Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 15 December 2021
Last week, in response to someone called Alex Salmond saying that the Scottish National Party Government had
“been dragged into student politics”
that would sacrifice and jeopardise
“the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Scots”,
an SNP spokeswoman said that we needed to
“get real on the climate emergency”.
They were both right. “Get real” means acknowledging that 78 per cent of Scotland’s total energy needs and 91 per cent of its heating are met from oil and gas. That is fuel and gas, which heats 24 million United Kingdom homes and goes towards making medicines, cosmetics, plastics, cleaning products, clothes and contact lenses. As Gary Smith of the GMB said, gas is
“a feedstock for the chemical industry ... our food supply ... our NHS”.
I ask Patrick Harvie, who is always keen to remind us that he rides a bike—sometimes even the right way up one-way streets—what he thinks the tyres are made from or the oil on the chain.
“Get real” means acknowledging that, in all scenarios given by the Climate Change Committee—all net zero compatible, incidentally—oil and gas account for around half of demand until 2050. Scotland has to get that from somewhere. Much of it already comes from abroad. It comes from Russia—that famous upholder of regulatory and environmental standards—to which we paid nearly £4 billion for oil and gas last year. It comes from Qatar, which sold to us £1 billion-worth of liquefied natural gas that has, according to the Oil and Gas Authority, more than double the carbon footprint of UK gas. It also comes from Norway which, to ensure that it can still sell us around £11 billion-worth of oil and gas, just licensed extraction in 136 blocks in the Barents Sea and exploration in the Arctic.
Conversely, local supply has advantages such as enhancing security of supply; protecting 100,000 jobs—around 65,000 of them in the North East Scotland region—while undertaking a fair and managed transition; avoiding inflicting ever-higher imported gas prices on the British consumer and plunging ever more of them into fuel poverty; and ensuring that we do not offshore our environmental responsibilities to the global south.
“Get real” means not lodging motions that refer to just transition funds about which, just last week, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy could tell me no detail so that I have had to write to her. It means not repeatedly saying “match that” when anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the industry knows that the UK Government’s £16 billion North Sea transition deal is happening now and aims to create 40,000 high-quality direct and indirect jobs. It also means—instead of boasting that offshore wind energy would create 28,000 posts by 2020 and then delivering fewer than 2,000 or boasting that 21,000 renewable energy jobs have been created but quietly forgetting that 130,000 were promised—fronting up, supporting the sector and working with it to deliver an actual transition.
“Get real” means that, when Siccar Point Energy postpones the Cambo project and immediately cuts 39 roles in Aberdeen, potentially forfeiting 1,000 jobs, a party of government does not respond by saying how “great” that is. It does not mean Ross Greer stating to Shell,
“Can’t wait till we seize your assets and prosecute your executives”,
or Maggie Chapman comparing the oil and gas industry, which is one of the most advanced industries in the world and key to our transition, to the stone age. It does not mean claiming that supporting oil and gas makes one “hard right”, or celebrating as tens of thousands face a Christmas fearing for their jobs, their livelihoods and their futures. Arrogance and hubris stalk the Greens like the jangling chains of Marley’s ghost but, just like the ghost, the people of Scotland will see right through them.