Eco-anxiety is not just for the young

Mervyn Pilley worries that the contradictory messages about saving the planet has left people with no clear idea about how that can best play their part

Eco anxiety has been on my mind a great deal recently. But isn’t that something that only affects the young? It could be linked to the news I have had recently found out that another grandchild is on the way. I remain concerned about the legacy that we are leaving the next generations. As my wife has frequently pointed out to me – running a trade association is not akin to being a brain surgeon in terms of how critical the work is. However, that still doesn’t mean that I don’t take a focused interest in the sectors I am involved with including concerns around things not going as well as they should when solutions exist. Saving the planet, we all live on is not a minor issue by any means and energy efficiency is an obvious solution to a lot of the challenges. I have always believed passionately that we need to take action to sort out the various messes that we have created.
Throughout my working life I have been an avid absorber of news, both general and sector specific, through signing up to a large number of email newsletters and also through various news-based websites. There has been a lot of challenging news stories around the energy sector recently and the optimism that seemed to exist in 2021 during the build up to COP26 seems to have dissolved somewhat. Not surprising when in the lead up to COP27 there was a lot of focus on the results that had come out post the agreements reached in Glasgow and the progress made was clearly very limited. It didn’t help that COP27 was also something of a failure with geopolitics clashing with the underlying aims of the event. Things aren’t looking too good for COP28 due to the fact that there has been much controversy over the choice of the COP chair and his obvious direct link to oil and gas production. The story that has just come out as I write this column around an alleged attempt to ‘greenwash’ his Wikipedia account to focus more on his work in the renewables area certainly isn’t helping.
Everyone seems to agree that we have a major challenge in saving the planet but the contradictory messages coming from different groups of people at the moment is of great concern. It hasn’t helped at all that the political chaos of 2022 has left so many people up in the air about exactly what they need to do. The Skidmore review was intended to reinforce the fact that businesses can both achieve net zero and still remain competitive. However, the fact that the government has only looked to adopt around half of the proposals may not have instilled a positive feeling about net zero in the minds of many business owners.
I attended the Innovation Zero event recently and came away with mixed feelings. I learned a lot about carbon removal and how technology is finding solutions in a myriad of sectors and types. But I left the day not being certain how the various solutions on offer will be pulled together to provide a coherent solution through a resource easily accessible to all. By focusing totally on net zero I am concerned that we are scaring off a lot of stakeholders including businesses. In the current economic climate business has so much more to focus on – in many cases just staying in business is a major task. Dealing with rising costs in itself restricts the resources that companies have to address the net zero issue. One of the reasons that we have been working hard to build the energy conscious organisation programme is that using behaviour change is by far the lowest cost way of reducing energy usage.
On the subject of resources available to business I am still waiting for Government to come up with a coherent plan to recruit more people into the energy sector. We have recently come up against the bureaucracy of trying to get our training courses approved by the Enhanced Learning Credits Administration Services (ELCAS), the scheme that provides training funds to members of the armed forces as they look to leave the services and transition into a new career/sector.
I am aware from a couple of actual cases that the energy sector tends to be an ideal sector for ex-military people to go into. We are in urgent need of energy assessors and consultants. This was proven to me when at a recent meeting with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero when they announced that they were looking to run a pilot for SMEs with 4,000 assessments looking to be done in an 18-month period. I was not alone in my thoughts during the meeting that there is not currently the capacity available in terms of assessor numbers for that to be an achievable target. It would have helped if getting ELCAS approval was straightforward but even where the training is proven and tested it still seems to remain more important to the Ministry of Defence that an ever-increasing number of hurdles need to be jumped over before approval can be granted. We will continue to look to do everything we can do to encourage people to get into the energy sector despite the challenges.

• Mervyn Pilley is executive director of ESTA (Energy Services & Technology Association)