Greener Jobs Alliance

How hot is too hot?

Photo by Rajiv Bajaj on Unsplash

By Paul Atkin

Mad dogs and Englishmen, go out in the mid-day sun

Noel Coward.

The heatwaves in May and June have so far caused 2,700 excess deaths. There are likely to be more before Summer is out. 

And with the current El Nino giving a violent upward spike to the underlying heat accumulation being steadily built by greenhouse gases, we can expect worse next year. And worse the year after that. This is what climate change is.

To put the deadly consequences into perspective, 2,700 excess deaths is 

• more than five times the number of people murdered in the year ending March 2025; which was 522.
• almost double the road accident total for 2025; which was 1,556 
• and three quarters as many as the total deaths during the thirty years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998; which was 3,489.

Some of the people who died will have read articles in the press playing down the severity of the heatwaves – claiming that Red and Amber heat warnings are not a sober health warning, but just another symptom of a society that no longer has what it takes even to get through “gorgeous weather” – believed them, and acted accordingly.

The TUC supports a maximum workplace temperature. 

Giving Hannah Spencer’s maximum workplace temperature bill government time to make sure it doesn’t get talked out, would be a good way for Andy Burnham to show he is serious about improving people’s lives. 

The bill, if passed, would create an independent body to recommend maximum safe workplace temperatures and set out how the recommendations should be implemented. 

In the coming months, while pressing for this legislation, we will have to struggle with unbearably hot workplaces, often with managers in air conditioned offices playing it down. 

• In August, UNISON is making heat its theme of the month for its Year of Green Action
• The TUC is hosting a heatwave organising call at 1pm on Wednesday 29 July, to share advice on how to keep your workplace cool — with actions you can take to win protections now and build towards a national maximum temperature.
• There’s a lot of useful resources on the Heat Strike site.  

This graph from the Met Office shows the trend and points to where we are heading. When Eurostar puts out a spec for a train capable of running in 55C heat, do they consider whether their crew and passengers would be able to get to or from the train if it was that hot outside?

 

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The post How hot is too hot? first appeared on Greener Jobs Alliance.

Drill baby drill or cry baby cry?  The energy sector and long-term job security

Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

Introduction

Climate change is already ruining millions of working-class lives across the globe, and increasingly threatening our homes, health, food supplies and safety here in the UK.  Radical changes are needed to stave off the worst impacts, and whilst these will affect every work sector and every community, the energy sector1 has a critical role to play.

1. Transition away from fossil fuels to renewables as quickly as possible.
2. Protect the jobs of workers in energy, supply chains and associated roles (and communities generally) as we move from fossil fuels to renewables.
3. Provide cheap renewable energy that can be afforded by all.

Despite the dire warnings about the consequences2, we are nowhere near doing any of these.  In the UK, the Labour government has made some nods towards each of these points3 without fully embracing transition as the engine of social and economic justice, equality and rejuvenation that it could be.  There are a number of explanations for this, including:

1. Labour’s ‘business as usual’ approach to governance prioritises technical solutions done TO people instead of governing in the campaign mode that’s needed, in which the population is fully informed and mobilised to become creative actors in the social green transition at all levels.
2. The immense weight of the US, pushing hard to sabotage the energy transition and retain ‘global energy dominance’ based on fossil fuels and militarisation, applying direct state to state pressure at government level while sponsoring subservient local political formations like Reform, Restore, Tommy Robinson and the Conservative Party as local agents of disinformation and mobilisation.

Keep the North Sea Working Campaign

One consequence of these currents is that they set a context within which some trade unions see the prevailing winds at the top and decide that they must travel in the same direction if they are to fulfil their purpose of protecting jobs4.  So Unite is currently pursuing a policy of ‘Keep the North Sea Working’5 through an expansion of oil and gas operations, as an extension of its ‘no ban without a plan’ campaign.

