Will Green jobs save us?

Partners:

Green jobs are often promoted as providing solutions to two pressing problems facing both Britain and, indeed, the whole developed world: they aim to tackle climate change while simultaneously helping to replace today’s low-quality ‘gig economy’ jobs and mitigating the impact of employment losses associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. Politicians from Joe Biden to Boris Johnson have made green jobs central to their ‘build back better’ recovery programmes. From this perspective they are integral to what is sometimes called the ‘new normal’.

In November 2020, the UK government announced a new Green Jobs Taskforce that would ‘set the direction for the job market as we transition to a high-skill, low carbon economy’. The aim is to ‘support two million green jobs by 2030’. Among the opportunities that are planned including work in renewable energy, retrofitting homes with better insulation and supporting workers in ‘high-carbon transitioning sectors’ like oil and gas.

In August, a report by Green Alliance, an environmental think tank, argued that the government could create 450,000 jobs in the ‘circular economy’ by 2035 through an ‘ambitious approach to reuse, repair and remanufacturing’ that would also lead to jobs being created more evenly across the regions of the UK.

More broadly, there are frequent claims that the transition to a low-carbon economy will provide a boost to output. For example, modelling by Cambridge Econometrics for the Committee on Climate Change suggests ‘despite there being an overall cost in bringing about the technologies to reduce carbon emissions, there is an increase in economic prosperity, in terms of an aggregate increase in GDP, jobs and real disposable incomes’. All this fits into a wider discussion of a ‘green recovery’ and earlier discussion of a ‘Green New Deal’.

But many observers are sceptical that such gains could be made. To the extent that a switch to low-carbon solutions creates new jobs, it may mean doing things in a more labour-intensive way, thus lowering productivity. While there are claims that renewable energy will become cheaper than fossil fuels, there is little sign that this is happening. The experience of Germany’s Energiewende (‘energy turn’) suggests that renewables will make energy more expensive, driving up costs across the economy.

Will a shift to a green economy revive the UK economy? Is the ‘green economy’ just the latest Big Idea to boost growth that will ultimately prove illusory? Is encouraging economic growth simply bad for the planet and should we accept that environmental problems mean we should strive for a zero-growth society?