Now even Greenpeace is worried about North Sea oil jobs

Telegraph

17-05-2025

Even by the standards of Greenpeace and Unite it was a very odd protest. A coalition of 60-plus environmental and union groups staged a demonstration outside Parliament this week demanding a huge programme of government spending to help North Sea oil workers laid off by the closure of the fields.
But hold on. Weren't we told there were going to be lots of well-paid green jobs? Surely the workers made redundant on the rigs can just get one of those?
There is just one problem. It is becoming painfully clear that the green jobs revolution promised by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, is a self-serving fantasy – and tens of thousands of genuinely well-paid jobs are being pointlessly sacrificed.
In a week when the legislation to create Great British Energy, the Labour Government's state-owned renewables champion, was finally passed through Parliament, we should all be welcoming the wave of green jobs that are about to be created, along with the lower energy bills that should be coming our way very soon.
'As part of our Plan for Change, this will make us a clean energy superpower and help bring down energy bills for good,' argued Miliband as the legislation was passed. Well, perhaps. It seems, however, that no one got around to telling all the workers in the North Sea who will soon be losing their careers.
As the bill was passing through Parliament, a group of protesters gathered outside to demand that as well as the £8bn being spent on GB Energy, another £1.9bn of taxpayers' money should be used to create new jobs for all the people about to be laid off from the oil and gas rigs in the North Sea.
'Offshore workers have risked life and limb and suffered long stints away from their families to keep this country moving and it's time the Government repaid their sacrifices with an industrial strategy that puts worker justice at its heart,' according to Greenpeace.
Seriously? Green campaigners are worried about workers on oil rigs?
For years now we have been lectured on how the transition to greener energy would create lots of jobs. Now we are being told that everyone laid off in the traditional energy industry will be unemployed if the Government doesn't step in to help them.
In reality, the contradiction only makes sense when you realise one very simple point: these supposed well-paid green jobs don't actually exist.
Sure, there are jobs that can be labelled as green if you don't mind twisting the definitions a little. The Office for National Statistics had a stab at calculating how many last year, and came up with what it admitted was an 'experimental' figure of 639,000 across the whole of the British economy, a surprisingly small number given there are 34m jobs in total.
There are extra jobs being created putting up the wind turbines off the Yorkshire coast – at least when they are not cancelled, as the huge Hornsea 4 wind farm was earlier this month – plus installing solar panels in supermarket car parks and putting up all the extra pylons that will be needed to secure the grid against blackouts.
But any reasonable calculation of the total has to factor in the job losses in the North Sea, as all the people who used to supply the country with conventional fuels. Even more importantly, it has to factor in all the job losses in manufacturing as whole industries get wiped out by sky-high energy prices.
Even the climate change groups protesting this week agree that 227,000 jobs have been lost in the last decade in fossil fuels. Likewise, it is estimated that 600,000 jobs have been lost in manufacturing in the UK over the last decade, and if we attribute at least half of that total to energy costs (which, if we are being honest is probably an underestimate), that means another 300,000 have been sacrificed to net zero.
Add the two figures together and more than 500,000 jobs have been lost, meaning that only a little over 100,000 net green jobs have been created.
Even worse, many of those are simply installation work for technologies such as heat pumps. All they do is simply replace existing work in traditional engineering. If a plumber switches from installing gas boilers to heat pumps he might be classified as moving into a 'green job'. But that doesn't mean any extra employment has been created.
The blunt reality is this. Ed Miliband, along with the climate commissars around him, have been peddling a lie. If there were genuinely lots of well-paid green jobs, we would have seen evidence of them by now.
Instead, we are now in the absurd position where climate groups such as Greenpeace clamour for one round of subsidies for green energy and then another round to help all the people who lose their jobs as a result. It is a never-ending cycle of more and more government spending.
We are lectured endlessly about how transitioning to net zero will create lots of employment. But there is no sign of it actually happening.
Sure, we can all argue about whether climate change is an emergency, or whether it is a problem that can be solved fairly easily with better technology. We can also debate whether the UK really needs to be a world leader in reducing carbon emissions, given that we account for less than 1pc of the global total.
But there is no point in kidding ourselves that the transition is going to make us richer. Right now it is becoming painfully clear that it is throwing lots of people out of work – and there are very few genuinely new jobs being created to compensate for that.