Hansard

I am grateful for the opportunity to bring this debate to the chamber. I am sure that I can speak to my motion with confidence that the Parliament will respond to the debate with rather more seriousness than those in the media who have already, perhaps predictably, chosen to use absurd misquotes in an attempt to misrepresent the Green position on the issue.

Nobody treats job losses in the north-east trivially. It is a serious matter that impacts on communities in that region and on our wider economy. Even those of us who have long argued that we are overreliant on the fossil fuel industries would never argue that the impact of job losses on this scale is trivial. However, simply comparing one headline, “Oil sector ‘has lost 65,000 jobs’”, with another, “Oil and gas production rises for first time in 15 years”, is enough to demonstrate that the mantra of maximum economic extraction is not the same as securing maximum economic benefit for our society, nor does it guarantee the security and safety of jobs in that industry or the wider economy.

Many will recognise the context in which the current situation has arisen. Low oil prices bear a great connection with wider geopolitical factors such as the behaviour of Saudi Arabia and others, as well as the long-term decline in North Sea production, which I hope none of us is any longer in denial about. The notion that the North Sea will get back to the levels of production that it once had is not credible. There is overreliance on fossil fuels throughout our society and our economy, not just for energy but for a wide range of other economic and industrial activities.

However, there are additional aspects to that context that will, in my view, require us to face up to the long-term transition that is required and a necessary move towards embracing the change that that transition will bring about. The first aspect is the carbon bubble, the argument on which is set out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report, which was the first to include an assessment of the overall carbon budget of the planet. By some estimates, it has to be kept to something like 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon emissions or equivalent to give us a likely chance of achieving the 2°C threshold—that is, not allowing climate change to exceed 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

It was estimated that more than half that budget had already been emitted by 2011, so, according to a variety of interpretations, there is somewhere between 446 billion and 616 billion tonnes left to emit if we want to have the reasonable likelihood of restraining climate change. However, other estimates put the position even more starkly and say that the additional warming factors from the way in which carbon dioxide is emitted mean that there is as little as 270 billion tonnes left in the global budget.

That situation is dramatically at odds with the level of fossil fuel reserves left on the planet. We already know that we have far more fossil fuels than we can afford to burn if we are remotely serious about achieving the likelihood of restraining climate change. That argument does not come only from the IPCC—I hope that the minister is still able to hear me—which is the global intergovernmental body that advises all of us, and it is certainly not an argument that comes only from environmentalists and campaigners. Just a few months ago, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, made much the same argument. Speaking not to campaigners or activists but to financiers in the City of London, he warned of the financial stability risk that this country faces because of our massive overexposure to the carbon bubble.

The fossil fuel industry is profoundly overvalued because its values are based on the assumption that all its reserves will be turned into economic resources, put on the global market and burned. Mark Carney said that the IPCC’s carbon budget

“amounts to between one-fifth and one-third of the world’s proven reserves of oil, gas and coal.

If that estimate is even approximately correct it would render the vast majority of reserves ‘stranded’”

and

“literally unburnable ... which itself alters fossil fuel economics.”

I have put that case to the Scottish Government on a number of occasions, and the previous climate change minister appeared to understand. In October 2013, I asked him about the IPCC report and the growing consensus on the carbon bubble, and he answered:

“I do not have a figure to give Mr Harvie for the percentage of fossil fuels that I would like to see remain under the earth, but I accept the point that, if we were to burn all the fossil fuels in the world, we would be doing untold damage to our environment.”—[Official Report, 1 October 2013; c 23073.]

Sadly, Scotland’s energy minister has repeatedly failed to endorse that basic argument.

All of that came, of course, before the most recent development in this context, which is the Paris agreement. The carbon budget in the IPCC’s fifth assessment report is based on the 2°C target—the idea of keeping climate change to a limit of 2°C above pre-industrial levels. However, the Paris agreement goes further and

“Notes with concern that the estimated aggregate greenhouse gas emission levels in 2025 and 2030 resulting from the intended nationally determined contributions do not fall within least-cost 2 °C scenarios”.

The agreement states that there should be a goal of achieving a global temperature increase of well below 2°C and even a 1.5°C target. That will dramatically shrink even further the global carbon budget and pose a challenge to all fossil fuel-producing countries to recognise that those resources are not a value to the economy but a vulnerability.