Patrick Harvie MSP
Former Scottish Greens Minister for Zero Carbon Buildings, Active Travel and Tenants’ RightsAmbitious rhetoric and targets are the easy parts of climate policy. To secure a greener future, Patrick Harvie MSP urges real action: cutting car use, rejecting polluting projects, ensuring a just transition, and enhancing powers for effective change.
It has been five years since the Scottish Parliament voted to declare a climate emergency, and 15 since Scotland set its first legally binding climate targets. These were important moments and there was a great deal of consensus about where we wanted to get to. But those kinds of rhetorical agreements are the easy part.
Tragically, the fixation on talking about world-leading targets has served as a smokescreen, allowing us to talk like climate leaders without putting in the hard graft of actually decarbonising our economy.
Scotland has managed to halve its emissions since the 1990 baseline, but almost all those reductions have been in the electricity sector – due to the turning off of coal-fired power stations and the widespread switch to renewables.
That change was already underway prior to the first Climate Change Act in 2009. Setting annual targets did not accelerate this trend, nor did they achieve any significant emission cuts in other sectors.
The failure has been far greater than any individual party or government. All politicians bear a shared responsibility for what has happened, or rather, what has not happened.
Too many have celebrated the targets but then opposed the action needed to actually meet them. That is why the UK Climate Change Committee has confirmed that Scotland’s ambitious and once-celebrated 2030 targets are now out of reach.
A Programme for Action
Our focus must be on urgently and rapidly delivering the policies that will make a difference and secure the Net Zero transition.
That means fast-tracking some steps the Scottish Government has committed to but not delivered – the rollout of congestion charging powers, integrated ticketing on public transport, and legislating for new polluter taxes, such as carbon land taxes. But we also need to go far beyond that.
One of the most vital things that we have to do is reduce the number of cars on our roads. However, the Scottish Government remains committed to pouring billions of pounds into projects to dual some of the longest roads in our country and has decided to hike rail fares with the return of peak charges.
The billions of pounds that have been earmarked for dualling the A96, for example, far eclipse any short-term costs that may come from removing peak fares permanently.
One of the most important environmental decisions the Scottish Government will make in the months ahead will be on whether or not to give permission to the proposed expansion of the gas-fuelled power station at Peterhead. The site is already one of the most polluting in Scotland, and any government that is serious about climate action would reject it.
We must decarbonise our buildings, with far greater support given to the transition to heat pumps and low-carbon technology
However, the threatened closure of the Grangemouth refinery underlines the need to have concrete transition plans for the communities and sites that are dependent on fossil fuel jobs. What is being proposed for Grangemouth is neither just nor a transition, it is an example of wealthy owners cutting and running and leaving workers behind.
The Limits of Devolution
Unlike independent nations across Europe and beyond, the Scottish Government does not have the full range of financial and regulatory powers at its disposal. There is no doubt that this makes the task in front of us harder.
So many of the biggest decisions rest with the UK Government, particularly in relation to areas like aviation and fossil fuel exploitation, and, crucially, the control it has over so many of the financial decisions that impact us.
It is no secret that my Party supports Scottish independence, precisely because we believe that the powers it would give us would allow us to better address these challenges and implement the extremely needed changes.
However, if the current constitutional stalemate is to continue, there must be a focus on revisiting devolution and the autonomy Scotland has over finance, regulation, and economic policy.
Final Thought: Huge Potential for Change
Scotland has a huge potential, and resources that any country would envy. But we can’t reach that potential without joined-up action from all levels of government.
Our local authorities have a crucial role to play in terms of rolling out active travel infrastructure, low-emission zones, and traffic control measures, and investing in our local green spaces and waste management. Yet all of these vital initiatives rely on funding from our national governments.
There is no doubt that the challenge we face today has been made infinitely harder by decades of climate inaction and an assumption that it was someone else’s problem to deal with. We cannot afford to repeat those mistakes, not if we want any kind of sustainable future.
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