Ed Miliband was quick to announce that there would be no new oil or gas licences in the North Sea, while the government also announced it would not be defending the Cumbrian coalmine. These quick decisions would not have been made had the Tories returned to power, demonstrating that there are at least some differences between Starmer’s ‘New Labour’ and Sunak’s even more right-wing Tory Party, at least concerning the climate.

The Importance of Hope

These differences are important not just because they are the right things to do but also because they give grounds for hope and optimism among those active in the climate and environmental movements. The current climate doom-scroll – of global climate records falling on a monthly, and even weekly basis; the increasing number and severity of extreme weather events; and mounting evidence of many Earthling species nearing extinction – is appalling and extremely worrying.

Such depressing evidence, if there are no obvious signs of even small victories, can lead to extreme pessimism among activists, especially those who have been most active and risked, and even lost, their liberty. Pessimism, coupled with burnout, can be a powerful demotivator just when we need to be stepping things up. In fact, justifiable hope is crucially important to any movement wanting to bring about significant transformational changes.

The idea that hope is revolutionary has been recognised by many committed revolutionaries in the past. According to Gramsci, in his March 1924 article “Against Pessimism,” possibly the greatest enemy faced by revolutionaries is despair and pessimism: “the thick, dark cloud of pessimism… oppressing the most able and responsible militants… may in fact be the greatest danger we face at present.” Not long afterwards, he began promoting his “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” approach.¹

However, Gramsci wasn’t alone in stressing the dangers of pessimism and the need for realistic hope and optimism. Lenin argued that revolutionaries “should dream!” provided “there is some connection between dreams and life,” while Che Guevara saw “revolutionary hope [as being] necessary for revolutionary politics and practice.” More recently, Ernest Mandel (a leading intellectual of the Trotskyist Fourth International) believed: “hopes and dreams are… categories of revolutionary Realpolitik.” Finally, as Marge Piercy stated in her classic feminist/utopian novel “Woman on the Edge of Time”: “Utopia is born of the hunger for something better, but it relies on hope as the engine for imagining such a future.”²

Reasons to Be Hopeful About GB Energy

So, are there any grounds for ecosocialists and climate activists to be hopeful about the government’s GB Energy project? According to the government’s own spin, their aim is to make Britain “a clean energy superpower” and the first step to achieving that is to set up Great British Energy. The money for this is to come from “a windfall tax on oil and gas giants,” with the stated aim of “tackling climate change and saving families money,” as well as creating 650,000 jobs by 2030. Additionally, the government is also still promising to “invest in home insulation upgrades to help families save money on their bills, and improve access to nature, promote biodiversity, and protect our landscapes and wildlife.” What’s not to like?³

Well, for a start, the scope of GB Energy is restricted by setting a ceiling of £8.5bn for the amount of public money to be invested, leaving the rest to private investment. Ideally, we would want clean energy projects to be taken out of the hands of private companies, and the whole of the energy industry to be socialised. However, that is no reason to oppose the plans for GB Energy – the climate and ecological crises are relentlessly worsening week by week, so we need to take all we can get while continuing to push for more. Although it is clear that Ed Miliband understands the seriousness of the climate and ecological crises, at present he seems prepared to accept minimal gains. However, the important point is that he is taking steps in the right direction after several years in which the last Tory government shifted even further to the right, embracing climate scepticism and thus reversing progress on climate issues.

And There’s More!

It’s encouraging to see that the government intends to decarbonise the National Grid by 2030. This is on top of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero announcing that, in 2023, renewables produced 46.4% of the UK’s electricity. Commenting on the renewable power generation records confirmed by the government’s Digest of UK Energy Statistics, RenewableUK’s chief executive Dan McGrail said:

“As these record-breaking figures show, renewables are now the backbone of the UK’s electricity system, keeping the country powered up as we transition away from expensive fossil fuels towards cheap electricity and our net zero goals.”⁴

While wind farms, solar farms, and tidal lagoons are all crucial in this, it’s becoming increasingly clear that solar energy will be an important way forward and is likely to become the bedrock of the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy over the next 10 years. Solar farms are becoming increasingly efficient, and modern solar panels are light and easily movable. They provide a way of achieving the quick transition to alternative energy sources which we now desperately need – something that the Chinese government has clearly realised. An article in the 20 June edition of The Economist argued that:

“The exponential growth of solar power will change the world [as] installed solar capacity roughly doubles every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade.”⁵

Thus, approval of plans for new solar farms in the UK – for instance, those planned for Oxfordshire and Yorkshire – should not be unnecessarily dragged out. There are even plans for solar farms in West Cumbria! Concerns about the loss of agricultural land tend to ignore that there also needs to be a massive transition from meat and dairy to diets that are more plant-based. That food transition would free up land for solar farms and allow land to be restored to nature, thus helping to tackle the biodiversity crisis.

Some Positive Pointers

In the first half of this year, wind and solar energy overtook fossil fuels in the EU’s rapid transition towards renewables. Reliance on fossil fuel generation reached an all-time low in the first half of this year, even though power prices returned to pre-crisis levels. The momentum behind the clean energy transition is spreading: almost half of Member States generated more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels in the first six months of 2024. In fact, fossil fuel use dropped by 17%, even as demand rebounded, and now accounts for only 27% of electricity generation. As a result, emissions in the first half of the year are now 31% lower than in the first half of 2022 – “an unprecedented decline over such a short period.”

According to Chris Rosslowe, Senior Energy and Climate Analyst at the clean-energy think tank Ember:

“The first half of the year shows fossil generation’s narrowing role in the power sector, and gains for renewables that are beyond temporary variations in conditions. We are witnessing a historic shift, and it is happening rapidly. If Member States can keep up momentum on wind and solar deployment, then freedom from fossil power reliance will truly start to come into view.”⁶

Conclusion

Overall, extending critical support to GB Energy and Labour’s other climate plans – and continuing to press hard for better – is surely the sensible way forward for climate activists and ecosocialists. As Alan Thornett, one of the UK’s leading ecosocialists and author of “Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism,” has commented:

“Whilst the current plans of GB Energy are not what we would choose, they nonetheless include some important steps in the right direction. Despite the shortcomings of those plans, which clearly need to be strengthened, it is essential at this stage of the climate and ecological crises to move to green energy systems as quickly as possible. We should thus demand the reinstatement of the £28bn a year of public borrowing that Starmer promised, and that this be used to capitalise GB Energy and fund the transition to renewable energy production that has rightly been pledged by 2030.”

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Footnotes

1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1924/03/pessimism.htm ↩︎
2. Vladimir I. Lenin, ‘What is to be done?’, in Lenin: Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp.225-6;Allan Todd, Che Guevara: The Romantic Revolutionary, p.222; Ernest Mandel, ‘We Must Dream’, in de Jong, A., ed., Ernest Mandel: Hope and Marxism, p.124;Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, p.xi. Emphasis added. ↩︎
3. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/what-is-great-british-energy-and-what-does-it-mean-for-me ↩︎
4. https://renewablesnow.com/news/uk-increases-renewables-share-of-generation-to-464-in-2023-864816/ ↩︎
5. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world ↩︎
6. https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/wind-and-solar-overtake-eu-fossil-fuels-in-the-first-half-of-2024/ ↩︎

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