The Political Physicist

During last year’s conference, the Labour Party made headlines with its seemingly bold promises on energy and climate change. These included a massive build-out of wind turbines, solar panels, and a housing retrofit programme. We were promised that these pledges would be elaborated on in a report to be released that weekend. However, said report proved to be woefully inadequate in terms of what we need to tackle climate change, as will be revealed in the summary and discussion below. Despite the apparent magnitude of its programme, Labour still has not truly grasped the scale of the task of confronting climate change.

What’s in the Report

The report opens with a one-page overview explaining that it sets out key findings of research into how to achieve Labour’s 2017 commitment to get 60% of the UK’s electricity and heat from renewable and low-carbon sources. (Note that the exact relationship between these two types of energy is not made clear in this paper; much heating is powered by electricity.) This research focuses on “the scale and scope of technologies required for Labour to meet the 60% target”. Future work will consider the concrete actions needed to achieve it. It states that this work is merely to provide information and “does not represent Labour Party policy”. A number of “industry professionals and experts … from right across the energy sector” who contributed to the document are listed.

Rebecca Long-Bailey (Shadow Secretary for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy) provides a foreword. This does not go beyond indicating that Labour is determined to address climate change in an equitable manner. She reaffirms Labour’s policy of net zero emissions by 2050 and pledges Labour will ensure “60 per cent of the UK’s energy comes from renewable and low carbon sources within twelve years of coming to power.” This contradicts statements made elsewhere in the document which said the 60% target applied only to electricity and heat.

The single longest portion of the report is the introduction, which makes it clear that this document is only a “briefing note”. A “full report, to be published later in the year … will set out our intended pathways for upgrading the whole energy system, including other electricity generation technologies, UK heating and our approach for non-domestic buildings”. To date the full paper still does not appear to have been published, but given Labour’s haphazard way of publishing and publicising its own policy documents it is difficult to know for certain. The introduction goes on to claim that “Britain has the best opportunities for renewable energy of almost any country in the world” and explains that the current paper will look at “four key elements” of Labour’s plans: energy efficiency, offshore wind, onshore wind, and solar power.

Many short-term benefits of such a policy are described: eliminating fuel poverty (and improved well-being that results), cleaner air, eliminating “the obscene wastefulness of our current, high-polluting energy system”, and energy security for “decades to come” with protection from fluctuations in fuel prices. This will be achieved by reducing heating demand by 23% and producing 85% of electricity and 44% of heat from renewable sources. Such actions are estimated to create 410,000 jobs, will require massive infrastructure renewal, and will affect “almost all [non-energy] sectors”. These steps will allow the UK to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement. We are reassured that, despite the intermittency of wind and solar power, “the lights will stay on” and that “this paper shows that even a limited selection of the cost-effective technical solutions available today would be more than sufficient” to do this.

The report proposes installing 4GW of new offshore wind capacity every year through the 2020s, bringing the UK’s total up to 52GW. This will allow the UK to harness “the largest wind resource in Europe”, taking advantage of falling costs and new technologies. It is mentioned that offshore wind works well to offset lower solar power production in winter. It is estimated that, by sourcing components from domestic suppliers, this policy would result in the creation of 120,000 jobs. There is a further proposal to bring installed onshore wind capacity to 30GW by 2030, taking advantage of cheaper building costs than offshore wind and a “low footprint”. This is expected to create an additional 60,000 jobs.

On solar power, the report suggests increasing installed capacity to 35GW by 2030, installing 2.2GW per year and creating 70,000 jobs. It is noted that capacity has grown massively since 2010, despite a slowdown due to “actions of the Tory government”. While installations were initially small scale, it is noted that larger installations now dominate.

Finally, it is proposed to cut domestic heat demand by about one quarter by 2030 by upgrading buildings to the highest standards of efficiency (as well as making non-energy related improvements), with 24 million homes upgraded by 2030. Higher energy standards will be enforced for all new homes. In addition to addressing climate change, this policy will improve energy poverty and quality of life. Efficiency is noted as being vital to meet the 60% target, given the large amount of heating currently used and difficulty in shifting to renewable heat. This project will “require a scale of investment, supply chain capacity building and innovation as yet unseen in post-war Britain” (emphasis added) and would create 160,000 jobs.

Problems

Though described as a summary, the above is a fairly complete reproduction of the actual content present in this 14 page report. No citations or arguments were given for any of the claims made. Given how little information the document contained, it is unclear what it was intended to achieve.

It is essential that we are told what sectors the 60% clean energy target applies to. The manifesto simply pledged to “ensure that 60 per cent of the UK’s energy comes from zero-carbon or renewable sources by 2030”, but this document (except the comments made by Rebecca Long-Bailey) claims this referred only to electricity and heating. However, together these make up less than half of current UK energy consumption. If this is current policy then it represents a massive retreat by Labour.

The relationship between “zero carbon” and “renewable” sources is also unclear. The plans presented in this document are for 60% renewable (electric and heating) energy by 2030. Is it intended that we should take “zero carbon” to just be a synonym for “renewable”? If so, what do we make of biomass which, while renewable, even the most generous estimates show emitting some greenhouse gases. (The IPPC estimates 230gCO₂/kWh, about 1/3 those from gas, but under certain circumstances it may be even worse than fossil fuels.) Jeremy Corbyn has indicated that nuclear will also make up part of the zero-carbon energy mix. Even existing reactors are not shown in this paper’s plans for 2030 (let alone the new ones Labour supposedly supports). Do the authors not think we need them? Whatever one’s stance on nuclear energy, Labour members deserve to know how it fits into climate change plans.

