SNP’s climate U-turn exposes reality of unworkable Net Zero targets

Our former Prime Minister Sir John Major may well have observed yesterday’s goings-on in the Scottish Parliament and reflected on one of his Pooterish sayings, that “fine words butter no parsnips”. For all the sound and fury, Mairi McAllan, the Scottish Net Zero secretary, was simply reflecting the reality of what the SNP has not done when she told MSPs that the Scottish Government’s goal of reaching a 75 per cent reduction in emissions (from 1990) by 2030 was “out of reach”. This admission by the Scottish government and the consequent legislation that will be needed to adjust the government’s targets follows a report by the Climate Change Commission that stated that Scotland was way off the required trajectory to meet its climate goals in almost every category.

Professor Piers Foster, the committee’s chairman said, “Scotland has laudable ambitions to decarbonise, but it isn’t enough to set a target; the government must act”. It is not a surprise that a nationalist government with one overwhelming policy mission struggles to develop and deliver policy in other areas; it is more surprising that they can’t see that performative government – the setting of targets that can never be reached alongside an absence of concrete actions  – harms their drive for independence by making them look so incapable. The reaction from opposition politicians (how the SNP must yearn to be back in the accountability-free world of opposition) and campaigning NGOs in Scotland was predictably brutal. Jamie Livingstone, head of Oxfam Scotland, was quoted in The Times as saying, “The Scottish government’s abandonment of its legal 2030 and annual emissions reduction targets is a reprehensible retreat caused by its recklessly inadequate level of action to date.”

Because of the lack of action, we say can, with confidence, that when Nicola Sturgeon set a target of Net Zero by 2045 because the Westminster government has a target of 2050, she had no sense of what would be required to meet the target. Even if Sturgeon had known, the problem is what is required is close to overwhelming and it is where those opposing Net Zero have half a point: that the global drive to Net Zero will require the greatest intervention and spending by government into everyday life for generations and no government anywhere – let alone the hapless Humza Yousef administration in Scotland – is being honest about what it will take. You only have to look at what Scotland needs to do to meet its 2045 target to realise the scale of the challenge ahead of them. The Climate Change Committee report spells it out: Scotland needs to double the rate at which it is planting trees, provide vehicle chargers three times as quickly and increase the roll out of heat pumps from 6,000 per year to 80,000 per year. Reaction subscribers can judge for themselves how likely they think any of that is either with or without government intervention.

Across the UK, reality around Net Zero is now biting. Labour’s criticisms of McAllan’s screeching U-turn follow Keir Starmer’s own screeching U-turn just a few short weeks ago as he realized that his party’s unworkable plans were sapping his credibility with key voters and providing the Tories with an easy attack line. The Tories themselves reversed their own climate pledges made by the king of performative politics, Boris Johnson, a few weeks before that. These reversals of policy are welcome because they reflect reality and no voter likes to be taken for a fool but the fact that the pledges were so easily made and so easily reversed – this stoush will be forgotten by Monday – also reflects a lack of honesty that infects so many areas of public policy. Let’s stop the boats but never discuss how we rely on imported cheap labour; let’s support Ukraine but reduce our own defence spending; let’s protect our beloved NHS but never ask whether the model works for a population that’s aging rapidly. Net Zero is no different: if governments across the UK believe that there is a climate crisis, that it’s the greatest challenge of our age and that we must be at Net Zero by 2050, then it’s time they fronted up and told us how it will be done and what it will cost because right now we’re living in land of unbuttered parsnips.

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