Scotland’s climate plans still amount to crossing our fingers

Inevitably, there is quite a lot of text in the Scottish Government's plans for decarbonising Scotland, which means of course there is quite a lot in the Climate Change Committee's response to it published today. But the main message that comes out is broadly 'you're making the same mistake as before'.

In fact it isn't quite the same mistake. When the Scottish Government set 'the most ambitious targets in the world' for decarbonising in the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) Act passed in 2019 it set a single path with a series of milestone indicators. It's new plan involves a sequence of 'carbon budgets' each lasting a shorter period of time.

However, the fundamental mistake remains the same; there is a lot of noise and all the low-hanging fruit is highlighted in detail and front-loaded, but all the difficult transitions are pushed further in further back in the plan and each have increasingly vague delivery plans.

This has now been reviewed by the authoritative Climate Change Committee and their conclusions highlight the problem – in the first five years the Committee has 91 per cent confidence in the likelihood of delivery, but this drops to 64 in the second five years and further to 58 in the final five years.

Indeed this may be an overstatement; in its efforts to remain authoritative the Climate Change Committee can if anything be somewhat lenient in its interpretations. There are some aspects where it is saying positive things but those more expert in the area are much less sanguine. For example, the CCC is comparatively positive about progress on peatland restoration but targets have been missed every year for the last five years and experts on peatland restoration (such as NatureScot) are much more critical.

Another example of over-generous analysis is on electric car charging. Scotland has 7,300 public car chargers compared to England's 188,000, so Scotland has more per capita. But Scotland has 37,000 miles of road compared to England's 88,500, so Scotland has a car charger for every five miles of road and England has one every two miles.

And the only reason Scotland has that many chargers in the first place is because we developed them as a public service in public control. The Scottish Government chose to privatise that a number of years ago. There is no viable commercial model for providing car charging in remote rural Scotland.

Nevertheless, even with over-generous interpretation the problem remains exactly what the problem was before – the easy things to do are covered and all the difficult things are fudged, pushed into the future or rely on what one commentator called “science fiction”.

For example one of the biggest issues continues to be the loss of heat in buildings and the overwhelming use of fossil fuels to re-heat them. This is confidently sorted in their plans through 'more heat pumps'.

And yet in the real world they have just dropped the Buildings (Heating and Energy Performance) and Heat Networks (Scotland) Bill (for the second time) which had already been watered down considerably anyway. On the one hand it is setting targets, on the other it is withdrawing the legislation it needed to deliver those targets.

There are areas in the plan where things get even more vague; while carbon emissions from the deterioration of peatlands is an important aspect of agricultural emissions, it is only one aspect and agricultural emissions represent the third largest category of emissions. On the rest there is mainly silence.

Waste is another area where there remain substantial emissions but no action is proposed. The Scottish Government does not want to interfere with the politics of consumerism and is wishing this problem away. There is almost nothing about what is to be done about industrial emissions other than 'hope business does the right thing'.

The problem is that emissions from land and agriculture, buildings, transport, industry and waste are just about all the remaining emissions left. In 2023 these represented 36.3 megatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (equivalent - a proportion is methane or nitrous oxide emissions). Electricity generation in Scotland emitted one megatonne. The 'science fiction' is that they then say 'carbon capture and storage' and hope you don't think about it too much.

The conclusion is that we have excellent solutions worked out for everything we've already sorted but the remaining tasks are punted into the future where they are address through precisely the kind of vague non-plans that resulted in the 2019 targets all being abandoned two years ago.

Until politicians start trying to solve the problems rather than talk about them in vague terms as a task for an ill-defined future we'll just keep failing on this. That is what Common Weal tried to do with the Common Home Plan. It remains a significantly more coherent solution than official government policy.