Number One Mission
Rebekah Diski
The government’s support for Heathrow expansion is in keeping with the robotic incantations of economic growth that beam out of every press interview and policy announcement from Labour HQ. Forget the climate emergency. As the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said when asked to choose between net zero and growth at Davos last week: ‘Well, if it’s the number one mission, it’s obviously the most important thing.’
The economic benefits of Heathrow expansion have been championed by every government since 2009. A majority of Labour MPs voted for a third runway in opposition under Jeremy Corbyn in 2018. Unite the union campaigned for expansion, sold on the promise of tens of thousands of new jobs. Most current cabinet members who previously voted against expansion have dropped their objections. Stansted and City airports have already been given permission to grow, and plans to expand Gatwick and Luton are waiting for ministerial sign-off.
The impact of airport expansion on jobs and growth is, in fact, questionable. Analysis by the New Economics Foundation has shown that the significant increase in air passenger numbers since 2003 has been driven predominantly by British tourists travelling – and spending their money – abroad. Meanwhile, business travel has stagnated and domestic tourism has dwindled. There has been no net growth in air transport jobs, and real wages in the sector have fallen – trends that will undoubtedly continue as employers strive to cut labour costs through further automation, outsourcing and wage suppression. Heathrow expansion may also exacerbate regional inequality by sucking existing passengers and jobs from other parts of the country, with smaller airports likely to lose air traffic to London and the South-East.
Even if a third runway passes the many bureaucratic and legislative hurdles to approval, construction won’t start for several years. But Labour presumably has an eye on Heathrow’s symbolic value, and hopes to head off attacks from the right and allay fears in the City. Amid efforts by the opposition to stir up a backlash against climate policy, and the government’s lacklustre reception in the corporate and finance worlds, the mantra that ‘growth trumps net zero’ has eclipsed the line that they go together.
Reeves has made some feeble attempts to suggest that increased airport capacity – leading to hundreds of thousands of additional flights every year – will reduce the number of planes circling London waiting to land. She has gestured towards innovations in ‘sustainable aviation’: electric and hydrogen planes that are years away from commercial viability, or biofuels that require extraordinary tracts of land which could otherwise be used for food and forests. Airport expansion is palpably at odds with the government’s climate commitments. Its own advisers, the Climate Change Committee, have repeatedly said there should be no net expansion. In only five years, a third runway at Heathrow would cancel out emissions savings from the government’s vaunted (and already off-track) plans to decarbonise the electricity grid.
Unwilling to accept the hard truth that we need to reduce demand for products and services that use gargantuan amounts of energy, or to countenance the impact that would have on capital, the government rallies behind the preferred industry solutions across the economy: biofuel planes, electric vehicles, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen-powered industrial processes. As Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates in More and More and More, previous energy transitions have in reality been energy additions, layering coal on top of wood, oil and gas on top of coal, and now renewable sources on top of oil and gas. A genuine transition away from fossil fuels requires curbing overall energy demand.
Any honest observer can see that increasing air traffic will raise greenhouse gas emissions. To make room for these rising emissions, other carbon-intensive industries, disproportionately concentrated in poorer regions, will have to decarbonise more quickly if the government is to have any chance of meeting its own statutory climate targets.
But perhaps this last point is instructive: after a brief rhetorical dalliance with net zero, enthusiasm among political and financial elites for climate action has conspicuously cooled. In 2020, under popular pressure from climate movements and diminishing returns from Covid-related slumps in oil and gas prices, governments, institutions and even fossil fuel producers raced to announce ‘ambitious’ net-zero targets. But this high-water mark of climate commitment quickly receded as fossil fuel profits rebounded after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, alongside the global trend towards economic nationalism and its twin, ‘energy security’, now turbocharged by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Centrist and centre-left parties in Europe have been thrown into crisis by a virulent melding of anti-climate and ethnonationalist politics, which have effectively mobilised against government plans to reduce agricultural emissions, introduce heat pumps and expand low emissions zones. As the threat of serious climate regulation faded into the distance, Shell and BP dropped their (already dubious) pledges; the Net Zero Banking Alliance has seen an exodus of banks for whom the risk calculus has changed.
It’s increasingly clear that the notion of green growth is an exercise in magical thinking. The US Inflation Reduction Act, hailed as a significant piece of climate legislation, provided billions in federal support for green infrastructure but also included enormous subsidies for oil and gas companies. The US is the world’s largest oil producer. As the political terrain has shifted, the ‘return of industrial policy’ is revealed to be less concerned with an energy transition than with competition for growth between nations in a global economic context constrained by stagnation and ecological limits.
Reeves has self-consciously emulated Bidenomics, hoping to ‘crowd in’ private investment in the British economy with tax breaks and subsidies. The results of this approach in the US, even with the massive injection of public money, have so far been muted in terms of jobs and growth, and it roundly failed in its political goal of constructing a new class compromise to shore up the Democratic project and defeat Trump. The UK, lacking the financial and geopolitical might of the US, faces even less convincing prospects for growth, and Labour’s project is likely to founder as Reform, and perhaps a revivified Conservative Party, capitalise on its empty promises.
Labour’s obsession with growth has led it to depend on asset managers, deregulation and a vain hope that AI, itself an exorbitant energy drain, will mean ‘more jobs and investment in the UK, more money in people’s pockets, and transformed public services’. These are all desperately needed, but the idea that ‘mainlin[ing] AI into the veins of this enterprising nation’ will fix the long-term and multifarious ills of the British economy is manifestly delusional. At the same time, the government shies away from even modest redistributive policies such as a wealth tax and warns that a new round of austerity is just around the corner.
