Image by https://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/

By Paul Atkin

Trump’s war on Iran has already raised the price of energy, food, and other essentials and overlays the crises caused by climate change. This is likely to become more acute as gas and power prices will remain high for at least the coming year, even if ceasefires hold and the Strait of Hormuz were to remain reopened.  

We believe

1. To stop the crisis we need to stop the war, ensure that it doesn’t restart, tax war profits and transfer military spending
2. The transition to renewable energy and energy conservation is the solution.
3. Crisis measures must be social justice measures. 

To look at these in turn

1. To stop the crisis we need to stop the war, ensure that it doesn’t restart, tax war profits and transfer military spending

• The government should give no support to the war on Iran in any form and press for sustained peace instead. 
• Energy corporations, banks and arms companies are making huge sums from the rises in fossil fuel prices and demand for munitions. All such windfall profits should be taxed at 100% to fund short term targeted measures like an essential energy guarantee to support people through the immediate crisis, and accelerate investment in the climate transition.  
• Any additional investment into war preparation is unaffordable. Using the funds earmarked for arms increases to accelerate the energy transition instead, including restoring climate funding in overseas development, will also be better for national security.

2. The transition to renewable energy and energy conservation is the solution.  

Countries which have moved decisively to renewables have suffered far less from the war’s price volatility, with wholesale electricity prices in Spain less than half what they are here.

Dependence on fossil fuels is disastrous, and all possible measures should be taken to end it.  

We need as a bottom line

• Public transport fares to be sharply cut and private jets banned. 
• Building fairness into how we price energy by launching a social tariff alongside the next Price Cap rate, combined with Energy For All or an Essential Energy Guarantee to ensure that everyone on low or average income can afford their energy bill; ensuring that low-income energy households aren’t forced to choose between heating and eating.
• Increased investment in accelerated deployment of renewable energy in the North Sea and across the country, with a planned retraining and redeployment of offshore workers, whose jobs would not be not safe whether the ban on new investment is lifted or not, including in the decommissioning of redundant offshore installations; a major job which will take years with massive job potential. This could most effectively be done through public ownership; to prioritise long-term energy security over short-term returns, invest across the full range of clean technologies, and plough profits back into lowering bills rather than boosting shareholder dividends. 
• Government should ensure that clean energy jobs are good jobs, with collective bargaining, across the board.  . 
• Investment in upgrading infrastructure to create good jobs, and reduce exposure to fossil fuel price volatility by committing to the TUC’s “Invest in Our Future” programme: which sets out a potential £30 billion a year boost for clean infrastructure investment with costed, shovel-ready investments identified by trade unions across sectors including: retrofitting schools and public buildings; expanding bus and rail; upgrading industry; rolling out electric vehicle infrastructure; building battery gigafactories; and expanding the electricity grid to carry clean power. This would be at half the cost of meeting Trump’s demand for 5% a year on war and have a positive multiplier effect on the economy and people’s lives, in a way that war spending does not.

3. Crisis measures must be social justice measures. 

• Rationing by price is inherently inequitable.  
• The benefits of renewable energy and new technology for travel, cooking, and heating and cooling homes, must be fairly distributed to everyone.  Currently, well-to-do, digitally savvy households with solar panels and electric vehicles see immediate benefits, while poorer families a mile away see none. 
• The government must commit to a guarantee that everyone in the UK will get a fair share of the benefits of renewable energy. 

Emergency options should include 

• reduce fossil fuel demand (and therefore prices) by banning private jets, slashing public transport fares or making them free to encourage a shift. 
• Put pre-emptive limits on purchases of key food items in limited supply, to ensure equitable distribution of what there is.
• An Energy For All approach, which would offer the real security of a baseline which no one can fall below based on higher prices for high use of energy, free or low prices for low users, combined with adjustments for those who need more energy because of disabilities, large families, or housing conditions. Instead would offer the real security of a baseline which no one can fall below.  

A motion for unions, campaigns and parties follows.