Greener Jobs Alliance

Drill baby drill or cry baby cry?  The energy sector and long-term job security

Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

Introduction

Climate change is already ruining millions of working-class lives across the globe, and increasingly threatening our homes, health, food supplies and safety here in the UK.  Radical changes are needed to stave off the worst impacts, and whilst these will affect every work sector and every community, the energy sector1 has a critical role to play.

1. Transition away from fossil fuels to renewables as quickly as possible.
2. Protect the jobs of workers in energy, supply chains and associated roles (and communities generally) as we move from fossil fuels to renewables.
3. Provide cheap renewable energy that can be afforded by all.

Despite the dire warnings about the consequences2, we are nowhere near doing any of these.  In the UK, the Labour government has made some nods towards each of these points3 without fully embracing transition as the engine of social and economic justice, equality and rejuvenation that it could be.  There are a number of explanations for this, including:

1. Labour’s ‘business as usual’ approach to governance prioritises technical solutions done TO people instead of governing in the campaign mode that’s needed, in which the population is fully informed and mobilised to become creative actors in the social green transition at all levels.
2. The immense weight of the US, pushing hard to sabotage the energy transition and retain ‘global energy dominance’ based on fossil fuels and militarisation, applying direct state to state pressure at government level while sponsoring subservient local political formations like Reform, Restore, Tommy Robinson and the Conservative Party as local agents of disinformation and mobilisation.

Keep the North Sea Working Campaign

One consequence of these currents is that they set a context within which some trade unions see the prevailing winds at the top and decide that they must travel in the same direction if they are to fulfil their purpose of protecting jobs4.  So Unite is currently pursuing a policy of ‘Keep the North Sea Working’5 through an expansion of oil and gas operations, as an extension of its ‘no ban without a plan’ campaign.

Unite wrote to leaders of all political parties ahead of the 2026 Scottish Parliamentary Elections asking if they back the campaign to Keep the North Sea Working and support the delivery of a No Compulsory Redundancy Pledge.  We firmly support the latter as a critical plank in a Just Transition but arguing that ‘keeping the North Sea working’ through expanded oil and gas production including pushing ahead with the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields’ raises expectations among workers that cannot be met. 

While these comments will resonate with members worried about what the future will bring, and that they might have a future in fossil fuel extraction if only the government would cease its attacks on the North Sea.

The approach is fundamentally flawed, even if we leave the disastrous impact on the planet of the continued extraction of fossil fuels aside and focus solely on jobs.

Why the North Sea is Closing Down Not Opening Up

Jobs in the North Sea have been declining at a rate of about 950 a month since 19996.  The projection that they will halve, from 115,000 to around 64,000, by the early 2030s does not accelerate that trend.  This is not so much falling off a cliff as sliding down a pretty steep slope with no chance of slowing it down, a slide that’s been going on for 27 years.  The only lifeline is to get off the slope onto the renewables that are, bizarrely, being blamed.  Oil and gas will keep smaller and smaller parts of the North Sea working regardless of how much investment might be put in.

• The job losses are coming because the North Sea basin is running dry7. Current oil production is 25% of what it was in 1999.
• 93% of what was in there has been ‘drained dry’ already.
• Government data shows that 4.1 billion tonnes of oil has been extracted in the UK since 1975, with the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) projecting a further 218 million tonnes out to 2050 from existing fields.
• These projections also suggest that new drilling could yield another 74 million tonnes, equivalent to 1.7% of the total that could be extracted from 1975 to 2050.

The bald comparison indicates that any idea that there is sufficient oil to meet current demand is absurd, as is any notion that additional investment will be sufficient to save the industry, jobs or communities.

For gas, the UK has produced 33,421 TWh since commercial operations began in 1967, with projected production out to 2050 of a further 2,060 TWh from existing fields and up to an extra 381 TWh (1.1% of the total) from new drilling.

If it was profitable to drill baby drill into what’s left, they would be doing it.  As it is they are not, because gas in the North Sea costs four times as much to ‘lift’ as it does in Qatar8.

