THE CARBON WAR

Guilt and disruption 239
change under a government led by Jeremy Corbyn. Britain needs an energy
policy for the Big 60 million, not the Big 6, he says.
As for subsidies, why are we putting more subsidies into fossil fuels
than renewables? We should be looking at feed-in tariffs as an investment in
green jobs.
After he has finished, the rows of young listeners clap enthusiastically.
I ask a question. If you are elected, you suggest you would have five
years to confer within the Labour party to make sure all opinions on energy
are heard. But is it not more likely that the current government’s catastrophic
miscalculations on energy will come home to roost within those five years?
That you’ll be having to add specifics to your energy agenda under fire, in a
national emergency? In particular, the government is fixated on fracking, yet
the US shale boom they seek to import looks as though it is about to go bust.
They are in favour of nuclear at all costs, yet the French nuclear industry they
seek to import is imploding before our eyes. They are actively suppressing
renewables at the same time much of the rest of the world is enthusiastically
deploying them. There is every chance of an energy crisis on their watch. And
yours, were you to be elected leader of the opposition.
Let me be clear, says Jeremy Corbyn. I am against fracking and shale
gas exploitation. The water use and pollution alone would make it impossible.
Nuclear is enormously expensive and has obvious security issues. I’m in favour
of a German-style phase out. The solution lies in job-rich green infrastructure
building.
How he would fund all this climate-friendly refiring of job creation has
already been the subject of discussion in the national media. Richard Murphy, a
colleague of mine on the Green New Deal group of economic and environmental
thinkers, has been influential in the Corbyn camp. Richard advocates what he
calls “people’s quantitative easing”, a strategy Jeremy Corbyn has enthusiastically
embraced. In the traditional form of quantitative easing, used by governments
in the financial crisis, central banks bought liquid assets such as bonds as a
way to inject money into the economy in an effort to rev it back up. Much of
that ended up in the pockets of the bankers who created the financial crisis
in the first place, adding inflated value of the mansions they elect to live in,
pumping up house prices to increasingly unaffordable levels for the rest of the
population. In people’s quantitative easing, debt would be deliberately created
and issued by agencies with a specific interest in new green investment in the
economy, such as local authorities and health trusts. The Bank of England would
be mandated by the government to buy those debts. The decisions on how the