23: Back to the future: industrial history and community in the just transition
Dr Ewan Gibbs joins us to discuss what the history of UK industry and energy can teach us about a just transition.
Can communities built around industries of the past drive forward, as well as benefit from, a greener future?
Tweet us @LocalZeroPod or email localzeropod@gmail.com
Episode Transcript:
Matt: Hello, I’m Dr Matt Hannon.
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford and welcome to Local Zero.
[Music flourish]
In this episode, we’re talking with Dr Ewan Gibbs. Ewan is a historian at the University of Glasgow specialising in the relationship between energy, industry and community in Scotland and the UK. He’s also the author of the acclaimed book Coal Country, a deep exploration into deindustrialisation in Scotland’s coal mining communities.
Matt: We’ll be talking with Ewan about the historic connections between energy, place and community in Scotland and the UK, the lessons that history can teach us as we get to work on creating a just transition and what that transition might look like for those people and communities around the country.
Ewan: British capitalism or Scottish capitalism is going green in the context of the defeat of the labour movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the construction of an increasingly precarious labour market and that includes the energy sector.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: And as always, you can reach out to us on our dedicated Twitter handle, so if you haven’t already, go find and follow us @LocalZeroPod to get involved with the discussions there and email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts.
[Music flourish]
So, as always, it wouldn’t be Local Zero without Fraser, so how is everyone?
Fraser: Good, good, good. How are we all doing?
Matt: Yeah, excellent. I’m alright. Yeah, it feels like we are inching ever closer to the big day of COP26 just around the corner. As we record this, we are in autumn officially, so we’re not far away now.
Rebecca: Wow! I think it’s less than two months to go, isn’t it?
Matt: Really? [Laughter] Yes, it is [laughter]. That’s shockingly close.
Rebecca: Shockingly close [laughter].
Matt: Yeah, there have been some interesting news articles. We’ve been having a think about how we frame this: the good, the bad and the ugly. Why don’t we begin with the good news stories first?
Rebecca: It’s always nice. It’s always heartening. Kick us off and tell us what we’ve got to smile about this week.
Matt: Yeah, one of the things that caught my eye this week was EV sales going up through the roof. We saw electric car sales in the first half of 2021 nearly triple globally versus last year.
Rebecca: Which is great actually and I can say for the EVs... I’ve been on holiday the last couple of weeks and doing bits of driving around Scotland in my EV. I definitely saw a lot of other EVs on the road and the older ones you kind of know because they’re fairly obvious brands. With the newer ones, ours has got this green stripe on the number plate which makes it really easy to start to recognise them.
Matt: Yeah, sought after.
Rebecca: Yeah, and more and more charging stations picking up.
Fraser: The new status symbol [laughter].
Rebecca: Yeah, I know, right? Check me out! I’m green! [Laughter]
Matt: The green striper.
Rebecca: Yeah, but definitely charging stations... I did not expect to see them in some of the more remote parts of Scotland, so I was quite heartened by that actually.
Matt: Okay, so we’ve had the good news. Fraser, I think it’s fair to say, objectively and speaking from a green and eco-perspective, that there was some big news this week.
Fraser: Yeah, absolutely. For anyone who hasn’t seen yet, for the first time in UK history, we’ve had Greens in government. They’ve gone into a conference-and-supply agreement with the SNP in Holyrood in Scotland and it looks quite promising. I think a lot of people are sceptical of it given the SNP’s relationship with the Northeast, with oil and missing targets on climate in the past. A lot of people think that the Greens maybe have a bit of a raw deal in that the ministries that they’ve been allowed to take over seem to be responsible for quite minor things but actually when you dig into it, they have a lot of responsibility in climate terms over active travel with a lot of funding for that. They have a lot of responsibility over elements of public transport; not all of it which I’m sure Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater would have loved to have seen but they also have a huge chunk of energy efficiency and heat decarbonisation which we talk about on the show all the time and it’s going to be huge in the next 10, 15, 20 years and all the way up to 2045 and the Scottish government’s targets. So it’s a big thing and hopefully, they can deliver on it and hopefully, there isn’t too much politics to those key areas that we’re looking at just now.
