The ‘old’ industrial regions of Europe: ‘Green transitions’ or just the transitions inherent to capitalist business as usual?

Abstract

Reflecting on recent research and publications, I consider the possibilities for ‘green transitions’ in Europe’s ‘old’ industrial regions (OIRs) and more widely in the global economy. The wider changes in the global political economy are not only undermining any possibility of a ‘just’ green transition in Europe’s OIRs but that of green transitions more generally.

There has been considerable discussion as to the possibility of a transition away from carbon-based fuels to ‘green’ alternatives, and more specifically about the possibility of a ‘just’ transition or, more specifically still, a ‘just’ green transition. In this short intervention, I want to argue that there are formidable obstacles to achieving such a change. These reflect the dominance of the power of capital within the social relations of capitalism and the implications of the pursuit of profit for the possibilities for transitions that would enhance ecological and social justice. And nowhere is this clearer than in the ‘old’ industrial regions of Europe.

While there has been considerable discussion as to how to define a ‘just transition’ (Eadson et al., 2025; Morena et al., 2021; Stark et al., 2023; Wang and Lo, 2021), such a ‘just transition’ to a ‘greener’ economy and energy system would be one that, inter-alia, created well-paid, skilled and secure jobs to replace those lost in the process of decarbonisation. These discussions about possible transitions have major implications that extend across the economy. In terms of the production and distribution of energy, and given an assumption that such changes are, or could become, possible, they would have wider implications for the organisation of production, trade, mobility and consumption patterns across the totality of the economy. Importantly, however, their effects would vary spatially, and they would have a particular relevance to Europe’s ‘old’ industrial regions. These are those regions that emerged in the early phases of industrial capitalist development in Great Britain (north east England, west central Scotland, south Wales), Germany (the Ruhr), France (Alsace-Lorraine and Nord-Pas-de-Calais) and Belgium (Wallonia) based around the mining of coal and the greatly expanded production of iron and steel and its transformation to produce commodities in a range of industries – ship-building, railways and their associated engineering (e.g. see Hudson, 2025). Capitalist interests in these activities were typically organised in integrated combines with complex linkages within and among them. Labour had over time also developed forms of trades union organisation, with variations between and within industries and places (e.g. within Great Britain coal mining trades unions developed in different ways in north east England and south Wales, with different political orientations, organisational forms and relationships to the coal owners: Beynon and Austrin, 1994; Beynon and Hudson, 2024 [2021]), so that characteristic forms of working-class community developed, typically with gendered divisions of labour involving male waged labour outside the home and unwaged female domestic labour within it. By the end of the 19th century, these regions were central to the emergent and expanding, increasingly global, capitalist economy, forming crucial ‘workshops of the world’, not only mining the dominant form of energy but also producing the means of production, transportation and destruction.

Subsequently, there was a limited degree of diversification of the industrial structure and restructuring of the labour market within these regional economies. This was primarily as a result of the formation and implementation of a range of state policies in response to recurrent crises in these ‘old’ industries, forms of policy that emerged initially in the UK in the 1920s following the ending of the First World War, as competition in international markets intensified, and there was an increasing move from coal to oil within the carbon economy (Mitchell, 2011). Nevertheless, these regions remained heavily dependent upon carbon-based activities until these too began increasingly to decline in the latter decades of the 20th century. This was a consequence of, initially, increasing imports of coal, oil and gas, and subsequently the growing realisation of the implications of the threat to planetary well-being and life on earth posed by global warming as a result of increasing levels of greenhouse gases (CO₂, methane, etc.) in the atmosphere. As a result of these changes, employment and trade union membership in these industries fell further, in turn undermining established forms of community relationships and political allegiances. These pressures were acutely felt in the ‘old’ industrial regions and other regional economies that had subsequently grown on the basis of mining coal in Europe, but also in other places that had developed around the processing of oil and gas and were adversely affected by decarbonisation (Gibbs, 2025). Moreover, attracted by a combination of the financial incentives offered by regional policies and the availability of male labour as coal mines closed, many of the ‘old’ industrial regions had become integrated into the carboniferous economy in new ways, as the location of automobile assembly plants and some of their suppliers, especially as systems of just-in-time production expanded (Hudson and Schamp, 1996), and these began to cut capacity and jobs as companies sought to move to producing vehicles powered by batteries rather than combustion engines. As a result, fewer workers would be required in assembly plants. These changes then had a wider effect on the labour market, with extensive job losses as supply chains were restructured and reconfigured (e.g. see Rísquez-Ramos and Ruiz-Gálvez, 2024).

