Setting targets is the easy part of climate policy – we must act

It is five years since the Scottish Government first voted to declare a climate emergency, and 15 since Scotland set its first legally binding climate targets. Both of these were moments of political consensus about where we wanted to get to. But that’s the easy part of climate policy.

Since then, we’ve seen progress on renewable energy, but next to nothing on decarbonising the rest of the economy. The result, as the Climate Change Committee confirmed this year, is that the 2030 targets are now unreachable.

This is the difference between words and actions.

The malaise and failure has been far greater than any individual party or government. All politicians bear a collective responsibility for what has happened, or not happened. Over successive parliaments too many people have celebrated the targets, but opposed the action needed to actually meet them.

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The entire climate movement was disappointed and angry that the 2030 target is now out of reach. The announcement, and the need for greater action than the SNP was comfortable with, undoubtedly played a part in the break-up of the Bute House Agreement between my party, the Scottish Greens, and the Scottish Government.

Yet with global temperatures continuing to soar well beyond the records of the last century, and with growing threats from extreme weather events in Scotland and beyond, the time for rolling out incremental shifts in policy to change our emissions trajectory has long passed.

Our focus – all across government, business and civil society – must now be on urgently and rapidly delivering the policies that will secure the net zero transition, and do it fast.

That’s the only way we can have any hope at all of hitting our long-term targets and leaving any kind of liveable future.

That means fast-tracking some of the steps that the Scottish Government has committed to on paper but not delivered – the rollout of congestion charging powers, integrated ticketing on public transport and legislating for new polluter taxes. But it also needs to go far beyond that.

One of the most important things we can do is reduce the number of cars on our roads. Yet the Scottish Government remains committed to pouring billions of pounds into projects to dual some of the longest roads in our country.

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Only last week the SNP decided to hike rail fares with the return of peak charges. It was a hammer blow to commuters, but also to our climate ambitions.

Train fares in the UK are already among the highest in Europe, with many choosing to drive or fly instead. Particularly at a time when so many people are being squeezed, raising prices will do nothing to encourage people to give up their cars.

Politics is about choices, and the billions of pounds that have been earmarked for the A96, for example, far eclipse any of the short-term costs that may come from removing peak fares permanently.

The Scottish Greens and the SNP have always had big differences on environmental policy. In government we worked hard to find compromises and make progress together, and, for the most part, we did well. But,

especially since the end of the agreement between our parties, there have been worrying signs that the SNP is moving further away from where it needs to be. Raiding the Nature Restoration Fund did nothing to allay these concerns.

Over the course of the General Election we saw the First Minister and a lot of his cabinet colleagues equivocating when it came to their position on new oil and gas licences.

They couldn’t say if they were going to retain the presumption against new fossil fuel exploration in the forthcoming energy strategy, and even repeated scaremongering fossil fuel industry attack lines about the impact of windfall taxes on some of the world’s biggest polluters. At a time when global temperatures are rising, there can be no room for climate complacency.

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.

Over 14 years of Tory rule, Westminster was actively working against our planet, with oil and gas licences being given out left, right and centre, and abuse of veto powers to stop basic steps like a can and bottle recycling scheme.

The new Labour government is nowhere near as radical as it needs to be, but there are some grounds for hoping that they won’t be the same roadblock to progress that the Tories were.

The news that they will not be defending the climate-wrecking Rosebank and Jackdaw oil licences in court is undoubtedly an important step forward. But it isn’t Labour we need to thank for that, it is the climate campaigners who brought it this far in the first place.

We cannot underestimate the scale of change that is needed, or the importance of the decisions that will be made in the next few months.

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. Every government needs to act and Scotland can lead the way.