Matt: Yeah, and I think with the big ticket items there, it means both Patrick and Lorna will be ministers. I think Patrick becomes Minister of Zero Carbon Buildings, if I read that correctly yesterday, but also there were other key policies. If we can pull some out, there’s the £500 million Just Transition Fund which it remains to be seen how that’s going to be spent and crucially, where and with whom. I think the other thing that caught my eye was that 10% of the transport budget is being focused on active travel. So potentially big changes there if these come to pass.
Rebecca: Really exciting and really exciting potential. I think it’s going to come down to the devil being in the detail. It’s nice to see that there is some money being put aside to be invested in areas which we know are absolutely critical but how that actually plays through... we’ve got some big targets to meet and some big changes to make and it needs to be done in a way that is going to actually help us move quickly and move fairly.
Matt: Our homework was marked by none other than Greta Thunberg this week as well and so when this goes out, obviously, this will be maybe in the distant past. I mean some were arguing that the BBC article on this was maybe making a little bit more of her comments than if you actually watched the interview but...
Rebecca: The news? The news making more of comments? [Laughter]
Matt: ...she did say, if I can quote, ‘it’s a bit strange that we’re talking about single, individual oilfields when the UK is already producing so much oil as it is. It’s not just that we need to stop future expansion but we also need to scale down the existing ones.’ She said she found it very peculiar that we were pushing at a new oilfield in Cambo when we were hosting COP26. So thoughts on that, guys?
Fraser: I think she’s spot on. An important context of the interview was that she wasn’t going after at Scotland specifically on everything. It was effectively that there is no such thing as a climate leader. Nobody is doing enough and no country is doing enough just now. That’s correct and Scotland being a little bit better than most places on generating renewable electricity does not a climate leader make. It’s not enough, when nobody is doing enough, to do a little bit better than other places and I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interests for Scotland to go, ‘Oh, you’re kidding? No, we are.’ We’ve been telling ourselves for so long that we are. It’s in nobody’s interest to let that live on when we know there’s so much more that we can do. So you’re right that the headline maybe blew it out a little bit but the sentiment behind it, I’d struggle to disagree with.
Matt: Yeah, lead by example.
Rebecca: No, absolutely and I completely agree with concerns about creating new oilfields. I think we also need to be realistic. We’re not going to suddenly switch this off overnight and if we did, there would be huge detrimental consequences to workers in these industries. I think this comes back to the point of needing policies that can create these sustainable, ongoing jobs in clean energy and I just don’t think that we have a clear enough direction from government yet that’s allowing industry and business to get in line behind that and start putting money where it needs to go.
Matt: I think that’s why we’re talking to Ewan Gibbs later and we’ll hear a little bit more from him because he’s looked at the coal industry and what happened after that. Other news items... Becky, I’ll leave the ugliest till last.
Rebecca: [Laughter] So I want to talk about nappies [laughter]. Not something I ever thought I would be talking about on a podcast.
Matt: Do we have to?
Rebecca: I was in the car yesterday and listening to the news and hearing about the need to do something about nappies because disposable nappies can be incredibly detrimental to the environment in terms of degradation. They were talking about the potential for nappy taxes. For me, this just felt like a really inconsiderate way to go about policy. I mean, Matt, you’ve been in the same position as I have. We’ve both had twins and that is a lot of poo that you’re dealing with [laughter].
Matt: Double trouble...
Rebecca: Double trouble [laughter].
Matt: ...particularly with nappies, yeah [laughter].
Rebecca: Actually, one of the things that was mentioned on the news programme was that some of the people that you will be discriminating against by doing this are people that might be the least well able to switch to reusable nappies. It’s just another example of where policy may not be that well thought through in terms of who’s going to be impacted and how it’s going to be impacted. Again, whilst the sentiment of switching from disposable to renewable nappies is something that I wholeheartedly get in line behind, there’s no way I could have done that because... let alone just trying to wrestle a baby in a nappy. Let’s be honest, I have friends that use the reusable ones...
Matt: Heroes [laughter].
