That was the year, that was

Part One of The Green Edge's roundup of 2022.

Our Green Edge post on 21st July this year featured the newly-released 2022 Progress Report from the Climate Change Committee (CCC). As is our wont, our post focused on what the CCC had to say in the report’s 600-odd pages about how green skills were coming along. But we thought this ‘lipstick’ chart right at the beginning summarised the UK’s current progress towards Net Zero perfectly. Based on this chart, if the CCC were Ofsted, the UK Government would be in ‘special measures’. Perhaps, at best, ‘requires improvement’.

Image: CCC

Behind each green, amber, red, white and grey there is, of course, a skills story. Over the course of 2022, we’ve posted on quite a few of these, including EVs (and electric buses, by the way, which we found surprising not to have been included in the CCC’s grid), wind, solar, heat pumps and networks, retrofit, hydrogen, and buildings. The part we will admit a nostra culpa for neglecting to date is agriculture and land use. We’ll correct that in 2023, we promise.

Inspired by the CCC, though, we did think it appropriate to create our own infographic describing our view of 2022’s progress in some of the key areas towards a green-skilled nation. We’ll also discuss the detail behind this infographic in this week’s podcast, scheduled for release at 9am on Friday, 16th December.

Infographic: TGE. Click to download as png.

There’s no doubt 2022 has been a tumultuous year, both globally and nationally. Sometimes we’ve found ourselves asking whether Net Zero is at risk of being sidelined in favour of more pressing issues like energy and food security, and growth. Certainly, the ‘mini-budget’ in September 2022 found us looking for the Government’s green heart, although by now that all seems like a hazily-remembered if slightly unpleasant dream – you know, the type where you can’t quite recollect what happened but feel somewhat discombobulated by it all the same.

So, wearing our Green Edge hats, how do we sum up 2022? In categories, of course. So, drawing on the template used by Chris Skidmore MP in his Net Zero review - the findings of which we eagerly await – we present our review of 2022 and the contributions towards Skilling Up for Net Zero made by government, business and industry, education and training, and technology.

Government

Government in its widest sense – central, devolved and local, alongside parliament itself – has done many things right this year, but as the CCC chart shown above demonstrates, there are still many shortfalls and gaps. We talk a lot on The Green Edge about the need for a consistent taxonomy to drive green skills development and the setting up of DfE’s new Unit for Future Skills is a significant step forward, although the (almost) non-appearance of the Green Jobs Delivery Group, a major lack of delivery on de-carbonising buildings, insufficient incentives to drive the installation of gas boiler replacements and a sluggish rate of EV charging rollout all sit on the negative side of the ledger.

A question we regularly ask is whether Westminster Government is trying to do too much when it should be delegating to the devolved and local governments. Scotland in particular is certainly making a bunch of its own Net Zero programmes, although we do note that it’s taken a panning recently for perhaps being too ambitious, almost setting itself up for failure on a number of fronts.

We do find that understanding which UK government department has which finger in the Net Zero pie can at times be confusing: while BEIS owns Net Zero overall, DWP, DfE, Defra, DHULC and others – not least the Treasury – all have their fingers in the pie and their shoulders (at times, Teflon-coated) to the Net Zero wheel.

We also ask at times whether Westminster is asking the right questions. A critical question for us is, what are the skills and manpower requirements for Net Zero? We see the odd snapshot but as yet there is no national view, particularly regarding the trade-offs that might be needed resulting from competing demands for the same skill sets. Our post in September about the Electrical Contractors’ Association’s (ECA’s) Leading The Charge programme illustrates this nicely for the critical-to-Net-Zero electrical contracting sector.

In our opinion, one of the best things Westminster has done this year is to kick off the rollout of Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) in England. Although it’s still early days, with some good trailblazer templates already out there we have high hopes and will be looking around May 2023 for the first drafts of the 38 LSIPs currently being written.

But here’s a caveat. While the local authorities (LAs) – particularly those who are part of the UK100 network – are leading the way in ‘seek[ing] to devise and implement plans for the transition to clean energy that are ambitious, cost effective and take the public and business with them’, time and time again we hear of LAs struggling under the continuous pressure of too many demands and too little resource. We hear some of them can’t even find people with the time and (specialist) skills to write the proposals needed to join in Westminster’s seeming obsession with funding competitions.

