Meeting of the Parliament 27 March 2019
We know that we have a global climate crisis. As a historical contributor to global warming, Scotland has a responsibility to be at the heart of how we mitigate its effects.
I feel strongly that, in response to the climate strikes, we have a responsibility to open the Parliament’s doors a little wider and to involve the young people who took to the streets to make their voices heard, and I am glad that the Green motion specifically mentions those young people. Some of the climate strikers are coming into the Parliament on Tuesday next week to talk to the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee about the kind of society that they believe Scotland has to be if we are to play our part in reducing emissions. Asking for change is the easy part; determining the pathways is the challenge, and it is our job to involve young people in those decisions. I have arranged for the climate strikers also to be in the public gallery as we debate stage 1 of the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill.
If the status quo is not an option as we try to reach the ambitious emissions targets that the Scottish Government has set, how should our way of life change? As we decide on radical changes—as we must do—how do we make sure that those changes do not spell economic disaster for communities and leave behind the people who can least afford to adapt, such as people in rural communities who have limited access to public transport and people who live in rented accommodation and have no power to decide how they heat their home?
I have spoken many times before about the just transition issues in the latter part of the Green motion and the extraction of oil and gas. It is no secret that my area of the north-east of Scotland largely relies on the oil and gas industry and I do not think that it is hyperbolic to say that if we turned off the taps of the oil and gas industry, we would potentially destroy the north-east economy and many lives with it.
It should be noted that the majority of jobs in oil and gas are not in production; they are in exploration. [Interruption.] I do not know whether someone wants to make an intervention or that was just a lot of noise. I see that the Greens are not making an intervention; they just made a noise, which put me off, so I will carry on.
A couple of years ago, we had a taste of what might happen, when thousands of people lost their livelihoods because of the global oil price crash. I caught my breath today as figures came out from my area relating to the huge surges in food-bank use, as people have fallen out of work and fallen foul of the United Kingdom welfare system. The climate crisis is real, but the solution is not to shut off an entire sector; the solution is to use the sector’s products differently. We are talking about putting hundreds of thousands of livelihoods at stake, but also about workers with expertise who could lead us into a low-carbon, renewables and carbon capture and storage future if the transition is managed appropriately.