Meeting of the Parliament 20 January 2016
A recovery in the oil price does nothing to change the fundamental context of the world’s global carbon budget and the world’s overvaluation of the industry. We will still be overreliant on an industry that is overvalued. That is an economic bubble, not just an environmental problem. We all know what happens when economic bubbles burst. How reliant do we want to be on that industry when that moment comes?
I want to mention the Scottish Trades Union Congress’s warning, in its evidence to the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee’s recent short inquiry into the oil and gas industry. We were told that, even if we took climate change right out of the equation and focused on the change in the economics of the oil industry, we would still have to be looking towards
“the transition happening much earlier than was previously anticipated”.
We were told that
“we have to be planning for the North Sea to have a shorter lifespan than previously thought”.—[Official Report, Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, 25 November 2015; c 31, 32.]
The question is not whether we share the view that this is a desirable change. The change is upon us and we must be ready, prepared and investing in the alternative.
There is the opportunity for us to get back on track with our own carbon emissions, making up the lost ground of the 10 million extra tonnes of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere when we missed the targets. That is something that I hope we can do despite the reductions in funding in the current Scottish budget for climate change and energy efficiency of 10 per cent and 13 per cent respectively. If we reverse that in the budget, we have the opportunity to get back on track with the climate change agenda.
However, we must also open up the opportunity for transition, look at the opportunity for the new industries that will emerge, not only in energy production—clean, green, renewable energy production—not only in decommissioning but in other sustainable industries, whether that is the retrofit job that has to be done on our built environment and the huge number of jobs that can come out of that agenda or the development of new science. No one can tell me or convince me that Scotland does not have what it takes to put in some of the research effort that the world is going to have to undertake to find alternative chemical feedstocks when these hydrocarbons are no longer available. There will be a period when they will be too valuable to burn, but we are not going to be able to pretend that they will continue to flow for ever.
My argument is that ministers of any political party in this Parliament have been at their best when they have been put under pressure by a Parliament bold enough to push them further, whether that be on the fracking moratorium, which I am sure Mr Ewing was delighted to have to announce, community ownership, climate change or whatever. The Green Party has a strong track record of pushing the Government beyond its own comfort zone, but it is the only political party that is willing to acknowledge that Scotland requires this transition from an overreliance on fossil fuels and which has set out the opportunities for making such a transition beneficial and good for our society and economy and ensuring that it brings us into line with the ecological limits that the planet sets down.