‘Transition’ From Oil? Our Idea Now Looks Like A Delusion

People And Nature ☭ Neil Rothnie, retired oil worker and climate activist, reflects on his participation in Extinction Rebellion and what we have, and have not, achieved.

“The rebellion starts here”, I wrote in October 2019. “There must be non violent direct action aimed at big oil, and targeting oil production.”

4-February-2025

The article, North Sea oil and gas: the elephant in the room, was originally a leaflet that I took to London, to Extinction Rebellion’s festival of rebellion. It takes about three minutes to read. My old friend Simon, who writes this blog, asked if he could reproduce it.

Demonstrators against the Rosebank oil project at the Scottish high court in November.
Photo from Stop Rosebank’s twitter feed

At that time I was four years’ retired, after 40 years as an offshore oil worker. I was experiencing a personal renaissance, as Extinction Rebellion (XR) crashed onto the streets.

My article wasn’t particularly radical or controversial. Certainly not to most XR rebels who were its target audience. And it still today, at least in part, reflects what is a fairly mainstream position in the climate movement.

I wasn’t really focussed on XR’s demands as such – e.g. getting the government to “tell the truth”. Even then I wasn’t convinced that that was very likely, but I certainly didn’t disagree. I knew next to nothing about the popular assemblies that XR was calling for, or about whether Net Zero was remotely achievable by 2025.

But I’d been hugely impressed by the way Extinction Rebellion had burst onto the scene, blocking bridges over the Thames the year before. That’s when I’d become aware of the movement.

By this time, I was troubled about global warming and thought that it would take the masses to intervene in this existential issue. Really all I wanted to do was to bring my own experience to bear on the situation.

I’d been flabbergasted that many rebels I’d spoken to had little awareness of the North Sea oilfield’s existence.

I felt that the “fossil fuels” that were understood to be the major source of greenhouse gases when burned, were in fact still pretty much a “concept” – something in their heads, rather than real stuff mined by real people in our patch.

My article called on the climate movement to turn towards the oil workers with a call for a “just transition”.

Just transition of course was not my formulation, but was a concept that I swallowed whole, and expected would appeal to the offshore oil workforce on some level and might be the basis for workers to mobilise around.

This, after all, was the workforce that had engaged in a huge struggle after the 167 deaths by burning and drowning on the Piper Alpha platform, albeit 30 years previously.

In what now seems like an age since 2019, we’ve seen virtually no response from oil and gas workers, despite a concerted turn towards them by parts of the climate movement.

Perhaps the one concrete thing is that we know that they would be more than happy to transfer from offshore oilfield to offshore wind field … if they can keep the lifestyle and the wages.

But the workers are still in lock step with their trade unions (the minority that are actually organised) and with their employers, with Big Oil globally, and with our government.

Short of a massive storm event on the North Sea creating another major tragedy, it’s hard to see this unholy alliance unravelling any time soon.

But while I’m not embarrassed by the 2019 article, I don’t think it reflects the reality we’re experiencing, never mind the future we’re facing. That is why I came back and asked Simon for the use of his blog again.

Right now, everywhere, we have an accelerating pattern of disasters, intermittently destroying lives and the natural environment and by all accounts driving the tendency towards mass extinctions of species.

We’ve seen a succession of global heating-induced disasters rock the planet. The floods in Pakistan, the fires in the Amazon, and today in California, stand out for me. It’s relentless. You’ll have your own list.

Can I tell the future? Well obviously not. But, as far as any layman can understand the climate science consensus, it seems that we’re way way further down the road to a radically different global climate, and massive changes to local weather that cause mayhem and misery.

My characterisation of the industry/government strategy as “business as usual” was, and remains, accurate, I think.

The court decision last week, that the process that gave the go-ahead for the development of the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields on the North Sea was unlawful, should pose absolutely no problem for the industry that was complicit in the hanging of Ken Saro-wiwa, and has been involved in human and ecological atrocities across the globe.

Not much of a problem either, I’d have thought, for Rachel Reeves and Sir Starmer with their Growth & Growth & Growth mantra.

The concept of a transition – never mind “just” – from fossil fuels to renewables, led in any part by the massed ranks of the proletariat self-organised in the offshore unions, now looks like an ongoing exercise in self delusion.

Long before XR was set up, in 1989-90, I was desperate to get some sort of an idea of the nature of the relationship of oil and capitalism – something that might inform me whether the rank and file Offshore Industry Liaison Committee (OILC) could chew what we’d bitten off by organising strikes and platform occupations after the Piper Alpha disaster. [Note. Here is an interview with Neil about this, and an archive of the rank and file paper he edited, Blowout.]