Unite wrote to leaders of all political parties ahead of the 2026 Scottish Parliamentary Elections asking if they back the campaign to Keep the North Sea Working and support the delivery of a No Compulsory Redundancy Pledge.  We firmly support the latter as a critical plank in a Just Transition but arguing that ‘keeping the North Sea working’ through expanded oil and gas production including pushing ahead with the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields’ raises expectations among workers that cannot be met. 

While these comments will resonate with members worried about what the future will bring, and that they might have a future in fossil fuel extraction if only the government would cease its attacks on the North Sea.

The approach is fundamentally flawed, even if we leave the disastrous impact on the planet of the continued extraction of fossil fuels aside and focus solely on jobs.

Why the North Sea is Closing Down Not Opening Up

Jobs in the North Sea have been declining at a rate of about 950 a month since 19996.  The projection that they will halve, from 115,000 to around 64,000, by the early 2030s does not accelerate that trend.  This is not so much falling off a cliff as sliding down a pretty steep slope with no chance of slowing it down, a slide that’s been going on for 27 years.  The only lifeline is to get off the slope onto the renewables that are, bizarrely, being blamed.  Oil and gas will keep smaller and smaller parts of the North Sea working regardless of how much investment might be put in.

• The job losses are coming because the North Sea basin is running dry7. Current oil production is 25% of what it was in 1999.
• 93% of what was in there has been ‘drained dry’ already.
• Government data shows that 4.1 billion tonnes of oil has been extracted in the UK since 1975, with the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) projecting a further 218 million tonnes out to 2050 from existing fields.
• These projections also suggest that new drilling could yield another 74 million tonnes, equivalent to 1.7% of the total that could be extracted from 1975 to 2050.

The bald comparison indicates that any idea that there is sufficient oil to meet current demand is absurd, as is any notion that additional investment will be sufficient to save the industry, jobs or communities.

For gas, the UK has produced 33,421 TWh since commercial operations began in 1967, with projected production out to 2050 of a further 2,060 TWh from existing fields and up to an extra 381 TWh (1.1% of the total) from new drilling.

If it was profitable to drill baby drill into what’s left, they would be doing it.  As it is they are not, because gas in the North Sea costs four times as much to ‘lift’ as it does in Qatar8.

So, the jobs crisis in the North Sea is not primarily a matter of industrial or climate policy but of the exhaustion of the field, which makes continued profitable extraction increasingly marginal.  The policy issues are a matter of how to manage the decline, with increased investment making only a small difference to this.  You could overturn the ban on new investment and open up Rosebank and Jackdaw and we will still lose thousands of jobs; pretending otherwise is misleading members.  Rosebank would need 1600 workers to set it up in the short term and employ just 450 while in operation9, which is no lifeline at all when 1,000 jobs a month are being lost.  This makes the need for a PLAN for transition even more important.

What Kind of Long Term Future

This is not to paint a picture of gloom for energy workers and the communities they live in, but to point out that

• a campaign for ‘business as usual’ will not serve those workers or communities,
• hope for the future does not lie in reverting to the status quo under the Tories, which allowed lots of new licences but generated just 36 days’ worth of additional supply as a result10.
• Rather, hope lies in the transition to renewables that is desperately needed and demanding that the government ensures that the huge number of jobs that such a transition requires is actually forthcoming11. This would include a large number in the manufacturing supply chain and decommissioning of redundant rigs, located where jobs are most needed. 

The only way to ‘Keep the North Sea Working’, at current levels of employment is to invest in renewable energy.  Jobs do not have to be exported if they are transferred, and that’s the plan we need, that all of us can fight for together.

The consequences if we don’t are:

1. We would become wholly dependent on imported energy, including hugely expensive US-made Liquefied Natural Gas12, a prospect that has LNG corporations licking their lips in anticipation, and we’d continue to be vulnerable to global shocks (like the one we are currently experiencing with the war on Iran).
2. UK energy workers jobs would fall off a cliff edge – with no lifeline to grab hold of.
3. Fuel bills, already prohibitively high (the ‘eating or heating’ dilemma) would rise further.

