Britain’s energy trilemma (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The approach of the UK government to energy is characterised by a trilemma. It tries to balance out the need to reduce carbon emissions, supporting national energy security and control the costs of the transition. The hidden premise behind all of these, is the class nature of society and the need for the government to negotiate with the owners of energy generating resources, without threatening their control of their property and securing a tribute from them to allow the change.

People speak about the costs of transferring to renewables. Initially this was largely down to the fact that the infrastructure for generating energy through fossil fuels already existed. The cost of energy, like any commodity, depends on how much labour it typically takes to produce it. Capital, that is past labour, reduces the need for fresh effort. So, no good or process has an inherent cost, just the relative cost of how much society is geared towards carrying out the activity.

Renewables and other sources of generation originally appear more costly compared to oil and gas, but that is only because the means of obtaining and using the latter are already in place. To build a renewable energy network within a capitalist society means persuading the owners of capital that there will be profits to be made in carrying out that activity: but the structural advantage fossil fuels have means that the markets, of their own accord, will not promote this change.

UK government has created designed markets. Renewable Obligation Certificates were used, as a means of transferring payments from people who obtain their electricity from fossil fuels to renewable companies. These are still supported by the government, but the scheme is closed, and has been replaced by Contracts for Difference (CFDs): the government auctions off licences to supply energy at a fixed cost, the supplier will repay any excess income, or be paid if market prices for electricity fall below the fixed ‘strike price’. This removes volatility from the market, and allows capitalists to invest with an almost guaranteed rate of return.

Even then, there have been auctions where few firms applied at the stated strike price, and the government has had to raise their offer in order to entice more investment.

Finally, there is a cost of ‘balancing the grid’, paying producers to stop producing or start producing, to offset the unbalanced and intermittent nature of renewables (or if, say, the wind is generating energy too far away from where the grid can carry it to be used adequately). This is expected to reach a cost of £8 billion per year by 2030. Effectively transferring profits to the energy producers via taxation.

The overall market price tends to be set by the most expensive resource, which in the case of energy, is unsubsidised gas on the world market. The loss of Russian gas from the market (and the wider shocks of the Russia-Ukraine war) has pushed the cost of gas up, which means, overall, we have seen significant upward pressure on energy bills, which in the end hit the consumer. Those on fixed incomes will bear the brunt, whilst workers in employment will struggle to pass on the burden to their employers.

This isn’t helped by the anti-democratic approach governments take. In order to hide their powerlessness in the face of the capitalists’ interest, they simply plough on with the policy behind closed doors. The system of subsidy and incentive is opaque (at best) alongside the complicated character of the energy markets that have grown up. Most people will only see the cost of heating their homes going up.

Into that space step voices which claim climate change is a hoax, that subsidies to renewables are making electricity more expensive and that if we just resumed extracting fossil fuels bills would come down. Such voices have the backing of some in the energy industry, or other capitalists who rely on cheap energy for their operations. They would put immediate profits against the cost of the effects of climate change (or even gambling that the costs won’t affect them primarily).

In the meantime, the changes already made have been impressive. In 1991, according to the National Grid, only 2 percent of electricity came from renewable sources compared to over 50 percent by 2023. Coal has been practically eliminated as an electricity generation source. The UK has a target of <50gCO2 per kW hour, in 2023 the average was 140g. Nonetheless, total emissions were 50 percent of those in 1990.

Total renewable energy generation needs to double by 2030 to stay on track. Most of that, apparently, is planned. This will be helped by the tumbling of the costs of renewable generation on a global scale, partly due to China’s massive investment in renewable energy. Although over half of China’s electricity comes from coal, growth of coal generation there is slowing, and renewables are expanding faster. This enables China to export renewable technology. For the first time, this year, less than 50 percent of a growing electricity output worldwide came from non-renewable sources.

This fall in costs, though, presents a problem for the subsidised capitalists, as it means that overall renewable electricity generation will never be as profitable as they would hope.

As we build socialism, we will be confronted by the context of climate change, and will inherit the energy system as it is now. Obviously, we would be able collectively and democratically to discontinue some wasteful branches of energy use, but we would still need to heat homes and provide power for the projects we do want to carry out. The Royal Society has carried out research that suggests all of the UK’s energy needs could be met from wind and solar alone (with sufficient capacity for storage in the form of hydrogen).

The issues of energy generation and climate change are solvable, even within capitalism, but the need is urgent and worldwide democratic co-operation offers us the best and speediest chance and that will require ending the tribute to capital.

Pik Smeet

Afghanistan and the new Silk Road (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following testimony by an oil and gas corporation executive (of Union Oil of California) to the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations on 12 February 1998 throws much light on the strategic importance of Afghanistan to the Western capitalist powers and goes a long way to explain why they have gone to war there.

Mr. Chairman, I am John Maresca, Vice President, International Relations, of Unocal Corporation. Unocal is one of the world’s leading energy resource and project development companies. Our activities are focused on three major regions – Asia, Latin America and the US Gulf of Mexico. In Asia and the US Gulf of Mexico, we are a major oil and gas producer. I appreciate your invitation to speak here today. I believe these hearings are important and timely, and I congratulate you for focusing on Central Asia oil and gas reserves and the role they play in shaping US policy.

Today we would like to focus on three issues concerning this region, its resources and US policy:

• The need for multiple pipeline routes for Central Asian oil and gas.
• The need for US support for international and regional efforts to achieve balanced and lasting political settlements within Russia, other newly independent states and in Afghanistan.
• The need for structured assistance to encourage economic reforms and the development of appropriate investment climates in the region. In this regard, we specifically support repeal or removal of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act.

For more than 2,000 years, Central Asia has been a meeting ground between Europe and Asia, the site of ancient east-west trade routes collectively called the Silk Road and, at various points in history, a cradle of scholarship, culture and power. It is also a region of truly enormous natural resources, which are revitalizing cross-border trade, creating positive political interaction and stimulating regional cooperation. These resources have the potential to recharge the economies of neighboring countries and put entire regions on the road to prosperity.

About 100 years ago, the international oil industry was born in the Caspian/Central Asian region with the discovery of oil. In the intervening years, under Soviet rule, the existence of the region’s oil and gas resources was generally known, but only partially or poorly developed.

As we near the end of the 20th century, history brings us full circle. With political barriers falling, Central Asia and the Caspian are once again attracting people from around the globe who are seeking ways to develop and deliver its bountiful energy resources to the markets of the world.

The Caspian region contains tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves, much of them located in the Caspian Sea basin itself. Proven natural gas reserves within Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan equal more than 236 trillion cubic feet. The region’s total oil reserves may reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil – enough to service Europe’s oil needs for 11 years. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels. In 1995, the region was producing only 870,000 barrels per day (44 million tons per year [Mt/y]).

By 2010, Western companies could increase production to about 4.5 million barrels a day (Mb/d) – an increase of more than 500 percent in only 15 years. If this occurs, the region would represent about five percent of the world’s total oil production, and almost 20 percent of oil produced among non-OPEC countries.

One major problem has yet to be resolved: how to get the region’s vast energy resources to the markets where they are needed. There are few, if any, other areas of the world where there can be such a dramatic increase in the supply of oil and gas to the world market. The solution seems simple: build a “new” Silk Road. Implementing this solution, however, is far from simple. The risks are high, but so are the rewards.

Finding and Building Routes to World Markets

One of the main problems is that Central Asia is isolated. The region is bounded on the north by the Arctic Circle, on the east and west by vast land distances, and on the south by a series of natural obstacles – mountains and seas – as well as political obstacles, such as conflict zones or sanctioned countries.

This means that the area’s natural resources are landlocked, both geographically and politically. Each of the countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia faces difficult political challenges. Some have unsettled wars or latent conflicts. Others have evolving systems where the laws – and even the courts – are dynamic and changing. Business commitments can be rescinded without warning, or they can be displaced by new geopolitical realities.

