Meeting of the Parliament 20 April 2023
I welcome the cabinet secretary to her new role. We, too, recognise the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. That is why the UK’s success in nearly halving carbon emissions and cutting carbon emissions from electricity generation by 73 per cent between 1990 and 2021 is so welcome. We also agree on the need to get to net zero through a transition that is just—not only for the workforce but for communities in Scotland, the UK and around the world.
When it comes to the workforce transition, the Government has to recognise that when its energy strategy promises 77,000 low-carbon jobs by 2050, people are sceptical.
In 2010, the Scottish Government pledged to create 130,000 green jobs by 2020; in fact, it delivered marginally over 20,000. We also heard that it remains unsure of its definition of “green jobs”—gaming the definitions, presumably, to hit the targets. It is just that sort of magical thinking, which lacks evidential, data-driven and scientific analysis, that permeates the energy strategy and makes people, particularly in the north-east, dubious about this Government’s ability to deliver a just transition.
Professor Skea of the just transition commission said of the strategy that he was
“deeply concerned about the lack of evidence of adequate policy actions to deliver a just transition for the Energy sector”.
That is writ large, in that we know that demand for electricity is expected to nearly treble by 2050. We know from Scottish Government figures that oil and gas made up nearly 80 per cent of Scottish energy consumption and more than 90 per cent of Scotland’s heat demand in 2020. We know from this Government’s own figures that the decline in Scottish oil and gas is steeper than the decline required globally to keep temperature rises below 1.5°C, and we know that natural gas from the North Sea—