I was looking for some sort of an understanding of the possibilities and opportunities. Where did any of this lead?

Thirty-five years later, and along comes Adam Hanieh with his book Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market (reviewed here). He says, as I read him, that the capital system and fossil fuels are inextricably entwined.

His book begs the question, at least for me, of the likelihood that the capital system can turn off oil and gas, and replace the world’s energy needs from renewables, before climate chaos becomes the norm.

The vision this question conjures up, in my imagination, is of someone ripping out their own heart with one hand, while trying to construct a replacement organ with the other.

Meanwhile Jean-Baptiste Fressoz tells us, in his book More and More and More: an all-consuming history of energy (Allen Lane, 2024), that that holy grail of the climate movement, a “transition” to renewables, is in fact a pipe dream, a chimera.

There never was, it seems, in human history a precedent – an energy transition – corresponding in any way to the fantasy we hold of fossil fuels being replaced by renewables. Oil didn’t replace coal. Coal didn’t replace wood. It’s just been “more and more and more”.

The history, Fressoz insists, is of “symbiotic” relationships. Burning coal leads to using (more) wood. The exploitation of oil and gas drives (more) wood and (more) coal to be used, and crucially, renewable energy adds to and encourages the use of (more) wood and coal and oil and gas in such a way that Fressoz sees no plausible scenario where global heating might remain within 1.5, or 2.0 degrees C.

We’re looking at “three degrees C – a catastrophic increase” he says. “How can we make do with less and less and less?” he asks.

And Brett Christophers, in his book The Price is Wrong: why capitalism won’t save the planet (reviewed here) challenges another growing orthodoxy. The idea is firmly out there that now that the price of renewables is right, that renewables are “cheaper” than fossil fuels.

This, the argument goes, will inevitably, according to the laws of the market, mean that renewables will supplant fossil fuels. Only who would have guessed that in fact “the price is wrong”, and that all along it’s been profits, not prices, that drive capitalism?

Let’s suppose that you’ve checked out these authors for yourself, and found that my very crude argument, largely drawn from my reading of them, casts reasonable doubt on the idea that there is a snowball’s chance in hell of the current “powers that be” getting us out of this mess.

Then your next step might be to have a look around for the Leninist parties that are going to wrest global power from the current crop of megalomaniacs and oligarchs and downright genocidal bastards. Where are the forces that will lead us over the barricades, kalashnikovs in hand, to capture the state (everywhere) and plan our way out of this one?

Perhaps that’s not the place to look. Perhaps it’s going to be more complicated.

If you are, like I am, disabused of almost every certainty you ever held dear, then there is at least one step that might help us “take care of ourselves”. No! This is not about Lush bath bombs (if they are still a thing). It’s not about playing Radio 3 in the mornings instead of exploding from bed shouting and swearing at Radio 4’s climate-deniers-lite.

April 2012: Volunteers running a centre where Hurricane Sandy survivors could
stock up on staples. Photo by Liz Roll/ Creative Commons

“Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire” is the subtitle of Adam Greenfield’s book Lifehouse (Verso, 2024). The “care” he’s talking about is putting human need, human relations and self organisation at the centre of our practice – in a period when it would seem that we are going to have to learn to survive and make worthwhile lives with less and less and less.

And all this in the face of escalating climate emergencies and the inevitable breakdowns they provoke.

The book is rooted in Greenfield’s own experience as part of Occupy Sandy, which had morphed out of Occupy Wall Street, organising relief to the victims of the hurricane that hit New York in 2012.

He draws material together from the way people have been self organising in the face of inadequate official support, abandonment and just downright open hostility, in places as disparate as Rojava in Kurdistan; Jackson, Mississippi, in the USA; Greece in 2010, during the debt crisis that exploded health care; and in California, where the Black Panthers organised from the late 60s to the early 80s.

The book is “optimistic”, not “hopeful”. Greenfield inveighs against hope, and lays out a rationale and a blueprint for a practice, and a physical space, that offers us a place to organise and the chance of shelter and community and dignity.

This is a rant, not a series of book reviews. And it may turn out to be no more prescient than that one from 2019.

But is Greenfield, broadly speaking, right? No point in just hoping so. The point of his book is, it seems to me, not just to understand the world but to change it. I’ve heard that somewhere before. A first step might be to have a look. 4 February 2025.

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