PUBLIC OWNERSHIP TO PROTECT PEOPLE AND PLANET

Those who deny the urgency of action against climate change are as rare and as ridiculous as members of the Flat Earth Society. A plethora of reports pour out, and millions witness climate-based human disasters across the globe, both confirming the need for emergency action against global warming and associated chaos.

But the central question is how to make a radical, rapid transition to a clean, green economy that benefits the working-class majority, rather than measures that punish us with mass job losses, punitive carbon taxes and increased inequality. All the evidence, including in Scotland, proves that ownership is at the heart of what is dubbed a ‘Just Transition’.

For at least 200 years, western capitalism has relied heavily on carbon to build its wealth and power, plundering people and planet alike. The carbon emissions have helped create the crisis where the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned we only have 12 years to take emergency action to keep global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, or else it will be too late; irreversible. 
The same study concluded pollution from carbon emissions must be eradicated by 2050, not 2075 as suggested by previous world summits.

Oxfam has identified that climate-based disasters have increased four-fold in the short ten years from 1995-2015. 
The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030, climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths each year, due to malnutrition, malaria, heat stress, and diarrhoea - mostly in the global south.

Droughts, landslides, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, creeping desertification, extinction of species...all these and others are common symptoms of the system we need to confront. But at whose cost?

Class and Climate Chaos

Every disaster, itself the product of the reckless, ruthless profiteering system that is capitalism, also serves to remind us of the class divide inherent to that same system. When wildfires erupted in California last November, millionaires hired private firefighters to shield their sumptuous homes, whilst working class communities were burnt to the ground.

Equally, if we rely on the capitalist rich to ‘green’ the economy, every hopelessly inadequate measure they take will be at the expense of the working class: regressive ‘green’ taxes, reduced services, slaughter of jobs, etc.

In the words of author and pioneering environmental activist, Naomi Klein, “neo-liberal climate action passes on the costs to working people, offer them no better jobs or services and lets the big polluters off the hook. People see it as class war, because it is.”

Scotland is prone to boast of being a world leader in reducing carbon emissions, by 49% since 1990. But there are two other sides to that encouraging fact. 
One of the reasons is the closure of mines, steelworks and other deindustrialisation, which has left the devastation of mass poverty, alienation, rising crime and drug dependency in whole communities. Hardly a ‘just transition’!

The other sobering fact is that much of Scotland's carbon emissions have simply been shipped abroad, dumped on other peoples, as part of capitalist globalisation. Taking total carbon emissions generated at home and abroad in the production and transportation of goods and services for consumption in Scotland, the reduction is a far more modest 8.6% from 1998-2014. 
It's not just jobs that have been offshored, but pollution too. 

The Market Won’t Provide

Capitalist ownership gives no comfort nor guarantees of a stable future for workers in the existing high-carbon sector, let alone the population of Scotland as a whole. 
The cut-throat competition between privately-owned North Sea companies has meant worsened terms and conditions, lengthened shift patterns for offshore workers, use of cheap labour overseas workers, and 160,000 job losses in 2014-17. 
The one-man dictatorship of capital, in the form of INEOS owner Jim Ratcliffe, owns 4% of Scotland's GDP. He used this to bully and blackmail the workforce and Scottish government with threats of total closure at Grangemouth, wiping out effective union recognition for several years, and squeezing millions of public funds in subsidies from Alex Salmond's government, in Ratcliffe’s pursuit of fracking.

But capitalist ownership is no route to a just transition to a clean, green economy either. 
And the reliance of successive Scottish (and UK) governments on the market economy has led to an utter failure to carry out the necessary measures to combat climate chaos and simultaneously protect the jobs and living conditions of workers.

The STUC have published a devastating report exposing the gaping chasm between promises of massive job creation in the low carbon and renewable energy economy (LCRE) over the past 15 years – by successive Labour-LibDem and SNP governments – and the paltry reality of less than 2% of jobs being in this sector...which, in any case, includes nuclear power!

Promises in 2004 of 7,000 new jobs by 2020; 35,000 by 2020 (in 2004); 130,000 by 2020 (in 2010); 40,000 in renewables by 2020 (in 2011). The soaring visions of a green and pleasant land have crashed to earth with a shudder; taken together, all forms of renewable energy (onshore wind, offshore wind, hydropower, renewable heat, bioenergy and alternative fuels) only account for 7,600 direct jobs in Scotland (17,600 direct and indirect). 

