The Labour government’s dirty energy technofix must be contested and replaced

The government combines a modest promise of 4000 jobs from this scheme with a vague claim that it will “support [??!] 50,000 jobs in the long term”.   That figure is tame, as jobs promises go, especially compared with the enormous investment. Nevertheless Starmer lambasted anyone who questioned the scheme as “drum-banging, finger-wagging extremists” – in the Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s hate-filled rag.

Starmer’s promises versus CCUS realities

In reality, CCUS has been plagued by technical problems throughout its 40-year history.  It has only ever worked at scale when combined with enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a technique for squeezing more oil out of underground deposits.

Nevertheless Starmer described the scheme as “a game-changer in our efforts to fulfil our legal obligations to reach Net Zero by 2050 in a sensible way, while supporting jobs and industry’, as well as attracting foreign investment. 

“Without this tech, heavy industries such as cement, glass-making and chemicals will risk having to down tools”, he claimed – with no evidence. In another speechStarmer even suggested that CCUS would “kickstart growth, and repair this country once and for all”.

Starmer ridicules and demonises sceptics with contemptuous language that echoes his attacks on opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and of racist migration policies.

Starmer’s Sun article tries to set the interests of “working people” against climate scientists and young people who despair of an oil-fuelled future.  In his words, they are “blockers” who want a “slow decline to the Dark Ages”.

This inflammatory, populist rhetoric can also be heard from some union leaders.  For example, Sharon Graham of Unite sets up a false choice between jobs versus life-and-death climate targets.  In her words, workers must not be “sacrificed on the altar of net zero”, as if anyone suggested this.

Starmer’s stance attracted outrage and sarcasm. Here are three examples from a Reddit site for Labour Party supporters:  

• “Damn right. Why sacrifice Great British industry to us climate change nutters when you can sacrifice the planet as habitable to us instead? That’ll show them.”
• “Clever trick: tarring anyone who critiques the carbon capture funding as an extremist, rather than ordinary people who can tell it’s a massive waste of money.”
• “Why use that language? Does he know his own supporter base?”

Indeed, Starmer does know his supporter base: increasingly, capitalist elites, including those in high-carbon industries. 

CCUS as a long-time false solution

Starmer’s empty promises of jobs conveniently distract from long-time doubts about CCUS.  

For several years before the October 2024 announcement, and especially since then, climate scientists and energy specialists have warned against CCUS as a false solution. They argue that CCUS would lock in a long-term large-scale dependence on natural gas, increase carbon emissions, and make enegy unnecessarily expensive.  Meanwhile, this priority would delay more straightforward means to reduce carbon emissions and provide new jobs.

Take the flagship project in the government’s scheme, Net Zero Teesside, a new gas-fired power station built by the oil companies BP and Equinor.  The station is to be fitted with post-combustion carbon capture equipment that has never worked – and may never work – on an industrial scale.  Other projects involve converting natural gas and biomass into hydrogen fuel, processes that also rely on CCUS.

As a Campaign Against Climate Change briefing says: Fossil fuel and biomass companies have mobilised vast resources to promote their operations to policymakers, investors, local communities and trade unions. This promotion often involves highly misleading claims about the numbers of jobs to be created.  “In reality these jobs drop off dramatically after the relatively brief construction phase. In addition, it is risky to rely on jobs linked to technologies which may well fail or never materialise.”

Despite such long-time warnings, CCUS has been central to the Labour Party’s decarbonisation agenda since the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership.  

After Starmer became leader, in 2023 the Party announced a “clean-energy mission”, envisaging multi-billion annual investments in renewable energy.  Back then its agenda already relied heavily on fossil fuels with CCUS.

In the October 2024 announcement, the earlier budget plans for renewable energy were greatly reduced, while CCUS investment was expanded. Now Labour Party policy has become a dirty energy mission. 

Socially just, low-carbon alternatives

What are the alternatives?  If decarbonisation and livelihoods were really the government’s aims, then it would direct funds at different priorities. They would integrate labour, environmental and care issues for the public good.

Take one example: the huge potential for insulating people’s homes to reduce energy bills, fitting low-carbon heating systems such as heat pumps and district heat, and launching local energy projects based mainly on small-scale solar and battery storage. These technologies have worked for years and can be installed quickly –  unlike large-scale CCUS for power plants and hydrogen fabrication.

In October the New Economics Foundation proposed a ten-year scheme to spend £33.5 billion on retrofitting homes and £10.1 billion on local energy projects. If the government was defending the public interest, it would have considered such investments before committing to CCUS. It has not.

Other priorities could include: expanding proven technologies for renewable energy; displacing the Big Five energy generators through decentralised ownership; upgrading the UK national grid to promptly use new supplies of renewable energy; and boosting public transport, combined with schemes to reduce private car traffic. 

Alternative livelihoods should also include care roles, which must be valued for helping people to recuperate from various harms.

