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+--- Thread: Article UK: Where are all the green jobs? (securonomics community) (/thread-17343.html)
UK: Where are all the green jobs? (securonomics community) - C C - Feb 7, 2025
https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/sustainability/climate/2025/02/green-jobs-sharon-graham
EXCERPTS: Is the green transition, the move to net zero, to be billed as a project to restore the natural environment, to conserve the flora and fauna of a planet withering under the weight of man-made industry? Or is it a catalyst for creating millions of high-skilled, productive, green jobs of the future, for regional industrial renaissance and green tech, for public infrastructure upgrades and an investment-led effort towards national renewal via net zero?
In choosing between what we might call a more conservationist, nature-based approach, and a jobs-and-skills approach, Starmer, we were told, would prefer to orient towards the latter.
[...] But we are now more than six months into the Labour administration. It is feeling more and more awkward to call this a “new” government. And rather than a re-skilling or redeployment of a carbon-intensive workforce into the green “industries of the future”, the decline of traditional manufacturing has continued apace and even accelerated. This decline is yet to be accompanied by a flurry of parallel, net zero job creation.
[...] You can’t let go of one rope before you’ve grabbed onto another,” says Sharon Graham ... “If we are going to transfer to renewable energy then we need to have the infrastructure in place, and we need to know where the jobs are. Because there’s no doubt – you could transfer oil and gas workers to wind manufacturing. You could have commensurate jobs. There may be some different skillsets, but there’s nothing insurmountable.”
But that kind of joined-up effort is yet to appear. Graham has opposed Labour’s cancellation of new oil and gas licensing because workers in the sector – which is well-paid, safe and highly skilled compared with jobs in the maintenance of offshore wind facilities – risk becoming “the miners of the net zero”.
“We’re going to lose the jobs in Britain, lose the industry in Britain, not create any jobs in Britain, and then be reliant on other countries for our energy”, she says. “They haven’t got a plan for new jobs, and we’re still importing oil.”
It needn’t be this way. As an advanced economy, we are still using and consuming steel in vast quantities, not to mention running a gas-reliant grid that will continue to rely on emergency dispatchable gas generation even beyond the net zero target date. Meanwhile, glass, cement, concrete and a whole variety of chemicals all remain essential to modern life. And all still rely on carbon-based materials and energy in their production processes.
Green hydrogen, green steel and sustainable aviation fuel are emerging energy sources that will develop rapidly in the near future as demand for essential goods with a lower carbon footprint intensifies. But they are not here yet, or at least not always at prices that would make them competitive.
In the meantime, we are in danger of losing the jobs, skills, expertise, institutions and industries that could make British versions of these green industries a success. The demand is here, but the jobs of the future are being created elsewhere... (MORE - details)
RE: UK: Where are all the green jobs? (securonomics community) - stryder - Feb 7, 2025
Locally the "Green Jobs" have been slow to develop because of various things that need to be inplace for them to happen. Where I'm located (in Lowe's Constituency where Musk seems to have taken a shine to him) there has been a long standing plan to increase the Offshore windfarms and to place an engineering school for dealing with the building and maintainence of both the local windfarm and windfarms in general. That had previously been waiting on the Bridge that was only finished last year and of course the licencing for the development on the windfarms themselves (That was originally put out to tender but had an awful return price for anyone to want to offer a tender to it as they were expected to offer "Cheap" energy at a dumprate loss.)
Slowly but surely the jobs will come about, however it's a slow process (It can take over a decade for something to go from planning to even get operational which has different people employed in different jobs at different stages.)
It's also why it's awkwards having a government that wants to go "wide" with it's building regime. If it pushes people into the jobs to meet the criteria and even surpass it, they'll be taking people away from other areas of the market who might be needed at a later stage (which then means people have to be trained at a later point and will not be ready for the later stages of development)
There is also a factor thats beyond just the local economy. Green energies have been a convenient way for people to borrow money on projects that ultimately fold due to their unproven nature such as Research and Development. That has cost a lot of money over the years and the jobs attached to them eventually go nowhere.
RE: UK: Where are all the green jobs? (securonomics community) - confused2 - Feb 7, 2025
We (the UK) need a Department of Green Energy (DOGE) run by someone who knows what they're doing and how to do it. The reality kind'a speaks (or not) for itself.
RE: UK: Where are all the green jobs? (securonomics community) - stryder - Feb 7, 2025
(Feb 7, 2025 03:39 PM)confused2 Wrote: We (the UK) need a Department of Green Energy (DOGE) run by someone who knows what they're doing and how to do it. The reality kind'a speaks (or not) for itself.
Great! Now I've got to stop being lazy about it and put a "Like" button on the site.
