Meeting of the Parliament 15 September 2021 (Hybrid)
I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in what is a hugely important debate—and one that will continue long after this afternoon. I hope that we will make an awful lot more progress in this session of Parliament.
I will start from a position on which I think we all agree. We have an environmental crisis that is impacting the planet in ways that we cannot afford to ignore. There can surely be no debating the fact that we need to change how we create and consume energy. The drive towards net zero emissions and beyond has accelerated greatly recently and is now in the forefront of our minds in a way that would not have been considered even just a decade ago.
However, where I differ from the approach of some members of the Government is around the most effective and timeous way in which we can achieve that crucial goal. I believe that we will reach those targets through innovation, not by shutting down huge swathes of the economy as the Greens and the Scottish Government would have us do. Their approach is blinkered, devoid of any creativity and as far from reality as it could possibly be.
As my colleague Liam Kerr suggested, the petrochemical industry is about far more than simply burning fossil fuel. A significant proportion of oil is used in many other industries, not least in medicines, plastics and even the renewables sector itself—the list goes on and on. It is far too narrow to frame the debate just around fossil fuels.