COP26, the 26thUN Climate Change Conference of the Parties will take place in November this year (1-12.11.2021); hosted in Glasgow by the UK.
The conference will mark the endpoint of a season of national governments announcing their own emissions targets and low carbon transition policies. This ‘season’ has been kicked off by President Joseph Biden’s virtual Leaders Summit on 22ndand 23rdof April to which forty world leaders from all five continents were invited.
In the aftermath of the climate change denying Trump administration, the new US president set an ambitious climate target of 50 to 52 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas pollution from 2005 levels by 2030. Not directly comparable but also increasingly ambitious are the EU plans of an at least 55 per cent net reduction of emissions by 2030, compared with 1990s levels, and zero net emissions by 2050. The EU is also the first world region to have a comprehensive policy strategy for achieving these goals. But the most ambitious plan worldwide comes from the UK itself – setting the bar high for the upcoming COP meeting – with the planned statutory obligation to reduce its emissions by 78 per cent by 2035 compared to 1990 levels.
These targets and announcements are however not enough by far as they leave too many loopholes for emitters, says zero-bullshit climate activist Greta Thunberg, and risk to stay just rhetoric according to the increasingly ‘blunt’ (his own words) director of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The world leaders’ problems with the low carbon transition lie in the details of steering their countries, pluralist societies with complex economies and industries and most of them democracies, onto a climate friendly course.
After years of struggle around the question of what will become of workers who lose their jobs in polluting and therefore unsustainable industries, and pushback on climate questions from invested actors, the terms ‘Just Transition’ and ‘Good-Paying Union Jobs’ have found their way into ‘green’ policy vernacular. Workers who have a substantial interest in dirty industries need to be taken on board; and these terms are aiming to make the transition more palatable to them.
Addressing this issue a recent BBC podcast (23rdApril, The Real Story) rightly asks the question “What is the Cost of Climate Reform?” The question refers not to the cost of investment in new green energy generation infrastructure, home insulation, or zero emissions public transport, but to the social and economic costs of divestment. In addition to its panel of scientists and climate change philanthropists, the podcast gives voice to the mayor of a US coal town and a UK electrical engineer. Their interventions are brief, but they summarise the crux of the problem for those whose jobs and communities will be deeply affected by the transition to low carbon industries.
Divestment from polluting industries and technologies is necessary and urgent, but the individuals and communities whose livelihood is affected by divestment need to be presented and involved in the development of economic and social perspectives in the future green economy and low carbon society. This is what is meant by Just Transition.
And this is not just about ‘good paying union jobs’ but about the nitty gritty of public financing, labour market and skill formation regulations for which each country has its own toolsets, institutional paths, and policy preferences. These toolsets, paths, and preferences at times prove more, in some cases less effective and rather dysfunctional for industrial transitions, not to speak of industrial revolutions – such as the one that the green transition requires.
The mayor of the coal town and the electrical engineer highlight just two of these institutional dysfunctions within their specific national, municipal and sectoral context. For the mayor the problem lies in public services and in particular schools being financed by a levy raised from the local coal industry. As the coal company divests, the local site loses value, hence the levy is significantly reduced and hence there is no funding for the local schools anymore.
For the electrical engineer, who would like to or needs to work across all sectors – offshore wind, onshore wind, and nuclear power plants – the largely privately financed and fragmented UK further education system creates a huge financial burden as for each sector a different Sector Skills Councils provides the statutory health and safety certificate which needs to be renewed and paid for every other year.
What is more, in the UK since 2012, the task of local economic development has been transferred from the public Regional Development Agencies to the publicly funded but industry-led Local Enterprise Partnerships. This is a symptom of UK governmental preference for giving much responsibility and leeway to the private sector in questions of industrial development and change. The empowerment of the private sector has however excluded local populations, workers, and trade unions from important decisions that affect their communities.
Although UK policy makers were able to create a huge momentum for the deployment of offshore wind turbines around its coasts, it has been notoriously weak in streamlining and funding its vocational skill formation system and in making vocational skill formation broadly accessible. Moreover, there is a need for more strongly involving local populations, workers, and trade unions in the design of a ‘green future’ for all. Countries more successful in the area of skill formation and green technology development are Denmark and Germany. These examples, which however do not come without their own dilemmas, will be further explored in future blog posts.
Scientists state that 2020-2030 is the defining decade for climate change; major policies reducing emissions and changing consumption patterns need to be brought on the way and implemented in order to avert dangerous climate change and, as a proxy, the raising of temperatures above 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But as always, the devil lies in the detail of politics, policies and institutional set-ups.