Meeting of the Parliament 16 March 2017
I am sorry, but not at the moment.
“Climate change increasingly poses one of the biggest long-term threats to ... investments and the wealth of the global economy.”
That was the view of Christiana Figueres, the then executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who was instrumental in forming the Paris climate agreement.
So it is that the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work Committee takes part in today’s debate; in fact, many aspects of the draft climate change plan fall within our committee’s remit. Given that it also includes energy, our remit covers quite a lot of ground and I cannot hope to address everything in a few minutes today. However, I will touch on a few issues that the committee considered, including transparency, timescale and behaviour change.
Although we welcome the whole-system approach of the TIMES model, it cannot be at the expense of the level of detail included in previous climate plans. Do not take just our word for it—we defer to the authority of the Stern review of the economics of climate change, which encouraged caution and humility in all modelling and reminded us that results are always specific to the model and its assumptions. The evidence that we heard was that even a whole-system approach offers only a partial insight, and ambition should not be confused with wishful thinking.
A snazzier title is one thing, but the information fed into the model has not been proffered, nor has the weighting afforded to delivery, costs and disruption. The plan should detail budgets, targets and timelines as well as policies, not only for our benefit but for those tasked with the plan’s delivery. It would be helpful to know the inputs for certain sectors and how they were formulated. What, for some, are lesser targets put pressure on other aspects such as electricity, services and housing. They have been told to cut emissions by 120, 96 and 76 per cent respectively, while transport and agriculture have been asked to make cuts of 31 and 12 per cent, despite the fact that, together, those two produce 28 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Suffice it to say that the Scottish Government has not shown its workings, nor has it given much of a clue as to the content of Scotland’s energy efficiency programme, which is called SEEP by its friends. It is said to be key to ministerial thinking on climate change, but according to Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, much of the plan’s success
“relies on a programme which does not yet exist”.
One wonders whether androids dream of an energy-efficient future. That is something that the committee will return to in our scrutiny of the draft energy strategy—SEEP that is, not the androids; at least, not yet.
Timescale is my next theme. The Stern review said that climate change was
“the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”,
and that delay would be costly and dangerous. In that regard, the committee supports the move towards low-carbon heat, but we are concerned by the pace of change, given that so little is to happen before 2025. We appreciate that technologies are evolving, but can we transform our housing stock and the public and commercial sectors in the space of seven years? Surely more can be done to front-load some of that work.
My final theme is behaviour change. It is a case not of altering, attuning or adjusting behaviour, but of making major non-marginal change in how we consume energy. Again, I am afraid that we found detail in short supply. Scottish Renewables underscored the need for buy-in of support from individuals and institutions alike. It said that it is unclear how we can achieve that without “clear and concise messages”. The final plan must deliver those messages. More than a decade ago, the Stern review said:
“Governments can be a catalyst for dialogue through evidence, education, persuasion and discussion.”
I will end where I began. Our economies and the necessities of life—access to water, production of food and the very air that we breathe—are under threat. The next chapter of the story is for us to write, and write it we must.