New EU and UK legislation aiming to cut carbon emissions has caused job cuts, but renewable energy is expected to generate new jobs in the future
Tata Steel announced on Saturday (May 21) that it was being forced to cut 1,500 jobs due to climate change legislation.
The company – Britain’s largest steelmaker – said that EU legislation and the UK Climate Change Act had increased energy costs and imposed limits in order to reduce carbon emissions, which would push the price of its steel to uncompetitive levels.
Karl-Ulrich Köhler, Tata’s head of European operations, said: “EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry.
“Besides, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about the level of further unilateral carbon cost rises the UK Government is planning. These measures risk undermining our competitiveness and we must make ourselves stronger in preparation for them.”
Godfrey Bloom, the UK Independence Party’s business spokesperson, said: “The mad drive to Islington-friendly green energy is driving jobs out of the north. You cannot pile billions of pounds of extra costs on industry without a price being paid.
“That price is the livelihoods of steel workers. The Government and the EU are dangerous, damaging and deluded if they think that throwing people on to the scrapheap of unemployment will affect the sea level in Fiji.”
He went on to attack energy secretary Chris Huhne, saying: “Extra costs and additional targets are clearly undermining business confidence. It is clear that British manufacturing is put at high risk by the ideologically charged Climate Change Act and Mr Huhne’s latest environmentalist nonsense.
“British jobs are at risk, British competitiveness is undermined. Why? So our Government can preen in a European spotlight.”
An independent report by Civitas has recently claimed that the current green energy initiatives in the UK will cost the economy £60 billion as well as ending up to 600,000 jobs by creating “the highest energy costs in the world”.
The UK’s current carbon target is a 34 percent reduction from the 1990 level by 2020. Although this is the highest target of any industrialised nation worldwide, Huhne is pressing for a 50 percent reduction target by 2025 – something the Civitas report refers to as “too much too soon”.
Although the new legislation has caused job losses, it is thought that the Government’s Green Deal could create up to 250,000 jobs over the next 20 years.