In addition, a chief technical obstacle we face in transporting oil is the region’s existing pipeline infrastructure. Because the region’s pipelines were constructed during the Moscow-centered Soviet period, they tend to head north and west toward Russia. There are no connections to the south and east.

Depending wholly on this infrastructure to export Central Asia oil is not practical. Russia currently is unlikely to absorb large new quantities of “foreign” oil, is unlikely to be a significant market for energy in the next decade, and lacks the capacity to deliver it to other markets.

Certainly there is no easy way out of Central Asia. If there are to be other routes, in other directions, they must be built.

Two major energy infrastructure projects are seeking to meet this challenge. One, under the aegis of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, or CPC, plans to build a pipeline west from the Northern Caspian to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossisk. From Novorossisk, oil from this line would be transported by tanker through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean and world markets.

The other project is sponsored by the Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), a consortium of 11 foreign oil companies including four American companies – Unocal, Amoco, Exxon and Pennzoil. It will follow one or both of two routes west from Baku. One line will angle north and cross the North Caucasus to Novorossisk. The other route would cross Georgia and extend to a shipping terminal on the Black Sea port of Supsa. This second route may be extended west and south across Turkey to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

But even if both pipelines were built, they would not have enough total capacity to transport all the oil expected to flow from the region in the future; nor would they have the capability to move it to the right markets. Other export pipelines must be built.

Unocal believes that the central factor in planning these pipelines should be the location of the future energy markets that are most likely to need these new supplies. Just as Central Asia was the meeting ground between Europe and Asia in centuries past, it is again in a unique position to potentially service markets in both of these regions – if export routes to these markets can be built. Let’s take a look at some of the potential markets.

Western Europe

Western Europe is a tough market. It is characterized by high prices for oil products, an aging population, and increasing competition from natural gas. Between 1995 and 2010, we estimate that demand for oil will increase from 14.1 Mb/d (705 Mt/y) to 15.0 Mb/d (750 Mt/y), an average growth rate of only 0.5 percent annually. Furthermore, the region is already amply supplied from fields in the Middle East, North Sea, Scandinavia and Russia. Although there is perhaps room for some of Central Asia’s oil, the Western European market is unlikely to be able to absorb all of the production from the Caspian region.

Central and Eastern Europe

Central and Eastern Europe markets do not look any better. Although there is increased demand for oil in the region’s transport sector, natural gas is gaining strength as a competitor. Between 1995 and 2010, demand for oil is expected to increase by only half a million barrels per day, from 1.3 Mb/d (67 Mt/y) to 1.8 Mb/d (91.5 Mt/y). Like Western Europe, this market is also very competitive. In addition to supplies of oil from the North Sea, Africa and the Middle East, Russia supplies the majority of the oil to this region.

The Domestic NIS Market

The growth in demand for oil also will be weak in the Newly Independent States (NIS). We expect Russian and other NIS markets to increase demand by only 1.2 percent annually between 1997 and 2010.

Asia/Pacific

In stark contrast to the other three markets, the Asia/Pacific region has a rapidly increasing demand for oil and an expected significant increase in population. Prior to the recent turbulence in the various Asian/Pacific economies, we anticipated that this region’s demand for oil would almost double by 2010. Although the short-term increase in demand will probably not meet these expectations, Unocal stands behind its long-term estimates.

Energy demand growth will remain strong for one key reason: the region’s population is expected to grow by 700 million people by 2010.

It is in everyone’s interests that there be adequate supplies for Asia’s increasing energy requirements. If Asia’s energy needs are not satisfied, they will simply put pressure on all world markets, driving prices upwards everywhere.

The key question is how the energy resources of Central Asia can be made available to satisfy the energy needs of nearby Asian markets. There are two possible solutions – with several variations.

Export Routes

East to China: Prohibitively Long?

One option is to go east across China. But this would mean constructing a pipeline of more than 3,000 kilometers to central China – as well as a 2,000-kilometer connection to reach the main population centers along the coast. Even with these formidable challenges, China National Petroleum Corporation is considering building a pipeline east from Kazakhstan to Chinese markets.

Unocal had a team in Beijing just last week for consultations with the Chinese. Given China’s long-range outlook and its ability to concentrate resources to meet its own needs, China is almost certain to build such a line. The question is what will the costs of transporting oil through this pipeline be and what netback will the producers receive.

South to the Indian Ocean: A Shorter Distance to Growing Markets

A second option is to build a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean.

One obvious potential route south would be across Iran. However, this option is foreclosed for American companies because of US sanctions legislation. The only other possible route option is across Afghanistan, which has its own unique challenges.

The country has been involved in bitter warfare for almost two decades. The territory across which the pipeline would extend is controlled by the Taliban, an Islamic movement that is not recognized as a government by most other nations. From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of our proposed pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders and our company.

In spite of this, a route through Afghanistan appears to be the best option with the fewest technical obstacles. It is the shortest route to the sea and has relatively favorable terrain for a pipeline. The route through Afghanistan is the one that would bring Central Asian oil closest to Asian markets and thus would be the cheapest in terms of transporting the oil.

Unocal envisions the creation of a Central Asian Oil Pipeline Consortium. The pipeline would become an integral part of a regional oil pipeline system that will utilize and gather oil from existing pipeline infrastructure in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia.

The 1,040-mile-long oil pipeline would begin near the town of Chardzhou, in northern Turkmenistan, and extend southeasterly through Afghanistan to an export terminal that would be constructed on the Pakistan coast on the Arabian Sea. Only about 440 miles of the pipeline would be in Afghanistan.

This 42-inch-diameter pipeline will have a shipping capacity of one million barrels of oil per day. Estimated cost of the project – which is similar in scope to the Trans Alaska Pipeline – is about US$2.5 billion.

There is considerable international and regional political interest in this pipeline. Asian crude oil importers, particularly from Japan, are looking to Central Asia and the Caspian as a new strategic source of supply to satisfy their desire for resource diversity. The pipeline benefits Central Asian countries because it would allow them to sell their oil in expanding and highly prospective hard currency markets. The pipeline would benefit Afghanistan, which would receive revenues from transport tariffs, and would promote stability and encourage trade and economic development. Although Unocal has not negotiated with any one group, and does not favor any group, we have had contacts with and briefings for all of them. We know that the different factions in Afghanistan understand the importance of the pipeline project for their country, and have expressed their support of it.

A recent study for the World Bank states that the proposed pipeline from Central Asia across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea would provide more favorable netbacks to oil producers through access to higher value markets than those currently being accessed through the traditional Baltic and Black Sea export routes.

This is evidenced by the netback values producers will receive as determined by the World Bank study. For West Siberian crude, the netback value will increase by nearly $2.00 per barrel by going south to Asia. For a producer in western Kazakhstan, the netback value will increase by more than $1 per barrel by going south to Asia as compared to west to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea.

Natural Gas Export

Given the plentiful natural gas supplies of Central Asia, our aim is to link a specific natural resource with the nearest viable market. This is basic for the commercial viability of any gas project. As with all projects being considered in this region, the following projects face geo-political challenges, as well as market issues.

Unocal and the Turkish company, Koc Holding A.S., are interested in bringing competitive gas supplies to the Turkey market. The proposed Eurasia Natural Gas Pipeline would transport gas from Turkmenistan directly across the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey. Sixty percent of this proposed gas pipeline would follow the same route as the oil pipeline proposed to run from Baku to Ceyhan. Of course, the demarcation of the Caspian remains an issue.

