Twice as Many People Work in Environment ‘Charities’ Than in Wind Power Generation: ONS Report Reveals Shocking Truth About UK’s ‘Green Jobs’
British Government Minister Michael Shanks, Under Secretary at Mad Miliband’s Net Zero Energy Department, recently claimed that abandoning Net Zero is an anti-growth ideology that will cost nearly a million jobs. Like most Net Zero predictions, the million jobs is a through-the-looking-glass fantasy. Back on Planet Reality, the latest ‘Green Jobs’ survey from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has suggested an annual rise of 8% in 2023 to 690,900. As usual, the survey reveals how few so-called green jobs are being created in the real economy. Desperation rules the day with the ONS job jugglers lumping into the ‘green jobs’ bucket waste disposal, environment charity agitprop, repairing home appliances and controlling forest fires.
The survey was released a few days ago but it does not appear to have been widely promoted by interested parties including the Labour Government. Perhaps this is not surprising since the Government is embarking on a planned de-industrialisation of the British hydrocarbon economy. Allied to out-of-control state spending for fantasy projects such as open borders and Net Zero, the hard-Left Government has made steady progress in its first year with the loss of 135,000 jobs. Higher employment taxes and more meddlesome labour restrictions promise further progress on this front in the coming years. It’s possible that piddling increases in the green jobs total – just 2.7% of total employment – were not deemed worthwhile highlighting since doing so might draw attention to actual job destruction in the real economy. Best just to feed the ‘million job’ make-believe out to the believe-anything mainstream media.
The latest ONS report lays bare the shockingly small number of genuinely green jobs that are currently present in the British economy. The chart above highlights the miniscule growth since figures began in 2015. The largest group titled “waste” is a sleight of hand – dustmen have now been re-badged as recycling and waste disposal operatives – while “repairs” are hardly a new economic activity and “environmental charities” is a euphemism for Green Blob billionaire-funded agitprop.
But the really shocking news is contained in a downloadable database that identifies the jobs total in numerous industries. According to the ONS, offshore wind employs only 16,400 people, while the onshore variety accounts for just 5,900. Despite all the supposed activity of late – and the vast wind subsidies loaded onto British consumers – it would not appear to be much of an improvement on the 10,600 employed in 2015. It is not as if Miliband and his governing crew have not been told that the negligible number of jobs being created by wind farms has not gone unnoticed. Gary Smith, the boss of the third largest trade union, GMB, has warned that plans to decarbonise the energy network by 2030 will cost up to one million jobs, decimate working communities and push up bills for the poorest. He did observe some employment created by offshore wind farms, noting: “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds.”
Great hope is being placed in some quarters on hydrogen as a future major energy source, but at the moment the real world provides just 2,100 employment opportunities, down from 3,900 in 2015 – a back to the future moment for this unrealistic fuel suggestion. Miliband has recently committed £22 billion of our money to carbon capture and storage and he must be hoping that this pointless activity will move its employment dial from its current level of 500. Given how many car factories have recently closed and the enormous number of general transport jobs created in the past, you might wish that “low carbon transport” would be providing more than 38,500 jobs. Carry on wishing is the message here. Not so with the Green Blob charities employing 45,200 virtuous middle class elitists, or the 19,400 public sector employees pay-rolled to destroy our economic lifestyle in “managerial activities of government bodies”.
Another coming technology, battery storage, employs just 6,200 people, which might seem a little high since only minute amounts of energy can realistically be stored – about three minutes worth if we are lucky when the breezes and the sunbeams pack up. Environmental consultancy (17,700) and environmental related education (2,500) – in other words agitprop – look better employment prospects going forward. Since this is mostly parasitical activity drawing resources away from the productive economy, expect more job losses in the wealth-creating sectors – but hey, who cares, we are saving the planet.