Scotland’s Natural Potential

Mother Nature provided Scotland with 40% of Europe's onshore and offshore renewable energy potential. Not to even mention the copious hydro-power sources. Yet Scotland is a net importer of low carbon and renewable energy goods and services – to the tune of £229m trade deficit in 2017, including £165m in the case of onshore wind! Why?

Despite nature’s gifts, Scotland builds virtually nothing for this sector, even though Howdens of Glasgow manufactured the UK’s first ever wind turbine in the early 1980s; removal of government grants, and failure by British capitalism to bother investing, opened the way to Danish companies to carve out a profitable niche.

The lack of a publicly owned energy industry, with planned and integrated investment in research, production and development, has meant a complete lack of an industrial strategy for transition to clean energy production that could tap into nature’s advantages for the benefit of workers and the environment. 
Instead, piecemeal developments have been handed over to networks of overseas, profiteering capitalist firms – who often lack expertise, have dodgy track records in the sector, but are often heavily subsidised by their own governments in their pursuit of global markets.

Lunacy of Globalised Capitalism

At the Moray East Windfarm, off the Caithness coast, 100 turbines are being built by a consortium of firms from Portugal, France and Japan. The blades are being made by a Danish company, the wind turbine jackets by a Belgian company that subsequently handed the contract to Lamprell, of the United Arab Emirates.

Kincardine Offshore Wind Ltd is developing a floating wind farm south-east of Aberdeen; contrary to its name, KOWL is Spanish owned. In turn it's contracted Navantia, who build the Spanish Navy's warships, but made a whopping loss when they diversified into renewables.

Meantime, the BiFab yards in Methil and Burntisland are mothballed! So much for the Scottish government's pledges a decade ago of ‘a Saudi Arabia of renewables’.

Even the massive, lucrative decommissioning sector of the offshore industry is a victim of the same capitalist ‘logic’, the lunacy of globalised profiteering at the expense of workers’ jobs, workers’ conditions, and the climate.

Bountiful tax relief is being handed over to the oil and gas companies for decommissioning, while some of them have been exposed for paying below the legal minimum wage to overseas workers. 
North Sea rigs have been towed across the oceans to be decommissioned on the beaches of Bangladesh and India, without environmental protection or workers’ rights – sailing past several sites with the capacity to do the work up the east coast of Scotland. 

Just Transition Through Public Ownership

We need the trade union, socialist and environmental movement to demand democratic public ownership of the entire energy industry to seriously tackle climate change and ensure a just transition to clean, green energy production - with not only the protection, but vast expansion, of decent jobs and conditions.

A recent House of Commons report brutally declared that “green investment has collapsed”. The capitalist market will never save the planet that it has despoiled for profit.

The SNP government’s talk of a Publicly Owned Energy Company is a lame, timid half-step, miles short of the bold move required. It is designed to be merely another energy retailer in a crowded marketplace, competing with the capitalist sharks – but not in any way involved in the actual production of energy supplies. 
But public ownership of oil, gas, hydro, wind-power, all forms of renewables, is precisely what is needed. With unions representing energy workers and the wider working class - alongside scientists, local and national government, colleges and universities - having a full voice in planning the urgent transition to green energy without loss of jobs or skills, with retraining, investment in research and development, and expansion of education in the sciences of the sector. We already have world-leading academic expertise in offshore wind, wave, tidal and carbon capture techniques – all squandered by a system based on short-term profit maximisation.

Full public ownership of all forms of energy could then be integrated with an expanded public transport network that tackles pollution and poverty through investment in fare-free public transport. 
And with a nationalised construction industry, local councils and social sector housing, to retrofit and insulate homes; build 100,000 new homes for rent to the highest environmental standards; cut fuel prices and eliminate fuel poverty; and in the process, create at least 100,000 well-paid, skilled jobs and apprenticeships.

Public ownership is at the very heart of the solution to pollution, replacing the private plundering of our planet for profit by capitalism. 
Tackling the emergency of climate change requires urgent system change – to a socialist democracy where it’s not a false choice between jobs and the environment.