Rebecca: ...and they are not as leakproof [laughter] as the disposable ones.
Matt: Listen, we could have a whole special episode on this but I’m not sure we’d get many listeners [laughter].
Rebecca: We really could. It’s just the time commitment. So I think it’s just another really nice example of this idea that we want bolder action and we want to move in that direction but the policies need to be put in place to make sure that people are able to get on board with the action that is required and I don’t think that’s happening, whether we’re talking about EVs or whether we’re talking about nappies.
Matt: You can’t say we don’t cover all bases on this show [laughter].
[Music flourish]
So listen, let’s come to the matter in hand around today’s interview. Ewan is a historian by training and he takes a long-range view of the energy sector over the 20th century, particularly in the UK, and how this evolved and particularly what happens after the industry falls away. The reason we really wanted to get him along was that we feel that history is important and actually, history shapes today but also what happens today shapes tomorrow and that brings us right back to net zero and a just transition.
Rebecca: I think history is absolutely critical but only if we can learn from it. I think one of the problems that I definitely see when looking or trying to find out about initiatives that have happened in the past and how we can learn from them looking forward is you don’t always have all the evidence there. So I feel like often when we look back, particularly when we’re looking at things that were really innovative at the time and the switches that were made, we often only really hear about the positive outcomes. A lot of the time, negative things can get swept under the rug and not talked about and, therefore, we’re not always learning in the way that we need to. I think that unless we are really reflecting back on what didn’t work, why it didn’t work or what worked and why it worked, we’re not going to be learning enough to be able to then translate those insights. So I’m really excited to start to dig in and understand how that has been shaped, how those transitions of the past have been shaped and what we can learn from that to take more effective action today.
Fraser: Yeah, completely and I think as much as anything, the just transition element and the justice element is going to be massive. I’m looking forward to digging into that. Specifically for Ewan’s work on deindustrialisation, I think we have a lot of communities that were built around industries locally and then being hollowed out through the 80s and through the 90s specifically; communities that still have community and still have memory and legacy of these industries that have lost out in the past through this transition but also who have a connection to that history and to that place and may very well be primed to capitalise on what we would consider now as the greener industries of the future as well. I’m interested in how we learn lessons to bring benefit into those communities to capitalise on that in a properly just transition; not just a transition or an industrial revolution that’s as fast or as big as possible but one that recognises these historic issues as well.
Matt: Absolutely. I’d echo both of those points. For me, it’s not just about navigating history and making sure it doesn’t trip us up as we try and deliver a cleaner future and a fairer future but also using history and leveraging history and, as you say, the cultures and the legacy that comes with that in a way that helps us get there quicker and in a fairer way. Hey, who are we to pass judgement? Ewan’s the expert but before we bring him in, sadly, we’re going to have to wave goodbye to Becky.
Rebecca: I desperately wanted to be part of this conversation. I think there’s so much to be learnt but I got a puppy yesterday. I know we talked a couple of episodes ago about what were some of the worst things you could do for the environment now and I remember, Matt, you telling me that getting a dog [laughter]...
Matt: It wasn’t that high, to be fair, [laughter] but it was on the list.
Rebecca: It was on the list but I’ll eat less meat and take fewer flights [laughter].
Matt: It’s okay, you’re vegan and you’ve got an EV, so you’ve got a pass on this one for the moment.
Rebecca: I have to take her to the vet because it was now or November [laughter].
Matt: For the dog’s sake, I’m glad you’re not here for Ewan’s interview [laughter]. So without further ado, let’s bring in Dr Ewan Gibbs.
[Music flourish]
Ewan: I’m Ewan Gibbs. I lecture on global inequalities at the University of Glasgow where I’m based in the Economic and Social History subject area.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Welcome, Ewan. Thank you very much for making the time. We have been wanting to get you along for a little while now and we’re delighted to have you here finally. Fraser and I have been keen followers of your work and trying to understand a little bit more about how history can inform what we do in terms of the next steps for a just transition and net zero. Of course, you’ve covered this work in detail before, so initially, could you just explain a little bit about the type of work that you’ve covered of late, particularly with regard to coal mining and the like, just to set the scene for the listeners?
