Just transition? It’s getting as brutal as 1980s mining shutdown for oil workers

Certainly, if any Scots were still surprised by his admission that it might take 20 years to create the 1,000 jobs promised in Aberdeen, we have some decommissioned oil rigs to sell them.

GB Energy was, of course, unleashed by Sir Keir Starmer to power the country’s transformation into a “clean-energy super-power”, running on sun, wind and lower energy bills. Although, as Maier admitted, the lower bills will, like the jobs, also take a little time.

In fairness, the publicly owned company is only showing the same urgency we have come to expect during our slow but unsteady progress to a greener tomorrow when, we have been repeatedly told, skilled workers in oil and gas will seamlessly transition to similarly well-paid roles in renewables.

It is lovely to think so but, in the real world, the real families and real communities relying on our offshore industries, their supply chains, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that go with them are not entirely reassured. Who can blame them?

Unused to unvarnished truth

Ministers in one government after another, on one side of the border or the other, have offered only airy aspiration where detailed plans should be. Perhaps Maier’s comments raised so many eyebrows because, when it comes to energy, we are so unused to plain talk and unvarnished truth.

We need more of it because even the most ardent supporters of renewable energy, the most vocal proponents of net zero, quietly admit oil and, especially, gas will be needed for a couple of decades at least. That obvious truth, that inarguable necessity, is not, apparently, enough for ministers to encourage UK production, however, or temper their rhetoric around renewables.

Allowing our rigs and refineries to power down and relying on other countries to keep the lights on still seems a little, well, counter-intuitive. We will import oil and gas but not produce it while happily exporting contracts, skills and jobs overseas? The practical impact of Labour’s refusal to grant new exploration licences in the North Sea might remain unclear but the message it sent was absolutely crystal.

It is unfair, however, to suggest nothing is happening because tiny wheels are grinding, meetings, held, consultative papers written, and busywork done but the pace is glacial, the progress painfully slow. It is 14 years since Alex Salmond promised Scotland would become the Saudi Arabia of renewables. At this pace, who would bet on us being very much closer in another 14?

National imperatives

Holyrood ministers insist, of course they do, that Scotland will still become “a global powerhouse of green energy”, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of wind power. There are now said to be 24 offshore wind-related projects under review, potentially underpinned by £628 million in public and private investment.

But how many turbines will be built here? How much cabling? How many engineering and manufacturing jobs created? Where is the £500m ringfenced by Holyrood to build supply chains? What about the grid, the storage, the infrastructure? What about a plan?

The drive to renewables is clearly a national imperative but so too is the economy and energy security. There is little to be gained and too much to be lost by securing one while sacrificing another. There is little time for more talk and none at all for more photoshoots of politicians in hard hats and hi-vis vests pointing at derelict land where, they insist, new jobs will one day grow.

It is beyond time for Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to open the curtains and allow a glimmer of reality to fall on his grand design and that goes for his counterparts at Holyrood too. John Swinney was in solemn high dudgeon after the less than shocking revelations from GB Energy. Scots have been hoodwinked, the First Minister despaired, knuckles white as he clutched his pearls.

He’s right but they have been hoodwinked by politicians and policy-makers on both sides of the border making huge claims for an energy strategy that would embarrass the back of a fag packet and still remains more ambition than achievement after all these years. They have been confused by talk of just transitions when there is no transition, just or otherwise. They have been nonplussed by repeated promises of jobs tomorrow while they watch skills and contracts going abroad today.

And they have been bamboozled, like the oil and gas companies, by ministers’ finely weighted words of support while practical, productive support is withheld. Meanwhile, the SNP’s point-blank and dogmatic refusal to even consider new nuclear power stations only adds to the bewilderment.

The opposite of just

There is, however, one clear and expert voice capable of cutting through the babble, a voice that has been too seldom heard in this debate: the voice of workers. So far, our drive to renewables is something that has been done to our energy workers, not with them.

The transition underway from Forth Valley to South Wales, from Grangemouth to Port Talbot, is the opposite of just. This transition, the one politicians don’t like to discuss, is brutal, a thing to be suffered not embraced, and measured in redundancies not opportunities. It is the same transition our mining communities endured in the 1980s and cannot, must not, be repeated.

It may take GB Energy 20 years to create 1,000 jobs in Aberdeen, as Juergen Maier admits, but, without a realistic plan, an honest, clear-eyed strategy to shape this country’s transition to renewables, how many more might be lost by then?

Louise Gilmour is secretary of GMB Scotland