Nonetheless, some LAs are putting useful initiatives in place and during the course of the year we’ve posted on a few: Liverpool City Region, Portsmouth (one of our hometowns) and its municipally-owned port, and local retrofit skilling-up initiatives described recently by Ashden in places like Portsmouth (again), Stockport and Manchester.

In 2023, we’ll continue to watch how the central, devolved and local splits in responsibility, authority and funding play out. Certainly, we can see the value in stimulating alternative approaches locally and in providing a kind of big policy petri dish. But this can get too scattergun and at some point – particularly on pressing issues like skilling up for retrofitting – the crystals have to form around the catalysts. We’ve certainly seen progressive cities like Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds developing coherent Net Zero plans, but often they’re hampered in their quest to direct funding to execute on those plans. We shall see.

Business and Industry

As we explored the corporate Net Zero world in 2022, we often found ourselves asking three key questions. Firstly, are the big firms doing enough? Secondly, how effective are the industry and sector bodies? And thirdly, how can small and medium enterprises (SMEs) be better supported and leveraged to make Net Zero happen?

For the big corporations, mechanisms like the Carbon Disclosure Project, Science Based Targets Initiative and the Financial Institution Net Zero Transition Plans seem to be continuing apace, while we’ve recently posted on the rise of the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) among the big Publics. But, almost by definition, we remain on the fence. After all, enough will enough only be when we see every corporate entity of every size hit Net Zero. The B Corporation movement is a good place to see who’s serious about the triple bottom line, though, and we’ve posted a few times during the year on companies flying in this part of the ESG stratosphere.

Next up, the industry and sector bodies. Cautious praise here. We’ve already mentioned the ECA’s Leading the Charge programme and we’ve also had a fair bit of contact with what’s going on in the UK maritime sector. We’ve also seen a further coming together of the high energy using industries to find ways of doing joint projects to decarbonise their core processes – although we do note that in our opinion big initiatives like this need to be strongly linked to what is happening elsewhere in the world. For example, a country like China with more than 800 cement works is much more likely (if it has the political will) to crack the Net Zero challenge than here in the UK with our 17 plants.

Source: GCCA 2050 Cement and Concrete Industry Roadmap for Net Zero Concrete

We’ve also seen quite a few of the English Chambers of Commerce swinging over the ropes into the skills ring, with 32 of the 38 aforementioned LSIPs designating chambers as their endorsing Employer Representative Boards (ERBs). Kudos to them – we do hope though that they can properly resource the considerable project management tasks ahead of them in building and executing the LSIPs in their charge.

Chambers of Commerce do, of course, have a significant role to play in supporting and representing SMEs and, as we noted in our post at the beginning of September, SMEs play as vital a role in the Green Revolution as engineers did for steam engines in the first Industrial Revolution. Individually, many SMEs are severely challenged by Net Zero, but if properly supported and deployed, they represent an invaluable green resource. As we opine in our post, Government needs to think small (and medium) by properly recognising the strategic importance of SMEs and not be dazzled by the headlights of big business, and to support and extend their roles, particularly in critical areas like retrofitting and the wider decarbonisation of the built environment.

Education and Training

There’s little doubt that the myriad institutions in the UK delivering education and training, standards and qualifications are making progress. For example, we note that one of the key educational bodies, the Institute for Apprenticeship and Technical Education (IfATE) has been busy during the year greening up its standards. But overall we have a nagging feeling that Education in general is trying to pin a wave to the sand in its quest to understand how to educate people for ‘green jobs’ that aren’t yet neatly defined.

Having a well-defined set of occupations can make a big difference here. Some countries have made great efforts to recognise both core and emerging green occupations and even to build them into their national occupational standards. The US in particular has done this and has gone on to incorporate those occupations, with their associated skill and competence requirements, into its world-leading O*NET occupational information database. The process is somewhat Pied Piper-ish: define the occupations, then describe the skills and competences, and education and training follows. Higher Education has formed its own views, as we talked about in our October post on ES3 (Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences and Environmental Studies) programmes. But the schools appear to be struggling, despite DfE’s strategy, drafted in late 2021 and published early this year, for tending the green shoots.

Lastly in this section we turn to a topic that’s growing in significance, in our minds at least: Citizen Education. There are, of course, the obvious areas, like homeowners understanding their Net Zero home heating options. But Citizen Education for Net Zero (we might even coin a new acronym here: CENZ) can be argued to be cultural rather than merely structural. How should I operate my newly-decarbonised home? How should I move about in my upwardly micromobility-enabled home town? What should my diet look like for a food-secure world? We could go on, but it seems clear to us that questions like our starter here for three suggests we need a massive shift in individual behaviour and thinking.

