While the Green Energy Transition promises a cleaner, lighter, more sustainable future, as currently designed and implemented in Scotland it treats us as hostage consumers, providing relatively few sustainable skilled jobs and minimal revenue for local and national renewal. Relying upon technocratic advocacy, in the absence of wholesale societal and community “pull”, it risks wholesale failure. Without glorifying our industrial past, we can learn profound lessons from it. How can we better ensure a successful energy transition truly works for all Scots?
Just Transition: “Greening the economy in a way that is as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned, creating decent work opportunities and leaving no one behind.” International Labour Organisation definition
Imagine the following: A few hundred kilometres across the North Sea a poor nation suffered centuries of rapacious extraction and export of its raw materials, fish, timber, iron ore. This impoverished its own population and enriched the foreign players who oversaw this extraction. Norway remained one of the poorest countries in Europe for centuries because of this. Indigenous industries were underdeveloped and marginal.
Fifty years ago, when faced with a new bounty, oil and gas, this nation took a very different path. The single key consideration would be their people, the Norwegians. Despite intense pressure from more experienced foreign players, the entire ecosystem would be designed by Norwegians to ensure Norway and its population flourished. They would directly own the raw resources. And the means of production. And the means of export. They would prioritise the sequence in which resources were developed. And levy higher than average taxation while providing stable, safe conditions for foreign investment. Norwegian supply chains would grow providing high quality sustainable jobs. An Oil Fund would be set up for future generations. Every road, school, university, social housing development, research institute, bridge, tunnel, community would share in the bounty. Irrespective of location. Irrespective of political persuasion. For generations. And generations.
Now imagine Scotland and our green transition. And imagine that rather than the latter enlightened Norwegian route we elected to choose the former exploitative model!
We have designed an entire neoliberal ecosystem which guarantees that that we will not flourish. The control of the generation capacity is vested in the hands of private corporations, many foreign owned. Likewise, our midstream transmission grid is owned by private companies. In both cases we guarantee attractive returns and moderate risks. Taxation is light and flows primarily to Westminster. Scottish supply chains are emaciated and marginal since Scottish content is not mandated. There is no Renewables Fund for future generations. Devolved capacity in ScotWind and the Crown Estate is timidly exercised and the proceeds unsustainably used to plug budget “holes”. Communities are blighted by private enterprise export infrastructure while paying some of the highest domestic energy bills in Europe, nationally impoverishing hundreds of thousands. As capacity grows to supply English markets, Scots net employment and revenue stagnates. Even when we are more than 100% self-sufficient in renewable electricity generation, we are net zero better off!
In parallel our indigenous Oil and Gas industry is kicked and battered, unloved, heavily taxed and shedding more quality jobs than Renewables will provide. Grangemouth shudders to a halt with no Plan B.
This is the opposite of fair and inclusive to everyone concerned. It does not create decent work opportunities. It leaves most Scots behind. It doesn’t even do much for the global environment.
What’s on offer for the future? The British Energy chimera? English carbon capture and storage schemes? Thousands more kilometres of high-tension lines criss-crossing Scotland to ensure the lights stay on in Birmingham and London? Billions more in profits from Scottish windfarms and transmission for private and foreign investors? Billions in manufacturing and fabrication for supply chains beyond our borders? Relentlessly increasing domestic energy bills for Scottish consumers, irrespective of any “promises” that Ed Miliband plucks from his incredible strategy hat. Plus, a political and social backlash as seen across Europe, most recently in the wipeout of the Greens in Ireland. A combination of climate scepticism, online trolling and huge push-back on costs and “benefits” makes progress challenging or even impossible in some cases. And even more shrill technocratic advocacy will not cut it.
Extractive industries like mining and oil and gas frequently carry large risks for host communities and governments. Especially where benefits are blatantly shared unequally. In the best cases, like Norway, the bounty “lifts all boats”, is sustainable and equable. In the worst-case corruption, theft, environmental blight and political instability and violence accompany exploitation.
Even in European democracies communities can still be destroyed or be left with terrible legacy issues. Scotland experienced this with the brutal demise of our coal, steel and shipbuilding industries. In the northern Netherlands the giant Groningen gas field exported hundreds of billions of euros worth of gas since the 1960’s. It paid hundreds of billions in tax to the Dutch State. But the north of the Netherlands remained the poorest and least developed part of the country. When extraction-related seismicity started it was handled technocratically, dismissively, arrogantly. It grew and grew. Now some 100 000 buildings are damaged. Reparations run likely to many tens of billions. Tens of thousands of lives are blighted, and Groningen is a national scandal. A terrible example of extraction for the benefit of private investors and a distant disinterested government at the expense of the communities living with the resource and export infrastructure.