Ewan: Yeah, thanks for having me on the show, Matt. I’ve enjoyed following what you and Fraser are doing and it’s dragged my interest into what’s happening in Scotland just now and away from thinking about the more recent past. My background, as you say, is in studying deindustrialisation in the Scottish coalfields. In my PhD, I looked at that experience as an experience that developed across the second half of the 20th century. In this framing, deindustrialisation isn’t a very sudden occurrence in the 1980s and I think it’s often been understood politically but instead, it’s actually a much longer experience which is managed in different ways, more successfully and less successfully, from a social welfare perspective across five or six decades. We’re still obviously living with those consequences and that’s what has taken me into my more current research. I’m currently finishing a project about the connection between fuel sources and Scottish nationalism and understanding how constitutional politics have developed around, firstly, coal and shale to a lesser extent but then through oil and gas and now renewables as well as opposition to nuclear power. I’m going to start a British Academy Wolfson Fellowship next year which will take me to looking at that experience from a more community and workforce-centred perspective and looking from a UK-wide view at the long movement out of coal which began in the 50s but is only really ending now with the closure of the last generation of coal-fired power stations.
Matt: So in that context, Ewan, you’ve covered the bulk of the 20th century and probably touched upon the late 19th century as well with coal and, of course, into the 21st century. A big question on many people’s lips is how big are the changes that we’re likely to see going forward and how do they compare to those that we’ve felt over the course of the 20th century? From the research that you’ve done, do you feel that we’re about to enter unchartered territory with regard to disruption or is this just another wave of change?
Ewan: I think that there are differences in scale intensity and purpose in the current energy transition from those that have gone before them which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot that we can’t learn from what we’ve experienced in the past. I was looking, shortly before we began this conversation, at that terrifying graph that shows that more than half of global carbon emissions took place in my lifetime since 1990. That’s connected to rapid industrialisation and the global spread of coal and oil technologies and their more intense use relatively recently. So I think it’s important that we bear that in mind. I think from a more localised perspective, Scotland is a country which enjoys its relatively affluent position by global standards in the international economy from two centuries of carbon burning, a century and a half and more of coal and then the last 50 years or so of oil. I think there are important and valid comparisons to be made with the move to oil, gas and nuclear in the second half of the 20th century where coal went from an overwhelmingly dominant position in Scotland and Britain’s energy system to a more marginalised one. Something that I find interesting and important there is that isn’t just about the uses of energy that we might think about most of the time in terms of power generation for instance. Coal made the built environment as well: it made bricks; it made steel; it powered ships and trains; it made the town gas that heated homes, in some cases, as well as supplied electricity. So over a period of time between the early 50s and the late 70s, more or less no significant transport was fuelled by coal anymore in a British context. Town gas had been converted to natural gas quite rapidly with the discovery of the North Sea gas in the 60s and 70s. Coal’s use in domestic heating was a fraction of what it had been. I think there are some parallels in terms of the fact that we can make relatively quick transitions at a societal level and also I think it’s important to note these transitions have political ramifications and are rarely simply choices that are made in the market and I think it’s important we bear that in mind.
Fraser: Yeah, I think something that’s fascinating about the work that you’re doing, Ewan, and that we talk about a lot in Scotland specifically, is the idea of a just transition. Who is benefiting? Who’s footing the bill? Where are the jobs? Where are the industries? Who is extracting profit versus who gets to deal with it? Do you see any parallels between the likes of the original industrial revolution and what we’re experiencing now with renewables in terms of who is actually benefiting from this so far in terms of industry and in terms of profit as well?