Snackable knowledge offering rewards-based microcredentials might be one approach. Certainly, we believe incentives need to be in place to drive consumer action. And these would not be simply short-term nudges reinforced with the occasional carrot.

Technology

We were struck recently by an article from a trio of respected academics opining that the goal of Net Zero to balance residual emissions of greenhouse gases against technologies removing them from the atmosphere only serves to ‘perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now’. As we said at the time, a good point, well presented.

Nonetheless, we’ve made a raft of posts during the year about various technologies which, directly or indirectly, will make big contributions to Net Zero. Several times on electric vehicles (EVs), of course, along with the batteries that power them and the smart cities that could enable them to realise their full potential. We’ve looked from the potentially massive to the demonstrably tiny: from hydrogen to the Internet of Things. And we’ve found out more about some real innovations along the way, like winged ships and crew transfer boats using Admiral’s Cup technology, additive manufacturing, electric ferries and crypto-enabled green financing.

Image: BAR Technologies

But are our three academics correct? Are we placing too much emphasis on technology to achieve Net Zero? Of course, technology for decarbonising the generation of energy – particularly wind – is a major government and corporate action, one which is reported on daily. We also see much coverage on decarbonising the built environment, although every road right now seems to lead to the air source heat pump. Then there are the major fossil fuel companies backing major technology fixes like carbon capture and storage, mainly to enable them to extend the life of their existing assets. We’d love to see our friends at the CCC provide a ranking of the grants and subsidies mapped against carbon emissions for these and other sectors.

Here's a controversial question though. How credible is the vision of our brave new electrified Net Zero world when today’s electricity prices are ballooning to the point where many people are struggling to decide whether to heat or eat? It’s a scary thought and one for which we have no answer. But one observation we will make: the current energy crisis is certainly focusing many people’s minds on conserving energy and adjusting lifestyles to match. It will be interesting to see whether these lifestyle adjustments are conserved when (if?) the crisis abates. Further, might lifestyle adjustments be extended to gradually bring down long haul travel to mid-pandemic levels, reduce meat consumption (we aren’t vegetarians, so no hidden agenda here) and shift our individual carbon footprints to be under our personal control? One could argue they should.

One final point here, and we touched on it above. Is a focus on just a few sub-technologies, such as air source heat pumps, appropriate when there are clearly other options? In our experience, there’s never a single solution to anything. For new builds and retrofits alike, the general lack of speed in installing air source heat pumps in the UK suggests a major market failure above and beyond the price barrier. This must be seen as both a problem and an opportunity to explore alternatives. If, as we’ve seen in places like Nottingham, a deep retrofit approach is adopted would we end up in a different place? If, say, we went further with heat networks and pooled individual building energy requirements, we might find greater gains to be made and reduce the cost of installations. This and many other questions to ponder.

Thank you for reading The Green Edge. This is part one of our roundup of 2022 and we’ll follow it next week with our pick of the year’s green reports. Also look out for our weekly podcast, which is now mainstreamed on the major podcasting platforms including Apple, Google and Amazon.

We finish this post with the elephant in the room. We have posted on this previously, but we think it’s worth repeating. Is it right for the UK to be blazing the trail to net zero, perhaps to the detriment of our economy? Certainly, the world needs to make rapid and lasting progress and in some parts the UK can claim to be a ‘green gorilla’. Offshore wind for one, and perhaps in technologies like high performance batteries where our predisposition towards R&D can be leveraged. But it could be argued that we’re being very selective and, let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the first time that the UK Government has sunk a bunch of cash into inventing stuff for the rest of the world to use, while remaining complacent about what the rest of the world can bring to us.

That said, we remain confident that the UK will eventually get to Net Zero, or at least a close-enough version of it to respect the world’s need for a healthy global triple bottom line. We sincerely hope the other nations of the world will come along with us on the journey. And, while we could quote Matthew 7 and refer to specks in other countries’ eyes while there are planks in ours, with too many poorly insulated homes, too few heat pumps and a pitiful shortage of public EV charging points, perhaps the lipstick chart in the CCC’s next progress report in 2023 will show a few more greens and a few less reds, ambers, whites and greys.