With so-called green charities employing more people than the low carbon transport sector, a situation that has not changed for eight years, it’s obvious that the prospects for green jobs is dire in the UK. Jobs making electric cars, windmills and solar panels are mostly occurring elsewhere. The UK consumer gains little economic benefit, while its ideology-blinded Government throws billions at what are mostly second-rate, unwanted and unreliable technologies. The ONS hides this dire situation by claiming 158,400 jobs in waste disposal, 145,800 in energy efficient products (new windows and lightbulbs) and 11,900 in forest management. In fact, the ONS report shows only too clearly that there are barely 150,000 new jobs in the UK green economy. Meanwhile, the high energy prices and money wasted over Net Zero is likely to lead to job losses on an unimaginable and tragic scale.
Chris Morrison is the Environment Editor of the Daily Sceptic. Follow him on X.
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Shouldn’t ‘work’ [in the strapline] be in inverted commas? https://www.facebook.com/reel/1422867688921462
And how many real jobs have been lost in recent years in the steel, aluminium, refinery, and chemicals industries?
And how many jobs have been outsourced? Private sector consultancies are involved in most Government engineering/infrastructure projects. I know that the larger consultancies have teams based in other countries (where staff are paid a much lower salary) for IT support/HR/accounts/CAD. If nothing else, this amounts to a tremendous skills drain for the future and erosion of entry level jobs. Along with UK based roles being filled by VISA applicants due to genuine skills shortages. Which means when the Government announces schemes which include job creation, I’m sceptical as to how much they will benefit British workers.
Nearly all of them.
They have jobs in, not work in… not the same thing. Work is a labour input which produces an output valued and desired by consumers who will pay for it.
Jobs in charities are welfare for unemployable grifters and losers.
We have far too many people in “jobs” which create no wealth, particularly employed by the State including in those activities whose cost exceeds value of output, eg NHS. They are paid with borrowed and printed money – £2.8 trillion and rising.
This transfers wealth from a diminishing number of producers to non-producers.
What shall we do when everyone has “jobs” that produce no wealth.
Workers in wind generation = grifters.
It is not a ‘green’ job if it would be done regardless of the Net Zero nonsense although when it comes to emptying the bins Birmingham may be an exception. Making more energy efficient products hardly counts either since if the products are good then people will buy them. LED lights are efficient and I love the colour changing ones that would not exist without that technology, and they are a massive improvement on the dreadful compact fluourescents although I still use a few of these as I am too mean to throw them away while they still work. Hydrogen is slowly dying around the world as the sheer cost hits home and even here a proposed plant with BP has been abandoned.
while its ideology-blinded Government throws billions at what are mostly second-rate, unwanted and unreliable technologies
I think Chris is being very kind with the word ‘mostly’ and I am hard pushed to think of anything that is an improvement or beneficial. Take LED lights, their flexibility and lower energy costs not to mention for example in stage lighting, much lower heat output, would have seen them evolve regardless.
Notice when you hear Net Zero Supporters on TV news, they always talk about all the jobs that will come from having renewables. But the purpose of energy production is to produce ENERGY, not jobs. Economic success comes from affordable reliable energy. It does not come from expensive unreliable energy. ———In their missing the point claims about all of these “jobs” they never ever mention all the jobs they are destroying in the fossil fuel industry. Apparently some jobs are morally superior to others.
Exactly – luckily the renewable sector doesn’t actually employ many at all, as they want to make some money where they can, mainly from harvesting subsidies, and occasionally generating and selling some power when it’s needed. Once your wind turbine is built and planted, it’s mostly left alone, same for solar – occasionally bung a bucket of water over the panels, but apart from that, not much needed
Any thoughts of Carbon Capture and Storage are just a costly and energy expensive way to throw away minor amounts of useful plant food: for £22Billion !!
It’s a great way of transferring £22billion from the government coffers to the private sector…
There’s only one job Red Ed is thinking about.
The one he’ll get in the Global Eco-Socialism Quangocracy, as a reward for destroying the British economy, when he’s kicked out of Parliament.