Jack James has advised me that this motion was passed at the Labour Party North West Regional Conference last weekend:
Conference welcomes the manifesto promise to ban fracking and the Labour Party's commitment to this issue. However, we recognise the threats still posed by fossil fuel production and climate change. We also recognise that our economy is suffering from a lack of investment, underemployment and low productivity.Conference calls on the Labour Party to address these issues by creating a plan for a Green New Deal that would transform the UK to a low carbon, sustainable economy. That would involve large scale investment in the renewable energy industry and energy and resource efficiency, create hundreds of thousands of skilled and unskilled jobs in the renewable energy industry, ensure that fossil fuel prices reflect the cost to the environment, re-regulate the finance sector to ensure investment is socially valuable and reregulate Tax Havens to provide more funds to public finance.
Bring it on, I say.
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I told you; the North West is where grassroots organisations are actually creating the change we need right now.
Can’t they just ensure that fossil fuel prices reflect the cost to the environment, and then leave the est to market forces?
Apparently not.
Arsene Zverev says:
November 10 2017 at 7:05 pm
“Can’t they just ensure that fossil fuel prices reflect the cost to the environment, and then leave the est to market forces?
Apparently not.”
I think you’ll find that additional taxation on fossil fuels will not be necessary. despite the Trump push for the fossil fuel industry the US is already finding that sustainable energy production is romping ahead on grounds of pure economics.
The spending on ‘oil wars’ in the Middle East could have made the US clean and green by now. Leading the field rather than being dragged along by the heels in a desperate rearguard action to protect idle vested interests. Some areas are already leading the charge despite government policy and White House pronouncements.
The US government is increasingly to be seen as the World’s biggest rogue state. It remains the only state ever to have used (quite unnecessarily) atom bombs and the state most likely to do so now.
No.
https://theconversation.com/carbon-offsets-saving-emissions-but-not-saving-the-environment-11429
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/14/un-carbon-offset-coal-plants
Those seem like arguments for replacing all the interventions in energy and manufacturing with one simple intervention tax based on a price for the amount of CO2 produced. Dieter Helm recently said this would have led to higher rates of decarbonisation, for lower use of resources.
Arsene,
Yes and no.
A carbon tax, as you suggest, is much better than cap & trade. It is not enough on its own though (even if it was globally uniform). There is more to the issue than CO2 alone. There are local as well as global aspects and some of them involve public goods. In those cases “market forces” are either somewhat ineffective or of no use whatsoever.
Marco Fante says:
November 11 2017 at 12:19 pm
“No.”
Interesting links to carbon trading scheme articles, Marco.
It reminds me of the milk credits trading scheme. The credits become a more lucrative asset than the product. The milk producers still get paid a pittance and the market traders suck the profit out of the dairy industry.
I see carbon trading going the same way. Schemes are so complicated the wide boys will drive trucks through the regulations filling them with money as they go. Much of the calculating of carbon reductions will be subjective and based on expert opinions which suit the big corporations and the credits traders. It will be a shambles won’t it?
I can’t furnish you with a link, I’m afraid, as this was quite a while ago, but I recall at its inception there were indeed suggestions from some quarters that carbon trading, and also much of the brouhaha about climate change, had been concocted for the benefit of the financial community, not the planet.
Very good news!
Hope to see it succeed at the national conference. I will enquire of other Labour members in my area to see what we can do.
Sadly it’s window dressing. Labour support Nuclear Power, HS2 and airport expansion. Corbyn wants even faster economic growth. Here is Sheffield Labour have welcomed Boeing setting up a large factory thus locking us into a high carbon future and out of town shopping centre Meadowhall has been given planning permission to expand which along with the opening of Ikea will increase air pollution.
No doubt you will have read about the mass felling of thousands of healthy street trees in Sheffield and trying to imprison one of the Green Party councillors. Tree campaigner Calvin Payne has been given a three month suspended prison sentence and a £16 K fine.
I understand why people are desperate for a Labour government but to say that they will deliver a low carbon economy is very far from the truth.
