The wrong kind of climate action: What if net zero is making it worse?
By Nicholas Beuret. Illustration by Rory Robertson-Shaw
Just in the last 24 hours of writing this article storms have smashed both New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, while in Jamaica, government officials warned that as Hurricane Melissa intensified into a Category 5 storm, many impacted communities ‘will not survive the flooding’, and that no community in the Jamaican capital Kingston is safe.
The speed with which the hurricane intensified is no longer shocking. Scarcely a day goes by without multiple news stories covering the increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Yet where is the climate movement? Or any environmental movement for that matter? There are still local campaigns against the flood of shit in our rivers and covering our beaches, but bar the occasional NGO press release, where have all the actions and activists gone?
Not only do we no longer seem to have a climate movement, what we have instead is a rising tide of fascistic climate denial. The conspirituality right-wing are protesting imaginary ‘climate lock-downs’, while disgruntled drivers smash traffic cameras alongside declarations by Reform that they will ban wind farms.
Perhaps most damningly, in Port Talbot where thousands of steel mill workers recently lost their jobs, workers are reportedly giving up their union membership and joining Reform instead. The mill closed its coal-fired furnaces and is set to replace them with greener electric mills, employing less than half as many people. Reform have promised to reopen the blast furnaces and restore the town.
Illustration by Rory Robertson-Shaw
A story of green betrayal?
But the furnaces can’t be restarted—they’re full of hardened slag. And the UK steel industry is now largely an export industry, unable to compete with much cheaper steel from overseas. But for many of the people working there, keeping the mill open and protecting their jobs is exactly what successive governments promised would happen in the transition to a net zero economy.
Both Tory and Labour governments promised thousands of new jobs, while US ex-president Biden declared the transition a once-in-a-generation economic opportunity that would result in ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ for US industry.
Instead, manufacturing employment continues to decline across the West as heavy industry contracts. Instead of jobs, it seems we just ended up with a greening of deindustrialisation. A sense of promises betrayed, not a manufacturing revival, is what has been delivered.
But the transition, as a roll out of infrastructure and the creation of jobs, is actually powering ahead. In fact, the net zero economy is growing—much faster than the rest of the economy—at 10% per year. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed in it across thousands of businesses. And its momentum seems unstoppable despite the backsliding of governments.
However, polling shows only about one in five voters think the energy transition will create jobs in their area, while only one in three believe it will have a positive impact on jobs anywhere in the UK. So why does nobody believe the politicians? And where are the jobs?
Installing the green economy on our way to a 3°C future.
The transition isn’t reviving manufacturing. Against the backdrop of slowing global economic growth, there’s only so much room for new green industry, and China has gobbled up the lion’s share.
For the most part, making industry ‘green’ results in fewer jobs. As factories are upgraded, they become more automated. Worse for employment, most green manufactured goods are much simpler to produce and so don’t need as many workers in the first place. Instead, a ‘green’ job seems to entail installing things made somewhere else—solar panels, insulation, heat pumps, and ‘smart’ energy systems. Net zero has produced an installation economy, one dominated by small businesses, where work is far less regular and your employer is at constant risk of going bust.
The other big employer is waste processing—collecting and sorting other people’s rubbish.
Neither installing things out in the rain nor empting other people’s bins is what successive governments told people they’d be doing in our bright green future.
Work is not the only frontier of dissent. Rural communities are increasingly vocal in their opposition to solar farms, battery arrays and wind turbines. While most people support them in the abstract, few want green development in their area. In response, government has weakened local democracy, increasingly made protest illegal and opposition to planning close to impossible.
At the same time, cuts to local government budgets, together with increased costs and decreased central government funding, mean flood defences are being neglected, putting ever more people at risk. There is a proliferation of so-called ‘flood risk ghettos’ across Britain. Costs mount year after year, businesses go bust, and people lose their homes to disasters.
Not only is the transition not delivering the jobs promised, but the strategies carried out to adapt to or stop climate change are not adequately working. People are increasingly exposed to climate risk while the world is on track to a truly catastrophic level of climate change.
After all the agreements and green platitudes, we are looking at three degrees of global warming by 2060. This won’t be the end of the world. But it will be a hotter, harder one where we find our lives ever more squeezed, and our futures smaller each year. Meanwhile, governments are working hard to ensure a future of guaranteed corporate profit, by enabling the consolidation of globe-spanning monopolies and the privatisation of crucial services and data.
Moving against a transition into something worse.
This is the reality of the transition. In place of the promised win-win future, what we have is a zero-sum conflict. Prices rise, while jobs shift further into services and small businesses. Meanwhile green rentierism and corporate monopolies grow at our expense.
It was hoped that as the climate worsened, opposition to the crisis would organically grow. But just as with the impacts of neoliberalism, the climate crisis hasn’t automatically produced the movement we need. The reality is, before we can properly contest their transition and make our own, we need to build the movement we need.
We can’t organise and struggle if we can’t even afford to feed ourselves or pay our bills. We need to start by naming the cost of living crisis as a consequence of climate change. Climate change is already driving up food and bill prices, while corporations profit from our suffering. The first step in opposition to their transition and building our movements is to organise against price rises and impose controls from below. Movements like Don’t Pay and the London Renters Union are what we need—but extended to the shopping basket and other life essentials.
It's not enough to fight defensive struggles workplace by workplace. We need to organise across our communities to institute local plans for our own transitions. Learning from radical municipal projects and community defence campaigns, we must seize local power and plan how to transform our communities from the ground up.
But we can’t do either of these in a 3°C world. We need to make environmentalism a threat again. We have to return environmentalism to its direct action roots and blockade their fossil fuel economy. Power comes from disruption, and without a movement capable of blocking the oil and gas industry, we cannot stop climate change.
We have little time left, but we do have time enough to build the movement we need. Refusing the market through price controls, taking hold of our local areas and instituting our own transition, and blocking the fossil fuel economy will both buy us time and build the movement we need to fight this war of transition.
Nicholas Beuret is a researcher and activist, whose book Or Something Worse: Why we need to disrupt the climate transition is out now.
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