Shortage of Experts and Low Pay 'Major Barriers To UK's Net Zero Future' (theguardian.com) 94
Staff shortages, a lack of specialist personnel and low pay are major barriers to achieving net zero, according to workers in the UK environment sector. From a report: The trade union Prospect, many members of which work in the climate and environment sector, received more than 500 responses to a survey on workplace trends. Widespread shortages of expert staff and reductions in specialist personnel in recent years had seriously affected workload levels, the study found. Four in 10 workers said they had seen a reduction in the numbers of expert staff in the past year, and 35% said they had experienced a significant increase in workload.
More than 100 respondents provided additional comments. "I really like the people I work with and the value of the work I do," one wrote, "but I could be paid four times as much for my skills in a different industry -- one that is bad or indifferent to the environment. We can't solve environmental problems or net zero unless we have people to do the work." The reduction in expertise has led to important tasks being assigned to inexperienced staff, according to respondents, with 36% saying specialist jobs are being allocated to untrained workers. Low pay is a significant concern across the sector, which has a large percentage of specialised and highly educated staff. Despite the skilled nature of many roles and 20% of survey participants having a PhD or equivalent, 38% of respondents report earning $38,000 or less.
More than 100 respondents provided additional comments. "I really like the people I work with and the value of the work I do," one wrote, "but I could be paid four times as much for my skills in a different industry -- one that is bad or indifferent to the environment. We can't solve environmental problems or net zero unless we have people to do the work." The reduction in expertise has led to important tasks being assigned to inexperienced staff, according to respondents, with 36% saying specialist jobs are being allocated to untrained workers. Low pay is a significant concern across the sector, which has a large percentage of specialised and highly educated staff. Despite the skilled nature of many roles and 20% of survey participants having a PhD or equivalent, 38% of respondents report earning $38,000 or less.
Plant more trees and plants. (Score:2)
Photosynthesis doesn't require experts, just gardeners.
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but UK will find a way to tax photosynthesis.
On a more serious note, people may be hesitant to go into a field often knocked around by political whims and budget hiccups. Either they need to be paid higher than an average engineer to compensate for the risk, and/or have an education that prepares them for "backup careers" when the green biz slumps.
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I don't think so, there are to may "experts" at the moment. We need action not more experts telling use what to do, but we need to actually start doing things.
On a less serious note, really unions think people need to be paid more, knock me down with a feather.
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That is pretty much the road to hell. "Doing something" is only going to make things worse.
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What experts and specialists would you hire at any given average company making widgets and generating money for its shareholders, etc?
What would said experts and specialists actually do in terms of real job at a regular company?
What would the resume experience and job description requiring skills be like for these positions?
Since this is all pretty much new stuff being seriously talked about in common news and conversations, this is a "young" field.
How many years experience do
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> You have to plant the right plants in the right location for them to be effective and not add to other problems such as maintenance, invasive, habitat destruction, etc.
The nice lady at the greenhouse knows all this stuff, just ask her when you buy your seeds. No need for high paid consultants.
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These are the people who write into Gardener's Question Time because the bamboo they planted has taken over the garden. To have a hope of offsetting emissions will require non-native, high-growth species like bamboo and would require wholesale replacement of existing habitats and somewhere sequester the output without impoverishing the soil. If you think NIMBYs object to wind turbines, planting the whole of Dartmoor, Exmoor and the North York Moors with bamboo would cause much more of an objection. And it still wouldn't be enough plant production.
And even that isn't likely to be effective. Research into the actual dynamics of carbon sequestration was shockingly little to nonexistent before roughly 10-15 years ago, when people at various universities began either questioning the wisdom of, or attempting to quantify the effect of, wholesale planting of large currently open areas with trees or other plants. What's been increasingly found is that a tremendous amount of carbon is sequestered very deep into the earth via microorganisms, we're talking ten
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> To offset the carbon output of the USA would require foresting all of the USA
So you're advocating for not offsetting it at all, since you can't offset all of it.