And of course, the catastrophic impact of climate change would continue to fall primarily on the most vulnerable communities.

What We Should Be Campaigning For

There are 145,000 jobs in the renewables sector currently and growth to over 180,000 by 2035, much more if full government support is forthcoming13.  What unions need to demand is that this not happen haphazardly but in a planned way, including:

• job guarantees,
• no compulsory redundancies,
• training and reskilling of workers from the shrinking fossil fuel sector as they transfer to the growing renewables sector,
• unionisation and full recognition rights for what has been allowed to become, via a piecemeal private sector-led approach, a non-union work force.

That’s why we say the transition has to be just.

In so far as that isn’t happening currently, that’s a failure of governance and it’s what the whole labour movement needs to demand must happen14. 

This argument is about:

1. the danger to jobs from delaying the transition and failing to develop a worker-led plan to accelerate it and on terms that ensure workers don’t lose out, and
2. the serious danger to the working class as a whole from such a failure, in terms of the collapse of the real value of incomes and direct danger to life and wellbeing – especially of the most vulnerable – from climate chaos.

The current Unite leadership’s argument that ‘with no credible plan for jobs, it’s time to take a new approach that protects jobs, communities and our energy security’ does not actually spell out any demands for ‘a credible plan for jobs’ but, on the contrary, reasserts the business as usual scenario that has lost so many over the last quarter of a century.  There is no ‘new approach’ here.  When the ban on new oil and gas exploration was first announced by Labour in opposition, Sharon Graham pledged that Unite would come up with such a plan to press on the aspirant government.  That’s what we need to put to the government at the negotiating table.  We are still waiting for it.

What is needed is a proactive, worked out transition plan that addresses

• skills retention and development,
• where work can and should be located both to meet labour needs and to prevent local/regional crashes,
• direct support for workers transitioning,
• the technological and climate credentials of technologies and production processes,
• a recognition that it’s not all about offshore workers, nor the technically skilled, but about supply chains, social geographies, offshore workers in catering, cleaning, healthcare and admin, onshore workers in induced jobs along the supply chain – and all these factors are integrated15.

This plan should be negotiated between the government and the unions/workers/communities.  We need a Just Transition Commission to work this through.  In so far as they don’t do that, it should be being demanded by the unions/workers/communities involved, which is the basis for the deepest unity and broadest support, and the cutting edge we need.  Proper union resources should be put into it, across unions in each sector, recognising that implicit within that demand is the seed of a transformation of the state and how it operates16.

Conclusion

No amount of fiery, rousing language is going to halt or reverse the exhaustion of the North Sea.  The steady, inexorable decline in oil and gas jobs can only be counteracted by the fastest possible expansion of the renewables sector to secure a long term future for workers, accompanied by  the guarantees needed to underpin the transition – no compulsory redundancies, guaranteed jobs, pay to compensate for any transition gaps, the training and reskilling needed etc.

We should never forget that the people and Parties currently posing as the saviours of offshore oil and gas workers are the same people who shattered the mining communities in the 1980s and finished them off with Heseltine’s ‘dash for gas’ in the early 90s.  Their promises to save jobs by ‘opening up’ the North Sea are simply a lie.  A lie repeated often and loudly, but a lie all the same.  Follow them down that path, trash the transition and profits will be made in the short term, and more jobs will be lost, bills will get even higher, and more climate damage done.

Paul Atkin, Tahir Latif, Ellen Robottom (personal capacities)

[For a far more detailed analysis of the situation, please do read this excellent article, Factcheck: Nine false or misleading myths about North Sea oil and gas, from Carbon Brief, 25 March 2026, which also contains a multitude of links to the sources of the information cited here.]