Last October, the Central Asia Pipeline, Ltd. (CentGas) consortium, in which Unocal holds an interest, was formed to develop a gas pipeline that will link Turkmenistan’s vast natural gas reserves in the Dauletabad Field with markets in Pakistan and possibly India. An independent evaluation shows that the field’s resources are adequate for the project’s needs, assuming production rates rising over time to 2 billion cubic feet of gas per day for 30 years or more.

In production since 1983, the Dauletabad Field’s natural gas has been delivered north via Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia to markets in the Caspian and Black Sea areas. The proposed 790-mile pipeline will open up new markets for this gas, travelling from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Multan, Pakistan. A proposed extension would link with the existing Sui pipeline system, moving gas to near New Delhi, where it would connect with the existing HBJ pipeline. By serving these additional volumes, the extension would enhance the economics of the project, leading to overall reductions in delivered natural gas costs for all users and better margins. As currently planned, the CentGas pipeline would cost approximately $2 billion. A 400-mile extension into India could add $600 million to the overall project cost.

As with the proposed Central Asia Oil Pipeline, CentGas cannot begin construction until an internationally recognized Afghanistan government is in place. For the project to advance, it must have international financing, government-to-government agreements and government-to-consortium agreements.

Conclusion

The Central Asia and Caspian region is blessed with abundant oil and gas that can enhance the lives of the region’s residents and provide energy for growth for Europe and Asia.

The impact of these resources on US commercial interests and US foreign policy is also significant and intertwined. Without peaceful settlement of conflicts within the region, cross-border oil and gas pipelines are not likely to be built. We urge the Administration and the Congress to give strong support to the United Nations-led peace process in Afghanistan.

US assistance in developing these new economies will be crucial to business’ success. We encourage strong technical assistance programs throughout the region. We also urge repeal or removal of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. This section unfairly restricts US government assistance to the government of Azerbaijan and limits US influence in the region.

Developing cost-effective, profitable and efficient export routes for Central Asia resources is a formidable, but not impossible, task. It has been accomplished before. A commercial corridor, a “new” Silk Road, can link the Central Asia supply with the demand – once again making Central Asia the crossroads between Europe and Asia.

Thank you.

(Was to be found at: http://www.house.gov/international_relations/105th/ap/wsap212982.htm. Now not operational)

The new source of energy (1956)

From the October 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

“In recent years physicists have found methods of producing radio-activity artificially.

Under suitable treatment many substances which are not in themselves radio-active, and which therefore do not disintegrate of their own accord, can be made to emit radio-active rays and particles whereby the atomic nucleus is transformed and finally destroyed—A relatively small inout of energy can lead to . . . the emission of much more energy than was put in ... We have potentially at our disposal an almost unlimited store of energy which, suitably unleashed, can have a tremendous effect on our economy and civilisation.

Used for destructive purposes, it can wipe out the human race; used as a source of industrial power it can confer limitless benefits on mankind.” (Power, Martin Ruhemann, D.Phil. Sigma Books.).

What price energy? (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main problem facing humanity when it comes to satisfying its needs is not so much resources — either mineral resources or food resources — as energy. Resources are virtually infinite, the problem is to find the energy to get at them. For most of human existence on the planet Earth the main source of energy for production was the energy of human beings and domestic animals, supplemented by various mechanical devices and by limited amounts of wind and water power. Then, beginning in the 18th century, came the widespread use of steam power (based on burning wood and later coal to heat the water) and. at the beginning of the 20th century. the internal combustion engine (based on burning another fossil fuel. oil).

What will probably turn out to have been the greatest technological advance made by humans since the introduction of agriculture was the discovery of how to generate and use electricity in the second half of the 19th century. Electricity is a form of energy that can be generated by mechanical means (by turbines) and then later transformed back again into mechanical energy to be applied to production when and where required. It can be generated on a large scale (in power stations) or on a small scale (as by windmills and waterfalls) and so can be adapted to various different ways and combinations of ways of living.

Most of the electricity used in the world today is generated by huge steam-powered turbines in which the steam is still, overwhelmingly. raised by burning fossil fuels but also, increasingly, by the heat given off when atoms of uranium and now plutonium are split (nuclear fission). Electricity generated by using turbines turned by water, wind or tidal power is still relatively marginal. From an ideal point of view, burning fossil fuels is an irrational way of using these natural resources since this wastes a large part of their potential as useless and harmful gases.

Nuclear fission, too. is not the long-term solution to humanity’s energy problem since it has been well described as "the dirtiest and most unpleasant method of releasing energy that man has ever discovered". It merits this description because, besides heat, the process of splitting the atom releases lethal radioactivity which can escape into the atmosphere (as at Chernobyl) and which, in any case, remains in the waste products. Nuclear fission reactors should be quickly phased out.if not stopped completely, in any rationally-organised human society, rather than being extended to meet the problem in the supply of fossil fuels. Certainly there can be no humane justification for embarking on the mad idea of building more and more "breeder" reactors (so called because they produce radioactive plutonium which can be re-used as a nuclear fuel).

So what, in a rational world of common ownership and production solely for use, could be the solution to the energy problem? In the light of present-day scientific knowledge. there are two main candidates for the not-too-distant future: solar power and nuclear fusion. Solar energy, in its natural form of heat and light, is the product of nuclear fusion, the sun being a sort of fusion reactor in which atoms of hydrogen are continually being fused into becoming helium, a process which generates huge amounts of heat and light energy. The sun is in fact the source of the energy that sustains all life on Earth (its rays being converted, in the first instance, by plants into chemical energy which serves as food for animals including humans); solar energy is thus nature’s source of energy. It is also the indirect source of some of the other forms of natural energy that humans have been able to harness such as wind and water power. If humans could find a way of harnessing solar energy, then our energy problem would be solved.

Solar batteries, which directly convert the sun’s light rays into electrical energy, already exist and are used in satellites and space vehicles. But an efficient method of doing this at Earth ground-level — where the sun’s rays are much less powerful — has yet to be devised, as the experimental batteries being developed use up more energy than they create. Further research into this is still necessary but a world socialist society would be able to direct resources, such as those that will be released by abandoning all military research, towards it. Another possibility would be to launch a satellite that would function as a power station, converting the sun’s light rays into energy and beaming this down to Earth. But once again until more research has been done, more energy would be needed to get such a power station into orbit than it would initially produce.

At the moment the only practical way of using solar energy, apart from small scale uses in particularly sunny parts of the world, is to use the heat from the sun to raise steam to drive electricity-generating turbines. Such power stations using mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays could be situated in sunny, desert areas and linked to a grid that would allow the electricity to be transported to whatever part of the world it was needed. Since, however, considerable amounts of electricity are lost in transport, such a change-over from fossil fuel and nuclear fission power stations to solar power stations. to be most effective, would demand a corresponding re-allocation of industry to the sunnier parts of the world.

In view of the geo-political considerations involved under capitalism in such a re-allocation of industry — and so also of economic and political power — a change to solar power on a massive scale is unlikely to occur while capitalism lasts. If capitalism is allowed to continue, it is much more likely that the states where industry is currently concentrated will choose to develop nuclear fission power stations, including breeder reactors, in these areas as a way of maintaining their economic and political power. This is one example of how capitalism prevents a rational solution to humanity’s energy problem and a reason why anti-nuclear protestors. justified as their protests are. are unlikely to succeed as long as capitalism lasts.

Nuclear fusion has nothing in common with nuclear fission beyond the fact that both are examples of nuclear engineering. Nuclear fusion is. as its name suggests, a process whereby atoms of the lightest chemical elements are fused together (as in the sun) as opposed to fission when atoms of the heaviest elements are split. Both processes release energy in the form of heat but fission also leaves a radioactive waste material, some of it extremely dangerous, fusion does not. and so to this extent is a clean source of energy.