Together these priorities would generate tens of thousands of skilled jobs alongside decarbonising the economy.

Dirty energy lock-in: an ignorant mistake? or a clever fossil-fuels partnership?

Given those straightforward alternatives for the public good, why has the Starmer government made an expensive long-term commitment to CCUS?  And so locked in dirty energy for the foreseeable future? Is this simply an ignorant mistake? Must we educate the government about the evidence? 

As a different explanation, perhaps the government has locked in a political partnership with the fossil fuel industry, ensuring corporate welfare for long-term dirty energy. This explanation warrants different evidence, for example:

• Financial donations: Before the June 2024 general election, the Labour Party received £4 million in donations from hedge funds linked with the fossil fuel industry.  These donations were not publicly disclosed until after the election.  
• New infrastructure: The government is set on approving the Net Zero Teesside power station and associated gas-intensive projects.  Moreover, as North Sea production declines, it is also preparing for even greater imports of natural gas for several decades.  It is therefore gearing up to approve a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal on Teesside. 
• Criminal law: The government has maintained the anti-protest laws from the previous Tory government, and stigmatised climate protesters as saboteurs, and even unpatriotic.  It has apparently encouraged prosecutors to criminalise and punish even their peaceful actions, now carrying severe penalties. These threats aim to limit any effective dissent against fossil fuels.

False “net zero” techno-saviour

The government’s political partnership with fossil fuel companies runs more deeply than a conspiracy. It is also ideological, using false narratives to co-opt union leaders and reassure their members – while sidelining critics including scientists, and criminalising protest.  

Like many hypothetical techno-fixes for societal problems, CCUS has been invested with a narrative of “saving British industry”, encouraging the belief that it will protect or create jobs.  This narrative has hijacked the Just Transition concept, inverting it into an unjust high-carbon continuity.  This has been promoted by trade unions with members in the energy sector (Unite, GMB, and Prospect), calling themselves “the energy unions”. The government directs funds at capital expenditure, especially high-carbon industrial continuity, while perpetuating austerity for public services.

Starmer’s ambitious claim for long-term job creation remains wishful thinking. But it reinforces a wider narrative that a future technology will regenerate Britain’s high-carbon sectors … led by the capitalist elites that have managed its decline in recent decades.  This narrative imagines that these industries could continue (even expand) in a similar form, if only replacing current technologies with new ones.  It evokes a seductive nostalgia for 20th century manual work, tranquillising doubts about the techno-fix. 

Together with the world’s most powerful governments, the Labour government weaves another strand of this ideological rope: the very idea of “net zero”. Originally a scientific concept, it  has evolved through more than three decades of international climate talks. 

Decades ago, “net zero” simply meant a physical state where greenhouse gas emissions were so low that they would be balanced by drawdowns of those gases from the atmosphere, mainly by forests. But politicians have warped and misused the concept for a different meaning.  It has become a cover for technofixes to displace or delay measures that really would cut emissions.

“As the mirage of each magical technical solution disappears, another equally unworkable alternative pops up to take its place. The next [large-scale geo-engineering] is already on the horizon,” wrote the climate scientists Wolfgang Knorr, James Dyke and Robert Watson in 2021.

Their powerful statement warns how “net zero” had become a dangerous trap, whereby hypothetical technologies justify expanding fossil fuels. “Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to.” 

When Starmer denounces “net zero extremists”, he means those who oppose twisting “net zero”  into a high-carbon agenda.

Government’s dirty energy mission: what political counter-force?

The government’s dirty energy technofix should be contested at many levels, as a deceptive narrative and as physical infrastructures.  Carbon capture projects impose burdens on local communities, while denying them the benefits of genuine decarbonisation schemes.  They have rightly attracted fierce opposition by campaigners in north-west England and Scotland, e.g. the Hynot campaign opposing the Hynet CCUS-hydrogen project.  We also welcome the legal challenges by the climate scientist, Andrew Boswell, which could force cancellation of some wasteful white elephants.

Now we should aspire to build a more powerful counter-force that can discredit, rupture and replace the false narrative of the elite high-carbon partnership. We should counterpose the alternatives mentioned above, especially home insulation,  heat pumps, solar panels, and the other measures. 

• A political counter-force could start with a broad alliance of civil society groups, environmentalists, and trade-union groups.  The latter could encompass the PCS, UCU and dissident groups within the ‘energy unions’ (GMB, Prospect, Unite), e.g. the Unite Grassroots Climate Caucus.   How to create an effective alliance warrants urgent debate and practical strategies.

Authors’ note

Les Levidow is Senior Research Fellow at the Open University, also a member of UCU’s Climate and Ecological Emergency Committee (CEEC).  He is author of Beyond Climate Fixes: From Public Controversy to System Change (Bristol University Press, 2023)  

Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham, and author of Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (Pluto Press, 2018). He is a lifelong labour movement activist