At the same time, there were claims that a ‘green transition’ offered the possibility of restoring economic growth in these various regions, providing skilled and well-paid manufacturing jobs and new possibilities for a revival of trade union activity, new forms of labour organisation and new forms of politics. Moreover, there were claims that, in contrast to those of the past, these changes would involve a ‘just transition’, and one with positive benefits for those living and working in these regions (e.g. see European Commission, 2023). However, these claims were and are contentious and by no means generally accepted (e.g. see Beynon and Hudson, 2022; Gaventa et al., 2025).

The limits of ‘green’ transition in North East England

There is, however, certainly one sense in which it could be said that a ‘green’ transition is taking place in some of these regions. In the north east of England, for example, the plethora of wind farms, both onshore and offshore, and proposals for a smaller number of solar farms could be seen as evidence of an ongoing ‘green’ transition in energy production. However, in a way reminiscent of opposition to earlier proposals for opencast coal mining (Beynon et al., 2000), it is a transition that is often hotly contested by local communities in the areas adjacent to these developments and by organisations concerned to protect local landscapes. Furthermore, the wind farms and solar panels are overwhelmingly imported, produced elsewhere in Europe and beyond by companies such as Vestas and Siemens Gamesa. While they may locate some of their routine production – for example, of the windmill blades – in the UK, in a manner reminiscent of earlier rounds of branch plant investment, centres of R&D and the production of technologically sophisticated control systems remain on the European mainland, nearer to their corporate headquarters.

There is little, if any, evidence of the north east developing as a centre of innovation and production of the means of generating, distributing or storing ‘green’ energy, either as a result of inward investment or the emergence of innovative new firms within the region. There are a few exceptions. One is the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult near Blyth harbour, originally established as a Centre of Excellence by the short-lived Regional Development Agency, One North East, to help translate university research into innovative new firms and products. More significant is a joint venture between Nissan and AESC, a Chinese company that is the dominant partner, to build a battery plant adjacent to Nissan’s Sunderland assembly plant as part of its strategy to move into the production of electric vehicles (although this may well lead to significant job losses in the assembly plant). There have been other well-publicised projects, but these, along with the jobs they promised, have failed to materialise. For example, the Britvolt project at Cambois, near Blyth, on the site of an old coal-fired power station, which aimed to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles, creating 3000 jobs, collapsed in 2023 and was ignominiously abandoned (Meek, 2025). Equally, the proposals to transform Teesside into a major centre of production for the means of producing and transporting ‘green’ energy (Kraushaar-Friesen et al., 2025), including proposals for manufacturing the rotor blades for wind turbines and for ‘green’ hydrogen production are allegedly intended to create 20,000 well-paid manufacturing jobs as a result. However, these have yet to lead to any developments on the ground other than clearing the traces of the region’s industrial past (Brooks, 2025). Proposals for a factory to build mega-blades for offshore wind farms by the USA multinational General Electric (GE) Renewables, creating 2000 jobs, collapsed in 2022 because of a lack of demand (Hakimian, 2022). Of perhaps greater significance in the long term, in 2025, BP abandoned its plans to construct a ‘blue’ hydrogen plant on Teesside (Murugesu, 2025).

Even if 20,000 new skilled and well-paid manufacturing jobs were eventually to be created, they would only replace a fraction of the jobs lost in the chemicals and steel industries on Teesside (see Hudson, 2025). In the context of the lack of significant employment growth in industries producing the means of production and transporting ‘green’ energy, the hopes of the ‘green’ economy providing the basis for a renewal of trade union activity will be dashed. Moreover, the proposals to build AI data centres on the abandoned Britvolt and BP sites, highly automated and only employing a handful of security guards and technicians, further undermine any hopes for rebuilding progressive trade unionism, while the vast amounts of electricity that these data centres will consume raise serious questions as to what a ‘green transition’ in the economy of the region might mean.

