What will happen to the thousands of people who work in Ireland’s peat-fired power stations, to the many tens of thousands who mine coal and drill for oil and gas across Europe, and to everybody else involved in distributing fossil fuels and the energy they produce to our communities if we uphold our promises to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in order to keep global warming below two degrees?

The optimistic view is that jobs lost in fossil-fuel industries will be gained in the green economy, as we build a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure and retrofit homes and offices to make them more energy efficient. But there are no guarantees that the people who lose their jobs will be the same people who get the new work.

As people realise that job losses in fossil-fuel industries will be a consequence of the move to a low-carbon economy, environmental campaigners and trade unionists have been forming an alliance, to highlight the need to combine cleaner energy with an enlightened employment policy.

Trade unions stress the need for a “just transition” to a carbon-free world and point out, as their slogan has it, that there are no jobs on a dead planet.

The International Trade Union Confederation, which says it represents 168 million workers in 155 countries, attended COP21, the UN climate-change conference in Paris at the end of last year. Here the Irish Congress of Trade Unions was one of the organisers of Climate Conservations, a series of public debates on climate change in 2015.

This month Liam Berney of Ictu was a speaker at a Friends of the Earth gathering in Dublin of groups from 25 countries that discussed, among other things, how to support communities in the move towards low-carbon economies.

“Decarbonisation is an economic, moral and political imperative for a stable world and climate,” he says. “We don’t have a choice, but it’s important that the environmental movement doesn’t dismiss working people and their jobs.”

Berney cites the 150,000 people employed in the coal industry in Poland and the 2,000 jobs that would be lost if the two Bord na Móna peat-fired stations closed.

Speaking in Dublin earlier this month, the Canadian climate-change activist Naomi Klein said that 100,000 people had already lost their jobs since the price of oil collapsed.

“When oil prices are down it’s a good time to introduce a carbon tax – to pay for the green transition. When people are losing their jobs in the extractive industries it’s also a good time for the environmental movement to build alliances with unions and labour movements,” she told a packed audience at the RDS.

Berney says there is too little debate about how we will move to a low-carbon economy. “Markets dictate policy to government, and workers have a right to know the Government’s plan to move to a different order. Workers and vulnerable people can’t be left behind.”

Diarmuid Torney, who teaches international relations at Dublin City University, says: “Much of the discussion on decarbonisation focuses on the business interests that either push for or, more often, hold back low-carbon transition.

“If Ireland and the EU are serious about decarbonising the economy, the Government needs to come up with a proactive set of interventions that will retrain and reskill workers from high-carbon sectors, so that they can move into emerging low-carbon sectors.”

Oisín Coghlan of Friends of the Earth is more vocal about the Government’s delay in closing down peat-fired electricity plants. “The Irish government was first told to stop burning peat for electricity in 1998, to meet their 2010 Kyoto targets. If they had put a plan to develop alternative employment in place and set 2005 as the deadline to close peat stations there would have been plenty of time to ensure a just transition. Instead they opened two new peat stations in 2005, and 10 years later we have a crisis.”

Activisits say that peat is the dirtiest fossil fuel. In Ireland it gives us 9 per cent of our power, with 27 per cent of climate pollution from electricity generation, yet we spend €120 million subsidising peat-burning power stations, according to Coghlan. “We simply have to stop industrial extraction of peat by 2020, and some of those subsidies should be diverted to ensuring decent employment for the affected workers.”

Others believe that a low-carbon economy with a high percentage of community energy projects will keep money in local communities and generate employment as a result.

Dirk Vansintjan is the founder of Ecopower, a Belgian renewable-energy co-operative that has 50,000 members. He also belongs to the European Federation for Renewable Energy Cooperatives (rescoop.eu), a European organisation of citizen initiatives that invest in supplying their own renewable energy.

“By making maximum use of local renewable-energy sources, and leaving the investments to local people, much money stays local that otherwise would be lost,” he says. “This translates into a resurgent local economy and increased employment.”

In its report The Energy Transition to Energy Democracy Rescoop cites Güssing, in Austria, as an example of a town whose economy was transformed when it cut carbon emissions by more than 90 per cent and became a thriving renewable-energy producer. It could be a model for Irish towns to follow.

Connecting: a smart, flexible way to go green
David Connolly, an engineer, has published a comprehensive guide to how Ireland could move to using only renewable energy without increasing the price of energy – and creating a huge number of jobs in the process.

Green Plan Ireland (dconnolly.net/greenplanireland), which first appeared in the 'International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management', in 2014, hinges on combining our transport, heat and electricity sectors into one energy system.

“This smart energy system allows the flexibility in heating and transport sectors to accommodate the intermittency of wind turbines,” says Connolly, of the department of development and planning at the University of Aalborg, in Denmark.

Wind power would be the primary form of energy production. “Due to recent improvements in wind-turbine technology and the excellent wind resource that exists in Ireland, a wind turbine in Ireland can produce electricity at a cheaper price than any other form of electricity-only production,” says Connolly, who was invited to speak at two events in Ireland this week, the International Energy Research Centre’s conference, in Co Carlow, and the Irish Wind Farmers’ Association conference, in Dublin.

Green Plan Ireland divides the transition to renewable energy into steps, among them expanding electricity production from onshore and offshore wind and from solar panels; converting the heat supply in Irish cities from gas boilers to district heating; converting individual boilers in rural areas from coal and oil to electric heat pumps; converting cars from petrol and diesel to electricity; and producing synthetic fuels from carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

All except the production of synthetic fuels will reduce the cost of energy, according to Connolly. “And instead of importing fuels for our energy” – Ireland imports more than 85 per cent of its fuel – “in a renewable-energy world Ireland will be producing its energy from local infrastructure. This means that the money will be spent locally.”

This would create an estimated 100,000 additional jobs, beginning in the construction sector and expanding as the plan develops.