If existing hydro and biomass capacity is included, then the proposed new wind and solar installations would produce the promised amount of renewable electricity. However, that’s only a small part of the battle. The real challenge will be to achieve “system integration”, allowing the lights to remain on when the wind isn’t blowing. These problems are dismissed as easily solved, with no explanation of how it would be done. It would probably be possible to do this for 60% renewable electricity, but gas plants would be needed for backup. Rather than just looking at the requirements for 60% renewable energy, as this paper claims to do, we need to think about how we’ll actually achieve 100% clean energy. Otherwise we could lock ourselves into dependence on fossil fuels in the medium term.

No explanation is given of what will provide the 44% renewable heat. Indeed, the term itself is never defined (although in the energy literature it is often taken to mean solar, geothermal, and biomass heating). Electricity and hydrogen are mentioned. However, all existing and proposed renewable installations will be needed to meet targets for existing electricity demand. Hydrogen takes energy to produce and this is not budgeted for either.

There are a number of other issues I could also challenge this paper on, but I will end here for reasons of space. As the authors say, we urgently need a plan to address climate change. It is a shame, therefore, that they have not provided us with one. Hopefully they will do so in the full report (if it is ever published) but, if so, I don’t see why this lightweight document was released.

Finally, we need to consider the way in which this report was written. Of the 10 authors, Internet searching revealed details on 8 of them. One of these is an academic researcher, another is a policy analyst at Ofgem, and the rest are energy or climate change consultants. All of the consultants work for the same company (Arup). One of the remaining two may run a business installing solar panels, but I’m not sure. All things considered, this seems like a less-than-diverse pool of expertise. Why weren’t the unions involved? What about people who work at power plants, build wind farms, or do load balancing for National Grid? Even beyond exactly who was chosen to write this report, given the weakness of its arguments and how little effort was made to distribute it to members, it feels like policy is being formed by small groups of leadership-appointed experts. This is a far cry from the membership-led policy formation which Jeremy Corbyn promised when he was elected leader.

The Missing Ingredient: Politics

This report and, it seems, the full version of it which is to come, deals with technical, rather than political questions. In and of itself, this is fine; Labour needs to ensure its policies are grounded in what is technologically feasible. However, we mustn’t lose sight of the political aspects of these issues, either. Political assumptions inform the context in which technical discussions take place. For example, anti-nuclear activists often argue that this technology only receives consideration due to its compatibility with centralised government and big business (not to mention its military applications). Conversely, its few left wing supporters suggest that nuclear power appears artificially expensive due to the high cost and short-term thinking of private finance and can be built much more cheaply in the public sector. The technical and political are linked, forming a dialectic which we must navigate.

The most obvious case of missing politics is the paper’s support for rooftop solar panels. Their installation in uncritically treated as a good thing, without any consideration of who benefits. To date this has largely been well-off property owners, who’ve received a subsidy paid for by other electricity consumers. Labour seems to want solar panels to also be placed on rental property, which begs the question of who will own them. It’s hard to imagine how the tenant could be the ones to finance the panels, but if it’s the landlord who iss paying for them then presumably it would also be the landlord receiving the government subsidy (either directly or through increased rent). We thus see how politics can very quickly infringe upon technical plans. Rather than examine these issues, the paper ignores them.

As Labour continues its work on energy policy, it is vital that it considers exactly how it wishes to organise ownership of the sector. To date it seems to have endorsed a plurality of structures, consisting of regional, local, personal, and cooperative ownership. I have, in the past, criticised this approach as incapable of delivering the national-level planning that will be necessary to build a low-carbon grid and will not repeat myself here. However, even many proponents of such a system often acknowledge the need to abolish the energy market and provide some sort of national guidance. Yet we have been given no indication of what form this might take, by Labour or anyone else.

Probably the closest this Labour document comes to truly considering the political implications of its proposals is when it says about its energy efficiency measures that “This level of ambition represents an unprecedented transformation of the UK’s housing stock and will require a scale of investment, supply chain capacity building and innovation as yet unseen in post-war Britain”. This is a fair assessment, with the task becoming all the more massive when considering the myriad other policies needed to address climate change. In short, it would require something on the scale of war-time economic planning. The problem is that, during the World Wars, the government could rely on an alliance with business. While capital might not have liked submitting to government control, it acknowledged that this was necessary in order to win the war. As national capital would not have fared well had Britain been on the losing side, they had a fairly immediate interest in cooperating.

Unfortunately, the effects of climate change are sufficiently distant and diffuse (not to mention, concentrated in the Global South) that business is unlikely to see the need for such cooperation with public planners today. This represents a formidable obstacle which, as far as I’m aware, no one has really considered. I can not confidently propose a solution to this, other than to say that clearly a powerful working class movement, dedicated to an environmental transition in the economy, will be necessary. Only such a popular force can scare capital into acquiescence or (as I think will likely prove necessary) actually begin to take democratic control of key economic sectors.

Over the following series of articles, I will outline some of the necessary technical elements of a strategy to address climate change and suggest policies which a socialist government could use to achieve these. By and large this will be focusing on what policies Labour government can adopt at the national and (to a lesser extent) local level, rather than the equally important grassroots mobilisation and capacity building which must also occur. Where possible, I will indicate where government policy could link up with grassroots efforts. My first article in the series will focus on the concept of a “Green New Deal”, providing an overall strategy for decarbonisation and examining how this requires cooperation across a wide range of both sectors and scales. I will then focus on some key individual sectors, including energy, transport, housing, and food/agriculture. Finally (and perhaps most importantly), the international dimensions of climate change will be considered.