References

1. Note that the energy sector refers not only to electricity generation, and not only to fossil fuel production, but to a system which includes these things plus all the infrastructure which enables them, including transmission, distribution and storage, homes and other buildings, transport, foundation industry and manufacture. However, attention has been focused primarily on the contested future of the oil and gas extraction sectors, and it is this we will be mainly addressing here, without losing site of these other elements or the overall question of fairness and working-class interests
2. Manifestly all around us in the shape of the current heatwave, but see also National Emergency Briefing on climate & nature
3. See, for example, Decisive action to break influence of gas on electricity prices – GOV.UK, 21 April 2026.
4. Most significantly in terms of jobs promises, see Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage: a vision to establish a competitive market – GOV.UK
5. Keep the North Sea Working campaign launched by Unite for Scottish elections, 23 March 2026.
6. North Sea Future Plan for fair, managed and prosperous transition – GOV.UK, 26 November 2025.
7. Around 90% of UK North Sea oil and gas already drained dry, Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, 20 March 2026.
8. ‘North Sea gas becomes unaffordable in multiple ways, not only given the geological fact that it can be extracted up to four times cheaper in other parts of the world, but also the fact that renewable sources such as offshore wind can produce electricity at less than half the cost of running new gas plants’, Can North Sea oil and gas really power Britain’s future?, Renewable UK, 10 September 2025
9. What is the Rosebank oil field? – #StopRosebank, 26 February 2024.
10. Hundreds of North Sea licences granted by Tories ‘produce only 36 days of gas’, The Guardian, 28 March 2026.
11. See ‘Little time to spare’: UK must act now to double offshore wind workforce by 2030, Business Green, 15 June 2026, and Green economy supports more than a million UK workers, Friends of the Earth, 2 Jun 2026.
12. Trump has growing stranglehold over EU and UK energy supply, study shows, The Guardian, 21 January 2026.
13. REA’s REView 25 Report, Renewable Energy Association, 23 March 2026.
14. Framing the issue as a failure of Green policies only contributes to the Reform surge in regions affected by these job losses and job precarity. That poses a massive danger to jobs and union rights and risks putting paid to any sort of transition, just or otherwise, leaving huge numbers of workers genuinely on the scrap heap with little hope for the future.  And are we really at a point where the politicians some of our trade union leaders are most closely echoing are the ill-informed and anti-working-class comments of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump?  See Trump says Burnham is ‘extremely liberal’ and the UK is ‘dying’
15. There are broader considerations that need to be integrated into this. What are the barriers that need to be tackled, a recognition of how that’s affecting workers, and issues like the geographical location of jobs, the impacts on local induced economies, the technological barriers to getting power where it’s needed and balancing the grid, recognition that a lot of the jobs that are classed as “green” are neither new jobs (e.g. bin workers), nor really green (CCS etc), nor adequately paid.  But also touch on the areas that are not being highlighted, e.g. that transition and “green jobs” can’t be reliant on dubious technologies like carbon capture and fossil hydrogen; is gender justice and wage parity between skilled roles being considered; and the fact that climate change itself is a massive financial and material danger to working class people.
16. The truth about North Sea jobs and why workers need a plan – Blogpost from Uplift (News), 11 June 2024

 

Other relevant links

Parents slam Tory ‘Trumpian obsession’ with drilling as extreme heat ‘no longer distant threat’ | Morning Star 24 June 2026

The next PM urged to hold the course on climate action: Oil drilling won’t pay the bills | Morning Star 24 June 2026

Government launches multi-million grant scheme to re-train oil and gas workers | BusinessGreen News 24 June 2026

Why unions don’t want Ed Miliband as Andy Burnham’s chancellor | The Independent25 June 2026

Unison, NEU and TSSA back Ed Miliband for chancellor | Morning Star 26 June 2026

‘We must act fast’: Government urged to recognise UK gas reliance as a national security threat | BusinessGreen News 26 June 2026

Clean economy brings jobs and growth, says Miliband as £100bn invested in green energy | Green economy | The Guardian 23 June 2026

Heatwave: Scientists warn media coverage ignoring ‘fundamental’ links to climate change | BusinessGreen News 24 June 2026

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The post Drill baby drill or cry baby cry?  The energy sector and long-term job security first appeared on Greener Jobs Alliance.