BY WILL JONES
“North Sea oil workers cannot be sacrificed on the altar of Net Zero,” the Unite union has told Labour as it launches a campaign against the party’s “irresponsible” green agenda. Ross Clark in the Spectator has more.
In a move which has been remarkably underreported in England, the union Unite has launched a campaign against Labour’s policy of refusing licences for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea.
The campaign, called ‘No ban without a plan’, demands that Labour suspends the policy. If successful, it means a future Labour Government would continue, like the Conservatives, to grant new licences, until it has come up with a plan to create at least 35,000 new ‘energy transition jobs’ in Scotland – equivalent to the current roles held by oil workers. The union’s General Secretary Sharon Graham has accused Keir Starmer of following a policy which would allow Britain to “be held to ransom by Saudi Arabia or other nations” and adds:
“Labour needs to pull back from this irresponsible policy. There is clearly no viable plan for the replacement of North Sea jobs or energy security… Unite will not stand by and let workers be thrown on the scrapheap. North Sea workers cannot be sacrificed on the altar of Net Zero.”
Worth reading in full.
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Who funds the Labour Party in the UK?
Australian Labor changed its name as it went hard left to Green and forgot where its money comes from.
If UK Labour is being funded by union fees then the unions should stop paying for the Green agenda that eliminates their jobs.
Australia’s Labor party is not a friend to the unions…
And the unions are finally starting to realise it.
Looks like it might be a similar case in the UK.
Who funds the Labour Party in the UK?
The unions, big donors and party members.
Dale Vince uses green subsidies to fund the Labour Party.
What about the Green industries? Do donations have to be made public?
Its not all that well reported, but this is the answer for 2023, in millions of pounds sterling:
Total funding: 21.5
Unions: 9.9
Business and individuals: 14.5
14.5 broken down further
Lubner: 4.6 [former head of Autoglass
Sainsbury: 3.1 [the supermarket family]
Perrin 1 [Sainsbury’s daughter]
Ecotricity 1 [Dale Vince also funds Just Stop Oil etc]
Subtotal: 10
Don’t know how much was from members. Less than 4.5 million in any case. Almost of it will have been from wealthy people. 114 donors gave £25,000 or more in 2023. If they gave 30k each that would be 3.4 million of a remaining 4 million.
Taxi drivers or care home workers don’t donate 25k to a political party.
Sorry, typo! That was 5.9 from unions, not 9.9!
People with money desiring control? Government v. any one carbon criminal union and government wins. Government has a lot of money behind its policies from people far more interested in control.
The big question is- will they? What’s with the union bosses that they went Green? It must be that they believed the propaganda of a vast number of new high paying jobs? Are they now enlightened to the reality of the net, jobless zero?
Makes me laugh. All they care about is the same number of jobs. Would day care attendants satisfy them, or maybe they can stand underneath wind mills when there’s no wind and spin them by hand.
I think the steel industry has woken them up a bit
All those solar panels won’t clean themselves.
It seems to me that “equivalent to the current roles held by oil workers” means they are thinking about pay as well.
Union involvement means less connection between pay and skill or necessity. Government involvement ensures that.
Floating Offshore Wind in Norway
.
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/natural-forces-cause-periodic-global-warming
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/hunga-tonga-volcanic-eruption
.
Equinor, a Norwegian company, put in operation, 11 Hywind, floating offshore wind turbines, each 8 MW, for a total of 88 MW, in the North Sea. The wind turbines are supplied by Siemens, a German company
Production will be about 88 x 8766 x 0.5, claimed lifetime capacity factor = 385,704 MWh/y, which is about 35% of the electricity used by 2 nearby Norwegian oil rigs, which cost at least $1.0 billion each.
On an annual basis, the existing diesel and gas-turbine generators on the rigs, designed to provide 100% of the rigs electricity requirements, 24/7/365, will provide only 65%, i.e., the wind turbines have 100% back up.
The generators will counteract the up/down output of the wind turbines, on a less-than-minute-by-minute basis, 24/7/365
The generators will provide almost all the electricity during low-wind periods, and 100% during high-wind periods, when rotors are feathered and locked.
