Climate Camp Scotland has always demanded, and continues to demand a just transition. The sudden closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery, with no alternative employment schemes for workers, and little real reduction in carbon emissions at the site is a damning indictment of a market-led transition away from fossil fuels.
The refinery has produced vast amounts of money for the billionaire INEOS owner Jim Ratcliffe, whilst dumping huge amounts of pollution onto the town of Grangemouth, one of the most deprived areas in Scotland. Grangemouth has been impoverished by oil CEOs, who have wrecked the local and global environment’s life-sustaining ecosystems and made a grotesque amount of money while doing so. If executed as Ratcliffe and his cronies wish, the abrupt closure of the refinery will result in more money for the ultra-rich at the expense of working class Scottish communities.
INEOS should be helping workers transition to new, secure, and well-paid jobs in the clean energy sector, and ensuring that profits are reinvested in the communities they have hurt.
We demand that INEOS and the Scottish Government do everything in their power to make the transition to renewable energy fair, and that it makes the lives of communities and workers better, not worse.
The new proposals to instead increase the processing of imported fracked gas at the Grangemouth site, the extraction of which is banned in Scotland, is insulting. The transition to fracked gas at Grangemouth shows the continued disregard INEOS has for its workers and the environment.