The SNP and Greens aren’t saving the planet. They’re just mucking up this little corner of it

DURING the Cop26 event in Glasgow last year, the visiting UN secretary-general António Guterres was heard telling colleagues and friends how impressed he was with the First Minister he had met in the city that November.

Using the platform provided to her by Boris Johnson’s decision to host the event in her home city, Nicola Sturgeon cleared out her diary over those two weeks and spent her time vigorously pressing the flesh. The highlight was an announcement that £6million of taxpayers’ money would be devoted to a ‘Climate Justice Fund’, a pot of money dedicated for poorer countries most affected by climate change. ‘I would like to say how much I appreciate the Scottish effort,’ purred Mr Guterres in response.

Next week Miss Sturgeon is back on the Cop bandwagon. Despite having no formal negotiating role in the event, she will travel to Sharm el Sheikh for the next instalment – Cop27. Doubtless the admiring Mr Guterres will be back in touch.

Yet, this time round, perhaps he should be briefed on the reality in Scotland. For behind the well-crafted speeches and the small pots of money for good causes, the SNP and their Green party allies in government have a record of total stagnation. This is the one thing they claim to care about the most. Apart from independence, obviously.

Miss Sturgeon and the Scottish Green party leader Patrick Harvie have followed a well-trodden Scottish nationalist path these past few years on the green agenda. Rule number one in the catechism of nationalist thought dictates that Scotland must always be seen to be more virtuous and pious than England.

Back-slapping

So, after the UK under Boris Johnson pledged to slash carbon emissions by 78 per cent of 1990 levels by 2035 – a highly ambitious target – the SNP announced it would achieve this five years earlier. Cue much back-slapping and Scottish exceptionalist flannel.

Warming to her task, Miss Sturgeon announced sonorously that the Scottish Government had officially decided that the world was facing a full-blown ‘climate emergency’. The greenest government in the UK set forth.

How are all those big promises and the brave talk coming along? A month after Mr Guterres had gone home and the Cop circus had moved on last year, the independent Committee for Climate Change (CCC) reported on Miss Sturgeon and Mr Harvie’s progress. Readers of Audit Scotland’s regular verdicts on the Scottish Government’s many political promises may spot a common theme.

‘We have not been able to establish whether and how policies and proposals add up to the required emissions reductions,’ it deadpanned.

In short, on the question of whether the Scottish Government is on track to meet its promises, the CCC issued a deep shrug.

A further CCC report earlier this year examining how Scotland was adapting to climate change concluded that progress ‘has stagnated’. That tallies with the Government’s own figures which show how, between 2016 and 2019, reductions in emission flatlined. Covid will have contributed to a fall in emissions since then. But few believe the Scottish Government has a chance in hell of meeting its target.

It’s not hard to see why. The government is not very good at implementing things. For example, if it really wants to meet its absurdly ambitious plans, the SNP-Green coalition has to slash the amount of carbon coming from transport, now the single biggest contributor to emissions in the country. Yet, a target to electrify Scotland’s bus fleet is being missed, according to Transform Scotland, an independent alliance on sustainable transport.

Meanwhile, this week, Motor Fuel Group, the largest UK forecourt operator of charging points for electric cars, said it ‘will have to stop investment’ in Scotland because of ‘barriers to investment’ in getting set up here. So much for the big move to electric.

Most comically of all, it was announced this week that one of the long-delayed ferries caught up in a Scottish Government contract – and already four years late – will not, as promised, run on environmentally friendly liquid natural gas but, initially at least, on diesel. That’s the polluting fossil fuel that drivers will be banned from using in a few years time.

Scotland is once again discovering that alongside its vast moral superiority complex, the other key characteristic of our governing class is its routine incompetence. Perhaps Mr Harvie should be made to fill up the new ferry’s tanks with diesel as a punishment.

Then there is the SNP’s tendency to want to have things both ways. We have a climate emergency, according to the SNP. In Wales, that has led to the Labour First Minister Mark Drakeford shelving new road building projects.

I think that’s wrong but at least he’s being consistent. The SNP, however, is the party which tells progressive lefties there is a climate emergency while spending billions on a new round of road building. Go figure.

Rhetoric

But then putting facts behind one’s rhetoric has never been an SNP thing.

Over the past year, Miss Sturgeon and her cabinet have repeatedly boasted of their record. ‘We’ve virtually decarbonised our electricity supply. Just short of 100 per cent of all the electricity we use is from renewable sources,’ she said.

Last week, persistent digging from campaigners such as Sam Taylor of the think tank These Islands finally exposed how misleading this is. It isn’t true: as we all know, gas-fired power stations are still vital in helping keep the lights on in Scotland.

Perhaps the root problem here – beyond the lack of seriousness and the obsession with presentation – is the way the SNP has run Scotland.

Over recent years, the Government has slashed funding for local authorities, yet it is these which can deliver plans to make council housing more energy efficient or cut emissions from public transport.

‘Is local government being equipped to meet the 75 per cent target?’ asked, council umbrella group Cosla this year. ‘The answer we must arrive at is, unfortunately, no.’

And then there is the Government’s engagement with industry. I am told relations are improving but the Government’s energy policy is still damaged by two factors: an ideological distaste for working with the oil and gas industry (which ministers will need to engineer the ‘just transition’ they aspire to) and a dislike of working with anyone in the UK outside Scotland.

This country could be working with mayors like Teesside’s Ben Houchen to develop the North Sea but, in Scotland, the global climate crisis stops at Berwick-on-Tweed.

I don’t suppose any of this will make it as far as Mr Guterres’ briefing notes over the next two weeks. Summitland doesn’t concern itself with facts on the ground. But the glare of the Egyptian sun shouldn’t blind people to the facts back home. The SNP and the Greens aren’t saving the planet. They’re just mucking up this little bit of it.