At the end of September, the UK’s last remaining coal power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, will be retired. The closure of the plant should—and will—be celebrated by environmentalists, as the move away from coal has made Britain’s electricity much cleaner over the past decade. It is on this basis that the UK claims climate leadership.

In the 1950s, coal provided the overwhelming majority of British energy, and as recently as 2012 it still generated 40%. By 2022, it was less than 2%. In a month’s time, it will be zero.

Phasing out coal was a brutal and profound process. Organized labor was decimated, entire regions were forced into decline, and communities were left with sustained economic, social and health problems. The towering ghosts of power stations like Ratcliffe-on-Soar will haunt Britain’s ongoing effort to phase out North Sea oil and gas and replace it with clean energy.

And we are witnessing this haunting in real-time. After the Labor government announced its plans to end new licenses for oil and gas in British waters—necessary to meet the Paris Agreement—workers and trade unions feared history would repeat itself in terms of job losses and blighted communities.

The general secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham, noted that without a more thorough plan, the policy risked creating “the coal miners of our generation.” A recent motion at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) gathering in Brighton called for no ban on oil and gas licensing before a fully funded jobs guarantee is agreed. The motion narrowly passed.

Workers and unions are demanding a “just transition” from polluting industries into the clean industries of the future. But to achieve this, the UK government must learn from what happened with coal.

Many places still rely on oil and gas jobs

Although oil and gas are not as embedded throughout British life as coal once was, there are many settlements and larger areas still dependent on energy jobs. Grangemouth in central Scotland is a good example. In November 2023, the owner, Petroineos, announced plans to close the town’s oil refinery in 2025, bringing a century of production to an end at the cost of 400 jobs.

Even if the UK government did issue new oil and gas licenses, the North Sea faces structural decline. Production peaked around the turn of the century. Since 2014, as many as 200,000 jobs have been lost either offshore or along the supply chain onshore.

From gas to wind?

Planning for the end of fossil fuels is therefore an urgent endeavor. The dominant strategy for protecting skilled jobs is to transition workers into the industries set to replace North Sea production: wind energy and other low-carbon technologies.

However, though Britain has developed a large wind power sector, it remains a major importer of turbines. Domestic manufacturing makes only a small contribution, and developers are not required to use British-made turbines or other parts, despite the jobs this would create.

This has left Grangemouth workers discontented. When one of us (Ewan Gibbs) and Riyoko Shibe interviewed young refinery workers at Grangemouth earlier this year, many commented that there were relatively few jobs in renewables. When jobs were visible on LinkedIn and comparable job sites, one told us that “you’ll see there’s a big difference in terms and conditions.”

In its current form, the UK wind industry will find it hard to provide the types of secure ongoing employment that oil and gas historically has. Most jobs are in the construction and maintenance of wind farms, with the latter threatened by automation. Without public investment and a targeted industrial policy, Britain will remain a net importer of wind technology, and the phasing out of North Sea oil and gas will prove costly in job terms.

More investment needed

Britain’s lack of state intervention is not the norm. After all, more than half of British wind farms are state-owned, though less than 1% are owned by the UK government. Swedish, Norwegian, French, Irish and German state-owned entities are major players, but the biggest is Denmark’s Ørsted, a former oil company turned renewables giant which is mostly state-owned. In the UK’s most recent offshore wind auction, 70% of the projects were awarded to Ørsted.

The newly launched Great British Energy could give the state a foothold in the North Sea once more. This publicly owned company plans to focus on domestic manufacturing and will invest in ports and other infrastructures to “unlock strategic bottlenecks.”

But if such projects are to be meaningfully incorporated into a just transition, they will need to offer continuity and security to oil and gas workers. As one Grangemouth worker put it, referring to his colleagues facing the choice of either remaining unemployed locally or relocating to use their skills:

“They’re moving to the Middle East, they’re moving to the north-east of Scotland. They’re moving offshore, they’re moving to the Shetlands, and therefore it’s not just a transition, in my view, if we’re moving to these jobs.”

