By NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
As we learned last week, Scotland's last remaining oil refinery – Grangemouth – is to close, with the loss of 400 jobs.
The plant – co-owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe's Ineos – is closing as the UK imposes a ban on new petrol and diesel cars to meet carbon targets.
Grangemouth produces most of the petrol, diesel, heating oil and aviation fuel used in Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland. The closure, Ineos said, is due to lower fuel demand as “the ban on new petrol and diesel cars is due to come into force”.
While Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, accused the “billionaire owners” of Grangemouth of “industrial vandalism”, she also pointed to the car ban. “The path to net zero cannot be paid for with workers' jobs,” said the head of Britain's second largest union.
In addition to Grangemouth, the government also recently confirmed the closure of the last two blast furnaces at the famous Port Talbot steelworks, resulting in a further 2,500 redundancies.
Labour's green policies are “hollowing out working-class communities,” said Gary Smith, leader of the GMB, Britain's third-largest union. The government must stop “decarbonisation through deindustrialisation,” he said.
At the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference last week, Unite and GMB highlighted unions' concerns about the path to “net zero” – a goal that Labour is even more determined to pursue than the Tories.
The two unions passed a joint motion opposing the Labour Party's impending ban on issuing new permits for drilling in the North Sea, supported by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
They are demanding “watertight” guarantees for the workers affected – around 30,000 jobs in the North Sea oil and gas industry offshore and around 200,000 more along the British oil and gas supply chain.
Graham recalled the closure of coal mines in the 1980s. “Unite will not stand idly by and watch these workers become the miners of our generation,” she said, one of Britain's most powerful union barons, raising the specter of Thatcher-era industrial relations marked by chaos and violence barely two months after the first Labour government in 14 years came to power.
Recently, attention has focused on the dispute between Downing Street and the Labour left over the means-testing of heating allowances for pensioners – complaints that Downing Street has largely dismissed.
But there are signs of a much larger, longer-term conflict: the existential costs to British industry of trying to meet the legally binding target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 are coming ever more clearly into focus.
Grangemouth and Port Talbot are just the latest examples in a growing list of carbon neutral-related factory closures. These factories have long provided good, well-paid jobs in parts of the country where such jobs are hard to come by.
The destruction of Britain's North Sea oil and gas production and the many associated activities will create enormous tensions in the developed world – and expose the gap between Labour's relatively wealthy, often urban-based “environmental voters” and its traditional voting base.
Already, voters are increasingly aware that net zero exacerbates the cost of living crisis. Yes, Britain has a relatively high proportion of what Miliband calls “cheap renewables” – which have produced around two-fifths of our electricity in recent months.
But these subsidies on top of electricity bills mean that British businesses and households pay almost the highest electricity prices in Europe, despite – or even because of – the increasing use of renewable energy.
If climate neutrality does not soon benefit citizens as well, rather than simply increasing their financial burden, the consensus to pursue the 2050 targets – which is taken for granted by much of our political and media class – could come under serious pressure.
And as unions fight for tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs during Sir Keir Starmer's “first term,” the resulting environmental and industrial conflicts could tear the Labour movement apart.
The first major test is the impending ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles across the UK and the European Union from 2035 – but the sale of used cars will remain legal.
The Labour Party's manifesto promised to bring this forward to 2030 – which I firmly believe will not happen. I expect the 2035 deadline will not be met either.
Why? Because consumer uptake of electric vehicles is well below forecasts and imposing the proposed ban could destroy large parts of the UK car industry, which employs around a million people. Large parts of our car market would be given over to heavily subsidised Chinese-made electric vehicles, which already account for around 60 percent of global production.
Car sales in the UK rose by around 3 percent last year, but are still 15 percent below pre-lockdown levels. Sales of electric vehicles have collapsed, with their market share remaining at around 18 percent for the past three years.
Last week I interviewed Robert Forrester, co-founder and CEO of Vertu Motors – one of the UK's largest car retailers – for the Telegraph's Planet Normal podcast. He described how the impending petrol and diesel ban is already affecting sales.
Since January, manufacturers have faced fines if 22 percent of the cars they sell in the UK are not fully electric – they have to pay £15,000 for each vehicle they fail to achieve. Next year, the target will be raised to 28 percent, and by 2030 it is expected to reach 80 percent – even if the complete ban remains in place in 2035.
Forrester describes how this will lead to a “rationing” of petrol and diesel vehicles as the ban approaches. Prices will soar as low sales of electric vehicles mean that manufacturers will only be able to avoid ruinous fines if they drastically reduce production of petrol and diesel vehicles.
He is just the latest high-ranking automaker, along with the bosses of Ford, Stellantis and Renault, to point out the dangers of a rapid transition to electric vehicles.
In the coming years, governments in the UK and across Europe face a huge industrial battle to push through carbon neutrality policies, despite resistance from trade unions and the population that is sure to grow.
With every plant closure that attracts attention, the intensity of this struggle increases.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/15/battle-over-net-zero-has-only-just-begun
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