t have net zero targets then we wouldn’t have an electricity distribution network, that no home would have insulation, that we wouldn’t have waste management, and that any car company which makes a single electric model would cease to exist. If Farage’s party really is planning to eliminate all these things, it hasn’t told us so yet.
The 951,000 net zero jobs claim seems to me little more than crude propaganda to cover up the fact that Britain has failed miserably to capture more than a token share of global jobs in renewable energy. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, Britain has a total of 57,000 in renewable energy – 0.3 per cent of 16.2 million jobs worldwide. Given that we have around 1 per cent of the global population and claim to be a global leader on net zero, that is pretty pathetic. Needless to say, it is China which really has scooped up the jobs, with 7.3 million of them – all this in spite of not have a legally-binding net zero target and still generating around 60 per cent of its energy from coal.
It is not unreasonable to argue that Reform could put at risk many of the 17,900 jobs in wind and 9,000 jobs in solar. This, however, has to be set against the jobs which have already and continue to be lost as a result of current policy on energy and net zero. To give an idea of the jobs being put at risk by the government’s refusal to issue new oil and gas licences, for example, the Rosebank field – if it is allowed to proceed – will create 4,000 jobs. Tata Steel’s closure of blast furnaces has cost 2,800 jobs. The Zero Emission Vehicle mandate can reasonably be blamed for 1,100 job losses at Vauxhall’s plant in Luton. The closure of the oil refinery at Grangemouth has cost 400 jobs. The abandonment of the proposed metallurgical coal mine at Whitehaven has cost the 500 jobs which would have been created. And on it goes. Labour should look in the mirror.
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