Ewan: Yeah, I think that’s a central question and that goes back to the point I was making before, I suppose, about the inherently political nature of choices to use certain energy sources over others. If we look at Andreas Malm’s book Fossil Capital, which introduces a very original and exciting analysis of that perspective about the choices to use coal in the first place in significant volumes in British industry, he points to power relations, particularly the labour disciplining qualities that steam-driven technologies enabled capitalists to employ. He points to textile manufacturers in the West of Scotland as absolutely central to those decisions. We may have heard the term Luddites before. Luddites were skilled craftworkers in parts of the North of England who tried to defend their traditional status by protesting against the use of labour-saving technologies. Luddites is often a term which is used as an insult but we could actually understand them as workers who had been displaced by the transition to a new set of technologies and ultimately, energy relations through the eventual adoption of steam power. Then again, obviously, the phasing out of coal technologies that I’ve assessed had similar ramifications whereby workers that had established their relatively secure position in an industrial system and in a national economy were threatened and displaced by the politicised choice to opt for other fuels. In my book, I refer to some research I did at the National Archives where I found officials from the Ministry of Fuel and Power in the mid-1950s discussing (and this is a direct quote) ‘the need to break the stranglehold the coalminers and unionised rail workers enjoyed over Britain’s energy system.’ So the transition to renewables could be a more hopeful one but it might not be and I think that in Scotland at the moment, in particular, there’s a big debate that’s being had about who is actually benefiting from the transition to renewables, particularly from an industrial workplace perspective and who is footing the bill. You could argue the public is essentially footing the bill and that large multinational enterprises, some of whom have origins in the privatisation of the British electricity system, are enjoying the profits.
Fraser: I think this is a critical point. This is really, really important and it’s something that I think we’ve spoken about separately ourselves before. We’ve capitalised and we’ve done really well to generate clean electricity in Scotland but so much of the benefit and the profit of that is going offshore. The Ferret had a great investigation into that recently but linking that back to your last answer, Ewan, do you think then that we maybe have a little bit of a gap – or maybe there isn’t a gap just now but that we need more civic society trade unionism to fill to really sort of capture a lot more of that benefit here in Scotland and in those communities?
Ewan: Yeah, certainly, I’m not going to lecture colleagues and comrades in the trade union movement on exactly what they should be doing but clearly, renewables, as it stands, is not a sector where the trade union voice has the same power that it enjoyed in, say, the coal industry for much of the 20th century. That was why coal provided the sort of well-paid, stable employment that it did. That wasn’t a gift from employers. It was a position that was fought for and sustained by communities in coalfield areas. There have been some local trade union actions in renewables, especially the occupation of the BiFab Yards in Fife in 2017 which I think were ultimately partly responsible for preventing their closure at that point by effectively putting pressure on the Scottish government to step in and take action. But I think the form of rescue action that the Scottish government took in 2017 and took again late last year, early this year at BiFab is demonstrative of the problem. I think we do need that sort of trade union mobilisation, of course, we do, but I think we need that to take place in a more favourable economic framework and set of policies which start with some basic principles about who these resources belong to and who should enjoy the benefits of them, particularly when significant public subsidies are still being paid for the erection of wind farms. It would be possible, I believe, to insist on conditions being met. Where Scottish workplaces can complete activities at a reasonable economic cost, I don’t see why conditions shouldn’t be applied in return for a subsidy to say that those sorts of capacity should be used and developed, for instance.
Matt: So, Ewan, in this context that you’re framing it and we’ve just mentioned the trade union movement and trying, essentially, to make – if I can pigeonhole it as such – capitalism fairer or at least more accountable to the labour force, is there possibly a bit too much stock, particularly in the media and various communication these days, about the technology and it’s about renewables versus oil, or oil versus gas, or gas versus coal and that actually, all these technologies are reinforcing a similar framework around those, as you just mentioned, own, those that reap the dividends and those that serve and work? Maybe the technology matters not so much here. Is it more the broader frameworks within which that technology and those industries sit?
Ewan: Yeah, I’m very wary of that sort of technological determinism. Oil industries around the world look pretty different depending on where you go. Some of the interviews I’ve completed in my more recent research included an interview with a former oil worker who now works for a trade union. He said to me that when he was working on oil rigs in the North Sea that you could look at rigs in the Norwegian sector and his phrase was ‘they just looked better.’ They were bigger, they were shinier, they were cleaner and they had better cabins for people to relax and sleep in. The unionisation rate in Norway in the oilfields is more or less 100%. Where multinational companies are taking part in extraction activities, they have to do it in partnership with the Norwegian state. In Scotland, I think people are quite familiar usually with the sense that Norway managed its oil much better than Scotland or Britain did.