So, the jobs crisis in the North Sea is not primarily a matter of industrial or climate policy but of the exhaustion of the field, which makes continued profitable extraction increasingly marginal.  The policy issues are a matter of how to manage the decline, with increased investment making only a small difference to this.  You could overturn the ban on new investment and open up Rosebank and Jackdaw and we will still lose thousands of jobs; pretending otherwise is misleading members.  Rosebank would need 1600 workers to set it up in the short term and employ just 450 while in operation9, which is no lifeline at all when 1,000 jobs a month are being lost.  This makes the need for a PLAN for transition even more important.

What Kind of Long Term Future

This is not to paint a picture of gloom for energy workers and the communities they live in, but to point out that

• a campaign for ‘business as usual’ will not serve those workers or communities,
• hope for the future does not lie in reverting to the status quo under the Tories, which allowed lots of new licences but generated just 36 days’ worth of additional supply as a result10.
• Rather, hope lies in the transition to renewables that is desperately needed and demanding that the government ensures that the huge number of jobs that such a transition requires is actually forthcoming11. This would include a large number in the manufacturing supply chain and decommissioning of redundant rigs, located where jobs are most needed. 

The only way to ‘Keep the North Sea Working’, at current levels of employment is to invest in renewable energy.  Jobs do not have to be exported if they are transferred, and that’s the plan we need, that all of us can fight for together.

The consequences if we don’t are:

1. We would become wholly dependent on imported energy, including hugely expensive US-made Liquefied Natural Gas12, a prospect that has LNG corporations licking their lips in anticipation, and we’d continue to be vulnerable to global shocks (like the one we are currently experiencing with the war on Iran).
2. UK energy workers jobs would fall off a cliff edge – with no lifeline to grab hold of.
3. Fuel bills, already prohibitively high (the ‘eating or heating’ dilemma) would rise further.

And of course, the catastrophic impact of climate change would continue to fall primarily on the most vulnerable communities.

What We Should Be Campaigning For

There are 145,000 jobs in the renewables sector currently and growth to over 180,000 by 2035, much more if full government support is forthcoming13.  What unions need to demand is that this not happen haphazardly but in a planned way, including:

• job guarantees,
• no compulsory redundancies,
• training and reskilling of workers from the shrinking fossil fuel sector as they transfer to the growing renewables sector,
• unionisation and full recognition rights for what has been allowed to become, via a piecemeal private sector-led approach, a non-union work force.

That’s why we say the transition has to be just.

In so far as that isn’t happening currently, that’s a failure of governance and it’s what the whole labour movement needs to demand must happen14. 

This argument is about:

1. the danger to jobs from delaying the transition and failing to develop a worker-led plan to accelerate it and on terms that ensure workers don’t lose out, and
2. the serious danger to the working class as a whole from such a failure, in terms of the collapse of the real value of incomes and direct danger to life and wellbeing – especially of the most vulnerable – from climate chaos.

The current Unite leadership’s argument that ‘with no credible plan for jobs, it’s time to take a new approach that protects jobs, communities and our energy security’ does not actually spell out any demands for ‘a credible plan for jobs’ but, on the contrary, reasserts the business as usual scenario that has lost so many over the last quarter of a century.  There is no ‘new approach’ here.  When the ban on new oil and gas exploration was first announced by Labour in opposition, Sharon Graham pledged that Unite would come up with such a plan to press on the aspirant government.  That’s what we need to put to the government at the negotiating table.  We are still waiting for it.

What is needed is a proactive, worked out transition plan that addresses

• skills retention and development,
• where work can and should be located both to meet labour needs and to prevent local/regional crashes,
• direct support for workers transitioning,
• the technological and climate credentials of technologies and production processes,
• a recognition that it’s not all about offshore workers, nor the technically skilled, but about supply chains, social geographies, offshore workers in catering, cleaning, healthcare and admin, onshore workers in induced jobs along the supply chain – and all these factors are integrated15.