Cute. You must be a highly paid expert. You speak like one.
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So you're advocating for not offsetting it at all, since you can't offset all of it.
No, that's rather twisted logic. I am simply pointing out that it can't be, as you seem to be suggesting, the only response. I'm not an expert but I personally know people who are.
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First, do you think these experts really know what they are doing, or will be held to account that the trees planted where not right, I very much doubt it. They would have taken their fees and left. An expert came and "fixed" my mothers heater, charged $300 for the privilege and nothing improved. I cleaned it and it has been working ever since.
Nobody truly knows what the long term effects of planting a particular plant will be. The environment is hugely complicated the only way we are actually going to get
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> Nobody truly knows what the long term effects of planting a particular plant will be.
It's not really hard to look at what is native to the region, and plant more of it. People make a bigger deal out of it than it is. Nature has been planting trees on its own without experts for millions of years, yet somehow we're in need of 500k$ a year consulting fees to do it now ?
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Do you realize gardening is a skill? I don't think insulting every gardener on the planet is terribly smart.
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> Do you realize gardening is a skill?
You realize not all skills are created equal right ? Nor do they all fetch high monetary compensation on the market.
The fact is, you can probably hire quite a few good gardeners to maintain a garden that will offset more CO2 than your high paid consultant and his powerpoints discussing Net Zero planning ever will for the same price.
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Your idea of doing nothing because one solution doesn't 100% offset all the carbon means you don't understand practical solutions.
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Actually gardening is quite difficult to get right if you need to plant and then let grow without further maintenance and long-term. And that is the only thing that would help a bit. Not solve the problem by a far cry, but at least not make it worse.
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Now think trees...
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At the risk of asking really personal info...you just pegged my curiosity meter to the right.
Can you give an idea on what this job is and how much it pays?
Do you own your own house or do you rent?
It pays enough to fund you doing "fun stuff"? What all does that inv
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Yo
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Indeed. And that is when you plant them all successfully. The "plant some trees" argument is essentially a lie by misdirection. The numbers just do not work out at all. Not the only warm fuzzy fantasies the deniers and the stupid use to tell themselves that things are not that bad and we have real options besides stopping to produce greenhouse gasses now.
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As I said, the numbers do not work. Sure, if you have 10'000 years, then trees plant themselves. In some areas.
But you lack if insight into trees is just on the same level as you lack of insight into nuclear power. No surprise.
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To have a high density, fast-growth forest that has a hope of pulling significant amounts of carbon out, you can't wait for them to plant themselves. That you suggested this means you don't at all understand the scale.
Indeed. This person does not understand numbers and scale at all. Also why he keeps pushing nuclear. For example, at present consumption rates, nuclear fuel roughly mineable at present cost runs out in about 50 years. At that time it will become massively more expensive. Now, if his pipe-dream of nuclear everywhere would be realized, current-price nuclear fuel would run out in about 5 years as only 10% of world electricity generation is nuclear. Also there would be massive problems even mining the fuel, mas
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Actually, the "roughly 50 year" estimation at current consumption is based on data from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Look under "Primary sources". The actual estimates range from 42 years to about 100 years, with none being much higher.
I have to admit I was surprised it is _this_ low. It seems the more we know, the worse nuclear looks for power generation. The limited reserves do prevent large scale economically feasible nuclear power generation in the foreseeable future though and there is no rea
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Actually tree-planting is very hard and does require real experts to do it. Not the actual putting them into the ground, but the selection which trees, where to plant them and when. That is why a lot of tree-planting projects fail in the short-term. And for the longer term, it is even harder, because you need accurate localized climate-change predictions. That said, even doing it right is not accomplishing much. Now, if we were 1000 years earlier in the process, then yes, that could do it. But now? Not so m
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Photosynthesis doesn't require experts, just gardeners.
Planting trees absolutely requires experts, or you end up with dead forests, damaged ground, depleted water resources, etc.