Matt: Yeah, that’s a really important point, Ewan. I think, maybe too often, people conflate renewables with the just transition and fossil fuels with a non-just transition and I think the examples you’ve given there say, ‘Pause and let’s think about this. It isn’t necessarily the case.’ We’ve actually got quite a lot of architectural work to do to put in place the groundwork for a just transition.
Ewan: Yeah, hugely. I think the problem is that British capitalism or Scottish capitalism is going green in the context of the defeat of the labour movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the negative redistribution of wealth that followed from that and the construction of an increasingly precarious labour market and that includes the energy sector. You mentioned, Fraser, that recent and really important bit of research that The Ferret did but that also matches the ownership of the North Sea now and actually, the North Sea isn’t owned so much by the big oil majors anymore. It’s owned by private equity firms in a lot of cases who have a short-term interest in oil extraction or a passing interest in it or in other cases, it’s actually owned by state-owned enterprises from other countries and these are the sorts of companies that often own the green energy sector in Scotland as well.
Matt: So if I can wind the clock back, Ewan, and play devil’s advocate for a moment, if we were to position ourselves in 1971 and just take us 50 years back here, would we be probably in a better position to deliver a just transition for renewables versus today? With regards to some of the developments that your book covers and that you’ve alluded to there about the breakdown of the labour and trade union movement and reinforcing more maybe a laissez-faire economic standpoint where we’ve seen that in several elections of late, are we taking a step backwards in that regard in terms of being match fit for a just transition?
Ewan: I mean my argument would be that a relatively just transition was organised in the coalfields in the 1940s and the 1970s, partly for all those reasons that you’ve alluded to there; that, broadly, speaking, the economic security of individual workers of colliery workforces and the communities they were built around was maintained relatively well. The largest number of pit closures... more collieries closed and more miners technically lost their jobs between the 40s and the 70s than they did in the 80s and 90s but they did so in a context where they were broadly, as individual workers, offered the means to maintain employment within the mining industry. A lot of them did and some of them chose to leave the mining industry and take up jobs in new sectors that were directed to contracting coalfields. These were jobs that were understood as cleaner, safer and higher paid in assembly goods and manufacturing, like making cars in Linwood near Paisley, for instance.
Fraser: I think that’s a nice segue, Ewan, as well into thinking about that local level. Do you think the cultural legacy of those industries in these places that were built around these different industrial centres and these communities can leverage that for the just transition today?
Ewan: Well, I mean I think in oil and gas, there’s a very direct transition and, in some cases, it’s happening. The use of the Nigg fabrication yard to construct wind turbines is quite interesting from that point of view; that actually, some of the skills and materials that are demanded in oil and offshore oil, in particular, are very easily redeployed in forms of offshore wind activity. I think something that is important there as well, perhaps, is a tactile way of framing these discussions. I think it becomes very easy, from a climate change perspective, to say, ‘Well, we burned all this coal into the air and that was terrible. The society that built was terrible and the world that built was terrible,’ but clearly, the world that built for people who lived in it was often much, much better than the world that came before it. So for a lot of the people that I interview, I think coal meant familiarity, it meant economic security and it meant having a recognised cultural place in the nation. I think it’s important maybe that we think about how those sorts of faculties could be harnessed as well. So I think there’s the materials and skills element and even material objects and infrastructure but there’s possibly I feel like a softer cultural question there as well which could be useful.
Matt: I think, Ewan, that’s a really important point you raise about almost vilifying the history of coal rather than coal. I was watching a really interesting BBC documentary called the Rigs of Nigg. Many of the oil workers there were wanting to speak very positively about their experience and enjoyed being part of a big group working on a very innovative and cutting-edge project. You have to remember that, at that time, this wasn’t being framed as a major carbon emitter and a driver of climate change in the way it is today. I often wonder, and I’d be interested to get your view on this, whether we need to be mindful about not vilifying these groups that we’re actually looking to them, whether they’re ex-coalminers or ex-oilfield workers, to adopt positive climate action and so how do we bring them on board?