This plan should be negotiated between the government and the unions/workers/communities.  We need a Just Transition Commission to work this through.  In so far as they don’t do that, it should be being demanded by the unions/workers/communities involved, which is the basis for the deepest unity and broadest support, and the cutting edge we need.  Proper union resources should be put into it, across unions in each sector, recognising that implicit within that demand is the seed of a transformation of the state and how it operates16.

Conclusion

No amount of fiery, rousing language is going to halt or reverse the exhaustion of the North Sea.  The steady, inexorable decline in oil and gas jobs can only be counteracted by the fastest possible expansion of the renewables sector to secure a long term future for workers, accompanied by  the guarantees needed to underpin the transition – no compulsory redundancies, guaranteed jobs, pay to compensate for any transition gaps, the training and reskilling needed etc.

We should never forget that the people and Parties currently posing as the saviours of offshore oil and gas workers are the same people who shattered the mining communities in the 1980s and finished them off with Heseltine’s ‘dash for gas’ in the early 90s.  Their promises to save jobs by ‘opening up’ the North Sea are simply a lie.  A lie repeated often and loudly, but a lie all the same.  Follow them down that path, trash the transition and profits will be made in the short term, and more jobs will be lost, bills will get even higher, and more climate damage done.

Paul Atkin, Tahir Latif, Ellen Robottom (personal capacities)

[For a far more detailed analysis of the situation, please do read this excellent article, Factcheck: Nine false or misleading myths about North Sea oil and gas, from Carbon Brief, 25 March 2026, which also contains a multitude of links to the sources of the information cited here.]

References

1. Note that the energy sector refers not only to electricity generation, and not only to fossil fuel production, but to a system which includes these things plus all the infrastructure which enables them, including transmission, distribution and storage, homes and other buildings, transport, foundation industry and manufacture. However, attention has been focused primarily on the contested future of the oil and gas extraction sectors, and it is this we will be mainly addressing here, without losing site of these other elements or the overall question of fairness and working-class interests
2. Manifestly all around us in the shape of the current heatwave, but see also National Emergency Briefing on climate & nature
3. See, for example, Decisive action to break influence of gas on electricity prices – GOV.UK, 21 April 2026.
4. Most significantly in terms of jobs promises, see Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage: a vision to establish a competitive market – GOV.UK
5. Keep the North Sea Working campaign launched by Unite for Scottish elections, 23 March 2026.
6. North Sea Future Plan for fair, managed and prosperous transition – GOV.UK, 26 November 2025.
7. Around 90% of UK North Sea oil and gas already drained dry, Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, 20 March 2026.
8. ‘North Sea gas becomes unaffordable in multiple ways, not only given the geological fact that it can be extracted up to four times cheaper in other parts of the world, but also the fact that renewable sources such as offshore wind can produce electricity at less than half the cost of running new gas plants’, Can North Sea oil and gas really power Britain’s future?, Renewable UK, 10 September 2025
9. What is the Rosebank oil field? – #StopRosebank, 26 February 2024.
10. Hundreds of North Sea licences granted by Tories ‘produce only 36 days of gas’, The Guardian, 28 March 2026.
11. See ‘Little time to spare’: UK must act now to double offshore wind workforce by 2030, Business Green, 15 June 2026, and Green economy supports more than a million UK workers, Friends of the Earth, 2 Jun 2026.
12. Trump has growing stranglehold over EU and UK energy supply, study shows, The Guardian, 21 January 2026.
13. REA’s REView 25 Report, Renewable Energy Association, 23 March 2026.
14. Framing the issue as a failure of Green policies only contributes to the Reform surge in regions affected by these job losses and job precarity. That poses a massive danger to jobs and union rights and risks putting paid to any sort of transition, just or otherwise, leaving huge numbers of workers genuinely on the scrap heap with little hope for the future.  And are we really at a point where the politicians some of our trade union leaders are most closely echoing are the ill-informed and anti-working-class comments of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump?  See Trump says Burnham is ‘extremely liberal’ and the UK is ‘dying’
15. There are broader considerations that need to be integrated into this. What are the barriers that need to be tackled, a recognition of how that’s affecting workers, and issues like the geographical location of jobs, the impacts on local induced economies, the technological barriers to getting power where it’s needed and balancing the grid, recognition that a lot of the jobs that are classed as “green” are neither new jobs (e.g. bin workers), nor really green (CCS etc), nor adequately paid.  But also touch on the areas that are not being highlighted, e.g. that transition and “green jobs” can’t be reliant on dubious technologies like carbon capture and fossil hydrogen; is gender justice and wage parity between skilled roles being considered; and the fact that climate change itself is a massive financial and material danger to working class people.
16. The truth about North Sea jobs and why workers need a plan – Blogpost from Uplift (News), 11 June 2024