Also you can't plant your way out of our current predicament. They aren't nearly the carbon sink you think they are. You can plant literally 10s of thousands of trees and you'll have offset a single construction project by a single company in a single city. It's not viable.
Yes we should be planting trees (helps against deforestation, urban heating, soil damage, among many things) but yo
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Plants are friends AND food. English food is, well, if you've been there you'll understand. Loads of animal products.
A union claims its members are underpaid!! (Score:2)
Well - there's a surprise... 'I could be paid four times as much for my skills in a different industry'. Really?
Re:A union claims its members are underpaid!! (Score:5, Informative)
You quip but yes you could get paid 4x as much in an only slightly different industry. They are competing with talent for oil and gas companies. The expert salaries listed in TFA are far lower than a first year graduate engineer would get paid in oil and gas, or chemicals, or pharma and the skillset isn't too different.
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That would be because competing experts you mention do productive things elevating society, whereas these experts do destructive things degrading society. If you enable more people to move around affordably and easily, or more goods to move around affordably and easily, or less people to freeze in the winter to death, you're a constructive expert. If you make it so less people can move around affordably and easily, goods have to be moved around more expensively and with more difficulty, and more people free
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You still haven't noticed that salaries have nothing to do with how much someone contributes to society?
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Massive in depth explanation needed as to why you believe something this fundamentally absurd.
Preferably without quoting the likes of Marx and his countless apostles, who's entire thesis has been tested against reality and found false on merits, or relying on a handful of outliers to pretend that this invalidates the system in place for countless millenia among our entire species which is largely culture-agnostic.
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If you enable more people to move around affordably and easily, or more goods to move around affordably and easily, or less people to freeze in the winter to death, you're a constructive expert. If you make it so less people can move around affordably and easily, goods have to be moved around more expensively and with more difficulty, and more people freeze to death in winter, you're a destructive expert.
Where do you live? Seriously, your comment claiming that this has anything to do with productivity or mobility shows signs that you have had a stroke and I want to call you an ambulance right now.
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Finland. Pretty much every small nation resident of note has instinctual understanding of these things, because we can't afford imperial largesse that rich imperial citizens often mistakenly assume to be the norm for humanity.
As for my claims on productivity and mobility, have you ever read a single meaningful paper on NetZero? Because they're all fundamentally noting that to achieve NetZero, most of Westerners will have to give up things like personal mobility and decrease heating of houses. I don't need t
All the wrong people (Score:2)
Last year, individuals in the business of trading energy, specially electricity, made 100 of millions each in bonuses while energy prices were soaring, profiting on the war in Ukraine.
There's a lot of money to be made, but as usual it is the robber barons winning
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They actually profited on ESG proliferation. Typical oil refinery takes a decade from zero to operational. ESG hit the ability to finance refineries about a decade ago, halving the available funding.
So as existing refineries age out and aren't replaced by new ones because funding isn't there, oil and gas being inflexible demand goods are still required, with refining capacity being the limiting factor. That means refineries became exceedingly profitable, and it will take a decade for this to correct at leas
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It's worth remembering that when things that can be explained by incompetence, it's not healthy to assume malice instead.
In this case, propaganda has been pervasive enough that even on a message board primarily filled by IT engineers, people who actually are taught things like mathematics, physics and basic logic as its necessary to do what they do professionally, there are still people who genuinely illogical shit, like that refining margins go up because war in Ukraine constrained access to raw materials.
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Panel of experts agree: (Score:5, Insightful)
"You need to hire more experts and pay them more."
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So? Does not make that statement wrong.
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You're making it sound like the panel of experts is self serving rather than pointing out the obvious: Why would I work for you if that person over there is paying me more than double.
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It's not a chronic problem in the UK. After brexit the situation got much worse because the UK is a much less attractive place for skilled workers - as evidenced by the UK's skilled worker visa having fewer than 5 applicants in the years since it started.
