Please, do try to get this right:

One of the central premises of net zero is that the resulting job destruction in old industries such as car-making, but also oil and gas exploration, construction and farming, will be more than offset by the job creation in green industries such as renewable energy

No. Or at least anyone thinking that is hopelessly misinformed.

We do not hope that any replacement technology produces as many jobs as we had supplying that same thing before. Precisely and exactly the opposite. We desire, insist upon in fact, precisely the opposite. We want there to be fewer jobs in this new way of doing things than there were in the old.

Think on it. Before tractors (or perhaps that whole agricultural revolution thing) we had 90% of all people standing in muddy fields wondering how the green grass grows. Then we got tractors and we ended up with 2% of the population as farmers. We did not then move 88% of the people, of the jobs, into making tractors - nor other bits of the agricultural revolution. We moved 1 or 2% into supplying that new agricultural technology, sure. But 86% of the people went off and did other things. Danced ballet, staffed the NHS, taught kids to read, built computers and so on. Tractors made us richer not by the amount of food we got, but by the ballet, NHS, literacy and computers we got as a result of tractors.

We do not want the replacement tech to produce as many jobs. We want the replacement tech to require less human labour so we can be made richer by the labour of humans at sating other desires.

We’re afraid that it gets worse. If the jobs lost are to be more than offset then that means productivity falls.

No, really. Imagine we kill off fossil fuels and replace with renewables. Renewables create more jobs than fossil fuels - The Green Party has crowed about this in every election manifesto for decades now. But what is the product, production, here? The energy required to power society. And if we say that the energy to power society now requires more human labour then we’ve just insisted upon lowering productivity. Because that’s what productivity is, value of output by the hours of human labour it takes to create that output.

The entire political world shouts about how British labour productivity isn’t rising, or not fast enough. Then everyone insists that we must lower it by having renewables? Well, yes, actually that is what is happening. Because far too few actually grasp the basics of economics. Note that the above isn’t neoliberal, it’s not even neoclassical. It’s simply a statement of fact. If we start to employ more people in gaining our energy then we’ve just lowered labour productivity in energy production. Because that’s what productivity means, requiring how much labour to gain how much output?

No wonder we’ve economic problems if the ruling class think that we want new techs to produce more jobs than the old they replace. That’s entirely and wholly wrong. The entire point of new techs is to require less human labour so that other needs and desires can be addressed by that newly freed up scarce resource, human labour.