Number One Mission

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?