It is true that, as the equipment used to contain the fusion process will become radioactive, fusion power will not be entirely clean, though the levels of radioactivity involved would be nowhere near those caused by the process of nuclear fission. It is also true that the technically-easiest process, now in the experimental stage, does involve the production of a radioactive gas. but other possible fusion processes could avoid this. If the technical problems involved in these latter can be solved, humanity will have at its disposal a relatively clean and virtually unlimited source of energy since the raw material — an isotope of hydrogen, deuterium — exists in abundance in the sea. to the extent of 1 gramme in every 30 litres.

Since neither solar batteries nor fusion power yet exist in a form that can be applied to production, it is clear that if socialism is established in the near future it is going to have to rely on existing ways of generating electricity, essentially burning oil and coal even if. ideally, this is not the best way of using these resources. Since socialist society will need all the energy it can muster to clean up the initial problem of world poverty and hunger it will inherit from capitalism, on present day knowledge it may well not be able to afford not to use any nuclear fission reactors in existence at the time, dirty and dangerous though they are — though, freed from the profit and cost considerations of capitalism they could be and would be made less dangerous than they are now. It will be a question of deciding to use them temporarily to help eliminate the more pressing evil of deaths from world hunger, disease and poverty. But the aim will have to be to take such reactors out of service as soon as these immediate problems have been cleared up. Nuclear fission reactors have no long-term or even a medium-term future in socialism.

As to whether the substitute that will sooner or later be necessary for power stations based on burning coal or oil will be solar power or nuclear fusion, only future socialist society can decide but since certain forms of power can be applied straight away this would seem to be the obvious choice at the moment.

Adam Buick

Nuclear questions (1982)

From the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now three years since the nuclear “accident" at Three Mile Island. The full effects on the health of people working or living in the area will perhaps never be known. The release of radiation was not effectively monitored and in any case most of the resulting sickness and deaths will take up to 20 years to occur. This lack of information has enabled speculation by both the supporters and opponents of nuclear energy to obscure the real lessons of the accident.

Three years on we are still learning the extent of the disaster. In July the first examination of the fuel rods in the core of the reactor was made possible using special cameras lowered through a screw hole in the container vessel. This revealed that the uranium oxide fuel had in fact melted, which means that the nuclear reactor core was far closer to a "meltdown” than had earlier been presumed. The massive heat necessary for the melting of the fuel, over 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, was all but sufficient to have also melted the container vessel which encased the radioactive core. Had this happened the highly radioactive molten mass would have been totally exposed, with consequences so disastrous that it is extremely unlikely that they could have been dealt with.

Not surprisingly, there is now a lot of concern at the Central Electricity Generating Board's proposals to build a Pressure Water Reactor (PWR) at Sizewell in Suffolk. Three Mile Island was also a PWR and Sizewell will be the first of this type to be built in this country. The enquiry into these proposals begins in January and as many as two thousand individuals and groups have lodged objections. But the enquiry will not deal with the real problems of nuclear energy. It will look into the scientific, technological or engineering issues, and perhaps consider the architectural or even the employment effects. It will not look at the question of how a society based on class monopoly of the production of wealth can handle such potentially dangerous technology while serving the interests of a small minority of the population.

There are three areas that have to be looked at: radioactivity anti its effects; the design and construction of nuclear plant; and nuclear waste.

Radioactivity

All radiation is dangerous to human health. There is no accepted safe level, whether it be the “natural" radiation from the environment or whether it is the result of human labour. Although there are disagreements over the effects of low levels of radiation, the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP) accepts that all levels of radiation are liable to cause damage to health. The guidelines laid down by the ICRP are accepted by the nuclear industry. Consequently, when governments or other institutions fix a "safe" level of radiation they are really saying that so many deaths or so much sickness is acceptable.

At present this "safe" limit is fixed for the average person at 0.5 rem per year — three times the radiation emitted from the normal background conditions. This figure is partly arbitrary, based on how many increased deaths or illnesses are acceptable for running capitalism; the "safe" level is derived more from the estimates of what is necessary for operating a profitable nuclear industry than from the estimates of what is desirable in terms of human health. Nuclear power stations, even when working under normal conditions, need to emit a certain level of radiation into the environment only because the cost of overcoming the problems would affect profits.

The main difference between the working conditions of nuclear reactors and the conditions on, say, a building site are that the effects of radiation can take many years before becoming apparent. Radiation induced cancer may cut a worker’s life by 30 years, but the death may not occur until 20 years after contamination. On the other hand, the effects of an accident on a building site or in a factory are usually immediately noticeable. But even when the effects are known, the question is what level of human sacrifice is acceptable when priority must be given to profitable production? Even when governments introduce legislation to restrict the use of potentially dangerous materials or practices, the incentive for employers to cut corners means that constant surveillance is necessary. Nuclear power stations have been under tighter inspection than most industries, and yet Three Mile Island and other, less disastrous nuclear accidents have shown that safety problems remain.

Design and construction

The Marshall Study Group Report on the Integrity of Pressurised Water Reactor Pressure Vessels was published in April by a group which openly supports the nuclear programme. (Dr. Walter Marshall was at the time of the report the Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and is now the head of the Central Electricity Generating Board.) It shows the close association between concerns about the safety of the container vessels housing the radioactive core of a reactor and the problems of profitability.

In the PWRs there is no real means of preventing a large release of radiation if the vessel is badly fractured. As far back as 1969 an IEEE report stated that a container vessel fracture was "the most fearful of nuclear accidents that can occur in any plant with a highly pressurised primary system” and that no solution was possible “short of putting the plant underground or inside a mountain". This last proposal has in fact been recommended in the past but has been rejected as being economically unsound since the whole purpose of building PWRs is to reduce the cost of producing energy. Any concern for the safety of human beings is secondary. The CEGB statement, outlining its case for the new Sizewell B PWR, makes this clear: “economy, in that it is estimated to give lifetime operational savings that more than offset its original capital cost in a wide range of futures, and to have a superior economic return to investment in an AGR (Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor) or coal fired station”.

But that still leaves such problems as having to avoid fractures of the container vessel. The Marshall Report recognises the need for high standards of materials and welding, for detailed procedures in quality control, and wider measures for inspection during the manufacture of components. In the USA manufacturers on a number of nuclear sites were taking short cuts; standards were not being met and, because of the complexities involved in building a nuclear power station, the inspection process was to say the least inadequate.

The forces operating against safety are not just the employers’ prime incentive to make profits. There is also the question of the workers’ attitude. It is no coincidence that the Three Mile Island catastrophe arose through a succession of faults and mistakes which ended with a decision to turn off the water coolant. The prime reason for a worker seeking employment is to get the money in order to live. The workers’ product, whether it be a piece of equipment for a nuclear power station or an inspection job in the everyday running of that plant, is not the main purpose for working; it is a means to an end rather than a first concern. The alienation of the worker from the production process means that the incentive to create a quality product needs to be constantly enforced by external means.

To try to overcome this problem of the productive relations being in conflict with the desired technology, the Marshall Study Group recommended vast improvements in the inspection of equipment and procedures at all stages of manufacture and operation. But the problem remains.

Radioactive waste

Perhaps the most emotive issue in the field of nuclear energy in recent years has been the creation and disposal of radioactive waste. The secrecy that has surrounded the transporting and disposing of the waste has added to speculations about the dangers involved. Because the nuclear energy industry is closely associated with the nuclear weapons industry, the transportation of nuclear waste between power stations and reprocessing plants or to disposal sites has to be clouded with secrecy partly because of fears that terrorist groups may take advantage of the situation.

