Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB, tells the New Statesman’s Rachel Wearmouth…

We import a huge amount of fracked gas and we import methane from America, which is basically fracked gas… Now we have a choice: we are either going to import gas that has been fracked somewhere else in the world and put on diesel-bombing ships or we take responsibility for our own carbon. If it can be done safely, and that is demonstrable, then it’s time that we took responsibility for our own carbon emissions. …the idea that the future is going to be all about electricity, or that we’re moving to a future simply about renewables, is just not true. … listen to unions that are in the energy sector, such as the GMB.

We should not get caught up in a bourgeois environmental debate driven by the bourgeois environmental lobby …The debate on the left needs to seriously talk about climate change, but it needs to be focused on jobs. And the renewables industry, and many of those who espouse it in politics, have no interest in jobs for working class communities. And we should stop pretending that we’re in an alliance with them. The big winners from renewables have been the wealthy and big corporate interests. Invariably the only jobs that are created when wind farms get put up, particularly onshore wind, have been jobs in public relations and jobs for lawyers.