Measuring the green economy (with a thumb on the scale)
There are often many more ways than one to measure a thing. And so it is with the 'green economy'. But one attempt to measure the green economy is sheer fantasy...
The recent posts here have been about insight into the ‘green economy’ given by the ONS’s Low carbon and renewable energy economy estimates (LCREE). As we have shown, most sectors of the LCREE are stagnant or worse. And those which are growing seem to be driven by policy — mostly subsidy. It is far from clear that even despite such mandates, any part of the green economy can stand on its own. But this evaluation is still a work in progress. And so there is a still a lot of work to do to unpack the data, much of which is opaque, and to compare it to other data.
By ‘opaque’, I mean that it is not immediately obvious what is being measured, and the categories of economic activity that are encompassed by LCREE may not be as ‘green’ as they appear to be at face value. For example, yesterday, I showed that one of the components of the largest LCREE sub-sectors, ‘energy efficient products’, which has a turnover of about £14 billion per year and falling is ‘Energy efficient doors and windows (including double glazing)’. Is there even a market for NON-energy efficient doors and windows? Does regulation even allow it? A quick scan of current building regulations suggests not.
But, conversely, we also need to know whether the LCREE survey itself is complete. We know that its estimate is produced from a sample, not from a census. And there are other surveys, which we shall be looking at here. And we need, at the least, to explain why we give more or less weight to one survey than another.
For example, although we find LCREE representing the sorry state of the green economy, a rival survey of the green economy gives a much rosier impression. An august 2021 Guardian article announced that,
UK’s green economy nearly four times larger than manufacturing sector, says report
Exclusive: Analysis reveals more than 1.2 million people are employed in low carbon industry
The UK’s low carbon economy is now worth more than £200bn, almost four times the size of the country’s manufacturing sector, with growth expected to accelerate in the coming years, according to new analysis.
…
Today’s research shows that the low carbon sector is worth £205.7bn in the UK. Using a similar methodology, kMatrix found the manufacturing sector is worth £55.6bn and the construction sector is worth £132.9bn.
£205 billion?!!
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