EU citizens now need a visa. Not just for themselves, for their families too. When they arrive they are second class citizens, and the UK has a reputation for being hostile to foreigners. The government is openly xenophobic, and pitches skilled worker visas
To be fair this isn't a UK only problem (Score:3)
The expertise and knowledge required for the energy transition is not too different from the classical process industry. Why work for low pay doing net-zero projects when oil and gas or chemical companies will pay you 3-4x as much.
I got a call from a head-hunter for a hydrogen storage company. When I heard what they were offering I audibly laughed and the recruiter was a bit taken back and sounded a bit offended. When I told him he offered me less than I got paid as a graduate 20+ years ago he was left stunned, and we professionally parted ways.
Sad part is, I don't see much of a chance of solving this. Net-Zero projects don't enjoy high margins and ludicrous profits so can't actually afford to attract talent away from the classical process industry.
Experts they have are not Great (Score:3)
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Well, that's the low salary for you. You can't hire an engineer for a position you've only budgeted greenwashing levels of money for.
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The number of times I've seen enthusiastic descriptions of "new and exciting" projects where they clearly do not understand the difference between power in watts and energy in joules (or watt-hours) is staggering.
Don't confuse engineering experts and marketing. Don't confuse one engineering discipline with another. I know someone who screwed up power and energy, that someone designed what is looking to be a quite revolutionary electrolyser and his achievement is grand regardless of what unit you attach to the back of it.
Dismissing someone over something so trivial is dangerously cocky.
Places to find lots of experts (Score:4, Funny)
1. Slashdot
2. Neighborhood bars/taverns
3. YouTube
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You know you can watch classes from places like MIT on YouTube right?
No one goes to YouTube for MIT classes.
Case in point: Just typing "Lecture 1" resulted in https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] with 5 million views over 10 years.
On the flip side https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] here you can watch people getting wiped out doing silly shit on the beach and it has 2.7million views over the past couple of weeks.
Lack of commitment (Score:2)
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I imagine that if one just said you'd coddle the multinational energy companies by making them the big players in alternative technologies with a fixed time frame, you'd probably get some results that way. Trying to cobble together an alternative industry is never going to work, and this article's thrust is only one of the reasons. You'd also have the advantage of potentially convincing them to keep their leases on fossil fuels frozen for a period of time until the law can catch up, without exorbitant exp
Re:Lack of commitment (Score:5, Insightful)
Right - but lets be really really honest the real goal most netzero programs is to be able to say you have a netzero program, not actually do anything. From that perspective the lest it costs the better.
The second part of this is most activities are not and will never be netzero. They are accounting tricks were the actual carbon cost is shifted somewhere just outside what is ordinarily considered scope. Its hey our airplanes are carbon neutral, we bought enough offsets for the fuel we use, never mind the offsets went to buy the side of some mountain in South America that was not going to be developed in the next century anyway. Oh and the huge airport terminal that exists, we'd have totally built that anyway so none of it counters - yeah ok.
The qualified people don't want this work not because they can't make money at it, plenty of true believers out that at various non profits etc willing to work for way less than they could make elsewhere. There would be qualified people develop and run netzero programs even if the money isn't there, but those people are smart enough to understand the PROGRAM isn't really there. So that leaves the unqualified who are happy to work for peanuts, and the people who think they can use some big brand name as part of a climate grift of their very own.
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The main net zero aim is burning zero fossil fuel.
That still leaves concrete as a big emission source, but simply not burning fossil fuel gets you pretty close.
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> The main net zero aim is burning zero fossil fuel.
Nope.
Net zero means not releasing any CO2, you can burn fossil fuel as much as you like if you use carbon capture to hide the CO2 underground.
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Yet the main policy aim for countries aiming for net zero is burning zero fossil fuel, not massive sequestration.