 

Other relevant links

Parents slam Tory ‘Trumpian obsession’ with drilling as extreme heat ‘no longer distant threat’ | Morning Star 24 June 2026

The next PM urged to hold the course on climate action: Oil drilling won’t pay the bills | Morning Star 24 June 2026

Government launches multi-million grant scheme to re-train oil and gas workers | BusinessGreen News 24 June 2026

Why unions don’t want Ed Miliband as Andy Burnham’s chancellor | The Independent25 June 2026

Unison, NEU and TSSA back Ed Miliband for chancellor | Morning Star 26 June 2026

‘We must act fast’: Government urged to recognise UK gas reliance as a national security threat | BusinessGreen News 26 June 2026

Clean economy brings jobs and growth, says Miliband as £100bn invested in green energy | Green economy | The Guardian 23 June 2026

Heatwave: Scientists warn media coverage ignoring ‘fundamental’ links to climate change | BusinessGreen News 24 June 2026

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In the Red Heat, a  Transformative response to the war and energy crisis

Image by https://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/

By Paul Atkin

Trump’s war on Iran has already raised the price of energy, food, and other essentials and overlays the crises caused by climate change. This is likely to become more acute as gas and power prices will remain high for at least the coming year, even if ceasefires hold and the Strait of Hormuz were to remain reopened.  

We believe

1. To stop the crisis we need to stop the war, ensure that it doesn’t restart, tax war profits and transfer military spending
2. The transition to renewable energy and energy conservation is the solution.
3. Crisis measures must be social justice measures. 

To look at these in turn

1. To stop the crisis we need to stop the war, ensure that it doesn’t restart, tax war profits and transfer military spending

• The government should give no support to the war on Iran in any form and press for sustained peace instead. 
• Energy corporations, banks and arms companies are making huge sums from the rises in fossil fuel prices and demand for munitions. All such windfall profits should be taxed at 100% to fund short term targeted measures like an essential energy guarantee to support people through the immediate crisis, and accelerate investment in the climate transition.  
• Any additional investment into war preparation is unaffordable. Using the funds earmarked for arms increases to accelerate the energy transition instead, including restoring climate funding in overseas development, will also be better for national security.

2. The transition to renewable energy and energy conservation is the solution.  

Countries which have moved decisively to renewables have suffered far less from the war’s price volatility, with wholesale electricity prices in Spain less than half what they are here.

Dependence on fossil fuels is disastrous, and all possible measures should be taken to end it.  

We need as a bottom line

• Public transport fares to be sharply cut and private jets banned. 
• Building fairness into how we price energy by launching a social tariff alongside the next Price Cap rate, combined with Energy For All or an Essential Energy Guarantee to ensure that everyone on low or average income can afford their energy bill; ensuring that low-income energy households aren’t forced to choose between heating and eating.
• Increased investment in accelerated deployment of renewable energy in the North Sea and across the country, with a planned retraining and redeployment of offshore workers, whose jobs would not be not safe whether the ban on new investment is lifted or not, including in the decommissioning of redundant offshore installations; a major job which will take years with massive job potential. This could most effectively be done through public ownership; to prioritise long-term energy security over short-term returns, invest across the full range of clean technologies, and plough profits back into lowering bills rather than boosting shareholder dividends. 
• Government should ensure that clean energy jobs are good jobs, with collective bargaining, across the board.  . 
• Investment in upgrading infrastructure to create good jobs, and reduce exposure to fossil fuel price volatility by committing to the TUC’s “Invest in Our Future” programme: which sets out a potential £30 billion a year boost for clean infrastructure investment with costed, shovel-ready investments identified by trade unions across sectors including: retrofitting schools and public buildings; expanding bus and rail; upgrading industry; rolling out electric vehicle infrastructure; building battery gigafactories; and expanding the electricity grid to carry clean power. This would be at half the cost of meeting Trump’s demand for 5% a year on war and have a positive multiplier effect on the economy and people’s lives, in a way that war spending does not.

