If only there were some way to connect the two.
This morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme ran two segments back to back. God bless the editors for keeping on trying to make it easy for people to join the dots. Amol Rajan and Nick Robinson are both wonderful at leaving meaningful silences.
The first: should the UK reverse its ban on new North Sea oil drilling? The answer, even from those in favour, was no — it’d take a decade to produce anything, and the economics don’t stack up at current prices.
The second: nearly a million young people in the UK are now economically inactive. Not unemployed — inactive. They’ve stopped looking. The NEET rate has risen by a third since the pandemic, with more than one in three unemployed young people now out of work for over six months.
And yet.
The net zero sector is growing at three times the rate of the wider UK economy, but faces a current shortfall of at least 200,000 skilled workers. We need to retrofit 19 million homes. We need to electrify heating. Install solar at scale. Rewire the grid. By 2030, demand has been forecast for 400,000 retrofit professionals alone. With a bit of government backing and consistent signal, that would be an EASY million people for the green economy.
One side of the studio: where are the workers? The other side of the studio: where are the jobs?
This isn’t a policy puzzle. It’s a political will problem. We’re not short of work. We’re not short of people. We’re short of the institutional courage to connect them with funded training, with a national mobilisation framing, with the same urgency we’d apply if these were defence jobs. There are sabre rattlers keen to send another wave of young people to die in the Middle East, but those ‘patriots’ keep quiet when it comes to investing in national resilience and 21st & 22nd century infrastructure.
Catch22’s Energise programme (a pre-employment pipeline into energy transition jobs, run in partnership with Shell) showed that within 6 weeks, participants’ confidence in entering the job market nearly doubled. It works and scales.
Meanwhile, companies like Metaverse Learning are already building AR/VR-based retrofit training, providing immersive programmes aligned to Level 2/3 qualifications, allowing learners to experience on-site scenarios before they ever pick up a tool.
The Retrofit Academy, Green Building Renewables, Groundwork London, Hampshire County Council are all running green skills bootcamps.
So the infrastructure exists. What’s missing is the narrative and the resolve to commit — because without commitment and support for this future, there is no incentive.
I believe that the climate transition is the defining economic opportunity of this generation, and that AI is a one-in-a-species opportunity to leap ahead to escape our misaligned incentives and anachronistic systems.
Leaving a million young people on the sidelines is a choice. A shameful, tragic choice.