Nevertheless, the problems of nuclear waste are not merely of secrecy. There are three classifications for radioactive waste material, each presenting different problems. The first classification, low level waste, consists of a variety of materials that are mildly radioactive — old laboratory clothing, chemical sludges, but not of used fuel elements or materials from them. This is the type of waste that is packaged in large drums and dumped at sea. The International Atomic Energy Agency sets limits to the amount that can be disposed of in this way but, as all radiation is potentially dangerous, these levels are related more to the demands of a profitable nuclear energy programme than to any concern about human health. Dumping at sea is a cheap means of disposal and reflects the general aim of maximising profits rather than the technical problem of a particular industry.

Less publicised, but of greater concern as regards PWRs, is the intermediate level waste. This is radioactive material which even under the criteria laid down by the ICRP is too dangerous to be released into the environment and yet the quantity produced by the nuclear industry is too great to keep in store. The PWRs produce about five times the quantity of this type of waste as do the AGRs. This means that disposal and its costs are crucial issues with the PWRs. The latest report of the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC) recommends that the go-ahead should be given to dumping the expected 70,000 cubic metres of this material in some deep cavity or old mine shaft. The Sizewell Enquiry into the proposed PWR will certainly have to deal with the issue of whether damage to the environment and human health is a necessary sacrifice in the interests of production for profit, it is unlikely that the increased production of dangerous radioactive waste by this type of reactor will be a determining factor.

The third type of radioactive waste, high level, has received some publicity mainly because of the deep rock drilling programmes carried out recently on a number of sites in different parts of the country. High level waste consists of the remains of old fuel elements after recyclable materials such as plutonium and uranium have been removed. Compared to low level and intermediate waste this forms a small quantity, but because it is highly radioactive is requires constant attention for 50 or 100 years. At present this waste is kept in acid in stainless steel tanks but it is proposed to transform this liquid into solid glass blocks.

Scientists, even from the UKAEA, have emphasised the desirability of being able to monitor this waste material and have looked to some form of storage. The Royal Commission, on the other hand, was concerned about the possibilities of war or terrorism and their effects on such a store; it objected to the idea of long term storage and advocated disposal in some form or other. This is what the rock drilling in various parts of the country has been about. Last December the government decided to abandon the rock drilling surveys for prospective disposal sites because they realised that the heat problems from high level waste are such that it cannot be dumped for at least 50 years. As a result, no effective programme for dealing with high level waste exists. So workers in the plants where the waste is now kept are being exposed (and are likely to be for some time) to greater risks from radiation. Concern over this has been expressed in the latest RWMAC report. The differing approaches by scientists and politicians has already led to one resignation from the RWMAC. that of Dr. Stanley Bowie. The latest report also warns of the possibility of radioactive waste management getting seriously out of hand in the absence of an effective decision about its future.

Human beings are exposed to constant risk as statistical compromises are made in the trail of devastation left in the drive for profits. One effect of the industrial revolution was the destruction of human life in the new factory system. Capitalism's use and abuse of nuclear energy reflects the way 20th century technology is handled by a society which serves only a minority of the population. Behind the white coats and white walls that are everywhere in the clinical nuclear establishments, the anarchy of production that drives millions into poverty, unemployment, sickness and war rolls on.

Will a socialist society have a place for nuclear energy? Such decisions will be made by the majority of people, in contrast to the minority who at present own and control the means of producing wealth. It will not be a question of which energy source is the most profitable, but of what is in the interest of the whole community. If nuclear energy is developed in a socialist society it will not be driven along by market forces but will develop under conscious social control, to ensure that it serves human beings instead of the market system. And lastly, in a socialist society all work will be voluntary. Consequently the motive for work will not be because it is necessary in order to get a pay packet, but the satisfaction that can be gained from it.

MD

These Foolish Things: Poverty (1995)

The Scavenger column from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poverty

"Britain has the second lowest standard of living in western Europe after Portugal, according to a survey of incomes and living costs in Europe’s nine wealthiest countries . . . The wide variation in living standards is one reason why the governments of lower-income nations such as Britain are reluctant to embrace a single currency: it would throw a glaring spotlight on just how far Britain’s standard of living hits fallen behind those of Germany and France, say economists." 

(The Sunday Times, 17 September.)

Insecurity

"The Anglia Co-operative Society is being taken to an industrial tribunal by 110 of its staff alleging unfair dismissal and breach of contract. The action follows drastic changes in working practices imposed on staff at the company’s 20 East Anglian rainbow supermarkets. The shake-up hits their entitlement to pensions and maternity and sickness benefits. The 1,600 employees learned they faced a choice of having their hours cut or losing their jobs only after seeing them advertised in the local press earlier this year."

(Financial Mail on Sunday, 24 September.)

Destitution

"Homeless people in Camden are being urged to “adopt a doorway” in order to qualify to vote. Labour-controlled Camden council is advising them to find themselves a “regular pitch” so they can be placed on the electoral register. But the council’s campaign is being criticised by some residents, traders and Tory councillors who fear it is open to abuse and will act as a magnet for more “homeless and hungry” beggars, particularly in the King’s Cross area."

(Evening Standard, 20 September.)

A breath of competition

"Some British commentators gleefully predict that the infusion of American-style capitalism into the electricity industry will turn these stodgy “socialist” industries into sleek, low-cost operations. However, do not look to American managers for efficiency. Southern’s largest subsidiary, Georgia Power spent over $1.6 billion on plant now “stranded”—an industry euphemism for plant that would be worthless but for regulatory charges imposed by regulators to cover failed investments.

Despite its sordid record. Southern is not an especially poorly-managed utility by American standards. Atrocious overspending on plant is the American norm and questionable business practices arc all too common." 

(Gregory Palast, Guardian, 21 September.)

Sky's the limit

The Brewers and Licensed Retailers Association is pressing the Office of Fair Trading to investigate Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB charges for showing their satellite programmes in pubs. Publicans claim that, since 1992, the basic subscription has risen 1,152 percent— from £5.99 to £75 a month.

The Scavenger

Just stop being manipulative (2022)

From the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blocking roads, throwing paint at buildings, gluing themselves to paintings, what’s it all about? It’s all in the title. Just Stop Oil. In other words, keep capitalism but just stop extracting and using oil. In itself, it’s a completely unrealistic proposition. Even socialist society would have to use some oil for some purposes, even if not to burn on a massive scale to generate electricity or to power trains and planes and cars, vans and lorries. It is essential as a lubricant and can be used to make other products such as plastics, paints and ointments. But under capitalism, taken literally the demand to stop extracting it is way off the scale of unachievable demands.

Capitalist production is not production with the rational aim of meeting human needs. It is uncontrollable production by separate, competing enterprises for sale with a view to profit. The battle of competition is won by those which can keep their costs the lowest, not lastingly by cutting corners but by using the cheapest suitable materials and by installing new machines or adopting new methods of production that reduce the cost per unit of what the enterprise is selling.

At the moment oil is the cheapest practical source of energy, when burned, for powering transport, whether by land, air or sea, and transport is essential for getting goods to market and workers to work. If oil was stopped today from being used for transport, society would literally grind to a halt; millions would die. Nor is any government going to adopt this on its own as currently available alternatives are either not scaled up sufficiently, nor reliable, or would increase costs massively and render enterprises operating in and from its territory completely uncompetitive.

It could be that those behind Just Stop Oil are demanding the maximum in order to get something less such as a more rapid transition to alternatives. That might well be why some look on their campaign with some sympathy. On the other hand, it could just be a tactic to get people to demand something that the campaign’s initiators know to be unrealistic and that when their followers realise this they will turn to demanding something more radical than just stopping the extraction of oil. This wouldn’t be the end of capitalism since those behind the campaign have explicitly rejected such talk. It is more likely to be questioning ‘industrial civilisation’ and returning to a ‘simpler’ way of life, to an imagined earlier stage of production for the market when this was to meet local needs.

