Scotland’s Green Transition is happening, but remains far from Just

A new report from the CBI this week has revealed that the number of jobs in Scotland’s renewable energy sector has now exceeded the number of jobs in the oil and gas sector. 105,000 people are now employed in and around renewables compared to 83,000 in oil and gas. This also means that renewable energy jobs don’t just exceed oil and gas job numbers this year, but are higher than the latter number was as far back as 2018.

This is now an irreversible trend. The Green Transition is happening and has passed its tipping point. Oil and Gas will never be as significant to the Scottish economy as renewables now will be in precisely the same way that those fluid fossil fuels supplanted the coal industry just a few decades ago.

But therein lies the warning to the Government. The gross “number of jobs” in a sector does not tell us nearly enough of the full story of the transition we’re getting compared to the one we were promised. The transition is happening, but it may not be a Just Transition.

The Just Transition is a set of principles that foresaw this tipping point coming (Common Weal is a member of the Just Transition Partnership – an advisory and advocacy group set up in 2016 to promote these principles) and tried to learn the lessons of the demise of the coal industry which saw entire communities devastated when what was often the keystone employer shut up and left without any kind of coherent replacement or transition being in place. Many of those communities are still some of Scotland’s poorest and most deprived.

One of the main principles of the Just Transition is that it should directly support workers to make the jump from a fossil fuel job to a renewable energy one. We know that it’s possible. The skills involved in working on an offshore oil rig are very highly compatible with the jobs required to erect and maintain offshore wind turbines.

But we don’t know if it is happening. The raw numbers of jobs don’t tell us if oil workers are becoming renewable energy workers or whether they are simply being fired and a new engineer is replacing them.

This is why in 2021 – half a decade ago now – Common Weal drove and won a campaign to pass a motion at the SNP conference to create a Just Transition Jobs Register that would track the number of fossil fuel workers who wanted to transition to renewables, would count the number who actually made the jump, and would act as a facilitation mechanism to help make that jump happen.

Unfortunately, the Scottish Government has yet to adopt their own party policy on this, which is why the Herald article breaking the CBI story today points out that the Government is reliant on outside sources like the CBI to monitor the Transition rather than doing the work itself.

There are more aspects to the Just Transition than merely ensuring that the workers move jobs. There are still major issues with wage disparities, work conditions, trade union penetration and representation that also need to be addressed. It’s not just the job that needs to transition – livelihoods need to be protected as well.

The CBI report is broadly good news for Scotland. It shows that we are moving towards the long-predicted energy future at a pace. But it appears to be happening despite insufficient action from the Scottish Government and despite outright climate denial from parties on the Right. We would all be better off if a more strategic approach were taken to make sure that the transition moves even more rapidly than it currently is, and that once it is complete, we look back at the Just Transition that happened with pride, as we move away from oil and not with the shame of broken lives that happened when we moved away from coal.