The green economy: stagnant, booming, or mirage?

Official data shows that the the story of a 'green industrial revolution' driving 'green growth' and 'green jobs' is far from reality.

Since before this Substack launched, I have been working on data provided by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) that estimates the value of the green economy and its subsectors. This is a story I have been tracking since the 2000s, when various economic analyses began to mobilise political arguments from the likes of then Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, Ed Miliband. However, every time I looked, I found that these claims were unsound. More on that history later…

I had hoped that this analysis would be ready for the launch of this project, and then, as each week passed, that it would be ready in the next. But the scope of the story just kept getting bigger and bigger, and I kept needing to find more and more data, much of which proved to be less accurate or less reliable than I had wanted. We are a small organisation, with little resources and I’ve committed to a number of projects that take up my time.

So I have decided that, rather than this place go into radio silence (and lose supporters who have made this work possible — thank you), it’s probably best to break this project up into much smaller parts. This will allow me to post more frequently. But it may mean that it may be a wile longer before I can produce the overviews of the analysis here, and it may get a bit chart-heavy.

I have been interested in two main data sources from ONS. The first is an account of environmental taxes, and the second is an estimate of the green economy. The turnover of both environmental taxes and the Low Carbon and Renewable Energy Economy (LCREE) are shown below.