3. Crisis measures must be social justice measures. 

• Rationing by price is inherently inequitable.  
• The benefits of renewable energy and new technology for travel, cooking, and heating and cooling homes, must be fairly distributed to everyone.  Currently, well-to-do, digitally savvy households with solar panels and electric vehicles see immediate benefits, while poorer families a mile away see none. 
• The government must commit to a guarantee that everyone in the UK will get a fair share of the benefits of renewable energy. 

Emergency options should include 

• reduce fossil fuel demand (and therefore prices) by banning private jets, slashing public transport fares or making them free to encourage a shift. 
• Put pre-emptive limits on purchases of key food items in limited supply, to ensure equitable distribution of what there is.
• An Energy For All approach, which would offer the real security of a baseline which no one can fall below based on higher prices for high use of energy, free or low prices for low users, combined with adjustments for those who need more energy because of disabilities, large families, or housing conditions. Instead would offer the real security of a baseline which no one can fall below.  

A motion for unions, campaigns and parties follows.

 

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Though cowards flinch? No retreat on climate policy!

Image by Claudia Hinz from Pixabay

By Paul Atkin

Forces on the right of the labour movement are seeking to use the impending Labour leadership contest to attack what’s left of Labour’s commitments to a cheap sustainable energy policy.

In this they are the auxiliaries of the full throated and downright dishonest attacks coming from the Conservatives and Far Right; whose desire to act as local agents of the USA’s bid for global energy dominance trumps* any concern for the higher energy bills and the economic shrinkage that would result from a retreat on renewables. Genuine “patriots” would not want to keep the UK in hock to expensive and environmentally ruinous LNG imports from the USA and Qatar. If they weren’t in hock themselves to fossil fuel interests they could paint wind turbines red,white and blue and call them “freedom farms” if they wanted to; but they don’t.

This has been appositely described by James Murray, the editor of Business Green as “wanting to build a typewriter economy… after the invention of the PC”; and wanting “to turn UK industry into a heritage railway.”

• Badenoch and Farage (and Blair) know that the UK has no viable energy future based on fossil fuels; as the North Sea is steadily becoming exhausted, and fracking is too geologically difficult to be profitable.
• They also know therefore that slowing down or shutting down the “rush to renewables” and what they call “net zero madness” would mean that the UK would remain dependent on expensive fossil fuel imports that would keep bills high. The exact opposite of what they claim in the papers.
• They are also perfectly well aware that, since the start of Trump’s war on Iran, a war that they wanted the UK to join in initially, the energy produced by the wind and solar that has already been built is saving billions in displaced fossil fuel import bills. A paradox of a war aimed at securing US “global energy dominance” is that it is persuading countries all around the world to accelerate their shift to electrification and renewable energy.
• And that on a domestic level, as fossil fuels get more expensive, the technologies they power become unaffordable as well as dirty, so millions of people are drawing the conclusion that getting off them cuts costs: hence the rapid growth in EV and solar panel purchases. 

They also know that theirs are not popular polices.

Even Reform voters would rather have a solar farm near them than a fracking site at a rate of almost 2 to 1, while in most local authority areas around three quarters of people are worried about climate change, three fifths think it should be a government priority and more than three quarters support renewable energy. But they are seeking to brass it out with the help of what might best be called “fossil media” and covering fire from sections of the labour movement.

