The Green Betrayal

As in the United States under Barack Obama then Joe Biden, a raft of climate policies and funding were put in place in the UK after the 2015 Paris Accords, culminating in the adoption of a broad economic framework meant to spur investment that would deliver large numbers of green jobs. Across the rich world, the rhetoric was the same — the drive toward net-zero would restore national economies, arrest climate change, and generate economic growth.

As I set out in my new book, Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition, the promise wasn’t just for any kind of job. Climate policies promised a revival of manufacturing and industry.

One of the main causes of contemporary economic stagnation is the exhaustion of the room for growth in industry and manufacturing. Since the start of the neoliberal period in the late 1970s, global industrial competition and ever-advancing automation have combined to create an excess of global industrial capacity. This excess capacity is one of the driving forces behind the collapse of rates of economic growth in advanced capitalist states. This dynamic of what some have called secular stagnation is what has hollowed out industry in the areas of the UK now voting for Farage and Reform.

Advocates of climate policies promised that their agenda would help revive manufacturing along with economic growth. The green transition was effectively a massive state-led project of building and making everything from new machines to cars, power stations, and vast tracks of infrastructure. The hope was that this return to making “green” things would restore rust belt towns and, as heavy industry tends to have a strong multiplier effect creating scores of additional jobs for each industry role, would lead to an employment boom.

There were also politically expedient reasons for backing a green industrial policy. As New Left Review editor Tom Hazeldine argued in 2017, a map of regions that voted for Brexit overlapped with areas suffering from deindustrialization and poverty. If Labour or the Conservatives were to win these voters over, they had to do something about growing insecurity.

A decade in, this dream of a new green industrial revolution has yet to materialize. The failure of this project is what has allowed Farage and Donald Trump to call out the environmental movement’s broken promises.

Emblematic of this is the fate of steelworkers in Britain. Over the course of the last year, British steelworks have either closed their coal-fired furnaces or threatened to. All have claimed daily operating losses due to international competition, and all have demanded government support in the shape of vast piles of money to transition to greener electric arc furnaces. In late 2024, the owners of the Welsh Port Talbot steel mill, Tata Steel, demanded money to keep their mill open and underwrite the transition to electric furnaces.

The government obliged, putting up a full third of the transition cost. The very next day, Tata Steel announced over half the remaining mill workers would lose their jobs. Workers in the British steel industry can see the writing on the wall, which is why union organizers are reporting that workers are giving up their union membership and instead joining Reform.

Electric arc furnaces, like many green industries, require fewer workers in the production process. Worse, new industrial plants are often highly automated, reducing the need for workers even further. Green industry in general has a smaller employment footprint than the carbon-intensive sectors they replace.

Even at this early stage of green industrial build-out, competition is driving all but the most efficient and cheapest (i.e., lowest-paying) plants and mills out of business, not only in Europe and the United States but also in China. Green industry is no escape from the overcapacity dynamic.

There is also little evidence that climate policies are reviving industry. If anything, they are intensifying existing tendencies toward excess capacity and the further loss of manufacturing’s share of national employment.

A New Service Economy

In the United States, there are close to 3.5 million clean energy jobs, and the sector is growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy, despite coming under sustained political attack. The sector’s growth has been so fast that around 90 percent of employers say there are not enough workers to fill all the available positions.

Both the UK and the United States have booming climate sectors with strong economic and job growth, but the kind of skepticism of the green transition voiced by figures like Farage is not unjustified. While the climate transition is producing jobs, many of these are service sector jobs installing green tech.

Installation work is the labor of setting up and assembling systems and equipment on-site or in a specific location. Within the transition economy, the labor of assemblage has displaced manufacturing as the key sector of job and business growth. A perfect example of this is the solar industry.

Employment in the European and US solar industry is booming. There are currently over 600,000 solar installers across Europe, and that figure is set to climb to one million by the end of 2025. In the United States, installation work is rapidly expanding. These jobs have grown by 250 percent over the past decade. And while there are some large employers, the bulk of the industry is based on agency work.

Solar installation in the US is like any other kind of agency work. Payments are often late, and workers frequently face days without enough money for bills or food, plus rising debt and overdraft fees. Installation work involves moving from site to site, producing a large itinerant workforce shorn of the protection of a local community. Workers report sharing hotel rooms or sleeping in tents and cars near remote sites, and many have horror stories of travelling to remote sites just to be told there is no work for them. Sick pay, days off, holiday pay — all of these are either nonexistent or poorly enforced among many installation agency companies.

From glaziers and insulation installers to heat pump technicians, the green economy is an installation economy. Despite being labor-intensive work, it is better understood as part of the broad service sector rather than the manufacturing sector. And as such, it is unlikely to deliver on the promise of a manufacturing-led revival, any more than it can restore those towns and cities devastated by the loss of industry.

It is this context that has allowed Farage to trade on the pervasive sense of decline across the UK by pointing out the broken promises of the climate transition.

The green transition, sold as a project of restoring growth and reversing decline, has turned out to be an intensification of some of the worst tendencies of the neoliberal period. Yet the right-wing backlash against the transition economy will only deepen the crisis because undoing climate policies puts one of the few growing sectors of the economy at risk, not to mention undermining attempts to address the actual harms caused by climate change.

There is no going back to the glory days when fossil fuels powered a growing global economy marked by an abundance of industrial jobs. We are on a completely different political terrain. If we are to find a way through the transition, we have to organize not against the transition but for a different one entirely.