But we know that the leaders of the campaign are more manipulative than this. The campaign was planned before the war in Ukraine when there was an expectation that no more licences would be granted to drill for oil in the North Sea. The leaders’ declared aim was to demand something they thought was going to be achieved anyway and to pass this off as a victory for the campaign, so as to build up the confidence of its activist foot soldiers and gain more of them and reach the figure they consider enough to bring about a change that will stop and reverse global warming.

They have declared that figure to be around 3 percent of the population engaging in non-violent civil disobedience. Roger Hallam, the group’s chief strategist if not leader, has been quoted as saying: ‘You can basically save the next generation with 2 per cent of the American population mobilised, engaged in an intense intra-relationship between high-level disruption and intense mobilisation… If you don’t upset people enough, then nothing happens’ (Times, 24 October).

Something has happened. The government has brought in a new law to deal with Just Stop Oil’s tactics, adding to the state’s arsenal of repressive laws. But this, too, will be part of the group’s leaders’ strategy to attract more activist followers, this time from those who object to non-violent protestors being jailed. Grist for the mill to reach the 2 or 3 percent. As if such a small number could impose its will on the majority or even win majority sympathy. Not even minority insurrectionists believe that.

Adam Buick

Out of the ground in Asia (2003)

From the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is plain that the invasion of Iraq was essentially caused by Western capitalism’s desire to control that country’s oil supplies. But the Middle East is not the only area with such resources, and other capitalist powers are keen to get their hands on whatever energy supplies they can.

China, for instance, used to pride itself on its oil industry, with “In industry, learn from Daqing”, referring to a celebrated oilfield, being part of a ubiquitous slogan in Maoist days. Since 1993, however, it has been a net importer of oil, and now imports 30 percent of its requirements. Existing fields are approaching depletion, and on one estimate, by 2020 at least half of the oil it needs will have to be imported. This is problematic for China’s rulers, in terms of both cost and security of supplies.

Hence the interest in exploring and exploiting the Tarim Basin, a vast area located in the extreme west of China, near the border with Kirghistan (see Beijing Review, 9 October). This has both oil and gas, possibly as much as 6 billion tons of the former and 8 trillion cubic meters of the latter. Oil production is already under way, but it is gas that is the current focus of interest. A pipeline, over 4000 kilometers long and costing untold billions of dollars, is being planned to carry natural gas from Tarim to the Shanghai area on China’s eastern coast. Even this, though, is only likely to provide thirty years’ worth of gas supplies.

Meanwhile, oil resources in Russia have also become a subject of dispute. The Angarsk area, near Irkutsk on the shore of Lake Baikal, is at the centre of a sizeable oilfield, and the Russian rulers, relatively strapped for cash as they are, see this as a resource they can sell in return for foreign exchange. However, the amount of oil there is unlikely to be enough to justify more than one pipeline to deliver it to prospective customers, so there is a scramble to see where that pipeline should go. China, of course, wants it to go to Daqing so that its own needs for oil can be met.

But Japan has another idea, a pipeline to Nakhodka, which is in Russia’s far east, just down the coast from Vladivostok and facing Japan. The Japanese Prime Minister visited Moscow in January this year, and the pipeline was one of the items on their agenda. And the United States, not content with getting hold of Iraq’s oil, has its own eyes on what is happening: a pipeline in the other direction to Murmansk, near Russia’s border with Finland, could lead to the oil being exported to the US instead.

Behind all this diplomacy lie two issues, apart from the general one of ensuring access to energy. One is diversification of supplies, so that problems in one area will not lead to a drastic cutback in availability of oil or gas. China, for instance, sees Kazakhstan as another potential supplier, and a Chinese company is already exploring there. Japan currently takes nearly 90 percent of its oil imports from the Persian Gulf area, and this is not a healthy situation as far as Japan’s capitalists are concerned. The other issue is seeking to prevent any one rival country from dominating oil supplies in a particular area. Japan, again, does not want China to control the lion’s share of oil in east Asia. Any country that was in such a situation of dominance would quite likely have the whip-hand over its competitors.

The availability and sensible use of energy is an issue for any society. But under capitalism, questions of strategy and inter-nation rivalry far outweigh environmental and other concerns. We cannot predict whether there will be an Oil War in central or eastern Asia in the near future, but there is no doubt that this is one area of the world to watch very closely.

Paul Bennett

Nuclear fusion power (1983)

From the August 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The difficulties currently being encountered in the generation of electric-power by nuclear fission, highlighted by some of the evidence being presented to the current Sizewell Inquiry, makes its long term future uncertain. From the ecological point of view, fission now stands condemned and we can safely say that it will have no part in the sane socialist society of the future. This situation is leading to a renewed interest in alternative sources of energy but current progress in one of these — nuclear fusion — has been limited by a lack of financial support, as the Scientific American reported in its July 1972 issue.

The source of energy in nuclear fusion is the same as in nuclear fission; that is. by the transformation of mass into energy. Fission takes place by the splitting of heavy elements such as uranium, and is the basis of the A-bomb. This connection with the arms trade has helped to keep fission power going despite its disappointing economic performance. In contrast, fusion involves the combination of light elements such as isotopes of hydrogen, and is the basis of the H-bomb, where the reaction is triggered by the explosion of an A-bomb. This method is obviously unsuitable for industrial use. Fusion reactions take place continuously on the sun and other large stars.

On the surface, the prospects for nuclear fusion look sky high. There is virtually an unlimited supply of low cost fuel in the form of heavy water (deuterium oxide) in the ocean. The end product of the fusion reaction is radiation free (but this does not apply to all intermediate products) unlike the hellholes where fission wastes are stored. The low mass and volume of the fuel needed makes plant layout and siting relatively problem-free. Handling and storage areas can be very small and installations need not be tied to port and railway facilities.

The nuclei of the fuel atoms are positively charged and so repel each other just as the like poles of two magnets do. In order to overcome this repulsion and put the nuclei close enough together for a fusion reaction to occur, a level of kinetic energy must be imparted to them, which requires a temperature of about 90 million degrees centigrade. In the H-bomb this is the function which the A-bomb performs. At such temperatures the gaseous state is transcended and the material becomes a charge-dominated collection of ionised matter known as plasma which at high temperature cannot be confined by material walls and has instead to be held in position by strong electromagnetic forces. In the search for a controlled fusion reaction for industrial use the crux lies in the design of a magnetic field to contain the plasma in stable equilibrium. This is the main reason why fusion research is so expensive. Attention is now being given to a laser-induced fusion technique, which requires no containment of plasma although the requirement to generate enormous temperatures remains. At the present time it is not possible to say definitely that a satisfactory solution will eventually be found, even granted adequate funding.

The radioactive intermediate product of the fusion reaction is tritium, another isotope of hydrogen. Tritium is not found in nature and has a half life of 12.3 years. It permeates metal walls at high temperature and containment will require careful detailed design. The vacuum wall and blanket structure will become radioactive during operation and require long-term disposal after the end of their working life. The internal plant structure can only be handled and repaired by complex remote control facilities. There are clearly hazards associated with high pressure, high temperature materials and high magnetic fields.

Optimistic forecasts of the nuclear fusion future should be judged against this information. The prospects of this type of work being performed in the capitalist commercial environment are not very strong, to say the least.

E C Edge

Material World: The pimps of war (2023)

The Material World Column from the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Come, you masters of war

You that build the big guns

You that build the death planes

You that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks

                 (Masters of War, Bob Dylan)

For a capitalist, Winston Churchill’s saying ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ has never been so apt as in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war. Businesses are making profits from the conflict in Ukraine from the increase demand for liquefied natural gas. Cheniere Energy, America’s largest LNG exporter, says about 70 percent of shipments from its facilities in Texas and Louisiana have gone to Europe, compared with roughly 30 percent last year.

‘The country that is most profiting from this war is the US because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,’ observed a senior European Union official (politi.co/3OYBXj8).