The capital cost of the entire project was about 8 billion Norwegian Kroner, or about $730 million, as of August 2023, when all 11 units were placed in operation, or $730 million/88 MW = $8,300/kW. See URL
That cost was much higher than the estimated 5 billion NOK in 2019, i.e., 60% higher
The project is located about 70 miles from Norway, which means minimal transport costs of the entire supply to the erection sites
The project would produce electricity at about 42 c/kWh, no subsidies, at about 21 c/kWh, with 50% subsidies
In Norway, all work associated with oil rigs is very expensive.
Three shifts of workers are on the rigs for 6 weeks, work 60 h/week, and get 6 weeks off with pay, and are paid well over $150,000/y, plus benefits.
If Norwegian units were used in Maine, the production costs would be even higher in Maine, because of the additional cost of transport of almost the entire supply, including specialized ships and cranes, across the Atlantic Ocean, plus
A high voltage cable would be hanging from each unit, until it reaches bottom, say about 200 to 500 feet.
The cables would need some type of flexible support system
The cables would be combined into several cables to run horizontally to shore, for at least 25 to 30 miles, to several onshore substations, to the New England high voltage grid.
https://www.offshore-mag.com/regional-reports/north-sea-europe/article/14195647/floating-wind-turbines-to-power-north-sea-gullfaks-snorre-platforms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_wind_turbine
Labour: no plan without a ban
OF COURSE it was under-reported
Its another wonderful example of the UK leading the world into chaos on Net Zero.
The next thing, the unions will notice that all is not well with the car industry, and that, guess what, this too means jobs.
In the end they will notice that a collapsing economy and widespread layoffs because of a failing electricity supply also means jobs…
Takes a while, but they are getting there.
At the next UK election we could therefore, it seems, witness the unususal phenomenon of middle-class Tories voting Labour because they’re fed-up with their party’s leftward drift and left-wing, working-class trade unionists voting Conservative to protect their jobs!
Similar to the US, where Republican Donald Trump is now the working class hero and the Dems attract rich, mostly white voters.
The traditional union and minority group voters are moving rapidly toward Trump. The elites are appalled.
There used to be a system in place in the UK, we are talking back in the pre-Thatcher era, which went roughly like this.
There were a bunch of state owned industries, state owned utilities such as gas and electricity and rail, and quite a few very large trade unions.
The unions operated a closed shop, so you had to be a member to work. Then, as a member, there was an automatic payroll deduction which funded the Labour Party. Then, when it came to party matters, such as leadership or manifesto votes, you had already assigned your vote to the union, so the union leader cast all those votes. This was called ‘block voting’.
This sounds dreadful, but it had a surprisingly conservative effect. The unions like their members were socially conservative and rather cautious. They were totally obscurantist when it came to working practices, automation, quality control, stuff like that. They basically opposed all change to working practices and wanted overmanning and tariff barriers. The classic case was British Leyland, staggering on making rust buckets on 1950s assembly lines for year after year, to endless strikes whenever anyone picked up a tool their job description did not provide for them to use.
But they were not radical socialists, and under this system, with the support of the unions, Kinnock was able to see off the Militant movement and purge the Trotskyites from the party.
Thatcher demolished all that. First by selling off the state sector companies, then by breaking down the mandatory financing of the Labour Party. Then by generating an economic boom which was increasingly non-unionized.
The result was to lower union membership and lessen, though not eiliminate, union control of the party. As it had been intended to do.
However with falling union influence came an unforeseen consequence, a rise in the radical wing of the party, and a campaign arose for so called Labour Party Democracy, which meant all power to the members. This finally got control with Miliband’s reforms to the membership and leader selection process…. and this is how we got Corbyn as leader, supported by Momentum. Which was Militant by another name and as Trotskyite as Militant in nature.
Starmer has now largely seen them off in the wake of the failure of the party to win elections, and is hurriedly replacing the ethos with that of, roughly, the Guardian and Hampstead.
So we now have a Labour Party which is heavily funded by a few rich socially liberal individuals (you could call them woke!) and whose policies are set by a metropolitan elite.