The future of green transitions in old industrial regions

In the rest of this brief intervention, I want to go on to consider further the following issues in relation to the broader conditions that a ‘green transition’ away from carbon-based economies in these ‘old’ industrial regions and more generally would require, the extent to which any transition to ‘green’ approaches might be possible, and if possible, the form that it would most likely take (see also Langguth, 2025). How feasible is any form of ‘green’ transition in terms of the ‘old’ industrial regions becoming the site for the production of the necessary means of production – the necessary technologies and equipment and infrastructure – required for a ‘green’ transition and/or the site of production and transmission of ‘green’ energy (from wind, water (including mine water), solar, maybe hydrogen)?

In considering these issues, it is important to recognise that past energy transitions did not involve a sharp break from one source of energy to another but rather the development of successive hybrid regimes (Fressoz, 2024). Various sources of energy (wood, coal, oil, gas, nuclear) became entangled in complex regimes of energy production. Similarly, the use of coal as a raw material input into chemical production became relatively less significant following the discovery of oil and its use as a feedstock in the emergent petrochemicals industry, but it did not disappear completely. The later discovery of natural gas likewise led to it co-existing with oil as a raw material input into many forms of chemical production in hybrid regimes of production. Thus, there is no reason to believe that emergent green energy sources will not become entangled in the same way in hybrid regimes. For as long as coal, oil and natural gas remain as a source of profit for capital, the most probable futures might well be ones of complex hybrid regimes of energy production involving a range of ‘green’ processes and technologies alongside a variety of carbon-based approaches to energy production (e.g. see Ollivier de Leth, 2025). These may involve the deployment of CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology if this can be developed to function at scale (e.g. see Dawley et al., 2025). In turn, each emergent regime might be expected to develop its own version of ‘carbon democracy’.

Recognising that probable futures are likely to involve such hybrid energy regimes, will the ‘old’ industrial regions become the locations in which the centres of R&D that will underpin a ‘green’ energy system emerge and develop? Will these regions develop the necessary manufacturing capacity in relation to the production and transmission of ‘green’ energy? Many of these ‘green’ technology activities to generate, distribute and use various forms of green energy are currently dominated by China (the production of lithium batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles, the production and installation of wind farms and so on). This is a result of state strategies developed over the last quarter of a century within the ‘Chinese variety of capitalism’ (Peck and Zhang, 2013). Furthermore, China continues to push forward with further innovations (e.g. sodium-based batteries: in July 2024, China opened the world’s largest sodium-ion battery energy storage system, part of a long-term effort to build large-scale non-lithium technologies and maintain its dominant position in the production of ‘green’ technologies).

This relates to a second broad set of issues of relevance to the feasibility of a transition to the production of new forms of ‘green’ energy in and through the ‘old’ industrial regions: the availability of the required natural materials (cobalt, coltan, lithium, rare earths, etc.), their geographies and geologies, and where they are available. The ‘old’ industrial regions lack readily accessible deposits of these materials. The readily accessible key minerals and materials required for the ‘green’ transition are heavily concentrated in parts of the Global South (South America (Solar, 2025) and sub-Saharan Africa (Chandler, 2022)) in particular. In addition, there are significant deposits of lithium in Australia and the South American Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile; Chile alone has over 50% of known global reserves (Bednarski, 2024; Soto Hernandez, 2025), and cobalt and coltan in the DRC (Kara, 2023), while China also has significant deposits of lithium and other critical minerals. Furthermore, and very significantly, China has the vast majority of known mineable deposits of rare earths. Although there are increasing developments in relation to mining rare earths in southern Africa and parts of South America (Bednarski, 2024), China continues to dominate in terms of both known reserves and, crucially, capacity for processing rare earths.