When, ninety years ago, Simon Kuznets developed the measure of national income that underpins the concept of economic growth, he suggested differentiating between goods and services that were beneficial to society and those that were not: the production of weapons should be excluded from the stocktake, while valuable but unpaid labour such as caring and housework should be included. Such qualifications were dismissed, and growth as we know it prizes the profitable production of arms and fossil fuels just as it is blind to the care of an elderly relative or a community garden.
A government serious about societal wellbeing would reappraise what might need to grow (health and social care, education) and what might not (airports, arms). Growth can no longer guarantee the dividends it once paid (to many, in the global north) in the transformed economic context of the 21st century. Even if it could, it increasingly undermines the ecological basis on which human and non-human nature rely. Maybe that should be the most important thing?
Comments
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30 January 2025
at
12:50pm
Puck
says:
I wonder what lies beneath the almost pathological refusal of parts of the British establishment to acknowledge the implications of the climate crisis. They're not stupid, they know it's real, so why the profound reluctance to come to terms with it? Part of it may simply be blind panic - since the status quo underpins their very pleasant and privileged lives, the status quo must be protected at all costs. Another aspect, I suspect, is an unspoken and essentially racist belief that "we" will be protected from the worst of it even if poorer countries are not. These attitudes will not survive contact with reality for very long, but long enough to make things much worse.
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6 February 2025
at
3:53pm
M Smith
says:
@
Puck
I think first, fear of voter backlash, which means that no politician is willing confront consumers and deny them desirable products (beef, foreign holidays, cars). Remember the short-lived and now suspended fuel duty escalator? Second, a terrible prisoners' dilemma. We could have done something if all polluting nations acted together. Perhaps there was an opportunity in the 80/90s. But if many nations (or people) don't act, then those that do won't achieve the desirable result and will only cost their own populations. Third, I'm sure there are actors that know the harm they are doing but just don't care because they personally will be alright and are enriched by the current fossil fuel-driven economy. Exxon was a leader in climate change science but successfully sabotaged the USA efforts to sign up to the Kyoto protocol.
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30 January 2025
at
12:50pm
Puck
says:
I wonder what lies beneath the almost pathological refusal of parts of the British establishment to acknowledge the implications of the climate crisis. They're not stupid, they know it's real, so why the profound reluctance to come to terms with it? Part of it may simply be blind panic - since the status quo underpins their very pleasant and privileged lives, the status quo must be protected at all costs. Another aspect, I suspect, is an unspoken and essentially racist belief that "we" will be protected from the worst of it even if poorer countries are not. These attitudes will not survive contact with reality for very long, but long enough to make things much worse.
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31 January 2025
at
2:11pm
XopherO
says:
There are of course the cynics who say the UK's emissions are small, not significant even on a per capita basis. It will never be built as the UK cannot do grand projects efficiently or effectively - I don't need to itemise them do I. Unless cancelled it will go over budget by at least 50% and the other projects, more useful, will be cancelled or mothballed to help pay, and it will take around 20years from now to complete with the best will in the world.. And the real problem is productivity, and a load of earth-moving and demolition kit to the south west of London will do nothing for that.
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1 February 2025
at
11:10am
Mick Mooney
says:
Exampled most by the NHS, the UK governmental economy is not in general a digitally mature economy, and billions have been spent and abandoned for nothing to show. Trying to superimpose AI onto that mix is utterly delusional.
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1 February 2025
at
3:41pm
XopherO
says:
Not forgetting all the Little Jack Horners and Michelle Mones sticking their useless fingers in the pie, bloodsucking, which is made easier by poorly written contracts, so contractors can pile on the costs the moment they are asked to change or add something - and they all know that ruse. For some reason in France big projects come in on time, even early for bonuses. And they are quick to prosecute, though if you are big and rich enough you can ride the carousel of courts and stay out of prison for years. Sarkosy and Fillon are still not behind bars nearly ten years on.
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1 February 2025
at
7:19pm
Victoria Hanlon
says:
Excellent piece.
Read moreI think we need to do two things.
First, stop waiting for the bad guys to see sense and change their ways. They've shown us who they are, we should believe them.
We should take matters into our own hands. If we, rightly in my opinion, believe that there is a different way to conduct humanity's economic activities, that operates within planetary boundaries, whilst being significantly more profitable than current extractive capital processes, then we should get off our butts and put our money where our mouths are.
We should form new innovative forms of corporate organisation and get to work out-competing the lumbering dinosaurs that are strip mining our planet.
According to John Lanchester here ( https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser ) there's two thirds of a Quadrillion dollars sloshing around the Unreal Economy every year unproductively speculating on the Real Economy. That's a lot of cash going to waste that might be usefully crowded in to a Just Transition.
And second we need to admit that this is a David and Goliath battle and that we are not going to win in a head to head conflict. Those with all the money, power, and influence will crush us like bugs if our plans involve stripping them of that money, power, and influence.
We need to fight smarter and find ways to co-opt some of those that resist doing the right thing and offer them the opportunity to profit immensely from being the ones who switch sides. There's no sense taking a moral stand against those that have profited from plundering the Earth if it results in our extinction.