Ewan: I think you’re right about that. I think it’s worth thinking about that these people tend to be positive about what they did then and supplying energy to the nation is often part of it; being part of really impressive engineering projects of some sort or another like building the biggest moving human object that had ever been known to man in the North Sea oil industry or building the only tunnel under the Forth that had ever been built; hauling coal out of the ground and mechanically conveying it to the power stations. These are obviously quite heroic stories and people feel like they were part of something significant and important. I think particularly coal miners but also oil workers, in a lot of cases, have been involved in struggles for social justice within their workplace. It’s not as though these workers, in any simplistic sense, have always identified with their employers or the interests of industrial lobbies or anything like that. I think the long struggle for economic security in the coalfields included struggles for health and safety and recognition of forms of environmental problems in their workplaces and communities. The formation of the OILC, the oil workers’ union in the North Sea, after Piper Alpha in 1988 which was a major disaster, is another example of that. I think that’s important to think about here as well; that actually, there is a shared interest between environmentalists and workers often in these industries if that framing can be achieved and if we can think about the objectives being around long-term economic security and sustainable forms of activity.
Matt: I had a follow-up, I think, which was around the kind of holes left behind by deindustrialisation that you’ve uncovered with your research. I think a lot of just transition literature talks about taking something away from somebody, which might be a job or an industry, and leaving them with the question about what next but actually, in Scotland, all too often and particularly with the coal industry... you could look at the boom-and-bust nature of the oil and gas industry too and often, there’s nothing there to begin with. You mentioned Paisley before or Glasgow and the shipbuilding. With Scotland historically, there are big holes left there. What do we do with that for a net zero transition?
Ewan: Yeah, it’s a good point and one of the problems in the Scottish labour market, for some time, is actually a skills utilisation problem. That is only growing worse as the North Sea industry enters long-term contraction. I think we need to start with the thought of actually, how are we going to use and preserve the skills we’ve got because organising a just transition and the sort of framing we’re thinking of usually starts with the assumption that you have a fairly large industrial workforce and we’ll take them out of doing what they’re doing at the moment and we’ll put them into something else. But actually, you’re right that in Scotland, we’re already at a point where we’ve had two or three generations of deindustrialisation already and the carbon-intensive sectors we already have are not using those skills effectively. What concerns me is that, at the moment, there’s not a great case for optimism that the green sectors are going to do that either.
Fraser: So I guess the big question just to wrap up on, Ewan, is does history matter when planning the net-zero transition and how do we use it to our advantage going forward?
Ewan: I mean I’m obviously going to say that history matters [laughter].
Matt: You are a historian, of course, yeah.
Ewan: I’d say we live in a world that is produced and reproduced by fossil fuels and I think that’s really important for us to recognise and that we can’t just excavate ourselves from that and pretend we don’t live in that sort of society. The carbon economy social relations and the political ideologies that we understand the world through and the inequalities that that sort of economy is imbued in our society or the landscape that we’re all navigating as we make the case for a just transition or a net-zero society, that includes the business and corporate landscape and the powerful role that multinationals play in economic sectors but it also includes the structures and ways of thinking that dominate government. I think at a more diffuse level, it also shapes our views on what amounts to personal freedom and collective responsibility. There are dangers there, obviously. I think fossil fuels are important to what we might think of as Prometheanism or the sense that humankind can achieve anything and that we can and should achieve anything but that is about the benefits of faith in human agency that can be associated with that and the capacity to change the world. It’s only been in the era of fossil fuels that the sorts of industrial feats we’ve been discussing here have been possible and things that we think of as mundane would have seemed incredible to ordinary people a century or two centuries ago. I think connected to that are the global flows of goods, technology and ideas which can obviously cause damage and they do every day but they also create a collective reliance and that can be quite important when we’re thinking about the potential for the sort of scale and intensity of action we’re looking for. The last thing I’d want to say is that also modern nation-states and policies have been constructed in the context of fossil fuels as well. The mechanisms of transition that are products of industrial capitalist societies, the mechanisms of energy transitions and the forms of conflict that have shaped them are really important I think to building the transition out of fossil fuels themselves. There is a shared set of circumstances and a shared set of societal conflicts and objectives that shaped earlier transitions that will also shape this one.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Ewan, thank you very much. You have covered tremendous ground and probably the best part of three centuries worth, so thank you very much for that. Really interesting.