Historically, many of the places in the Global South with significant deposits of critical minerals had been colonised by emergent imperial powers as they sought slave labour and precious metals and minerals, spices and other crops unobtainable in the Global North and further colonised as part of the imperialist drive in the 19th and early 20th centuries to acquire territories as part of the process of building empires. As a consequence, these places were stripped of their resources and cast into the role of a dependent periphery in relation to imperial cores, sources of key materials, cheap labour and markets for commodities produced in the Global North (e.g. see Frank, 1967; Rodney, 1972). Although many of these places achieved formal political independence in the second half of the 20th century, they remained locked into relations of economic dependency. With the increasing emphasis on ‘green’ energy, there has been significant foreign investment in Africa and South America, especially from China, with mining and preliminary processing of ores in situ (e.g. Bednarski, 2024; Kara, 2023). As a result, there is widespread environmental damage, degraded living conditions, chronic ill-health and social disruption, involving child labour and illegal or precarious and exploitative working practices (e.g. see Kara, 2023). This involves demonstrably ‘unjust transitions’ before the enhanced ores are shipped to China, in particular for further processing as it pursues a ‘green’ – but not necessarily ‘just’ – energy transition there (Klinger, 2017).

As a result, neo-colonialist relationships more generally have been revived and reinforced with renewed inter-imperialist competition as major capitalist interests and national states seek to acquire and gain control over these key materials (e.g. see European Commission, 2023; Jütten, 2024; Pitron, 2023). In this context, it is also important to bear in mind that many of the critical minerals and rare earths, of which there are 17 variants, as well as technological advances in relation to the production of ‘green’ electricity and power systems, may be deployed in the production of new forms of weapon systems and armaments and the means of destruction rather than transitions to ‘green’ energy systems. As geo-political and geo-economic tensions have increased and violence and armed conflict have intensified – for example, in the Middle East and Ukraine – these competitive pressures have increasingly been driven by demands for materials in relation to armaments and weapons production rather than the production of ‘green’ energy as central to a wider peaceful transition of economy and society (Pitron, 2023).

It is also important, however, to note that, as Klinger (2017) emphasises, rare earths are anything but rare, and there are areas of the Global North with potentially accessible deposits of many key minerals – for example, in parts of Canada, Europe, Greenland, Russia and the United States. Mining rare earths in these places would, however, create significant environmental and health problems and would be politically contentious and, as such, unacceptable. It is, however, no coincidence that Canada and Greenland feature in Trump’s vision of the Greater America (which bears a striking resemblance to a map of the Technate of America which first appeared in the United States in the 1930s, produced by a group of technocratic utopians, including Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, and known as Technology Inc.: Francis, 2025). However, developing these rare earth deposits in difficult and harsh Arctic environments would be heavily polluting, expensive and politically contentious. As such, it is more attractive to continue to pursue neo-colonialist strategies of exploiting deposits in the Global South, as the trajectory of the uneven and combined development of capitalism continues to evolve.

Against this background and context, what are the probable impacts on the ‘old’ industrial regions of a limited and uneven ‘green’ transition? There may well be a transition in the economies of these regions, but it will be structured by state imperatives around defence and military capability and capital’s relentless pursuit of surplus value, either via production in situ or appropriation of surplus value produced elsewhere. In short, it will not be a ‘just transition’ but just a transition in capital’s strategies to acquire surplus value and reproduce the social relations of capital, underpinned by state strategies to defend the boundaries of the dominant national states. It will involve scant – if any – regard for the planetary environment and the boundary conditions that make life on earth possible and for the impacts on the people and places from which critical minerals and rare earths will be extracted let alone for the specific impacts on the ‘old’ industrial regions of Europe (and elsewhere – the United States, Australia and increasingly China and India) and the people living in them. Put another way, without the ending of the dominant role of the social relations of capital, any transition will just be the latest manifestation of capitalist ‘business as usual’, and the possibility of a ‘just green transition’ just will not exist (Hudson, 2024). Or as Offe (1975) might put it, this is another case of the necessary being impossible but the impossible being necessary.