Meeting of the Parliament 05 March 2026 [Draft]
I welcome the draft climate change plan. However, what has not been said enough today is that, if we are to deliver the change that is required, we must have complete and utter co-operation from the UK Government, because that cannot be done with the powers of this Parliament or this Government alone.
I welcome the fact that this Parliament has set world-leading emissions targets, but targets are not results. We must move from what we would like to see happen to how we are going to make that happen, and that “how” is fundamentally economic. Rules, regulations and well-meaning soundbites are pointless unless the people of Scotland see a positive change in their lives and, most important, positivity in their pooches and their purses. To put it bluntly, what we need to do to ensure that we meet our climate change targets in Scotland is entirely dependent on lowering electricity bills, in my opinion. If we want people to switch to heat pumps and electric vehicles, the numbers must work for the person in the street.
Currently, the numbers are not working. Scots are seeing their bills go up rather than down, and the central reason for that is that the energy market is fundamentally flawed. We have the absurd situation where the cost of clean, green electricity that is generated right here in Scotland is based on the price of imported international gas. That marginal pricing system is a relic of the past. We need to remove the tie to natural gas prices. The previous Conservative Government failed to do that, and the current Labour Government seems unwilling to do it. However, it is nonsense to ask Scottish families to decarbonise their lives while charging them a premium that is dictated by the volatility of global fossil fuel markets. We just have to look at yet another American war in the middle east to see the folly of that.
However, we also need to be honest about the role of hydrocarbons in our future electricity generation.