Ewan: Thanks a lot.
Matt: I wonder whether we might be able to ask you to stick around to play our Future or Fiction?
Ewan: Okay.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Thank you very much, Matthew. For the uninitiated, which I’m surmising includes Ewan from that response, Future or Fiction? is a game that we play at the end of every episode where I pitch our esteemed guest with a brand new technological innovation and they have to decide if it’s real, i.e. they think it’s the future or if I’ve just pulled it out of my backside. Now, we know that I love my clunky segues on this, so how about this one? This technology is called... Let’s Dance. That’s Let’s Dance. So anyone who follows Ewan on Twitter will know that Ewan, like my good self, is a Scotland football fan and everyone knows that we can boogie but how about this? A European nightclub has installed a dancefloor that harnesses the energy of people dancing to power its light and sound systems through special flooring that captures power from pressure and latent heat. The system provides a substantial amount of the club’s electricity by putting the energy of its revellers to good use. Do we think that’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish]
Matt: Well, this is a tricky one. This is reminding me, Fraser, of the well-known nightclub that used to be on the Tyne in Newcastle which had the revolving dancefloor [laughter] which was lit up but I’m not sure that captured... it probably did, in a roundabout way, as the boat rocked from one side to the other [laughter]. Ewan, have you got any prior knowledge of this at all?
Ewan: I’ve never heard of this before but I quite like the idea of it. I think I want it to be the future even if it isn’t, so I’m going to go for future in hope rather than expectation [laughter].
Matt: There’s this notion that if you stop dancing, the music might just cease [laughter]. It’s usually the other way around, right?
Fraser: I imagine there’s some storage element to it. It’s not that you are keeping it going and you can never stop dancing to keep the club in power.
Matt: I’m sure we’ve had something similar to this in the past, Fraser. We’ve had a few kinetic ones I think but there was one, if my memory serves me correctly, about gym equipment and I honestly can’t remember the result of that which is a problem because if I knew that, I might know this one [laughter]. I’m quite sure the tech exists for this and so that’s the first hurdle, Ewan. This is where I normally now fall over because the question is is anybody actually bothering to do this? I think somebody out there somewhere is doing this, like a dodgy nightclub in Ibiza. Why not? I’m going future.
Fraser: You’re going future? So, Ewan, I should say that whenever we have a guest on, we will take your answer, then Matt gives his answer and traditionally, we give you a chance to change your answer because Matt is always wrong. So if you want to switch and go for fiction... I’m not trying to get in your head too much.
Ewan: No, I’m sticking. I’m going for a hole.
Matt: It’s the equivalent of phoning a friend [laughter] if you knew that friend was definitely wrong [laughter]. Okay, well, I think we’re in agreement, Ewan. We’re both futures. So yeah, dodgy kinetic nightclubs. Yeah, future for sure.
Fraser: Future and future? The answer is... it’s the future.
Ewan: Yes!!
Matt: Okay, now we need the address because we’re going there.
Fraser: You do. I’ve got it for you [laughter]. You’ll believe exactly where it is. It’s called Club Watt in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It has installed a piezoelectric floor that harnesses the pressure of people’s dancing feet to power light and sound.
Ewan: It’s called Club Watts as well.
Fraser: Club Watts, yeah. I think it’s the whole thing.
Matt: Okay, well, that’s where we’re recording the next episode [laughter]. Maybe we can get the ferry. That’s alright then as that’s low carbon enough.
[Music flourish]
Good stuff. Okay, well, thank you, Ewan. Thank you, Fraser. It’s been another excellent episode. You’ve been listening to Local Zero pod. You can find us @LocalZeroPod on Twitter. Please engage and please let us know what you would like us to cover in the future and we’ll do our best to do so but until then and until the next episode, thank you for listening and goodbye.
Fraser: Goodbye. Bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
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