Leaders say they are serious about climate change. Is that enough?

This should have been the climate emergency election.

It is our first chance to vote for MSPs since the new Climate Act with its tougher targets, since the Scottish Government declared a climate emergency and since protests by 40,000 people in September 2019 called for more action to reduce climate emissions.

The politicians we are about to elect will make absolutely vital decisions over the next five years which will deliver a just transition out of fossil fuels and set us firmly on the path to zero climate emissions, or they will delay the action we need and prolong our fossil fuel fixation.

The good news is that all the main parties say they are serious about climate change, talk about creating green jobs and are planning to have a just transition for workers and communities who currently depend on the oil and gas industry. But is it enough and, most importantly, is it fast enough?

In the 2015 Paris Agreement the world’s nations agreed to try to keep the warming of the planet to less than 1.5°C. We’ve got less than a decade to avoid that disaster threshold. If we are serious that means almost everything has got to change, from where our energy comes from, how we heat our homes, how we travel to what we eat. There are many good proposals in the manifestos, which would definitely take us in the right direction. But perhaps the big flaw is the blindness to the need to stop extracting oil and gas – if you are in a hole, stop digging!

The Greens are pretty specific about this, the LibDems acknowledge that this has got to happen sometime, while the Tories say the oil industry will be with us for decades to come. All but the Greens have some enthusiasm for carbon capture and storage, the industry delaying tactic that has been trying to get off the ground for 20 years, and would let them keep on pumping the oil for years while pretending it’ll be all right in the end.

One possible outcome of the election is that the Greens and the SNP negotiate a coalition to run the country for the next five years. If so, my hope is that the Greens would drive a bargain that makes Scotland finally admit that we can’t take out every last drop of oil and urgently begins the transition in earnest.