This push backwards from Trump’s local agents is, however, given some encouragement from Wes Streeting’s call for new oil and gas licences to be permitted in the North Sea and Andy Burnham’s recent statement that he’s got “something of an open mind” and no “fixed position” on it. While Streeting is in open retreat, there is notably a deafening silence on climate in the summary of Burnham’s polices written by Daniel Green on Labour List this week; though some of them, greater public control of water, energy, housing and transport, cutting back the standard bus fare to £2 from £3, allocation of £39 billion solely to social housing, not social and “affordable” housing, are implicitly steps in the right direction and would have a positive, if limited, impact.

All this might be considered an example of Burnham’s capacity to sustain wide support through positive sounding ambiguity, but any indication of weakness on this issue is an invitation for attack. And so, a number of people, many of them quite obscure, have wheeled themselves out and laid down a barrage of bad faith arguments in defence of fossil fuels this week; summarised here on Politics Home.

Looking at these one by one.

If you discount Tony Blair, and who doesn’t these days, the most heavyweight voice is that of Gary Smith, General Secretary of the GMB. Gary, sadly, has consistently echoed climate sceptic talking points since his election, to the delight of right-wing media outlets from the Sun to the Spectator.  His comparison of the government’s net zero agenda this week to the deindustrialisation policies of Margaret Thatcher; arguing it is “closing factories, hitting investment and hitting jobs” and telling Times Radio that the “policy” of phasing out North Sea oil and gas was “economic madness” leading to thousands of job losses, turns reality on its head.

• The “green economy” is the one part of the UK economy that is booming, growing at 9% a year and already supporting over a million jobs, as the rest of the economy grinds along at 1%. Opening factories, drawing in investment, boosting jobs. If the GMB, and other unions, get on the right side of history on this, we could recruit many of the workers in these growing sectors, the way that ASTMS did with white collar workers in the late 60s. This is vital for the renewable workforce to be unionised to ensure bargaining rights and empowerment into the future.
• When it comes to the oil and gas sector in the North Sea, the fact is that tens of thousands of jobs have already been lost without the GMB’s existing policy saving a single one of them. 
• This is because the basin is running out of oil and gas. This makes continued extraction decreasingly profitable. In effect, the North Sea is phasing itself out.
• All the additional investment permitted under the last lot of Conservative governments, which amounted to hundreds of additional licences, contributed just 36 days of additional supply.
• This is a physical reality. Not a “policy”. The policy, of successive governments is about managing that reality.
• The difference between the decline of North Sea oil and gas with and without investment, and therefore the jobs that go with it, is about 2% by 2050. This is marginal, not a lifeline, let alone a “goldmine”. 
• The only lifeline for offshore workers is to fight for an easier transition from oil and gas to offshore wind. If the platform is sinking, we need to make sure that the workers on it can get into the only lifeboats we have.
• Pretending that it can stay afloat forever sells the delusion to his members that further increases in investment in oil and gas would save their jobs. It wouldn’t. And he knows it.
• So, the question for Gary is why keep leading your members up the garden path, where Nigel Farage has been waiting for them? There’s little point in denouncing Reform at GMB Congress, which he rightly did as “rebadged Tories”, if his arguments on climate echo their policies and, even their language, rather than fight for the transition his members need as much as the rest of us do. The net result of that approach has been more GMB members supporting Reform than Labour in recent polling.

Luke Akehurst, Labour MP for North Durham, and one of the founders of scandal hit faction Labour Together, said “I do think ministers need to listen carefully to what the GMB, one of Labour’s largest affiliates, is saying about the industrial and employment impact of our energy policies, and take a pragmatic approach that safeguards well-paid, unionised jobs in the oil and gas sector. The promised ‘green industrial revolution’ hasn’t involved enough job creation yet here in the UK. My constituents don’t get any jobs from the mass import of solar panels from China.”

