When it comes to Green New Deals, there
is still only one real deal
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 10-year-old car to make it last another 10 years leads to a 42%
decrease in energy and a 56% 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 inclusivity 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% 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, bringing
the total to 23,000 – 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 10-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% 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 faction 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.
From Green Party press office, 020 7561
0282.
Published and promoted by Spencer Fitz-Gibbon for the Green Party of
England & Wales, both at 1a Waterlow Road, London N19
5NJ.
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