The result is that their traditional voters woke up at the last election to wonder why they were voting for and funding a party which believed in unmlimited immigration (hence wage lowering job competition), wokery in gender and race, and heavy commitment to net zero, which also was becoming clear to cause job losses. As most recently in the collapse of the Port Talbot steel works.
So they voted for Boris Johnson. Something which they have subsequently come to regret deeply. And which, at the next chance, they may try and remedy by voting Reform.
Meanwhile in Scotland the SNP have taken much the same tack with their alliance with the lunatic Greens. And both Labour and SNP are following down a path well trodden by the US Democratic Party. With similar results and opportunities for populist led revolts.
Makes sense. The underlying problem, as I see it, is the same in most cases. The people that have power are too far removed from the people their decisions affect.
Totally agree. In America, the Dept. of Agriculture should be moved from DC to Goodland KS. The Dept of Interior should be in Farmington NM. The Dept of Energy should be in Midland TX. The Dept of Transportation should be in the South side of Chicago. HUD should be in Detroit.
Regulators should live among those that they regulate.
bingo!
An excellent exposition of the history, Michel; couldn’t have put it better myself. The paradoxes are clear to see…
How about some meaningful targets for the renewables industry complex.
You can have your next tranche of subsidies after you can provide power for the nation for one continuous 24 hour period.
Better make it 72 hours, just in case. That’ll fox ’em!
Harold the Chemist says:
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in March was 425 ppm by volume. This is only 0.835 grams of CO2 per cubic meter of air. At 15 deg C there is 1.22 kg of air per cubic meter.
The reason the concentration of CO2 in air is so small is that most of the CO2 is absorbed by the oceans where it rapidly fixed by the flora such as phytoplankton, sea grasses and weeds, and kelp as evidenced by the enormous amount of these flora. All the carbon in the sea animals comes from the plants. Whales are a sink for carbon. A lot CO2 is also fixed land plants.
I have concluded that “net zero carbon” is nonsense. Mother Nature does a really good job of keeping carbon dioxide at a low level in the air.
What do think the green zealots would say if they read this post?
Heretic!!! Burn him at the stake. (oops, that’ll release greenhouse gasses).
Plants like 1000 to 1200 ppm, much more than 400 ppm, and reward us by growing more, which supports us and other fauna.
Nature should step up its game and finally stop the gradual decrease of CO2 ppm of the past 20 million years.
Fossil fuels are helping out, but they will last maybe 100 more years.
Probably the only time I support action by a Labor Union.
Just one more reason to do the right thing and fund the overdue asset retirements with real GBP. Plugging out old wells and properly getting rid of platforms that hardly cast a show any more would account for many of those “transition” jobs. GOM and California OCS, are you listening?
Bigger pic, entitled UK platform hands. There are reasons so many US oil workers have always had backup jobs. First off, oilfield trash. worldwide, are money blowers. Lots of ex wives and unsold houses trailing along behind them. And of course it’s an up and down gig. One month you’re pulling slips in the windy sleet. The next you’re selling hot tubs out of a nearly empty mini mall.
Name one US extractive industry that didn’t end up screwing it’s work force and leaving trash cans behind. Not rhetorical, one.
So, UK workers, in reality if you want to be treated well, self “transit”. Go to work for Equinor, DNO (if you want to get paid well, in cash, to live dangerously), or their Austrian equivalent, OMV…
Equinor sounds like they went full retard.
Day to day, Equinor walks the walk. Best safety. Best environmental. Best $ stashing for asset retirements. I can find similar language in virtually every major and NOC documentation.
While I am happy to see the union open it’s eyes this is not about jobs. It is about honesty, integrity, energy security and economics. The truth is oil and gas make sense, wind and solar don’t. Oil and gas are economical, wind and solar aren’t. Oil and gas are reliable, wind and solar aren’t. I am concerned about oil and gas jobs because they make sense and are economical. I am not concerned about wind and solar jobs because the don’t make sense and aren’t economical.
You mean unions aren’t just Marxist stooges and actually care about their members? Naaaahhhhh! 🙂