From THE DAILY SCEPTIC
Last week, the U.K. took two new plunges towards purging its industrial wealth-creating capacity. On Thursday, Petroineos confirmed its plans to close the Grangemouth oil refinery. Then, on Friday, and after years of wrangling, the High Court ruled that the Whitehaven coal mine could not go ahead. The latter is more than mere negligence from the Net Zero fanatics running the country, who seem more interested in wind farms and clubbing in Ibiza than oil refineries; this is another expression of green spite.
The Whitehaven coal mine project has long been the subject of green lawfare. The hearing ultimately reached a conclusion because the new Government, in the form of Angela Rayner, decided not to continue the previous Government’s commitment to the project. Though the project to produce coal for steel production has support in an area that has a need for the jobs, has willing private investors backing it, has a domestic and international market, and had, most controversially, government backing, it was Green Blob funding of opposition organisations and legal challenges to planning decisions that took control away from democratically elected politicians in a series of hearings. The plan was incompatible with the Climate Change Act 2008 (CCA), found the judge, Justice Holgate, according to the Guardian. This echoes the point made by Peter Lilley when the legislation was being debated in Parliament (such as it was), that “the sole effect of enshrining the targets in statute will be that the Government’s policies will be open to judicial review”.
“The idea that judges should decide on policies costing billions of pounds, without being accountable to the electorate for the billions that they might decide need to be incurred, fills me with foreboding,” said Lilley.
But Blob-funded lawfare is now only half the story. The other half is now economic strangulation.
Petroineos’s announcement cites the U.K.’s projected falling demand for fossil fuels, the high cost of energy in the U.K. compared with overseas and more modern plants as reasons for the closure. Scottish secretary Ian Murray told STV that the decision had nothing to do with Net Zero. But this seems unlikely, given Petroineos’s CEO Frank Damey also told STV that “the energy transition is happening now and it is happening here”, and that “with a ban on new petrol and diesel cars due to come into force within the next decade, we foresee that the market for those fuels will shrink further”. This reflects earlier comments from Ineos founder Jim Ratcliffe that the U.K. and European chemical manufacturing sector had been destroyed by high energy prices.
Ed Miliband, meanwhile, shared his crocodile tears on Twitter, claiming “It is deeply disappointing that Petroineos have confirmed their previous decision to close Grangemouth oil refinery”. But he has been clear that Labour intends to destroy the North Sea oil and gas industry through punitive taxation and a pledge to grant no new licences for exploration. This hostility to oil and gas production has obvious consequences for sites such as Grangemouth, but may end up causing an even greater blow to British industry. Whereas the loss of the refinery causes 400 job losses, there are fears about the risk to 200,000 jobs in the sector caused by the Government’s eco-virtue-signalling – and from an unexpected source. On Monday, the BBC reported that the TUC, Unite and the GMB had all voiced concerns, although some unions reportedly claimed that “there are no jobs on a dead planet”.
This absurdly histrionic and wholly vapid rejoinder to concerns about jobs, industry and the economy highlights the broader Labour movement’s metamorphosis from representing the industrial working class to performative middle-class public-sector virtue-signalling. And it likely signals extremely serious tensions within the Labour movement caused by the Net Zero policy that have not been visible before now. As Unite’s executive council member Cliff Bowen told the BBC, the green agenda has been advanced with “false promises of green jobs which never seem to materialise”.
These problems are to be mitigated in Grangemouth with a £100 million Government grant. And similar negotiations are taking place in Port Talbot about a £500 million subsidy, conditional on £750 million of investment from Tata. But on a per-job basis, such subsidies are poor value: £250,000 and £200,000 per job in Grangemouth and Port Talbot respectively. No government is able to sustain that level of palliative care for the industries that Miliband is manifestly intent on euthanising. At such rates, supporting the oil and gas sector would cost in the order of £50 billion. The soft-handed, soft-headed faction of the Labour Party would find itself on the wrong side of industrial disputes, without a Conservative government, or a Thatcher, to blame.
Such tensions cannot be resolved with soundbites along the lines of “there are no jobs on a dead planet” because unemployment is a more real, more immediate and worse problem than climate change (aka slightly different weather). And Bowen’s warning about false promises of “green jobs” should cause deeper reflection on the consequences of unchecked green ideology crashing through Britain’s economy. Notice that whereas Lilley’s predictions have come true, the promises of “green jobs” (and “green growth” and “green industrial revolution”) that were made by the proponents of the Climate Change Act have not materialised and are not legally enforceable.
The green agenda has been sold to us on a false prospectus. As I pointed out last week, the viciousness with which it has been advanced has been epitomised by its abandoning pensioners to the winter cold. Can we take Ed Miliband’s claim, made in the wake of the Grangemouth news, that “this is a Government that stands with workers, trade unions, and businesses to fight for jobs and investment”, seriously? Even if he meant it, does he or the Labour Government have a clue about how to reconcile the manifest contradictions between commitments to green ideology and the interests of working people? Given that Miliband and his cronies lack any obvious capacity for thought, I very much doubt it.
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