As Europe attempted to reduce its reliance on Russian energy, the reduction in gas from Russia meant acquiring new suppliers. In stepped the United States but the price the Europeans have to pay is almost four times higher than the price for American customers.

Beatrice Mathieu, head of the economy department of the French magazine L’Express, explains:

‘Washington’s unwavering support for Ukraine makes the United States the big winner in the global stage without a single soldier needing to set foot onto Ukrainian soil,’ with undeniable geo-strategic, economic, military and political gains, she said (bit.ly/3gWhLBT).

This view coincides with the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, who accuses the United States of prolonging the conflict because of economic reasons:

‘The desire to skim the cream through the mass sale of military equipment and LNG supplies: nothing personal, just business’ (bit.ly/3H5D1Qa).

Mere Moscow propaganda, one could easily suspect, if it was not for the fact that President Biden has also rebuked oil companies for ‘profiteering’ from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

‘It’s time for these companies to stop war profiteering… At a time of war, any company receiving historic windfall profits like this has a responsibility to act beyond the narrow self-interest of its executives and shareholders’ (on.ft.com/3H5DbqK).

It’s all got too much for the EU. Germany’s economy minister has called on Washington to show more ‘solidarity’ and help reduce energy costs. French president Macron said high US gas prices were not ‘friendly’ and has talked of a ‘double standard’ being created by the ‘super-profits’ of energy producers (on.ft.com/3UuA8M3).

The war in Ukraine has reinforced America’s role as the arsenal of the world. American arms manufacturers and many other armament corporations expect a big-time bonanza by providing weaponry to countries eager to boost their defences against Russia. There is likely to be a rise in orders to replenish military stocks, from various European countries, in particular for rockets and artillery.

Germany, for example, has announced an extra €100bn to modernise its military capability. Finland, an aspiring new candidate member of NATO, decided to grant an additional €1.7bn to arms and other defence material purchases this year alone:

‘A very significant share of it will go to purchases from the US’ Governmental Counsellor Iikka Marttila from Finland’s Defence Ministry said (yhoo.it/3uigdoW).

American isolationists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene have claimed too much money is being spent on Ukraine: ‘Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine’ and ‘Our country comes first’. But that is just exactly it. War is proving very profitable for the USA and its business leaders know it.

Russia’s war on Ukraine, both of them major food exporters, the effect of less abundant harvests in Ukraine, and the financial complications imposed by sanctions upon Russia have resulted in American producers increasing their exports of maize to Europe.

This calls into question whether food price inflation can be attributed solely to a shortage. The world is experiencing a food price crisis rather than a food supply crisis. Huge multinational food corporations are reporting record profits (bit.ly/3H3taup).

War tends to establish hegemony rivalries among nations in a certain geographic area. Russia paints the US and EU as its main adversaries with Ukraine portrayed as a pawn in a proxy war. In response Russia, as an imperialist superpower, used its military might to impose its will upon Ukraine to defend its ‘privilege’ to dominate the region. Western interests proclaim their ‘right’ to expand their influence where they deem fit, bringing nation-states into conflict. And while politicians prattle on about the morality and ethics of a ‘just’ war, corporate investors view the cost and pain through the prism of profits and dividends.

ALJO

Proper Gander: Profits and power (2022)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

With gas and electricity bills rising, along with the cost of near-enough everything else, the most immediate concern for many of us is how and whether we can pay. A recent edition of BBC One’s Panorama featured households already finding it difficult to cope. A couple with a young son in Birmingham with a just-above-average income of £31,000pa were paying £100 a month for their energy a year ago, and now the amount is £250. Alongside all their other expenses, ‘it’s just getting tighter and tighter’. In Bournemouth, another couple care for their daughter with cerebral palsy. The machines which keep her alive all use electricity which they can’t afford if their bills increase further, having already trebled in a year. Her father says ‘I think it’s quite obscene for energy companies to be posting profits in the billions when we are struggling to actually pay our bills. And I think energy companies are isolated from the reality of a family like ours’.

Between April and June 2022, BP made nearly £7 billion in profit, while Shell raked in £9.4 billion. Over a year, BP has paid £10 billion and Shell £15 billion to their shareholders as dividends and share buybacks. Bland statements from both companies say they will provide financial support to those most vulnerable and are investing in low carbon energy production. At other times, though, their bosses have been more honest about their aims: BP’s Chief Executive has described the company as a cash machine for its shareholders.

In the edition of Panorama: The Energy Crisis: Who’s Cashing In?, reporter Bronagh Munro gives an introduction to the current context of sky-high fuel bills for us alongside astronomical profits for the energy companies. Gas prices increased as an effect of the pandemic, and then again due to the war in Ukraine. But, given that the UK hasn’t been dependent on Russia for gas imports while European countries have been, why has the UK been hit the hardest this side of the continent? Whether or not leaving the European Union has had an impact isn’t discussed. Instead, an explanation is found in how the energy market is shaped by policies such as the link between electricity and gas prices.

Munro explains how the wholesale price of electricity tracks the price of gas. The 40 percent of electricity which is generated from gas sets the price of all electricity, regardless of how it’s produced. Now that the price of gas has risen, so will the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors (15 percent of that in the UK) and wind farms, for example, even though their own costs haven’t increased. EDF, the French company which owns nuclear reactors in the UK, won’t be able to benefit from this yet though, as they’re locked into contracts at a previous lower price. Supplier Centrica, on the other hand, has doubled its prices in the past year with its profits having grown fivefold. Also, producers of so-called ‘green’ energy receive subsidies through the government, adding £6 billion to our bills. These payments have further bolstered the coffers of companies such as Greencoat wind generators, which has quadrupled its profits in a year.

The wholesale price of gas and electricity has climbed enough to make previous price caps on our bills irrelevant. With wholesale costs so high, the price cap would make it difficult for suppliers to buy in energy and sell it on to us customers while also making a profit. The limit on how much we can be charged for gas and electricity is set by Ofgem, the non-ministerial government department whose stated aim is to protect the interests of ‘energy consumers’. So, the cap has been adjusted to higher amounts more in line with the wholesale amount. One of Ofgem’s previous directors and board members, Christine Farnish, is briefly interviewed for Panorama about her resignation from her roles because she disagreed with decisions about the price cap, saying that they benefited companies more than consumers. She says that the price cap is no longer fit for purpose and only the government can have the solution.

The programme was first broadcast only a few days before Prime Minister Liz Truss announced that a new ‘Energy Price Guarantee’ effective from 1 October 2022 would limit typical household energy bills to £2,500 per year. This doesn’t mean that the wholesale price will change though, so the difference will be funded through government to the tune of around £90 billion, with a further £60 billion to subsidise businesses’ bills. Those on the Left have criticised this policy, arguing that it will be funded by more government borrowing to be paid back through more taxation on the working class, rather than by a windfall tax on energy companies’ profits.

However the money is shunted around, and wherever the burden of taxation really falls, the structural problem remains. While the companies which produce and supply energy are owned by a minority to make profits, they will follow strategies which aim to maximise those profits. Although these strategies, policies, reforms can’t control the economy, as shown by the price cap not impacting on the wholesale gas price, they can help the capitalist class benefit, even through the economic turbulence from the pandemic and now war in Ukraine.

Programmes like Panorama are useful to highlight issues and explain some of the economic context. But they stop short of considering the class divide central to any capitalist economy, or any kind of alternative. In a socialist society, energy production wouldn’t be measured in money and subject to the vagaries of either a profit-driven market or fraught relations between nation states. Instead, the only considerations would be the practicalities of generating sufficient power for people’s needs and wants in an environmentally sustainable way.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: A fair price for power? (2022)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month the limit on what utility companies could charge for gas and electricity was due to go up by 80 percent. In fixing the limit, Ofgem takes into account the price that utility companies have to pay when buying gas on the international market. This has shot up, the main reason being the bans and restrictions on buying gas from Russia which the US and its military allies imposed in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s counter-retaliation.