Sequestration and bio-energy were just silly excuses to stick with the status quo while promulgating fairy tales. Countries which are making real policy moves to net zero like the EU and Australia are treating sequestration as a fairy tale already, bio-energy soon to follow.
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Right - but lets be really really honest the real goal most netzero programs is to be able to say you have a netzero program, not actually do anything. From that perspective the lest it costs the better.
The second part of this is most activities are not and will never be netzero. They are accounting tricks were the actual carbon cost is shifted somewhere just outside what is ordinarily considered scope.
You are talking about carbon credits, not government net zero programs. The UK's net zero program (however slow it may be) involves literal billions of dollars of investment in actual technical solutions involving green power generation, hydrogen, decarbonising transport (actually, not just planting at tree somewhere), carbon capture projects, and yes Slashdot's darling: investment in the expansion of nuclear power plants.
There would be qualified people develop and run netzero programs even if the money isn't there, but those people are smart enough to understand the PROGRAM isn't really there.
The program is absolutely there. The problem is that the companies involved in the pro
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No a pile of money is there - the actual effort is to land government contracts to get the money, and as much of it as possible while spending as little as possible.
The solution does not have to work, it has to satisfy the governments carbon accounting conditions. There are two ways to go about that, creative accounting for carbon - hey our off shore wind farm is net-zero, as if the turbines sprouted from magic beans or something. - Or actually getting to zero net carbon release (that is the entire 'system'
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Indeed. And that is why 1.5C or 2C is a pipe dream: When it finally dawns on enough people how bad things are going to get, we will have 2.5C or more already locked in.
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You are going to pile even more lies on your already existing ones? Fine then. If there ever is a reckoning, you will be remembered as one of those that wanted the human race to fail and did his very best to push the lies to make that happen.
Incidentally, I am an engineer. I obviously a level of understanding that you completely lack. No surprise either.
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> Until society is actually willing to commit resources to achieving it, nothing will happen.
In the UK we are beginning to see sense and are trying to cancel the thing thank god.
energy salaries (Score:2)
I'd have thought (Score:2)
...that y'know actual facts and realities trumping quasi-religious dogma would have gotten in the way first, but whatever!
I guess they are not serious then (Score:2)
And probably in denial about the problem anyways. Seems to be SOP in the UK these days.
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I guess you're not serious about any sport you do because you're not in the Olympics? Net zero programs are spending literal billions of dollars. The companies involved are stretched thing. The biggest problem is, whatever you think you can spend, even as a government you don't have the budget of the oil and gas industry, so they pay experts better. Always have.
At the end of the day the result needs to be viable, and there's a reason the oil and gas industry is back peddling massively on green ambitions: it
Suck on that Brexit, brits! (Score:1)
Also enjoy being the poster child for how stupid referendums are.
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Brexit is great, when we actually get to use it.
The current thing we wish to sort out is the god auful corrupt ECHR. The sooner we get out of that the better.
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LOL.
Just
Keep believing, as your country flushes itself down the drain.
No, its not low pay or expertise shortage (Score:2)
Its not low pay or shortage of expertise, its that the UK Net Zero goal is unachievable.
If you look at the policies which are being implemented, it may strike you that the reason why its not going to be achieved is the policies they have chosen. But when you look closer, you see that the causation runs the other way. The policies are a mess because there is no collection of policies that will deliver the goal, and so they have put together a set of inconsistent, ineffective and impossible policies with no
I would think (Score:1)
One of the main barriers to "net zero" is the sheer insurmountable cost on the tax payer in trying to implement it.
Luckily, such ideas are starting to be scrapped. We have already reached peak net zero and it's either going to continue, bankrupting millions or be halted, which in this economic climate would be more sane.
Even Tony Blair says that Net Zero is simply stupid and unworkable in the UK and I'm not really a fan of him for so many reasons but recently he has been saying things with a bit more commo
UK will be KOed (Score:3)
UK net zero is going to lead to an even lower average standard of living. The only way out of that dilemma is greenwashing. Look for it aplenty.