• No jobs creation? The jobs growth created by that 9% a year growth in the “green economy” is running at four times the rate they are being lost in carbon heavy sectors. Diverting investment from the future to the past would choke this off.
• And, while the UK is only a marginal player in solar panel manufacture, it has competitive advantage in other sectors, some of which generate exports. The 2017 Renewables UK Export Nation Report listed these as follows “an extraordinarily wide variety of goods and services, including supplying, installing and maintaining onshore wind turbines and components, designing gearboxes, manufacturing offshore wind turbine blades and steelwork, supplying and laying underwater power cables, installing, inspecting and maintaining offshore wind farms, providing helicopters, crew and vessels, developing wave and tidal energy projects and providing components for the marine energy industry, as well as designing software, conducting geological surveys, monitoring wildlife, and providing financial and legal services”. 
• And “the mass import of solar panels from China”, or anywhere else, requires the mass employment of the workers needed to install and maintain them. Luke’s Durham constituency is just twenty minutes by train away from Sunderland, where a deal announced this week between Nissan and Chery to manufacture EVs at the biggest car plant in the country holds out the prospect of keeping the 6,000 “well paid unionised jobs” sustained by it secure into the future. So long as this inward investment by a Chinese company is not sabotaged on the sort of spurious Cold War “national security” grounds that pulled the rug out from the prospective wind turbine factory investment in NE Scotland from Minyang last year; after pressure from the US Embassy that Luke Akehurst would be one of the first to echo.
• As Miatta Fahnbulleh, a former energy minister who, in a hopeful sign, is helping Burnham develop policy ahead of his bid to replace Starmer, has said “There is a global industry that is building up around the green transition around renewables. China is at the absolute forefront of that. Why the hell would we not want a piece of that? Why would we not want to be on the front foot?”
• As for taking notice of large affiliates – the implicit argument being not to assess the quality of the argument but just to weigh the votes – perhaps Luke missed what UNISON, Labour’s largest affiliate had to say on this matter this week, with General Secretary Andrea Egan arguing on Labour List  “Climate change denial is creeping into politics like never before, with far-right parties treating fossil fuels as a panacea for the country’s problems (my emphasis). Some Labour figures are even calling on the government to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea”…which… “wouldn’t make a significant difference for working-class people in Britain, and it would be grossly irresponsible to working-class people in the Global South.” Andrea’s recognition that the working-class interest in averting climate breakdown is international is essential if our movement is to forge global alliances that push beyond the limitations of self subordination to the UK ruling class.
• And workers in oil and gas will need full trade union protection for as long as there are workers in those sectors, particularly because it is in decline. Part of that protection is negotiating transition. 

Jonathan Hinder, MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, chimed in with: “Britain must be pragmatic in our energy transition. We need oil and gas, and will do so for many decades to come. It is common sense to use our own resources as much as possible, supporting jobs and tax receipts in the process, rather than relying on foreign imports.”

• “Pragmatic”. Akehurst used the same word. Did these people get given a script, or is this sort of cliche hard  wired into their thinking? Is there any pusillanimous capitulation to power over truth that can’t be described as “pragmatic”? There is nothing “pragmatic” about ignoring the damage that would be done by additional carbon emissions when we are already in a world of trouble. Nothing “pragmatic” about ignoring scientific reality under pressure from fossil fuel interests and their political agents who are seeking a few more years of profits as the world tips towards disaster around them. A comment from Jo White, who convenes the “Red Wall” caucus, expresses the tension in this. “We need an energy policy that lifts the foot off the throttle for UK growth and jobs by ensuring that the severe impacts of rising costs from imported energy are mitigated through targeted interventions, a faster shift to home-grown green energy production, and keeps UK oil and gas in the mix until that point is reached,” So, the issue isn’t whether oil and gas will continue to be used. They will, and will stay “in the mix” as we make that “faster shift to home grown green energy production”. But their use has to be at ever decreasing levels. Oil and gas not where the future lies – if we are to have one. The faster we can get off them the more we limit the damage to the climate, and the cheaper it will be. We can’t be reckless and cavalier about that.
• And to restate the bleedin’ obvious; allowing new exploration in the North Sea, or approving the licences for Rosebank and Jackdaw, would make a miniscule difference to production, will not stop the decline of the basin, will not save jobs, will make no difference whatsoever to energy bills. Everyone knows this, but so many pretend otherwise.
• And “our resources” are not “our resources”. They belong to the companies that own them. They are not ring fenced for local use. Most are sold on the world market. All are sold at world market prices. All of these people talk as if North Sea oil and gas were a nationalised industry, but none of them are in favour of actually nationalising it; which would be the best way to manage the transition to make sure that it’s just.

