Comment: How Labour and the Tories stole Green clothes
Professor John Whitelegg , Green party spokesman
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Thursday, 08, Jan 2009 12:00
By John Whitelegg
It has suddenly become very trendy to talk about creating green jobs as a way of surviving the recession. Unfortunately most of the media attention has been given to the people whose policies have got us into the mess in the first place. And as these are also the people with the most tenuous grasp of what to do about it (one thinks of Messrs Brown and Cameron), they present us with inconsistent and unconvincing proposals. No wonder the public thinks it has little choice when it comes to voting.
So it really is time to set the record straight, by pointing out that the Green Party has consistently been promoting a green industrial revolution for decades, citing world best practice for inspiration. And more importantly it's time to turn the problem of the recession into an opportunity to re-engineer the UK economy in the interests of sustainable prosperity and quality of life. We can come out of this recession stronger.
First let's look at some of the policies that destroy jobs. And let's start at the top, with globalisation. The dogma of economic globalisation tells us we must liberalise markets and compete harder. So we export jobs to whoever can get the work done more cheaply and with fewer constraints – constraints like bothering about the long-term economic disaster that is climate change. So we need cheap fuel, we need to transport more goods longer distances, and we need to pump enough public money into roadbuilding that we strangle traffic and force business costs up. Let's not try to disentangle the logic of all this, because there really isn't any. Let's just look at jobs. Let's just note that by giving advantage to road transport over rail, the EU lost half a million jobs in railways in the last twenty years of the last century. And as both unions and Greens pointed out as long ago as 1990, the first decade of Margaret Thatcher's aggressively neoliberal government and its great car economy destroyed 70,000 rail jobs in the UK alone.
Of course building roads creates jobs. But building railways and light-rail public transport systems creates more jobs, per billion pounds of investment. We've known this since the 1990s, but the only political party arguing for the jobs-rich and sustainable option has been the Green party.
Manufacturing cars creates jobs too. So does scrapping them and building more. But studies have shown that reconditioning a ten-year-old car to make it last another ten years leads to a 42 per cent decrease in energy and a 56 per cent increase in jobs, compared with manufacturing a new car. We could actually cut the number of cars being manufactured while still increasing the number of jobs in the industry, even before we took into account the extra jobs building all the extra buses, trains and trams we need. Greener transport is a classic Green policy, combining social exclusivity with improved quality of life, reduced pollution costs, and a higher job-creation ratio.
The same applies to a number of other sectors. Green waste management sustains more jobs per tonne of rubbish than either landfill or incineration. Non-nuclear renewables sustain more jobs per megawatt than either nuclear or fossil-fuel power. Organic food production employs 20-30 per cent more people per hectare than chemical- and mechanical-intensive farming.
We have known the inherent advantages of green economics for a long time. It's now a decade since the European Commission worked out that doubling the amount of renewables in Europe would create 500,000 to 900,000 new jobs. Since then we've seen 13,000 jobs created in Denmark in wind energy alone – and that's a country the size of north west England with a population comparable to London's. Similarly it's a decade since researchers assessed that a ten-year programme to cut domestic energy use would create 500,000 person-years of work in the UK; but Tony Blair killed off the highly popular home energy conservation bill and we're still wanting a complete retrofit of twenty million UK homes to 21st-century green energy standards.
Why are we waiting? It was as long ago as 1994 that Labour's own report In Trust for Tomorrow found that 'higher environmental standards' could generate 682,000 jobs, allowing for a carbon tax and various investments. Other organisations made similar findings: Energy for Sustainable Development Ltd found in 1998 that for an investment of £2.2 billion a year, up to half a million UK jobs could be created by a range of policies calculated to cut CO2 emissions by 30 per cent by 2010. In A Green Scenario for the UK Economy, Cambridge Econometrics argued that applying the 'polluter pays' principle would create 200,000 jobs in the pollution control industry.
And again back in the mid-90s, the Employment Policy Institute calculated that nearly half a million jobs could be created if eco-taxes replaced employers' national insurance contributions. Friends of the Earth went further, and estimated that a serious road fuel escalator applied from 1996 could increase employment by 1.275 million by 2005, if the revenue from the tax was recycled through a decrease in employers' national insurance contributions.
But of course the Tory government didn't do it then, and Labour hasn't since. And now there's even more call for it, but what do we get instead? A VAT cut to increase spending on goods that are mostly produced abroad. More exporting of jobs producing more long-distance goods.
Why is it still only the Green party that has a coherent and comprehensive package of these jobs-rich policies for sustainable development? It's tempting to put it down to stupidity. But actually it's ideology. The three big neoliberal/neoconservative parties are still pursuing the wrong type of economics. Possibly they're reluctant to admit that they've been wrong all these years. Better to save face by tinkering with half-baked ideas tacked-on to an outmoded concept of economics than to get a serious grip on reality.
So Gordon Brown has launched a New Deal. He's going to create 100,000 new jobs, mostly by renovating schools and hospitals – one wonders, had it not been for the recession would he have allowed them to fall down? - and a fraction of this wholly inadequate number of jobs will be in the green sector.
No, we don't need a Brown New Deal. We need a Green New Deal.
Professor John Whitelegg is spokesperson on sustainable development for the Green party of England & Wales. He has worked with local and national governments in the UK and abroad as a transport, environment and development consultant and has held professorships of sustainable development and sustainable transport at UK universities. He is currently one of twelve Green party councillors on Lancaster City Council.
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