Meeting of the Parliament 25 September 2019
We are on the cusp of passing legislation that will have a massive impact. The hugely ambitious and challenging targets set out in the bill will cross every sector in Scotland, every business, every household and every person. The targets are the goal that we cannot miss, and committing to and achieving them will require massive system and behavioural change. Scotland will need to change and we will need to take those targets into account in so much of what we ask for from our Government, from now on, across all portfolios.
System change will have to happen urgently, and nowhere more than in my area, where public transport is not an option if you live in Rothienorman but work in Ellon, or if your surgery appointment is in Oldmeldrum but you live in Cross of Jackston.
Your choices are limited if you want a home made of materials that lock up carbon, rather than add to the carbon burden. You might be able to heat your home only by burning oil from a big tank out in the garden. You might live in rented accommodation where you have no choice about how you heat your home at all. Heat pumps and electric vehicles are still the preserve of the wealthy, and you can only dream of such choice.
You might want to cycle to work, but given that you do not live on a cycle route, you cannot take the risk of being hit by a car on the dark winter mornings.
You might want to rid your home of single-use plastics, but the supermarkets are full of them, and even though you recycle everything that you can, you find yourself with two or three bin bags of mixed refuse a week that you know is going to landfill.
Your job and the money that you take home to pay your mortgage and feed your kids depend on oil and gas. That applies to a lot of people in my area. You hear people campaigning to keep it in the ground, but you know that if we do that too soon, your city will be a ghost town and unemployment will be rife. You only just got a decent job after losing one in 2016, so you have first-hand experience of what that is like. You want to take your skills and work in an organisation that will be part of the low-carbon revolution, but that is not happening as fast as you had hoped.
Where you can change your life, you do; you make all the choices that you can make to reduce your carbon footprint. You holiday at home instead of flying. You modify your diet and you minimise your food waste. You try to fix things rather than replace them. You go round the house switching off lights, turning down the heating and shouting at your children to put jumpers on, but the big things that you want to do are outwith your hands.
Those big things are up to us, here in this chamber, and the choices that we urge the Government to make. I look forward to the updated climate change plan that will set in place what we need to do to achieve the aims of the bill, because we have no option but to achieve those aims, and the people of Scotland want to play their part. They have told us that.
Before I sit down, I pay tribute to my colleague and friend John Scott, who would have loved to be sitting with us here, but who I know for a fact is at home, watching us debate the bill. He made a tremendous contribution. I thank my committee colleagues for the contributions that we all made as we went forward together, not always agreeing with one another, but reaching a consensus, as Finlay Carson mentioned. I also want to thank the clerks who have steered us through the progress of the bill, and the many people who contributed. We probably opened our doors a little wider than we had time for, but I think that it was very important to have everyone with a locus in this issue round the table, including the many young activists from across Scotland, who sat round the table with us and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I am very proud that we all sat in the same room.
I am proud to vote for a bill that has ambitious targets, but, from tomorrow, it is all about action, just transition, system change and asking tough questions of every business, corporation and agency that the citizens of Scotland rely on for work, food, transport, health and housing. That change starts with a Government bill but the actions lie with us all.