Henry Tufnell, Labour MP for Mid and South Pembrokeshire, said “UK energy prices that are four times more expensive than the USA and six times more expensive than Texas cannot support a competitive industrial base.” 

• No country in Europe can emulate US energy policy, because no country in Europe has the vast supplies of relatively cheaply accessible fossil fuels that the USA has. If they did, seeking prosperity on the back of them would, in any case, be a short term fool’s paradise; as the consequence of burning them would put any hope of averting climate tipping points out of reach, with the rapidly increasing damage that we are already seeing. The US itself is already suffering enormous damage.
• To put this in figures, allowing global warming to reach 3°C by 2100 could reduce cumulative economic output by 15% to 34%. Alternatively, investing 1% to 2% in mitigation and adaptation would limit warming to 2°C, reducing economic damages to 2% to 4%. This net cost of inaction is equivalent to 11% to 27% of cumulative GDP. Not a “pragmatic” course to follow. By contrast, the cost of meeting the 87% GHG cut by 2040 has been assessed by the Climate Change Committee at 14p per person per day. Not exactly “eye watering”.
• And, if Henry wants cheaper energy bills, for households and manufacturing, he should note that Wind and solar have made Spain “one of Europe’s cheapest power markets”. In the first four months of 2026, the average wholesale electricity price in Spain was €44 per megawatt-hour. In Italy, where the Meloni government had dug in on gas reliance, it was €127.  In the UK, €103. The story behind that ranking is that Spain increasingly pushed gas out of its electricity supply, so the price of electricity dropped. Pragmatically, would it make sense to follow the Spanish example, or the Italian? Italy itself, even under Meloni, has drawn the right conclusion in getting a €23bn State aid scheme approved by the European Commission to support a shift to electricity production from renewable sources to counteract the impact of a fuel import bill that has risen to €60bn this year, up €8-9bn from 2025 .
  
  And then there’s yesterday’s man, war criminal, aging millionaire errand boy for billionaires, and wholly owned subsidiary of Larry Ellison, Tony Blair; who got in early last month to urge the government to slow down its “net zero agenda” to get closer to Donald Trump and “prioritise cheap energy over clean energy” neither noticing, nor caring, that dirty energy is expensive and clean energy is cheap.

Whoever ends up running the Labour Party and therefore, in this Parliament, the government, will be under enormous pressure to appease Donald Trump’s ferocious last ditch defence of fossil fuels – with Badenoch and Farage as his local agents – in the context of an energy cost crisis given a vicious upward spike by his war on Iran amid the growing heat of the impending El Nino.

Streeting, following Blair and, indeed, Mandelson, would fall in with that agenda.

Burnham looks like applying what might be called Starmerism with a human face; saying, “normally you would want a good relationship with the United States, but if you can’t agree with them, then say that as well. That’s the only way I think to deal with them. Obviously, the relationship is important to the UK, but not to the point where we just go along with anything they say. We’ve got in trouble in the past when that happens. I think the approach that Keir has taken is the right one.”

On climate, a sign of how much he will stand up and how far he will bend the knee to Trump will be whether he keeps Ed Miliband on at the DESNZ. While the GJA and others have critiqued the limitations of Miliband’s over technicist approach to green transition, were any new leader to throw his head to a press that has been baying for it since before the General Election in an attempt to appease them, they will find instead that they will have simply thrown chum into the shark filled waters they want to swim in.

Looking to the example of the Spanish government, pushing harder on energy transition, resisting increases in arms spending, welcoming migration, is the alternative course that we should fight for whoever comes out on top for now; while taking inspiration from Jean Luc Melenchon’s call at his campaign launch for the French Presidential election for regenerating society on a social and ecological basis.

*pun intended.

 

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The post Though cowards flinch? No retreat on climate policy! first appeared on Greener Jobs Alliance.