For many decades importing gas from Russia has been an obvious choice for European industry and energy suppliers, obvious because it has been the cheapest. Reducing the supply from there has meant that other sources have had to be found which are more expensive and whose price has gone up still more due to the sudden unexpected increase in demand. When the international price of the gas goes up, Ofgem’s remit is to calculate how much utility companies can pass on to households up to a limit that preserves the level of profits that they had been making.

Having to pay more for energy represents a reduction in workers’ standard of living as it means we have less to spend on the other things we must consume to reproduce the labour power we sell to some employer. If nothing is done, the inevitable consequence is labour market pressure to increase wages. In view of the size of the increase, there was also the prospect of widespread social unrest.

The government therefore decided to temporarily subsidise energy bills through limiting the price that utility companies can charge to a lower level than calculated by Ofgem, itself paying the difference between this and the international price. This is going to cost them a massive amount, which they propose to raise by borrowing. Even so, gas and electricity prices are still going up, by ‘only’ 27 percent and will be twice as much as last winter.

One of the protest groups that sprang up was Don’t Pay which called on consumers to ‘strike’ from 1 October by cancelling the direct debits to their utility company. They also asked, ‘How do we achieve a permanent solution to the energy crisis?’ and replied ‘A Fair Price for Power.’ This assumes that power should have a price. That makes them less radical than one Tory ex-minister who had floated the idea of allowing households a quota of free energy (‘Give households a free fuel quota, ex-minister urges’, Times, 1 September).

What is fair and what is not on any issue is a matter of opinion but, if we look at the logic of capitalist commodity exchange, a ‘fair’ price for a commodity would be its average cost of production plus the going rate of profit. It is possible that Don’t Pay have something else in mind, such as the government taking over the utilities and charging cost price or something less. Such a ‘permanent’ solution assumes that the capitalist wages-prices-profits system too is permanent. It is still thinking inside the capitalist box.

But what is fair about having to pay to heat our homes? We have to pay for this only because we are excluded from ownership of productive resources and have to work for wages out of which to buy what we need to keep ourselves in working order, including keeping warm. There is nothing fair about that. From a worker’s point of view, there is no such thing as a ‘fair price for power’ any more than there is a ‘fair day’s wage’.

But there is a permanent solution. It’s a society based on common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use not profit, where gas, electricity, water, telephone, broadband and all other utilities would be provided free of charge.

Pathfinders: Radioactive days (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radioactive days

Anyone who expressed shock, surprise, horror or helpless mirth at the government’s decision to give the go-ahead to a new round of nuclear power stations in the UK deserves a slap and a strong injunction to wake up and smell the plutonium. This was always going to happen, so get used to it. Some people may have thought, in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and the revelations of gross and grotesque safety infringements by nuclear companies in the 70’s and 80’s, that nuclear’s goose was cooked, and that public opinion was irreversibly set against its comeback. Such optimists underestimate the power of creeping propaganda by the state and overestimate the collective memory of the public. What, besides a lot of bilge about new safety procedures and new ideas about waste disposal, has really swung it for the nuclear lobby is the increasing fear that we, in the West, are either going to be hostages to the mullahs in Iran or those commies in Venezuela for oil, or hostages to the Russian mafia for gas (who have shown themselves quite capable of turning off the taps if they don’t get the price they want).

Blair’s government have played a clever game of buttering up the public with so-called energy reviews, which were really about acclimatizing public opinion to the inevitable. The greens have been effectively neutralized, being unable to find a way out of the environmental frying pan of fossil fuels without hitting the fire of nuclear fission, while emerging research into wind power has set back alarmingly the time necessary for this technology  to start being a net carbon saver, from an estimate of 18 months by the wind turbine industry itself to between 8 and 16 years by independent researchers, on a projected 25 year turbine life span (New Scientist, July 8).

 

And could there be another and darker reason why nuclear is back on the agenda and the same money is not going to be spent either on renewables, or even more sensibly, insulating houses and finding ways to reduce consumption? The original reason for the nuclear programme was that not only could you run steam turbines with the resulting water vapour but you could also build bombs to vaporize your political and economic rivals, and the reasoning still holds good, in a world of ageing nuclear arsenals and an emergent superpower, China, whose expected ruthlessness in suppressing global competitors may be judged by its ruthlessness in suppressing its own people.

But the bitterest pill for environmentalists to swallow is that the government’s case on nuclear is actually pretty hard to fault. Renewables provide about 4 per cent of the UK’s energy supply and the most massive expansion programme imaginable is not going to increase that amount to a significant level for decades, whereas the threat of strangulation from global suppliers of oil and gas is immediate and stark, as are the spiralling price rises.

While the USA and the UK may with impunity invade Iraq when its chieftain starts monkeying around with oil supplies, the same tactic is hardly going to work in Venezuela, heavily backed by China, or in Russia, which nobody has ever invaded without immediately and solemnly wishing they hadn’t. There are no other emergent technologies. Fusion is still decades away, and always will be, according to the old joke. Cold fusion is, according to the accepted wisdom, just a joke. As hydro goes bigger, the cracks in the dams start to appear, much to the embarrassment of Chinese engineers, and the energy of wind appears to be best harnessed by building on, and effectively destroying, millions of tons of peat bog, itself a massive carbon sink.

If socialism were established tomorrow, the question of nuclear energy would take a back-seat, behind more pressing questions of food production. But it would re-emerge, amid a hotly disputed debate over energy consumption and reduction. A socialist society which had to find energy out of nowhere and with no time to develop renewables, might conceivably go nuclear, at least for a time. But it is not a racing certainty, or even an ambling probability.

If one were to take away the factors of capitalist competitive production which so completely influence the present controversy one would be left with a more rational basis for planning, which would take into account global minimum energy requirements, both domestic and industrial, rather than global optimum industrial performance to outdo business rivals. If Europe, for example, didn’t have to stay one jump ahead of South East Asia and China in manufacturing stakes, and if China wasn’t in such an all-fired rush to industrialise simply to compete on global markets, the question of energy might be approached in an altogether calmer and more globally sustainable way. But in capitalism, the energy question is really one of global dominance. The power at stake is really political and economic. Whether the source of that power is from nuclear fission, fossil fuels, or farting Friesians, is entirely beside the point.

The Sting

The ongoing war between mainstream scientists and the homeopathic community, which recently saw the Royal Veterinary Society obliged to withdraw a list of homeopathic vets from its website after a storm of protests from the scientific community, has begun to assume farcical proportions. Now holiday makers are returning home with malaria after refusing conventional anti-malarial drugs in favour of homeopathic ‘alternatives’ (BBC Online, July 13).

An undercover investigation by the group Sense About  Science and BBC’s Newsnight programme revealed that homeopathic consultants were telling people they didn’t need the ‘horrible’ conventional drugs and could safely use homeopathic medications, which on analysis turned out to be 99.99 per cent water with a virtually undetectable level of quinine. When challenged by Newsnight, the clinics claimed this was a mistake, and that clients were told to consult their doctors, a claim not supported by the secretly recorded interview transcripts.

However, all this doesn’t seem quite fair on the hardworking homeopaths. Being in a sympathetic mood, Pathfinders offers the following explanation: what the clinics really meant to say was that their remedies were indeed perfectly effective, but only against homeopathic mosquitoes. The fact that mosquitoes are usually in the habit of delivering large and potentially deadly doses of malaria is a disappointing reflection on their unchristian natures but this can hardly be blamed on homeopathic clinics, who are only trying to help.

Paddy Shannon