Meeting of the Parliament 14 March 2023
The point was well worth waiting for, and it is a point that COSLA made in its recent response to the committee’s report. It said that the Government has no overall costed and coherent road map to net zero by 2040 or to the arguably more demanding target of a 75 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030.
That was also the conclusion of the Climate Change Committee in its recent report card on the Government’s performance. The chairman of the Committee, Lord Deben, said:
“One year ago, I called for more clarity and transparency on Scottish climate policy and delivery. That plea remains unanswered.”
The Climate Change Committee report was damning. It said that seven out of 11 of our “increasingly at risk” legal targets have been missed and that those targets are
“in danger of becoming meaningless”.
It also said that progress on cutting emissions has “largely stalled”. On the three big emitters—transport, heat in buildings and land use—the report card was a clear fail, fail and fail, and that view was largely echoed by the NZET Committee report.
Transport is our largest source of greenhouse gases and is responsible for a third of our emissions, with levels that are barely below those of 1990. The Government’s response has been to axe 90,000 train services a year and to propose just 2,000 more public electric vehicle charging points when we need 30,000 by 2030. Its response has also been to cut 120 million bus passenger journeys since 2007 as it dismantles our bus network route by route, with more cuts likely when it ends the network support grant plus at the end of the month.