Corbyn has utterly no time for proportional representation, is authoritarian and not democratic. It is nonsense to say Labour are now green.
People really need to know the problems associated with Fracking. Fracking companies want to dump the waste water associated with the Fracking process into the sea. That waste water would have the potential to pollute marine life
Really good to see that renewables are getting the attention they deserve…..
It’s about bloody time isn’t it?
The past ten years have been wasted both in pursuing the sustainable agenda and putting the economy to work for the people who live here.
I support the motion passed by Labour in the North west.
But.
The specifics will require government to move away from the “we don’t pick winners” ideology that has pervaded Whitehall (& the Treasury) since the 1970s. This led to the sale of a range of UK industrial companies (e.g. ICL, Pilkingtons, ARM), the decimation and ultimately collapse of others (ICI and GEC) and the death by a thousands cuts of the UK IC industry (believe it or not we had one – once upon a time). The current tactic followed since the 1970s (& before) is to encourage foreign companies to set up factory operations in the UK – off-shore wind is one example. However, these operations only last for as long as there are UK projects (= UK market). Thus whilst I fully support a Green New Deal, for there to be lasting impacts – it needs to be linked in a robust & clear sighted way to a UK re-industrialisation policy. This policy needs to be focused on supporting the growth of UK companies that provide the goods & services generated by the Green New Deal. Example: if you have an off-shore wind programme – should not most of the steel come from the UK? (ditto the fabrication into towers etc).
With the right incentives the UK should be able to rise to this challenge. Example: l in 25 years (1830 to 1855) it built (using only human muscle) 8500 miles of railway in the Uk plus the trains to run on it. There is no reason why in the 21st century in 25 years we could not have every house in the UK properly insulated, transport mostly electric and power geenration mostly renewable.
Meanwhile, In Germany, thanks to renewables, people are being paid to use electricity…http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/germany-grids-paying-electricity-customers-renewable-energy-power-surplus-wind-solar-generation-a8022576.html
Here in the UK I get paid for each KWH my solar panels generate, plus additional payment for power transferred to the grid (currently estimated) and don’t draw electricity from the grid if it is not needed. Also,, if I’m generating more power than needed then any additional is diverted to the immersion heater which reduces costs for heating water by the boiler.
(to be pedantic the Germans ‘are poised’ to make payments – not actually doing it)
The subsidies which made installations like yours economically feasible have been withdrawn, I believe. The Germans do seem to have been paid to use electricity http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/874024/Germany-electricity-wind-energy-storm-excess-renewable-energy
Hi thanks for sharing our conference motion! We are so pleased that Labour is supporting the creation of good quality jobs in the renewables industry.
For any Labour members interested in the issue of fracking, we have set up a national Facebook group to network called ‘Frack Free Labour’
https://m.facebook.com/groups/158260514912479?tsid=0.12150691823549953&source=result
“…reregulate Tax Havens to provide more funds to public finance.”
Not again!! How many times do we have to be subjected to this mantra?
Taxes *do not* “provide funds to public finance”.
They destroy money so that inflation does not occur as a result of continual public spending, which the government does every day *without* requiring a penny in taxes to be paid first.
Agreed
Mr Shigemitsu,
Yeah, I know exactly why are saying this but if we follow this through fully is not merely a technical or secondary point (a bit kind of 6 of one or half-dozen of the other).
The taxes that enable that continual public spending (by the very means you suggest) are necessary to avoid unwanted inflation – that is to say, somewhat necessary, whether they come ‘first’ or not.
Marco Fante,
The argument that spending comes first and tax’s are necessary to amongst other things control inflation invalidates the “where are you going to get the money for that” argument as well as the “which tax’s are you going to raise to pay for that”.
The argument then becomes “What will be the effect of that increased spending” and “which tax’s will we need to raise/create to regulate inflation and redistribute”.
i.e. It changes the framing of the discussion.
Agreed
Hi mr.shigemitsu,
I agree with you but unfortunately there was no time to go into the basics of mmt in a 250 word motion. The green new deal group also makes a similar statement in its core principles.
Jack
We do