Without glorifying and becoming unrealistically misty-eyed about Scotland’s carbon-fuelled industrial past, we must recognise that in large part it worked for many Scottish workers and businesses alike. When I was a boy miners dug coal which burned in furnaces in the central belt to smelt iron and steel. This went to local car factories and shipyards to build the cars that sat in our streets, and ships which carried passengers and goods all over the world. Almost all of this, warts and all, was in public ownership. When the oil and gas boom came, tens of thousands of Scots helped fabricate many of the offshore facilities that were positioned over our precious resources. Hundreds of thousands subsequently helped maintain and operate these facilities, deliver the commercial deals underpinning the assets, refine and export the finished products. We were not as wise as the Norwegians, but Scotland’s offshore industry was an asset, nonetheless.
This legacy is largely gone. Swept away in waves of privatisation, bankruptcy and deindustrialisation. Japanese and Korean shipyards rose in our wake. Likewise German and Chinese car plants and Danish supply chains for the new renewables industry. Our gas is now largely imported from places like Norway and the US where the producers have become rich.
The green economy is undoubtedly cleaner, lighter, more sustainable than our past. But that’s simply not good enough. As sold, it won’t renew my local primary school. Or build a better NHS. Or offer enough decent jobs to compensate for the decline in the oil and gas sector. Or pull consumers out of energy poverty. Or allow communities hosting green infrastructure to be treated with respect and to share in the bounty. Or convince many Scots that this is a fair trade-off. Or even make much of a dent in the global climate crisis.
As sold, it will however provide billions in profits for foreign and private investors. And keep London running. And put plenty of money in the pockets of the Crown Estate. And the UK Exchequer. And ensure supply chains outside Scotland flourish. While our indigenous legacy industries are run down, and the online and wider opposition inevitably grows.
We didn’t vote for this. It was never explained thus. If it had been offered as such, which of us Scots would have accepted this proposal? But here we are.
It is not too late. We can regroup. We can convene around a genuinely just energy transition that puts all Scots needs and futures at its core. While still growing infrastructure and building capacity. We need to get back to defining our needs. Economic needs. Employment needs. Investment needs. Consumer needs. Community needs. We need to get out of the bad carbon versus good electrons ideological rut. Let’s look at our key levers. Do we cooperate more closely with Westminster or do we sword-rattle to get better terms? Do we actively encourage bolshie behaviour to slow some progress and extract improved outcomes? How do we change regulation to focus more upon Scottish jobs and revenue? How do we better balance new versus legacy energy investment? We are not helpless. Nor lacking expertise. So, let’s stop behaving like it.
The risk is the strategy wonks line up yet again. More toothless Green Energy papers. More self-serving thousands of words. More delays. Or more technocratic “explaining” and “selling”. No thanks.
Better put representative Scots and international voices and experiences and needs at the very centre of our considerations. It would be much better to try three different things:
- Organise a genuinely radical fundamental energy convention for the Scots people, rooted in our collective needs and expectations. This should address shorter and longer timelines. We can build upon the positive democratic Irish Citizens Assembly experiences as a model. Groups of citizens empowered and supported to wrestle with the toughest political and social challenges. And create our equivalent of the “12 Commandments” that defined the core principles governing Norway’s oil and gas future and underpinned eventual wealth for all.
- Benchmark our principles against the green transition status quo. Identify gaps and priorities at strategy, policy, practice levels. Sharpen up our priorities, our costs and our prizes.
- Build negotiation teams selected to fight to close those gaps. A broad mix of skills and experiences, mandated by the convention recommendations. Working with and through existing institutions, but with the right to disrupt and agitate against the current frameworks, so heavily stacked against us.
We don’t need to be independent to do this. We don’t need to be SNP members. We have the bright talented experienced thoughtful people to do all this hard work. Within a broad and deep and informed Scottish coalition. I have no illusions that change will be resisted. Hard and long. Incumbents have much to lose. But not as much as us.
Neil Gilmour is a former energy industry senior executive recently returned to Scotland having led numerous successful world-scale projects.