Five years ago, progress on climate change ground to a halt in Scotland

When the battle against climate change is supposed to be a multi-decade battle, you might not think that there is much to see in annual statistical changes. But as the Scottish Government's annual carbon emission statistics are published, this is somewhat depressingly disproved.

There aren't any dramatic changes in 2024 (the year of the new statistics) over 2023, but it adds to evidence that we are now in a specific phase of climate change action and that phase is 'frozen progress' and policy retrenchment.

But you wouldn't instantly know that from the Scottish Government's release material. It goes to a great deal of effort to present a partial picture of what is happening and in obscuring the real story of where we are. Almost all the data is presented as 'in comparison to 1990' rather than 'trend over last five years'. And much is made of sectors which have already achieved big wins.

For example, electricity is presented as having reduced its emissions by 92.7 per cent, industrial emissions by 62.8 per cent and in fuel supply by 57.4 per cent. We also learn that the methodologies have changed so last year's figures are not directly comparable, though late on in the publication they do produce some like-for-like statistics (page 24).

But as is easy to see almost all the reductions in electricity were years ago and the reduction in fuel supply emissions is basically a way of counting the structural decline in oil, gas and particularly coal production. Yet looking at the industry sector tells us an awful lot.

Because yes, overall emissions dropped by about one per cent in the last year but that drop is almost all accounted for by reductions in the industry and fuel supply sectors and, even more bluntly, the change between 2023 and 2024 could almost all be traced to the closure of the Grangemouth refinery (though Grangemouth's emissions will largely have been included under 'fuel supply').

In fact from 2022 to 2023 Grangemouth emitted about 0.5 MtC02 less than in 2022 (that is half a megaton of carbon dioxide or half a million tonnes). Data isn't available for the following year but if the trend is the same, that reduction is actually more than the 0.3 MtCO2 reduction overall industrial emissions and 0.2 MtCO2 reduction in fuel supply emissions combined. This implies that Scottish industrial emissions would have got worse if Grangemouth wasn't being closed.

Meanwhile the reductions in the other sectors should be put into context – a full 67 per cent of Scotlands emissions are now created by only three sectors, domestic transport, households and agriculture and between them they actually increased emissions by about 0.4 per cent.

The best way to see what is happening is to look at these graphs here. They show a consistent trend – the big wins were achieved more than a decade ago, then they started to flatten off towards the later part of the 2010s and now have almost frozen since the pandemic. We have more or less stopped reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland.

The best (and perhaps most depressing) way to see this is to look at the first graph on this page. Those who follow public policy will tell you that all the pressure to act on climate change had peaked at the end of the 2010s and then were overwhelmed and petered out during and after Covid (when priorities were elsewhere).

And you can see the results quite clearly in this graph. We gave up on climate action and as a result we have seen a concerning lack of progress over the last half decade. But this is not just to do with public or political enthusiasm. In fact it would be a mistake to look at these numbers and say 'ah, it was just the pandemic', because that disguises something else which is more important.

In reality the pre-2015 gains were almost all about switching off coal-fired power stations, deindustrialisation and modern waste management practices and those were going to happen anyway. All the low-hanging fruit was gone by the middle of the decade, leaving the difficult tasks. We knew this ten years ago but we ducked preparing for the difficult bits and have done next to nothing.

The difficult bits are household heating, excessive consumption of energy-intensive products (consumption of goods is included in 'households'), domestic transport and agriculture (and to a lesser extent industrial emissions and our remaining fuel processing, though the latter will continue to decline of its own accord).

That is the story. The Scottish Government is very mildly celebrating what is in effect the closure of Grangemouth while all other outcomes basically stagnate and no policy action is being taken to change the rate of progress, which is very close to zero.

It is now seven years since Common Weal produced a comprehensive plan to kickstart progress again. That almost everything we proposed in the Common Home Plan still needs to be done is depressing – but the upside is that there is at least still a plan for how to change direction. What seems to be lacking at the moment is the political will to do it.