Hansard

I join other members in wishing Roseanna Cunningham, the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform, all the very best. I hope that she makes a speedy recovery and that she is able to join us again for the final days of this parliamentary session.

I thank all those who have given evidence throughout the inquiries on the climate change plan update during what have been challenging times. I thank the clerks to the ECCLR committee and SPICe staff for their support to me and my colleagues over the past five years.

There will not be a single legislature or Government anywhere in the world that can say that it has done enough to tackle the climate emergency. It is our moral duty to go faster and further, especially for the sake of those who will suffer the most and who have contributed the least to causing the crisis.

In that context, the Parliament was right to set an ambitious target of a cut in emissions of at least 75 per cent by 2030, because the next nine years will make or break the climate. However, any idea that we can reach the target by simply creating a more energy-efficient version of 2020 is misguided. Halving emissions over the past 30 years was the start, but halving them again in the next nine years will require a total change of mindset. It will require a system change to tackle climate change and to make choices easier, whether that is to leave the car at home, scrap a gas boiler or reduce meat consumption.

The updated plan ducks many of those challenges, because it is just an update and a stopgap. It does not fully answer the question that the Parliament asked the Government about how it could achieve the 2030 target. The additional effort that is demanded by that target is simply divvied out to all sectors evenly—except for farming and industry, which are largely let off.

The Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform admitted in committee that the update is not designed to be “encyclopaedic”; for the sake of the planet, at this point, it needs to be. That is why I attempted to amend the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets (Scotland) Bill to require a full plan to be produced early on. However, we will now have to wait until 2023 for the real deal—it is hoped—to emerge.

The only area in which the plan takes a leap of faith—and it is a huge one—is on technologies that could extend the life of the oil and gas sector in its current form. Negative emissions technologies, especially carbon capture and storage, which is so costly and uncertain, are relied on almost unquestioningly in the plan. The Government has put all its chips on CCS to deliver a cut of nearly a quarter of Scotland’s emissions by 2030—even waste incinerators are planned to have CCS bolted on—but that is a fantasy. It is not a just transition, because there is simply no transition. It is business as usual for the sector that has been licensed to nearly quadruple oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. That move is as incompatible with the Paris agreement today as it will be with the Glasgow agreement in November.

The reality is illustrated by Mossmorran, Scotland’s third-largest emitter. The operators have no plans for CCS. The plant creaks along and the promise of a just transition board to plan for the future with the community has been repeatedly sidelined. Even the cross-party meeting that the First Minister promised me in October last year has been kicked into the long grass.

Every time that there is delay, we let down the workers and the communities of the future, because we risk deferring collapse rather than planning now for a transition that is just and leaves no one behind. There has to be a plan B on those negative emissions technologies that is not written by the oil and gas sector.

The good news is that we are sitting on the European jackpot of renewable wind and tidal resources. Technologies from heat pumps to pumped storage are cost effective, well understood and deployable now. Green hydrogen will have a strong role to play in heavy industry and transport. There is a need to double down on the progress that Scotland has made with onshore wind, and to accelerate the roll-out of offshore wind and tidal, while treating energy efficiency as the national infrastructure priority of this decade.

On transport, as in so many areas, there is a need for clearer implementation plans that show the reduction in emissions and which are linked to policies and budgets. It is welcome that the Scottish Government is now planning for traffic reduction rather than growth, but that will be impossible to achieve, given that the infrastructure investment plan aims to spend three times more on high-carbon transport than on low-carbon transport. It is far better not to build an unnecessary road in the first place than to spend decades wondering what to do with the traffic growth that it has generated.

For those reasons, the decision by Stirling Council last week to drop the Viewforth link road was the right one. Every new road capacity project, right up to the A96, now needs to be re-evaluated in the light of the climate emergency. Budgets must be climate-proofed, because the Parliament cannot tell at the moment what the long-term impacts will be of that capital spend. Some areas, such as farm subsidies, are locking in the harmful ways of the past, when they should be delivering the solutions to the climate and nature emergencies.

I hope that this session’s final debate on climate change leaves the right questions, lessons and demands for the next Government and Parliament, because our futures depend on it.