© Supplied by Wullie Marr / DCT It is a bit late in the day to describe the Just Transition Commission’s report on Aberdeen and the north-east as a wake-up call. Anyone who wanted to be woken up has had plenty of time to think about it.
Instead, it crystallises what everyone knows to be the case – there has been no “just transition” and, without a radical change of direction, there is not going to be one. The transition will continue, but justice has featured only in the political rhetoric.
The outcomes are now upon us, and the longer the delay in recognising that realities need to be addressed, the more damage will be done and lasting bitterness engendered. Some common sense has to be restored in recognition of how events, domestically and globally, are unfolding.
We do not need the intervention of Donald Trump any more than we ever needed the Greens to dictate policy. Indeed, the urgent priority is to exclude extremes from the debate and look at purely practical arguments and consequences.
The Just Transition Commission, which is a Scottish Government body, could scarcely have been clearer: “There is still no transition plan for oil and gas workers. Industry, business, workers and communities need government to establish more favourable conditions for an orderly transition by setting out a clear plan”.
That is a shameful confession given all the false promises, based on nothing more than lip service to a “just” transition. The past cannot be rewritten, but the immediate penance lies in working with the North Sea industry to reduce the pace of decline, rather than accelerate it, as the zealots demand.
The Commission report puts the failure to plan the transition in its proper time context. This is not something that has leapt up at us within the past year or even five.
The North Sea has been in decline for 15 years. The potential for renewable energy to replace, or even exceed, the number of jobs it provides has been increasingly clear.
That created – and still does – a process to be managed and an opportunity to be maximised. It should have been a guiding principle throughout this period that the transition should evolve at a pace which recognised the social and economic consequences that would flow from getting it wrong.
Instead, the debate has been driven by sloganising – first by the SNP’s virtue-signalling “presumption” against new oil and gas licences which the incoming Labour government was daft enough to adopt; positions which created a false dichotomy between progressing towards net zero while slowing the decline of fossil fuels and rise of import dependency.
© Supplied by Kami Thomson / DCTI have asked before and ask again – how can any minister in either the Scottish or UK government look across the North Sea to Norway, where they are issuing exploration licences as if they are going out of fashion while building their renewables base, and say: “They have got it wrong and we, the unco’ guid, have got it right”?
Failure to plan the transition to renewables extends far beyond Aberdeen or the relationship with oil and gas, as the Just Transition Commission report also makes clear.
As I pointed out here previously, we are now confronted with a back-to-front process – the ScotWind licences were sold without the infrastructure in place or certainty of projects proceeding.
Question marks remain about their viability without major policy changes that developers are demanding.
Huge costs and disruption are driven by projects which remain hypothetical. There is no supply chain in place, so the vast majority of equipment will come from overseas.
As Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, put it: “We seem to have fired the starting gun without being race ready”.
The UK does not have enough trained workers and supply chains to meet the 2030 deadline, while £46 billion of cable contracts have been awarded without domestic manufacturing capacity.
All this is happening in piecemeal fashion in the absence of overarching plans, at national or local levels, which adds to the public’s sense of alienation from a process which nobody really comprehends.
The Just Transition Commission recommends: “The Scottish Government should initiate urgently a planning process for sites and regions by setting out the scope, core objectives, principles, roles and responsibilities, and governance arrangements to enable rapid progress in bringing together key stakeholders to begin joint planning efforts”.
Again, it should beggar belief that such a fundamental plea for a coherent, planned approach is necessary at this juncture.
Yet without it, the certainty is that the vast majority of economic opportunity presented by a “just transition” will be lost to Scotland, while communities in the frontline will pay a disproportionate price without commensurate benefits.
We are told, and I am willing to believe, that the Scottish and UK ministers most directly involved – Gillian Martin and Michael Shanks – are working in a more harmonious spirit than has existed within memory. Whether others are prepared to buy into that approach is more questionable.
However, the politics could be taken out of this critical situation if the Scottish and UK governments were prepared to bury differences long enough to admit they have both been wrong, and that a “just transition” must finally start to mean what it says on the label.
