Meeting of the Parliament 06 December 2022
To pick up from where the cabinet secretary left off, there is no doubt that COP27 did not have the groundbreaking commitments of COP26, but that is not to say that it was not a success, because it closed with what was described as a “breakthrough agreement”—the Sharm el-Sheik implementation plan, in which nations reaffirmed their commitment to keep 1.5 alive and strengthened their resolve to cut emissions and boost support for finance, technology and capacity building in developing countries.
The UK showed further leadership at COP27: it announced more than £100 million to support developing countries that are dealing with climate change impacts; it tripled funding for adaptation projects to £1.5 billion by 2025; and it committed £11.6 billion in international climate change funding.
COP27 was never going to match COP26. Indeed, Professor Peter Thorne, one of the lead authors of the UN report that warned of a code red for humanity, said that COP27 was always going to be more of a “technical” summit, as
“These COPs have a natural rhythm, and it is only every four to six years ... where major progress is expected ... Intervening COPs achieve much less tangible progress.”
However, what is crucial at any COP is that agreements and announcements are credible and deliverable. The motion rightly lauds the agreement between the parties to establish a loss and damage fund. As the cabinet secretary flagged, the First Minister tried to pre-empt that by suggesting that Scotland would put £5 million into its own loss and damage fund, yet when I asked Minister McAllan a few weeks ago what the eligibility criteria, the application process and the defined outcomes were, she replied that the Government was still designing the fund. Later, in responding to my written question, she confirmed that decisions on how the £5 million of loss and damage funding will be allocated are yet to be taken. In addition, it turns out that the £2 million scheme that the Scottish Government announced at COP26, which is mentioned in the motion, has not even been fully allocated yet. It is almost as though it is easier to produce soundbites than it is to produce hard data and action.
On which note, although it is absolutely right for the cabinet secretary to mention COP15, some might feel that it is brave for the Government to demand action on the protection of the seas in its motion when, last month, the Government told me that it would not respond to the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee’s report on regional marine planning—a report that was published in December 2020—until early in 2023. We should not forget, as the cabinet secretary flagged, that we are talking about a Government that, in 2018, put more than 200 policies and proposals into a climate change plan to achieve net zero by 2045, which it updated in 2020, but the cabinet secretary forgot to mention that, when I asked earlier this year how much it would cost to achieve, he told me that the Government did not yet know.
What the COPs show us is that we must strive towards accurate data. We cannot allow differing political visions or dogma to misinform the public, as that risks eroding trust. When Mark Ruskell, as an MSP in a party of Government, criticises the COP27 agreement for lacking any phase-out or even a phase-down of all fossil fuels, or Màiri McAllan says that the Scottish Government does not agree with the UK Government issuing new oil and gas licences, they must go on to address the fact that Britain’s electricity mix over the past four weeks—we should remember that that is the power that keeps us heated, keeps our lights on, charges our electric vehicles and keeps our cookers working—was: gas, 44.8 per cent; wind, 23.7 per cent; nuclear, 14.1 per cent; and solar, hydro and biomass, 10.2 per cent.
We already know that the Scottish Government will not allow any new nuclear plants to be built in Scotland and we also know, from the quotations that I have given and the text of the motion, that the SNP and the Greens want to stop North Sea gas production. However, it is blindingly obvious that there is no way that renewables can replace those energy sources any time soon, in which case, the Government is basically proposing to satisfy our gas needs by importing from places such as Qatar, which has two to three times the carbon emissions of the gas that is pulled up from the North Sea, even before the innovation and targeted oil and gas—INTOG—leasing round happens.