Another worker highlighted the risks that Grangemouth could join the coalfields in becoming “stranded” communities:

“We’ve got a community that’s been built round the site, we’ve got skills and we’ve got people that work there, we’ve got the infrastructure there—why should we not have these jobs when the time comes to move to these industries? Why can we not have it at Grangemouth?”

Britain’s push to phase out oil and gas is urgent and necessary, but it cannot follow the same trajectory as Britain’s exit from coal—lessons must be learned. The opportunities presented by the transition away from fossil fuels will only be fully realized if workers are at its center.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Before beginning its war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, Russia had already conducted an aerial bombardment of Georgia in 2008 and invaded Crimea as well as the Donbas region in 2014. This has left politicians and researchers puzzling over the question: Would it have been possible to prevent the current war in Ukraine if countries had implemented more decisive and intensive sanction policies back then?

In a new study, Gerald Schneider, a professor of international politics at the University of Konstanz, and Thies Niemeier, a doctoral researcher at the Konstanz Graduate School of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (GSBS), project how effective tougher sanctions could have been. The work is published in the journal Research & Politics.

Their assessment is based on a statistical model that compares the political and economic relationships between countries to the success of sanctions. This allows them to identify the factors that are likely to make sanctions more successful. These variables include a higher intensity of sanctions, closer economic ties to the sanctioned country and the country’s history of having been a colony of a European country.

Taking lessons from the past

“It is extremely important for politicians to be able to fully assess the likely consequences of various political measures. Ideally, they should be able to evaluate these effects ahead of time and decide accordingly,” says lead author Niemeier.

However, even afterwards it is useful to draw conclusions about the connection between the strength of sanctions and their impact. The researchers use “counterfactual scenarios” to analyze what would have happened differently if certain political measures had been taken earlier, had been more robust or had been implemented differently.

Niemeier and Schneider studied sanctions levied against Egypt, Burundi, Mali and Russia by the European Union and the United States. They classify sanctions into different degrees of intensity. According to their model, examples of “light measures” include restrictions on the freedom of movement of specific Russian oligarchs implemented after 2014, as well as barriers to investment by individual Russian companies.

Further categories of sanctions involve steps like banning the arms trade and freezing development aid or limiting trade in certain industrial sectors. The toughest category includes wide-ranging economic embargoes, like those once introduced against South Africa and currently imposed on Russia.

The greater the intensity, the greater the effectiveness

The researchers found that—at least with regard to the EU—robust measures in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbas region would have had a greater impact than the moderate approach that had been used.

“When they are more credible and costly for the target country, economic sanctions are more likely to induce the country to make concessions,” says Schneider. Especially in Africa, it has proven successful on several occasions for the EU or U.S. along with the African Union or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to mount a quick, robust response.

What about Russia? “Our models suggest that intensive sanctions in 2014 would have had a high probability of increasing the cost of future aggression and making President Putin more willing to negotiate,” Schneider explains. “Even if they would probably not have been enough to move Russia to withdraw from Crimea.”

The political scientists base this projection on the close economic and political ties between the EU and Russia as well as the resulting negotiating power of Brussels.

Schneider concludes, “The 2014 sanctions that were watered down as the result of lobbying from the financial and energy industries reinforced President Putin’s mistaken belief that increasing the level of aggression against Ukraine would result in only a few costly sanctions.”

According to the study, while tougher EU sanctions would have made Russia more willing to make concessions, similar measures by the U.S. would have had little success. The model predicts that stronger sanctions by the Western superpower do not necessarily have a greater impact.

US-American strategies in sanctioning

According to the study, the intensity of economic ties to the sanctioned country generally influences how effective sanctions will turn out to be. Being the Western superpower, the United States can follow a different strategy when sanctioning countries.

“When a world power like the United States threatens sanctions, the countries facing the prospect of these sanctions tend to back down so that the sanctions do not actually have to be imposed on them,” Niemeier explains. “Another factor is that the US sometimes enacts strong economic sanctions against countries that depend little on the US economy. These sanctions cannot be successful if they do not cause economic pressure.”