Description
The UK has produced one of the most fully realised energy transitions to date, with coal going from 70% to 2% of its electricity supply since 1990. The ability to produce this transition, with the knock-on effect of the particularly deep cuts in CO2 emissions in relative terms, was produced by the destruction of the incumbent power of the coal industry during the 1980s. While this was clearly a class project to destroy the power of the coal mining union, the NUM, it nevertheless also destroyed the power of any industrial actors defending coal. Later decisions to undermine coal – in the privatisation of electricity, in the design of the Climate Change Act, in the carbon price floor in the Emissions Trading Scheme, or in the final coal phaseout decision, were all made possible by this destruction of incumbent power. This raises the difficult dilemma for those pursuing just transitions – how might it be possible to challenge and undermine corporate power defending fossil fuels without destroying the livelihoods of workers and the communities that depend on them, when one of the only full transitions we know about was produced by the exact opposite.
